March 2009
29 posts
2 tags
Photo “Cin’ti Bussiness men at Fernbank Dam”, courtest of the Library of Congress’ Flickr page. Song: ‘Natchez Whistle’ written and performed by John Hartford, March 27, 1982.
2 tags
Seeing for a Moment
I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon.
I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water.
Eschatology was a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things;
facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling,
nevertheless I see for a moment...
3 tags
— “No kite, 2 bikes and a casual passer-by”, by OR U on Flickr.
2 tags
Radio played a pivotal role, especially in the first half of the century, in helping us imagine ourselves and our relationships to other Americans differently. It constructed imagined communities—of sports fans, Fred Allen devotees, rock ‘n’ rollers, ham operators, Dittoheads—and thus cultivated both a sense of nationhood and a validation of subcultures, often...
2 tags
Everything you hear on the album has come in a very natural way. We’re not really talking about music, like: we’re gonna try to go for a darker album, a more heavier album, or more distortioned, or more heavy metal, or so. It seems that what’s more or less happening probably has to do with...
2 tags
Hot Ass Poem Hey check out the ass on that guy he’s got a really hot ass I’d like to see his ass naked with his hot naked ass Hey check out her hot ass that chick’s got a hot ass she’s a red hot ass chick I want to touch it Hey check out the ass on that old man thats one hot old man ass look at his ass his ass his old man ass Hey check out that dog’s ass wow that dog’s ass is hot that dog’s got a...
3 tags
WatchThanks Ann and all for making this series available to watch (free) on Hulu.
2 tags
.GIF courtesy of Daniel. Thanks! Music: Menomena’s ‘Water’ from Under an Hour.
2 tags
The Germ
A mighty creature is the germ, Though smaller than the pachyderm. His customary dwelling place Is deep within the human race. I cannot help but wonder at The oddness of his habitat. His childish pride he often pleases By giving people strange diseases. Do you, my poppet, feel infirm? You probably contain a germ.
— Ogden Nash. The Primrose Path. 1935.
3 tags
‘Spencer Butte’ by hodgepodge on Flickr.
2 tags
In the 1930s benjamin Lee Whorf, a full-time chemist and engineer but an amateur in the field of linguistics, began studying with Sapir. Whorf’s papers based on his work with the Hopi and Shawnee Indians had revolutionary implications for the relation of language to both thought and perception. Language, he said, is more than just a medium for expressing thought. It is, in fact, a major...
3 tags
Photo, courtesy of lastmodified on Flickr.
Bill Evans writes in his liner notes that “Blue in Green” is “circular” because it is based on a ten-measure repeating harmonic pattern. (This pattern starts off with the two chords that Davis had given Bill Evans to work on: G minor and A augmented.) But the entire form of the piece is also a circle, or more accurately, a...
2 tags
Keeping Things Whole In a field I am the absence of the field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been.
We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
— Mark Strand. 1934.
2 tags
Whenever I start a new web project I like to begin with a statement of purpose. Since I’m in my third week of posting, I figured its high time to explain what exactly I’m trying to do here.
My simple goal is to keep track of interesting or pretty things that I come across day to day. Particularly, I am trying to post things that aren’t well documented online —especially...
2 tags
Photo, ‘Asking the Ghost to Dance,’ by suttonhoo on Flickr. Song, ‘Chemutengure’, performed by Dumisani Maraire and Ephat Mujuru from their record, Shona Spirit.
Mbira is required to bring rain during drought, stop rain during floods, and bring clouds when crops are burned by the sun. Mbira is used to chase away harmful spirits, and to cure illnesses with...
2 tags
She leans against the door, holds her left hand at the elbow with her right, looks at the bed
on my sheets — oranges peeled half peeled bright as hidden coins against the pillow
she walks slow to the window lifts the sackcloth and jams it horizontal on a nail so the bent oblong of sun hoists itself across the room framing the bed the white flesh of my arm
she is crossing the sun sits on...
2 tags
2 tags
A similar theory has emerged from a field called evolutionary psychology, which views the human mind as a collection of adaptations sculpted by natural selection in our primordial past. Some evolutionary psychologists have speculated that soon after infancy all healthy children manifest an innate, intuitive ability to infer the state of mind of other humans. This awkwardly named “theory of...
2 tags
I moved to New York in the mid ‘90’s, a time when a new generation of musicians was converging on the city. New sounds and ideas flourished, most notably at Smalls, where bands had the opportunity to develop their music through weekly gigs. Of all the incredible experiences I had hearing music then, some of the most moving and profound were the nights when Guillermo Klein played with his group,...
2 tags
Martian Landscape
I think of the Martian landscape late delivered To the eye of man by digits of code Reporting shades of grayness, darker, lighter, In dull processsion; in the end disclosing To the rapt eye the unimagined craters.
—And I see a poem, word by word assembled In markings down a page of flash into code, And bring in sightings of another landscape No eye has seen before.
...
3 tags
Photo, courtesy of McMorr on Flickr. Song, ‘I’ll be Glad,’ from Will Oldham’s Lie Down in the Light.
2 tags
To the poem
Let us do something grand just this once Something
small and important and unAmerican Some fine thing
will resemble a human hand and really be merely a thing
Not needing a military band nor an elegant forhcoming
to teast spotlights or a hand from public’s thinking
But be In a defiant land of its own a real right thing
— Frank O’Hara. 1952 or 53.
2 tags
The midwestern land has a softly undulating quality, like concentric circles spreading from a rock tossed into a farm pond. Before the giant plowing icebergs, water covered everything here. Often I see the bottom of an ancient ocean quite clearly—the ripples left by forgotten tides, the gentle upsweeps of a reef—and I imagine that the land is still under water. I possess gills in the...
2 tags
Have Gun — Will Travel is an American Western television series that aired on CBS from 1957 through 1963. It was rated either number three or number four in the Nielsen ratings during each year of its first four seasons. It was one of the few television shows to spawn a successful radio version. The radio series debuted November 23, 1958. There were 225 episodes.
The show followed the...
2 tags
It’s worth stressing here that the shift from the storytelling to commentary—from host organism to parasite—is more than just standard-issue postmodernism. The television shows that have gravitated toward metacommentary in the past few years have done so not because they have given up on “the real,” as the French psychoanalysts like to say. They have attached...
2 tags
“If one wanted to compare Horace Silver to anything, it could well be that beetle-shaped import from Germany, the Volkswagen: First of all, they both caught the public’s fancy in the early-fifties. Next is the fact that they are both, in their respective fields, trendsetters. And, though both are often imitated, neither has been, or ever will be, matched. Finally, and most important...
2 tags
The Storm
A perfect rainbow! a wide arc low in the northern sky spans the black lake
troubled by little waves over which the sun south of the city shines in
coldly from the bare hill supine to the wind which cannot waken anything
but drives the smoke from a few lean chimneys streaming violently southward
— William Carlos Williams. The Wedge. 1944.
1 tag
2 tags
“For how long do you mean to stay?” asked Mrs. Chisom, coming to face her. “Just long enough.” “You going to rush into a trip right now?” Major Bullock asked, going to her other side. “Major Bullock,” she said, “I think when a person can see a free ride one way, the decision is made for them. And it just so happens I haven’t unpacked my...