What I’m listening to —
Life Vest Inside — Kindness Boomerang — “One Day,” a song that talks about the hopes for the end of violence, and prays for creating a new world built on peace and understanding. I first heard this song being sung by a crowd of over 3,000 people in such a beautiful way that I wondered how they’ve organized and coordinated so many voices and created magic. That led me to Koolulam, a social-musical initiative. Their idea is to bring people from all walks of life, get them to stop all that they’re doing for a few hours and simply sing — together. A simple yet powerful idea.
A person I’m reading about —
For anyone who has ever heard the song, Rasputin by Boney M., besides loving the music and the style of this group, they’d wonder who is this Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine. According to the song, “Rasputin’s political power overshadowed that of the Tsar himself in “all affairs of state”. When his sexual and political acts became intolerable, “men of higher standing” plotted his downfall, although “the ladies begged” them not to.” This short video is a nice start to finding some answers The mysterious life and death of Rasputin — Eden Girma
Quote I’m pondering —
“He had always thought that the worst form of grieving was to treat the afterlife as a continuity of living — that people would carry on the burden of living not only for themselves but also for the dead.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants
An essay I’m reading —
Notes of a Native Son (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1955) by James A. Baldwin, an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and activist. The essay dives into Baldwin’s complex relationship with his father, his experiences living in New Jersey, his brush with racism, his father’s death and memories of the funeral. He shares his ideas about hatred and ponders about “blackness and whiteness” and why they did not matter. In the end he speaks of two opposing ideas — “The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.”
Short movie I’m watching —
Tsumiki no Ie (The House of Small Cubes), a 2008 Japanese animated film that was created by Kunio Katō and won several accolades including The Annecy Cristal at the 32nd Annecy International Animated Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 81st Academy Awards. The movie is about an old widower who builds more floors in his house in order to stay dry from the flooding. One day he accidentally drops his treasured smoking pipe into one of the lower submerged floors of his house. In his attempt to recover that pipe, the man relives memories and revisits events before the flooding.