Bright spots

A grateful smile and enthusiastic wave to wood s lot for spreading the word of the book quest. May you have amazing luck in finding ridiculously cheap copies of your own wished-for books!

For Earth Day, we planted a few trees. My class reached a compromise (with the boys lobbying for "Dash," although they were outnumbered) so we named our little mango tree "Armonía Dash Bureche." I'm sure she'll be very happy there.

I received an email from the indomitable Sarah Jane on Paste's visual arts issue. Apparently, they have a couple works by one of my most favorite people in the world: Joseph Arthur. Also, this brief piece of his:

Painting might be impossible to write about
It’s a place beyond words from where it comes
It’s nature showing strange flowers
It’s a drug that obliterates the self
It’s a mirror in the spirit world
It’s where the shadows come out to play
It’s a shared hallucination
It’s dream made materials set a blaze in the night
Maybe it goes beyond everything else
Like playing a guitar without strings
It’s a place man meets God and says
What the fuck
I love to paint
It’s where I go to church

Words fail when I try to describe the night Jane and I saw him on April Fool's Day (my last concert). Pure bliss. Aside from the powerful music, he also completed a painting on stage by working on it during certain songs throughout the evening. I'd never seen that done before--it was strangely moving (especially during "Invisible Hands"). His live arrangements vary quite markedly from the recorded versions--like ongoing explorations--and that night's performance of "All of Our Hands" was a poignant display of dire truth.