me?

March. 19. 2012

LOL!

“Totally homeless”

March. 1. 2012

Nestled on the pavement caught unwittingly between a Coca-Cola and an American Eagle advertisement, cigarette in hand (notice the most elegant of holds), her sign reads:

Please help me please

Totally Homeless

A $1.oo sure will help me a lot

(I sleep on the streets)

Please help me

God Bless You 

Somehow, the cigarettes, the backpack, the reading glasses and that vacant stare just don’t compare to her counterparts lining the streets of say, Mumbai…poverty redefined in New York City. Or is that being politically incorrect?

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-


“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

I am steel and concrete.

“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

marfa window

September. 7. 2011


looking through concrete Judd into the wilderness…

 

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!

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…

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 163 other followers