Portland, Oregon's Orange Lining Art Project

“Hi Jason, We had over 1100 submissions of lines for the Orange Lining project and have chosen 103 for potential use.  Your line, EVERY RUIN IS A THING WE HAVE MADE, was selected, during our second round of reviews.”

I’m pleased to announce that a line from my book Salty as a Lip has been chosen “for potential use” for an art installation that will accompany a new light-rail (metro) extension deep into SE Portland, Oregon.

Other authors include people I’ve read with in Portland (e.g. Hurricane Katrina Benefit, Wordstock/Poetland) or whose work and professionalism I’ve admired over the years, and I’m honored to be listed among them:

Anatoly Molotkov, David Abel, Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand, Laura Winter, Paulann Petersen, B.T. Shaw, and David Biespiel.

More info: http://orangelining.net/

Ross Perot - On Money & Happiness

"Right after my company got successful, as a young man I met some of the wealthiest people in the world. I found that they were such unhappy, lonely people... I learned that money and happiness are unrelated."

~ Ross Perot

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis

I recently saw the film Wilde, about Oscar Wilde, a man whose wit will be forever quoted. I was a little disappointed that the film was more about Wilde's homosexuality than his writing, but that seems to be the trend these days.

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis is a long and sappy letter he wrote to his lover while imprisoned for their 'transgressions'. (Yes, I'm obviously obsessed with all things de profundis.)

I've included here some of the more notable quotes from the text:

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.

*

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

*

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it.

*

Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.

*

I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.

*

I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

*

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at[...] Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.

*

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system.

*

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

*

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

*

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.

*

I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for.

Great Tom Waits Quotes

Tom Waits is no ordinary songwriter. He's probably one of the greatest American writers in American history - and partly because he has soaked up so much of it. The guy doesn't just reinterpret all things Americana, he's basically a walking Smithsonian. Here are a few of my favorite lines from his music, as well as another quote or two from interviews:

"Money's just something you throw off the back of a train"

"You'll be buried in the clothes that you never wore"

"My daddy told me, lookin back, the best friend you'll have is a railroad track"

"You can put all my possessions in Jesus' name"

"How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?"

"You know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk"

"Come down off the cross, we could use the wood"

"She's my black market baby, she's a diamond who wants to stay coal"

"I'll bet she's still a virgin, but it's only twenty-five to nine"

"The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep... And the combo went back to New York, the jukebox has to take a leak... And the carpet needs a haircut, and the spotlight looks like a prison break... Cause the telephone's out of cigarettes, and the balcony is on the make... And the piano has been drinking..."

"Disneyland is Vegas for children" (interview in Playboy, March 1988)

Quote For the New Year

"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority."

~Thomas H. Huxley (1825 - 1895)

Quotes of the Day

"I can believe anything, provided it is incredible." ~ Oscar Wilde

"It is to the poet a thing of awe to find that his story is true." ~ Isak Dinesen

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Women: You can't live with them, and you can't get them to dress up in a skimpy Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash.” ~ Emo Phillips

Quote of the Week

"It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them."

~ Bill Vaughan

Quote: Our Greatest Fear

The following quote, perhaps best-known from its use in the film Coach Carter, is often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela, but was in fact written by Marianne Williamson:

"Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God, your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."