eeyore's birthday party : austin celebrates

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after some 13 years i finally got to spend quality time with my brother in austin, texas ... there was a certain poetry in that we started the "reunion" with a celebration (again) - eeyore's birthday party, a local event we both discovered almost by accident in the late eighties when we lived together a few blocks from the park ... since that time, bc has helped the austin community with his activity ... not the least of which is the eponymous statute, which he helped a mutual friend make, and that became something of an icon for the event ... later we walked along shoal creek as we did twentysomething years ago, drank microbrews, had amazing performance enhancing breakfast tacos and fair trade coffee ... it was all great ... austin, and bc, are still beautiful
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Eeyore's Birthday Party began in 1963 as a spring party and picnic for Department of English students at the University of Texas at Austin by Lloyd W. Birdwell, Jr. and other UT students. It was named for Eeyore, a chronically depressed donkey in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories who, in one story, believes his friends have forgotten his birthday only to discover they have planned a surprise party for him. Despite its name, the event does not fall on the official birthday of the fictional character. The original event featured a trashcan full of lemonade, beer, honey sandwiches, a live, flower-draped donkey, and a may pole (in keeping with the event's proximity to May Day). For many years the party was a UT tradition, but subsequently the annual Birthday Party became a tradition in Austin's hippie subculture.

When the festival moved from Eastwoods Park to Pease Park in 1974, Austin-area non-profit Friends of the Forest, an organization which distributes funds to other area charities, began arranging for food and drink vendors at the festival. They continue this task today along with arranging public services (toilets, buses, security, medics) and scheduling live music and family-oriented games and contests. The event is still known to most as a festival oriented towards modern hippies, but attracts thousands of visitors from a wide demographic, including the more yuppie inclined students and faculty of the nearby University.
[from Wikipedia]

a short documentary

keep austin weird!

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see more:

• eeyore birthday tumblr
• official site
• pictures

ithaca : peace

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 ithaca peace ... if you look carefully ...
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At the 2008 Ithaca Festival over 5,800 Ithacans got together and formed the worlds largest peace sign while representatives from Guiness World Records looked on. At 3 p.m. on Sunday the large crowd gathered on the grass at Stewart park and began forming the peace sign, beating the former record of 2,500 people at the University of Michigan. The event was organized by 16 year old Trevor Dougherty; he'd begun an online campaign months before the event.

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see more:

• bbc
• cool
• record

ithaca by kavafis

linn & court, ithaca, ny
wrc twothousandfive

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a dear friend sent me this poem a few years ago  
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Ithaca
by Konstantinos Kavafis

As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you' ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

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see more:

• google