Daily Dose of Inspiring Beauty

This is a truly amazing display, an ingenious use of new media, and it really makes me miss figure painting...especially how whenever people asked me what kind of painting I did, when I answered "figure painting," I would almost always get the incredulous response of "finger painting??"

Blog-alicious!

Some of you, my gentle readers, may know that when I find consumed with the ennui, I often like to turn to the Craigslist Missed Connections board to idle away sometime, find great amusement, and even connect with the poignant pathos of the lonely and urban.

Well, now I have found a blog that takes one of my favorite activities of leisure and transforms it into a work of sublime New-Yorker-cartoon-style beauty. Behold:
missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com



This genius woman, Sophie Blackall, takes it upon herself to create these beautiful illustrative works, bringing to life the best that missed connections has to offer! I love it! Is there some board I could nominate this blog to?

This may be my fave:

My Latest Carnal Lust

Stuck in traffic on the way home from Venice, NPR nattering on, as always, I heard wonderful music from this great British chorale group, Stile Antico (which means 'ancient style').It was from their latest album, Song of Songs.

In general I love Renaissance and Medieval chants, but what makes this album extra wonderful/delicious/rapturous is that all of songs are renditions of the Biblical book, Songs of Solomon. For those of you who don't know, this "controversial" book is a collection of love poems from King Solomon to . . . a woman. Scholar and scriptorians love to intellectualize this book, justifying it with allegory and sexual politics, but really, it is the pretty explicit, wanton poetry of a hot-blooded man. Isn't it great?!!

So Jews and Christians read it in church and synagogue, sing songs about it, etc.

The songs Stile Antico has chosen are particularly wanton and beautiful, engaging in wonderful "conversation" through song.

What is special about Stile Antico is they don't use a conductor! They stand in a semi circle and look to each other and listen to each other for cues! What a wonderful parallelism to the subject matter they are singing about . . . .

I just love this music! It is this wonderful marriage of the ether of spirituality with the earthiness of carnal/aural pleasure (aural being auditory). I can think of few things more sublime than to perhaps make love to this beautiful music (overshare?). Sigh I will have to settle for some dark chocolate and wine for now, but I am definitely going to get this album!!

Check it here, yo.