The Flatland Chronicles

T13 #14 | Pictures from the Earth: Broken Hearts for Every Situation (13)

Not only love can break one.  Losing a friend,  losing a pet, losing a job, or losing hope can do it too.  As Paul Simon so rightly said:  "Losing love is like a window in your heart/Everybody sees you're blown apart/Everybody hears the wind blow...." Yes, they do.

These Flickr photographers have made art of the broken heart.  There's a strange beauty in the brokenness portrayed in each of these photographs.

They all look painful though, don't they?  Yes, they all look painful:  torn asunder, shattered, cut in two, crumbling, dripping, cracked, broken in half,  punctured,  ripped,  bruised,  riven, shredded, or torn. 

How does your heart look when it breaks, or does it just depend? 

Soundtracks of My Life: The Seguedilla (Carmen)

When I was about 15, I spent a summer at a well-known music camp where I participated in a number of operas, one of them Bizet's "Carmen."  (I've already written about this here.)  And while I naturally loved all the better known arias and songs from 'Carmen,' my favorite was probably "The Seguedilla," the song she uses to seduce Don Jose (a soldier who is supposed to be guarding the sexy miscreant).  I've really enjoyed watching---and of course, hearing--- this version by gorgeous mezzo-soprano Jessie Raven.  I thought it would be only right to share.

Soundtracks of My Life: Classic Songs of the Vietnam Era

I posted this at Buck Naked Politics for a Thursday 13.  It's so personal to me that I thought I'd cross-post it here.

You Tube is such a wonderful thing.    This is the sound of war, resistance, and a transient transcendence.  In those days everything had a rainbow aura around it, even blood and death and the seemingly endless grind of my generation's war.  We thought that things were changing and that we could be the agents of change.  You can hear in the voices that these singers thought what they were saying meant something that transcended the merely personal.  Meet the old boss just like the new boss, and the people who we thought were leading us into a new age.