Originally posted August 7th, 2011
By Michael Konik
When you walk into a room, the dining room let’s say for the sake of useful metaphor, her solitude is silent, screaming mutely and crying in the quiet.
The loneliness of the orchid.
The stillness of the table. The gentle droop, a swan’s neck, a dancer’s bow to the enveloping sound of love.
Cursed with wakefulness, the flowers cannot sleep. The talking goes on and then some more, shuffling the proper order of things. Renovating the piquant plan that our unseen hand once imagined in a fever fit. Ceaselessly yearning for light and the enveloping sound of love.
We can’t know her any more than ourselves. She’s white and frail and open, vulnerable to cold and cruelty. Her language is a mystery.
We can feel her. She is lonely.
You had no sister, only promises. And when the end came, messy and unhappy and not at all how you would . . . → Read More: Poem: The Loneliness of the Orchid
Originally posted July 10th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Here’s how we feed everyone, repair our environment, and provide meaningful work: convert lawns into organic vegetable gardens.
Imagine if all the property owners currently pumping water and fertilzer into their grass carpets used our precious natural resources to grow food — healthy, unprocessed, nutrient-rich vegetables. Imagine if vast swaths of public land currently serving as paved parking lots and grass-covered parks were parceled out to non-stakeholders for community gardens. Imagine if we used our wealth to feed each other.
An entire city block in my Hollywood neighborhood is devoted to such a cause. It’s called Wattles Garden. Hundreds of apartement renters in the area are granted a small plot of arable land to grow what they wish. This being Southern California, where the sun shines year-round, residents harvest thousands of pounds of real food derived directly from the ground, steps away from the Star Tour buses . . . → Read More: A Simple Plan to Save the World
For more than three years I’ve enjoyed a vegetarian diet, which has left me feeling altogether better. Better energy, better sleep, better digestion, better physical fitness, better health and wellness.
I grow a good portion of what I eat. The correlation may be circumstantial or fanciful, but farming my food seems to have made me healthier, too.
I’m tilting now toward eating vegan. No animals. No eggs or dairy. Instead, mostly stuff that’s live or sprouted or green.
I haven’t yet decided what I think about bivalves and invertabrates (or fish). But I’m certain that our society’s current model for producing and consuming meat is dangerous and unsustainable. There are several ways to measure how bad eating animals is for our health and for our planet. Cattle consume 80% of all farmland, pastures that could be used to grow food to feed billions. Cattle account for 70% . . . → Read More: Eating Animals
Originally posted April 17th, 2011
By Michael Konik
We fear radiation, especially when it’s emanating from a damaged nuclear energy facility. But without it, our plants won’t grow and our children won’t eat. We need the sun to radiate life.
Most plants spend their whole existence committed to a single purpose: producing a flower. For some this is easy; they get all the water and sun and mineral nutrients they need. For others it’s a struggle; they begin life disadvantaged (crowded behind a stronger plant, stuck in the shade, rooted in dusty wormless dirt) and toil throughout their entire existence merely to survive. For them, producing a flower — and with it the chance at offspring — is their defining accomplishment.
What seems like stillness is an illusion. Even when plants appear to be doing nothing, they’re moving, growing, eating. On perfect days filled with sun and water and a gentle breeze you can almost . . . → Read More: Notes from the Garden
Originally posted November 14th, 2010
By Michael Konik
Bold prediction: Within a decade, a whole class of societal crusaders will develop and be recognized by the arbiters of culture. They will be called radicals, Luddites, crackpots. They’ll be dismissed and ridiculed. And they’ll be consistently marginalized by those with money and power. But they’ll be right.
Their main focus? Harnessing the astonishing energy and passion Americans seem to have for “protecting” innocent folks, sheilding them from dangerous temptations, such as recreational drugs. homosexual marriage, and filthy pornography — and anything else that seems to controvert “family values.” These new crusaders will apply that same misdirected evenagelical zeal into a movement to really protect Americans from corporate disease merchants.
Soon the crackpots will be calling for the dismantling and reorganization of the automotive industry and the factory food industry, two of the biggest sources of death and disease in our society.
Originally posted August 28th, 2010
By Michael Konik
Like many of my friends, my pal Mommy S likes to visit a place in Hollywood we call The Farm. It’s a small garden, actually, where our dear buddy M plants his organic fruit, vegetables, and weed. She enjoys hanging with her gorgeous toddler son in the garden, absorbing the gentle vibrations of life. Mommy S also likes the organic cannabis that our friend M grows — she’s on the record as declaring it her “favorite ganja in America” — and M always sends her on her way with a care package, just as I do for all my friends in search of a lovingly tended tomato or a carefully cultivated cucumber. It’s our pleasure to give from our gardens!
This past weekend, Mommy S turned up at my home with her whole family. She was bearing a freshly baked vegetarian rice casserole and what I soon would discover . . . → Read More: Michael’s Sharing Manifesto
It’s a big universe out there. We’ve all looked skyward, trying vainly to gauge the distance to a star, mesmerized by the immensity of space and the comically irrelevant role we play in the Grand Scheme of Things. We’ve all imagined that somewhere out there in the twinkling infinity.
We’ve gone to the Moon. We’ve mapped the edges of our galaxy. We’ve viewed photographic images seemingly culled from our collective dream of existence. Outer Space is a powerful symbol for many of our essential human concerns: hope, divinity, eternity. It’s the constant metaphor that lingers above us — around us, actually — reminding all of us anonymous souls that the capacity to wonder might be our most endearing trait.
Space is cool. Understanding it is even cooler. Maybe spending jillions of dollars on exploring it is a good idea.
Originally posted March 14th, 2010
By Michael Konik
Plant a garden.
Dig up soil that previously hosted grass. Get dirt under fingernails and a pleasant ache in the back and fingers. Feel the sun. Drink the water. Share both with your baby vegetables.
Forget, if only for a few hours, what a cruel place this world can be.
Originally posted February 15th, 2010
By Michael Konik
Our finely developed sense of American vanity keeps us obsessed with working out and dieting, with inspirational weight-loss stories and TV game shows in which dramatically shrinking waistlines are seen not as a sign of dwindling well-being but as a heroic conquering of anarchic eating compulsions.
We fortunate ones desperately want to be thin, but only because we have a choice. Visit any “developing country” and you’ll be offered a stark reminder: the majority of folks on this planet don’t have to worry about Jenny Craig and 24 Hour Fitness. They would be thrilled to consume a small fraction of the calories we collectively “throw away” on the Nautilus and Bowflex. They would be delighted to chew on the energy-packed carbs we disdain.
What if all the excess calories stored as belly fat on Americans could somehow be transfered to our hungry brothers and sisters in Africa . . . → Read More: Caloric Equality
Originally posted January 11th, 2010
By Michael Konik
On the annual listings of “Greenest Cities in America,” New York, surprisingly, ranks near the top. A stellar public transportation system and the energy efficiency born of density has a lot to do with it. But maybe the most compelling factor is this: folks walk.
New York City isn’t the Italian Piedmont or French Riviera. It’s not pastoral and arboreal. But urbanity and heterogenous chaos have their charm. Manhattan island is, I think, one of the great walks on the planet. On a recent visit, I strolled more than 40 blocks, from Columbia University in Harlem to Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side. All my senses enjoyed constant stimulation, and I felt supremely glad to be alive and part of the crazy tapestry of modern life. New York is alive. Its inhabitants are alive. A visitor feels alive.
The walking invigorates, too.
Birders have their life . . . → Read More: Walking NYC
We're really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they're right. It shouldn't have happened, and we'll take steps to make sure it doesn't happen for a third time.
The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we failed to bring back from our annual company trip to Hollywood Park Racetrack and Casino will in... Read More-->
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Poet Robert Pinsky. Pianist Laurence Hobgood. Text, music, and the moment -- what we hear on the new POEMJAZZ recording is two giant artists making something greater than the sum of its parts. While Pinsky recites his lovely words with his unlovely (but weirdly attractive) voice, Hobgood, the longtime arranger and accompanist [...]
