Saturday, August 23, 2008

The Other Side of The World

I was born on the other side of the world.
I grew up with passion for
a perfect cup of tea
and a sense for moral duty.
I was taught to do good
in this world.
But there are days when I stand alone.
These are the days when I reflect,
on how I was bad.
In my mind these are vivid days,
like an icicle reflecting a glass shard
Do I believe in a God?
Or are you asking if I believe in sin?
Life is a balance between black and white
etching a negative shade of grey.
I don’t think I am duty-bound to anyone.
I have often found that an argument
that leads to success can only be borne
out of clarity.
Am I a conscious being, you ask?
I am intuitive, I retort,
as I lie in the sun to bask.
Was there ever an emotion
more intense than hate?
Whereas I often think that
“beautiful” can be so vague.
The secret to a happy existence
is in finding contentment.
Why let your soul become complicated?
Why let your heart be negative?
In the end we all enter Earth.
Order and chaos, come and go in cycles
The ones who remain are the dominant
who eliminate the weaker
thus revealing Darwinian evolution.
I hope my knowledge-thirst never runs thin
for there are many an impact yet to be made
through long nights
and an immovable conviction.

Friday, August 22, 2008

A Word Game

You erupted out of a piece of glass shard
Soaring above white cotton-candy clouds
The foreground emerges like a specter.
It colors itself and after a while
The contents of a locked heart
float above Earth, like bubbles
blown with some lip-flirtation
Rising up and above into empty space.
Isn't the heart asymmetric,
scrambling my mind into scrambled eggs,
as I anticipate your next move?
As you rotate your hips
and shift your canvas
in halftones, in fulltones,
in tones that seem complicated,
I can't help, but pull inwards
and ask myself how mindlessly,
I accelerated my heart into oblivion.
I dared and tried,
to enjoy your collection,
of beautiful, paintings which were
on the one hand lumpy, and on the other
seemed to give birth to a vast array of
leaky lines.
They magnified an infinite horizon of
infinite, multiple dots,
all connected in a delicate grid,
all balanced and full of passion.
These overlapping shapes, spilling
with sin-laden cognition,
draw attractive symbols,
cluttered with trashy, invertible
intuitive surfaces on a piece of
love-paper.
Perhaps in hindsight, all of love and life
is a collage of irreversible
mixture of colors.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Colors

I see your canvas splashed,
brushed with treks and lines of red,
my soul skips a beat,
even when there is no beat.
The orange in your paintings
feels as if my tongue is tasting
orange peeled in the middle
of a hot summer's day.
These black lines you etch
from the Arctic circle
to the end of Earth
engulf color, vigor, life and zest.
Death sits in the crevices,
and I know, know this
that life revolves around it.
Bands of blue shoot up,
through the stratosphere,
traveling the empty expanse of space,
and pierce our globe of golden fire,
shattering and pouring yellows,
reds, and mixture of pinks in the
hair of your paintbrush.
I know not what will become of us.
But this I know:
your colors enter my veins.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Bubblicious Categorically Not

The new fall season is just around the corner and I am very excited about all the cool, fun and interesting things happening around Los Angeles. I have been attending K.C. Cole's "Categorically Not" series for the last two years. It is a series of salon-style based talks with three speakers speaking on a single topic. The catch is that they talk about the topic from their perspective, from their point-of-view. For the fall '08 season the series starts off with "Bubbles." I am sure it is going to be an eye and ear opener for all of us. The "Bubbles" talk is scheduled for September 14th at 6:30 pm at the Santa Monica Art Studios a.k.a "The Hangar." Yes, I know that it is still quite a ways away, but I like to give folks an early head-start. So jot down the date and time in your calendars. I am excited about this talk because I'd like to hear Perrin Chilles thoughts on autism. I had worked with a really gifted and talented autistic girl as a freshman in Whittier College. I am pasting a description of the talk from the "Categorically Not" website:

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Bubble wrap or soap suds; champagne or soda pop; breakers or bread; all are built on bubbles. So, in a sense, are we—for any egg or seed is a kind of bubble enclosing a new life, and every cell in our bodies is a permeable membrane (a bubble) chock full of complicated molecular machinery that makes us go. Galaxies drape across the sky in what appear to be cosmic-scale bubbles; our universe may be one bubble among many, ever bubbling out of the void. Financial bubbles can wreck havoc with markets, while soap bubbles make almost everyone smile, and all of us, one way or the other, walk through life in self-created bubbles of our own.

For our September 14
th Categorically not, Bruce Tyson, President of the investment advisory firm Weston Capital Management, Inc., will tell us how identifying financial bubbles is critical to the investment process. Over the past year, the biggest bubble in generations has burst, and Bruce will talk about the disparate forces that came together to create the recent crisis as well as examine some basic elements usually present at bubble formation. Financial bubbles have a long history, and he’ll share thoughts on the subject by the Russian novelist Nicolai Gogol.

A bone fide “bubbleologist,” Sterling Johnson is a lawyer, former engineer, and bubble fanatic since JFK was president who believes that few things in life so consistently touch people's hearts as simple soap bubbles. He uses bubbles in performance to hook the imagination, sneak in some "oh, wow" experiences about wave interference patterns, thin films, and chemistry, but mostly to help people re-experience a piece of innocence. With a friend, he is currently attempting to engineer a 10' bubble on the Marin Headlands that (with luck) will float over the Golden Gate Bridge, into the Bay, and pop on Alcatraz.

Perrin Chiles is the founder of In Effect Films, a socially-conscious documentary film company which produced Emmy Award Nominee AUTISM: The Musical. The film takes a dynamic and intimate look inside the lives of several families with Autistic children as they create, prepare and then perform a live musical play on stage. Perrin will talk about the world of Autism and why people commonly refer to Autistic individuals living in their “own worlds,” or bubbles—and how the children in the film broke through their bubbles to defy stereotypes of what Autistic children can and cannot do.
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QEC-07 Videos Online

Videos of talks, tutorials and such from the First International Conference on Quantum Error-Correction are now posted on QServer here. You know you want to learn all about protecting your quantum information from all that nasty noise from the environment!

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Imagine

I can close my eyes and imagine,
imagine that when I am not young anymore,
I can no longer delude,
delude thirty into twenty,
forty into thirty,
fifty into forty,
I can close my eyes, open them
and see blue, gnarled veins
protruding from my hands,
from my ankles to my toes,
from my temples down my neck,
coursing, snaking, slithering,
mapping a leather-covered,
earth-colored, topographic landscape.
I can close my eyes and imagine,
imagine for just a moment,
a mere moment, the moment an atomic-clock
transitions, and hears a sexy montone,
announcing its transfer to line 10, downtown.
In that moment I can see
your black tresses coil
like the spiraling, springing smoky waif
of a mixture of incense and antimony.
I can see,
the slenderness of your fingers,
in mine
and I am reminded of the tenderness
of the stem of an unborn Narcissus.
I can close my eyes and imagine,
when you walk on your toes
a sliver of air separates you and Earth.
And I ask, how can this ever be?
At that moment,
the brown of the pupils within your eyes,
is like the color of walnuts.
Their shape,
the perfect curvature of an almond
meticulously carved by God.
The dark arches above,
are like the curvature of space-time, and
the radiating sheen of your skin
is the skin of a Greek olive,
wet, oily, full of vigor, zest and spice.
I can close my eyes and keep
imagining, imagining for a long,
long time.