It's been warm and rainy since halloween. One week later and the pumpkin by the door is all patchy, red and black mold inside, its smile collapsing in on itself. Didn't last long this year. I'm not sure why it occurred to me that blowing it up would be a good idea. Maybe because I've never done that. And maybe because the trajectory straight to the compost somehow felt less than honorable―not to mention anti-climactic. It seemed like it deserved more, after its short and orange glowing beauty of a life―like maybe going out with a bang... it was a simple matter of honor. And being a visual person, the idea had already taken on a life of its own. To be sure it actually coincided with my imagination, I had to do it. One never knows what will emerge from that space where imagination meets reality. Sometimes a whole new space emerges, which I guess you'd call art. And sometimes it doesn't. Either way, you learn something.
Afterwards the neighbor, seeing me in the backyard, opened their window and said "did you feel that??" Uh oh... "uhhh, yeah. I was just experimenting with the pumpkin..."
I guess that explosion sucked in a lot of oxygen and displaced it back out again enough to rattle a house...
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
a simple matter of honor
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
sugar skulls
Spent some time at El Centro this past week; first parent night, where I'm still kicking myself for not bringing my camera. The kids performed between presentations, the first one being where CP came out wearing a big "V" sandwich board, followed by an "O" and a "T" and an "E" and then launched into a rousing song and chant, half spanish half english (as was the rest of the night). A bunch of four year olds yelling VOTE, VOTE, VOTE! is a sight to behold. In between was halloween and then on the weekend was the "day of the dead" celebration, where the video is from. We don't have anything like it in our culture, where we take a day to honor the dead (on whose lives ours are built). We honor specific dead, like presidents or veterans, but no global civilian populist honoring of the dead. And god knows we all have them in our lives (and are moving in that general direction).
