new sound
February. 2. 2012
New sound is good for the soul…the right music does things to me I can’t explain. Caught this guy out tonight n he sounds like a keeper-
conversations with bricks and concrete
January. 28. 2012
“And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
“What do you want Brick?”
And Brick says to you
“I like an Arch.”
And if you say to Brick
“Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lentil over you.
What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”
Brick says:
“… I like an Arch””
-Louis Kahn
thought for the day
January. 18. 2012
Liberty isn’t given- a person can’t give another freedom. Every one was born free, that’s a gift of existence. You can only take away from it. Don’t.
fourth time around
November. 22. 2011
"En amour, écrire est dangereux, sans compter que c'est inutile." -Alexandre Dumas { Bon anniversaire Mama }
freedom from fear
September. 11. 2011
“All material in nature,
the mountains and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent,
and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light.”
– Louis Kahn
I came to the United States as a student on August 30th, 2001. 12 days after my arrival, the WTC was bombed.
Still jet-lagged, skipping Ms. Olin’s 9am class, I was asleep when Alli barged into my dorm room and exclaimed, “Ishi! They bombed the WTC!” But in my fitful fever, my mind couldn’t parse through the information well enough to command consciousness and I zoomed back into sleep. It was only later when I answered the phone to my new best friend’s quivering voice that I realized what had just happened.
Even as I stood trembling, incapacitated by shock waves of horror flowing through my being, living the crash in my head, I couldn’t entirely fathom it all. And somewhere in my trembling, I realized I knew this feeling all too well. It was the first attack on American soil, but the Indian soil in me had quivered before in the face of the same terror, many a time.
Before that morning, I did not know what WTC stood for and had never been to New York. Shy in my newness I wondered if I could honestly be a part of the grief? In which capacity does a legal alien console her 12 day old friends?
Although it wasn’t all 9/11 that did it, since that fateful day, I have grown up. The event gave me a premature preview into the American psyche and this society’s mechanisms of dealing with grief and disaster, very different from the fatalist nonchalance I was used to in India…With typically American efficiency, meetings were called, we were given phones to call home to re-assure our parents and cautioned against going out into town alone. Caught off-guard and cornered into switching points of view, my sense of self questioned itself and for the first time I contemplated my being as the Other.
I have lived and loved, won and lost and surrendered pieces of my heart to souls deep within American folds while nurturing them into mine; I have watched the dispersion of fear and the struggle to overcome it in an intoxicated, unpredictable dance which moves us all through the darkness, through the light. Resilience is a beautiful thing, grace under pressure, that is what defines a great civilization, or a human being.
“I have no fear at all at all, I have no fears at all.”
marfa window
September. 7. 2011
looking through concrete Judd into the wilderness…
“Food is one part. Love is another part.”
August. 20. 2011
Good Morning wonderful souls!
Please watch ze video first.
I don’t often do this, but maybe I should! Sometimes things need to be done to preserve and nourish the best within us all. And sometimes our money goes way farther than our time.
This story resonates so deeply…everyone needs to visit a developing nation, see what hunger does to a man. Why it is poverty- not terrorism, not civil war, not natural disasters, that claims the most lives throughout this planet- forget even that- it causes so much pain! pain that we can’t fathom! Sitting here on our iphones and laptops, living in a/c, driving cars, buying jewelry, wasting food, opening taps to find water flow freely- everything at our fingertips! ALL are luxuries, my friends. Every one of them.
Fragments of forgotten madmen starving in the streets of Srinagar (where I began life as a person) line the edges of my consciousness and still surface when I sit down to write stories…nothing I do ever seems enough, and I am still unsure of how to resolve or come to terms with what I have known of the tattered human condition. And then I find this, and it is uplifting, and hopeful, and resonates with all that I hold sacred. Something beautiful, that MUST be nourished.
Let’s please help him! Hell- reach for the 5 quid lying in your jeans back pocket if nothing else- people live on less than a dollar a day. Imagine what even 10 dollars can do! It is a LOT. What if you just donate $ for just one meal a month you’d eat outside- throw that into this bucket, cook yourself a meal, share it with someone you love, and send the money saved this guy’s way?!
I operate on joy, not guilt- this email isn’t to guilt you into helping- everyone’s misery is not your responsibility. It is just a reminder of what you value, and cherish- and an opportunity to uplift both the destitute, and your own spirit. Won’t you please forward it to every potentially resonant soul you know?
Donate here: http://t.co/oyaDyy3. Consider it a birthday gift to yourself ; )
Thanks for reading my ramblings. I hope you are thriving, no matter which piece of this precious planet you are on.
much love,
Ishi
acid rain
August. 6. 2011
I think everyone alive needs to make a pilgrimage to understand the wounds of our world. It puts things in perspective, and the next time you find yourself advocating violence, you might just find that thought quieting down. Last year I made my way down to Hiroshima because the bombings have haunted me ever since I was a little girl, and they come back to do so today, on the anniversary of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, as I remember walking through the streets and exhibits with eyes that would not stop crying.
This is a piece of concrete wall salvaged from the rubble after chemical acid rain dripped down from the skies. I stared at the wall and shuddered to imagine its touch on human skin, if it corroded concrete so. Imagine the burn searing through your pores, and then let’s talk about nuclear armament.
Japan’s radiation sorrows seemed forgotten to the rest of the world until the reactor explosion this year. The question now is whether humanity will awaken from its abysmal denial, and acknowledge the terrors of this dangerous game, or much like when a teenager guns people down with a vengeance in a US school here or there, it’ll just be played down as a one time thing- a chance encounter with death, with no need to address laws or policy. Do all these victims die in vain, time and time again?
the thing about the sea
June. 10. 2011
I am my family’s self proclaimed memory keeper, even though I arrived last.
This is Daddy and Aku at the beach, in a world where I didn’t exist, photographed by my very young mother. It’s a strange thought- the world without you in it- perhaps because no memory of it has survived in the stories we are become…even so, it seems to stay afloat whether we drift in or out
I think she was scared of the ocean, even wrapped in a sailor’s arms. So it looks to me they just stood there a while, toes in the sand. And that’s the kind of father mine is. Patient, and ever so gentle, he may just be kindness personified.
Happy coming birthday, Ak…we’re all missing you on it already : )
“The thing about the sea, it’s bigger than you and me,”
goes this beautiful new track, local artists Hope Trust’s throw me overboard
still
May. 28. 2011
“the password is books…speak easy,” he said.
fluid mechanics
May. 20. 2011
leaving storm clouds behind, flying west at dusk…like flying through a series of the wildest brushstrokes-
add the bonus of bonding with 26D and 26E, and you have one helluva trip-
thanks matt and seth for stellar in-flight shenanigans!
the roost!
May. 13. 2011
design + photos by Cletus Pippin
Cletus Pippin, one of the coolest people here at Corgan won the Bird House Play House Design Competition sponsored by the Audubon Center! His winning design (above) has been constructed and now resides alongside Predock’s building…So proud! CONGRATS Cletus!
Don’t miss the opening of his newly constructed playhouse to be unveiled May 19th, at 11 am at the Trinity River Audubon Center.
quarry
May. 6. 2011
art for art # 1 – I found these photographs that were so darn perfect, I had to own them…and since they’d already been shot, I thought I’d claim them in paint…
Imagine rock climbing up that face- I often do.
I am in love with burtynsky Look him up, if you aren’t you will be too!
abandon
March. 27. 2011
faces become irrelevant sometimes
the fag
March. 27. 2011
Fag, as in cigarette, you pervs!
Salute to the smoker- woman to woman.
This probably isn’t a stellar shot, but I enjoy the moment in it- the position she chose to indulge in this particular cigarette. There had to be some affinity there- SXSW weekend in Austin…somewhere around dirty sixth.
not broken
February. 23. 2011
I swallowed my awe and curled my toes in the cold sand, gazing at the flats and the darkness beyond, reflected at dawn…
had the story begun thus, would you ever have guessed what this photo really is? A crystalline landsape on a Monday morning windshield…sometimes, the trick is to relish the beauty buried in the mundane. I could write a whole story rooted in that one imaginary encounter here.
A most unusual, yet fitting way to understand happiness surfaced today:
“When we give in the world what we want the most,
we heal the broken part inside each of us.”
-Eve Ensler (of the Vagina Monologues)
something beautiful always exists, you see: broken, or not broken.
punctuation
February. 21. 2011
She didn’t remind me of them then, and I quite relished this languid moment of her abandon in the shadow of afternoon..
But revisiting this picture today, I flashed back to the nuns in St. Theresa’s Convent tucked away into the foothills of the Himalayas, guiding me through my sunshine years. L.K.G., U.K.G., Nursery…I was never really frazzled by any of it, but I seem to have preserved snapshots of their misguided frustrations somewhere in my woolen cotton memory- the hitting our three year old hands (knuckles side up) with age-hardened canes over the trivialities of punctuation. No mercy in their wooden eyes.
Goddamn nuns. May their souls find some solace at last…
bernini
February. 9. 2011
restfulness in bernini shade…
Rupinder, I remember making me repeat in studio, “Columns are beautiful things.”
vintage tesla
February. 8. 2011
The client has finalized this more vintage-y version.
We will have a red AND yellow hanging side by side…
inspiron # 1
February. 5. 2011
Ode to Nikola Tesla. Numero Uno.Prints available in Yellow or Red for the nerd boy in my life.
I think one of the biggest flaws of the world we live in today, is our set of constructed values as a race on the verge of unprecedented technological breakthroughs…
There seems to be a fascination with ‘genius,’ even if disconnected entirely with the emotional, human and spiritual intelligence. And we celebrate feats of the human mind often with complete disregard to their implications upon the human spirit. I have always argued the two are inseparable, and have subsequently found it disappointingly hard to truly, honestly, heroize and draw inspiration from the most celebrated of minds.
Sometimes it seems necessary to compartmentalize respect in order to have heroes, because most of them would predictably turn out to have some Shakespearean tragic flaw, which would inevitably be justified as being a facet of their very humanity. And I am not one to compartmentalize.
Still, through the eons since the dawn of time, there have been spirits who have overcome the disconnects and reveled in their own spiritual humanities- gifting their world, and its inheritors, their creative prowess, surely disturbed, yet still unperturbed by the resistance of their more stifled human counterparts.
When I encounter a “genius,” I ask, ” does s/he have a backbone?” And the answer changes everything.
Their stories trickle down to me strained through the webs of time, but I am still here to celebrate their beauty. My list is not long, but it is solid, and recently has a new addition : Nikola Tesla.
Hopefully, you will go off and investigate his story, and when you do, you will find in it instances of more than just a superpowered brain- glimpses into his strong, resplendent heart. He once lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of a desert. That’s still a record in 2011 because the blueprints of the mechanics were embedded in his head. And then he spoke of peace, saving pigeons, vegetarianism and equality for women.
He died broke and unrecognized, as is to be expected. But two thousand people showed up for his funeral. That’s the human factor I guess-
The Tesla quote on the poster I have made says: ”We begin to think cosmically” because that, really makes all the difference.
