A good pair of boots.
A good pair of boots
can set a girl free.
Take her to places
before never seen.
///////////////// Continue reading →
All posts in Musings of a Ski Bum Philosopher
C2C’s TETRA.
French turntable group C2C has been around for a handful (think: 15) of years now. Members 20SYL, Atom, Pfel and Greem have been hanging out around the world, winning turntablism competitions and melting electro/urban musical faces, but they hadn’t released any records until early 2012, when their first EP, “Down The Road,” hit the shelves. C2C’s debut album, “Tetra” came out this September 3rd after two years of hard work. Check out the Tetra album stream and a video of one of their live performances below.
I washed my sheets today
I washed my sheets today,
bleached them, actually. (For some reason, I bought white sheets) —
— a shade to which they returned,
or more like
into which they escaped,
running from a lesser-color grey. Continue reading →
We sat, and watched the sun set. And DJ Khaled’s “Hip-hop.”
A shot from Ms. Iris German --- the beautiful view from our porch.
We sat, and watched the sun set. We drank wine, the dogs played.
I was supposed to be writing, and she, sleeping —
but instead, we sat. Watched the sun, sun set, slinking into the peaks very gracefully, slowly.
“I’ve been reading too much Bukowski,” I said. “I’m going to write a poem.”
She did not reply. I responded: “It’s going to be good.”
I found a house. AND: French/Finnish duo The Dø.
I Found A House
During the course of my travels today, I found a house.
It was old, and it was wooden, and slanted to one roofless side
like a sun-baked and street-drunken beggar, too old even for his own beaten years.
The house had fat-faced, red-rusted nails that stuck out of it’s pieces like sporadically bent quills on a porcupine,
and it had Energy. Rolling from Young, to Old, and back into Young again.
There was an empty, west-facing window framing the Tetons, and in the late afternoon light,
the window was too tired to tell me anything
of sunshine and snow,
tales of the past
swelling with sunsets and rising,
falling through leaves and the seasons of change.
I wondered who had once lived in that house. Or I guess it was a cabin, really.
A cabin which seemed not at all lonely, sitting there;
out, empty, and completely stripped bare.
I walked away. Said goodbye,
and turned to run home.
~ m.
“Bohemian Dances,” by French-Finnish duo The Dø. This pair consists of Olivia Merilahti (singer, musician), and Dan Levy (multi-instrumentalist). The two met in 2005 and collaborated on different compositional projects, from ballet to film scores, before launching their personal project together as The Dø in 2007. They released their first studio album A Mouthful in 2008, which was the first sung-in-english French album to top out the French charts. Following that: Both Ways Open Jaws, their second studio LP, released in 2011.
A ceremonial scotch.
A CEREMONIAL SCOTCH.
I came home from work tonight ready for a drink. Not just any drink, but a special drink. The kind of drink that’s coming from the last of a scotch bottle that’s been sitting around for a bit too long, if you know what I mean. Over the past year or so, said bottle has ridden the coattails of my galavants around the country, somehow managing to find room to reside on my dresser, on my mantle, in my car, traveling across borders and moving around states.
That said, the time for me to spend the last of this particular bottle has been ripening like a sun-fattened grape. It’s a part of a chapter and a Series Of Things in my life that have been moving around, itching, inching and finally jumping off of the bridge from what is to what was. Hard pills to swallow sometimes, the easiest lessons in truth. Continue reading →
Monty Python – 1972 Philosopher’s Football — The Greeks v. The Germans
It’s been a long time since college philosophy class, but I know just enough to laugh out loud. This is freaking hilarious ~
Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, on the topic of Zen archery
Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner, Patagonia, Inc.
I’m currently reading Let My People Go Surfing, by Patagonia‘s founder and owner, Yvon Chouinard. It’s a few books rolled into one; from an autobiography on the story of Yvon’s life as the child of a French-Canadian blacksmith to his founding of the climbing hardware company Chouinard Equipment (which he sold, and is now known as Black Diamond Equipment), to the growth of Patagonia as a fledging and rapidly changing company through the 80′s and 90′s. Overall, the book is a philosophical blueprint on the sustainable future of the world as it should be.
Patagonia experienced rapid, unsustainable growth throughout the 80′s and 90′s, and in 1991, during an economic recession that was affecting business around the world, the company hit a wall. Chouinard and his company were forced to look at the way that they had been doing things to realize that they needed to try a different approach. Instead of focusing on the summit of where they were headed, they needed to take a more philosophical gate. I ran across this passage, and I must share with you Chouinard’s words on the company’s change in perspective during their early 90′s growth crisis:
“I’ve been a student of Zen philosophy for many years. In Zen archery, for example, you forget about the goal — hitting the bull’s-eye — and instead focus on all the individual movements involved in shooting an arrow. You practice instead your stance, reaching back and smoothly pulling an arrow out of the quiver, notching it on the string, controlling your breathing, and letting the arrow release itself. If you’ve perfected all the elements, you can’t help but hit the center of the target. The same philosophy is true for climbing mountains. If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up on the summit. As it turns out, the perfect place I’ve found to apply this Zen philosophy is in the business world.”
- from Let My People Go Surfing, by Yvon Chouinard
Food for thought. Enjoy your Saturday – I’m off to a Crawfish boil. Oh, yessss.
One Need Not Necessarily Travel
……If you haven’t seen this on Jackson’s The Mountain Pulse’s 100 Days, check it out here. Thanks to the gentlemen at The Mountain Pulse for their support and general badass-ness.
Little sisters and big love. Love my ladies.
One Need Not Necessarily Travel
I’ve been on the road 18 days now. Not a big deal; I’m not on any kind of epic road trip this time around, but for it’s part, I’m on a sweet and enjoyable journey. Continue reading →
157 Seasons of Change, 314 Seasons of Life
Another click into my life as a homeless ski bum...
314 Seasons
I am rocking and rolling inside of the full-blown “shoulder season,” as it’s known in the ski bum biz. Our beloved ski resorts have shut down, and our ski town employers close their doors and lay us off in the non-existent wake of lacking tourist flow. The snow has (for the most part) stopped in our winter wonderlands, and it’s too warm for playland pow, but it’s also too cold for dry mountain trails. Shoulder season is also known as “mud season” because, as the snow slowly creeps from it’s winter strongholds, mud is pretty much with what we’re left to deal. As such, most of us ski bum types escape our seasonal Never Never Lands to flee south ~ or abroad ~ into places of sunlight and warmth. Continue reading →
