Alexander Stuart

Check out this incredibly cool song by filmmaker and Buddhist David Lynch ( Blue Velvet , Twin Peaks , Mulholland Drive ) - I love it! Listen to a fascinating interview with David Lynch about the project, by KCRW's Jason Bentley, archived at Morning Becomes Eclectic.       

Photograph: Alexander Chow-Stuart We were at a children's party in Malibu yesterday afternoon until sunset...and what a beautiful sunset it was, dipping down over Point Dume in the distance. Our daughter had wanted to pet a dog she spotted earlier and I talked to the dog's owner, a friendly woman who had lived in her house on the beach for over 40 years (she bought it for $36,000 in 1968!). We were talking about possessions and how little they mean - although not always in Malibu.  (She said her books were the things she cared about most.) The beauty of the sunset underlined the fact that it's the moment that counts, and whom you are sharing it with. Nothing else can come close.   

    Martin Luther King Jr's truly remarkable and historic speech is always worth hearing any day of the year. Astonishing how profoundly stirring his words remain. We still have some way to go to achieve his dream. I believe we live it - but as yet we live it with our eyes partly closed.   

     Photograph: Alexander Chow-Stuart  Dawn was exceptionally beautiful this morning...a great way to greet the weekend!

   Image courtesy of The Mudflats It is hard, as someone who believes absolutely in peace and beauty, to comprehend the shootings in Arizona yesterday, though clearly they were the actions of a seriously disturbed individual or individuals. But it is also impossible to divorce what happened from the ugly rhetoric that passes for political discourse and commentary in this country - a country I love in my soul, not because it is "better" (or worse) than any other nation, but because it is naturally beautiful, its history, though conflicted, is fascinating, and its people, on a personal level, are mostly very warm and welcoming. I became a citizen for many of those reasons, and because my wife and young children are American, and events such as yesterday's - or my childhood memories of the political assassinations of John F and Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the 1960s - do not diminish the hope that America offers. Ideally they rekindle the desire for pea