Piri' Miri Muli'

11 February 2025

it looks like this outside tonight only the sky is white (snow and 99% waxing gibbous)

René Magritte, L'Empire des lumières, 1954, Oil on canvas and gouache on paper

Update: The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave a lustre of midday to objects below, When what to my wondering eyes did appear, But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer, With a little old driver so lively and quick, I knew in a moment he must be Coach Nick. Rapidly the Eagles his starters they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: "Now, Cooper! now, Quinyon! now Zach Baun and Jalen! On, Saquon! on, Johnson! on, AJ and Jalen! To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! Now beat the Rams! Beat the Chiefs! Beat them all!"

at the two minute mark:

..or in the remake...

09 February 2025

Moreover, Śāriputra, this buddha-land continuously produces heavenly music, and the ground is kelly green. In the six periods of the day and night, the heavens rain down māndārava flowers. In this land throughout the early morning, due to the precepts, all sentient beings have an abundant multitude of exquisite flowers.

(Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra)

22 January 2025

Fire, 2025

Painter and Altadena resident Hayv Kahraman has set up a GoFundMe for her relocation. “Fortunately, Hayv and her family made it out and their home remains standing BUT it will be UNINHABITABLE for the next year as it goes through the necessary steps to get decontaminated, which means they are homeless and uncertain at this time.

“Nearly everything they had in the house will have to be removed because of smoke damage and they will be moving into a temporary apartment in the coming weeks, hopefully.”

Kahraman grew up in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war and the Persian Gulf War: "I would look out my bedroom window and see a rain of air-raid bombs. They looked like fireworks. (The air-raid sirens) are so loud and when they happen, you know that you might actually die any minute. It shakes you to the core." Her family attempted to leave for Iran when she was eleven and was struck in traffic for eleven days before finding the border closed, hiring a smuggler the following year to get to Sweden and then Florence where she copied Fra Angelico and Giotto. “People talk about (the Altadena fire) looking like a war zone and they are right. I can tell you that it does. The loss is so vast and encompassing. The rubble. The air. The color of the sky. I felt transported to that time. I had begun building a life here. A home where I was slowly shedding my survivor mode that I’ve carried in my body since the Iraq war.”

“I am concerned with the multitude not the self," she said in a 2016 interview. "This is not only my story. It can be the story of more than 5 million people within the Iraqi diaspora or any diaspora.” Kahraman was a signatory to the October 19, 2023 ArtForum letter supporting “Palestinian liberation.. an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.. that the institutional silence around the ongoing humanitarian crisis that 2.3 million Palestinians are facing in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip be broken immediately” which led to the firing of its Editor-in-Chief David Velasco.

Recent works are up at Seattle's Frye Museum til February 2nd.