There are some evenings - these usually happen when one is not wrestling with the fickleness of desires (one's own and others') - when happiness seems to come as easily as words one is reading from a page at the edge of a river or a bay, or as if it were a small gull wheeling in smaller and smaller circles towards the blue-black waters (a proxy for the body, perhaps). Today was another such evening.

The big boys at the Met have decided to let us, the riff-raff, get a load of all their Dutch Masters for the next few months. Apparently, the curators' organizing theme for this exhibition is cash, i.e., the guiding spirits will be all those robber barons of yore who bought and gave the paintings to the museum.

I plan on going, given my current state of idleness, today or tomorrow, to commune with Monsieur van Rijn for a bit. This unless, I get my ship-out orders to the Olde World or the Newe World's back-country later today, to help folks make some money. I am doing it to keep another beneficent karmic wheel of capitalism in motion - so that these nice folks in turn can buy and donate conceptual art or something like that to the Met.

While I liked the crows that graced this page very much, I needed a change to fit my current mood. And the above extracted snippet from a moody photograph taken by João, my (currently) Berlin-based photographer friend, seems to perfectly encapsulate this mood, whatever it is. Please do visit João's Flickr stream, if you are looking for images to license, or more simply for the visual pleasure he provides us, the ones with limited eyes.