Nina!

This is Nina Simon''s “See-Line Woman” remixed. It was highlighted by one of the DJ's on KEXP's blog with a review of the album it came from, Verve Remixed, Volume 1.

Rauschenberg Dies at 82

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing 1953

This would be my favorite concept of his. More from the Tate here.

UPDATE: More at Mark Hardin's Artchive in the Pop art section. Also there are some online linkls from Artcylopedia.

Mondays...

Image is from FFFFound. Today is too nice to be indoors. Push the button.

"Push It" - The Rosebuds (SaltnPepa cover)

(Flowers from side of the house.)

Summer Job

"The trouble with intellectuals," Manny, my boss,
once told me, "is that they don't know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,"
he said, "he gets to middle age—and by the way,
he gets there late; he's trying to be a boy until
he's forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he's almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it's all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one."

from American Life in Poetry

"Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it "mentoring," there's likely to be a good deal of that sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem."

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I thought I would finish up National Poetry Month as belatedly as I started to post about it. Kooser's column is another great source of poetry via E-mail. This seemed uncannily prescient.

Stupid University Job

Your loveliest of sway-backs;
of mine I was once ashamed,
and my uni-brow and crooked teeth,
and red hair my mother never let me wash
all winter,
afraid I'd catch a draft.
She wouldn't let me bathe, either,
which made gym class a horror.
I thought I had it bad
until I met that handsome Scottish man
whose parents tried to make him spontaneously combust
by feeding him haggis laced with gunpowder
and making him sleep in the stove.
Instead of an ear, he had a shiny, snail-shaped ridge.
I guess we all have our tragic flaw.
Mine is like that of the naked man
who holds up a sign that says "I'm naked"
and runs screaming through the park.
My handlers say I'm difficult,
but don't you believe it.
My soul still radiates a luminous intensity
despite this stupid university job.

by Sharon Mesmer
From The Virgin Formica

This comes about as close to describing my job as I can find in verse. Although it does beat the one I had after college where I was paid to watch people weld and make sure they didn't start any fires. At least I was mostly outdoors for that one. (The tiger picture is from the image blog FFFOUND!)

"I must down to the seas again..."

My sister has uploaded a few videos of my niece and nephew with my brother-in-law on the local beach near their house in Connecticut. I would have overdubbed it with some Pixies as a soundtrack but it is cute to hear them too. It makes me cringe to think of the hundreds of hours of film my Dad shot of our family and how easy it would be to torture all of us if he digitized them and uploaded them. My last apartment in CT was a leisurely ten minute stroll from the beach in the video. Good times.


I have been enjoying the PBS series "Carrier". The biggest achievement may be that the producers were allowed access by the Navy to film it in the first place. It's a little uneven so far still but very impressive especially with some of the high-definition shots.

David Sedaris has a piece in the New Yorker about smoking/not smoking.

Self Portrait

Self Portrait

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Edward Hirsch
Special Orders



This from a daily E-Mail put out by Knopf Poetry from Random House. You can sign up for it at their website and peruse the archive of previous selections. Mr. Hirsch will be reading from his latest collection tonight in Iowa City at Prairie Lights Bookstore. Below is a clip for the author reading the poem. The Van Gogh self-portrait is from Wikipedia.

Self Portrait- Edward Hirsch

UPDATE: NPR has an interview with Hirsch.

Kathleen Edwards - A Video Primer

"Juice Newton!?! Holy Shit, she's gorgeous."
Interview and some song snippets. Saw her recently on Austin City Limits show on PBS and was hooked. Darker humourous lyrics in her earlier songs. Below is a song off her latest record.

Kathleen Edwards-"The Cheapest Key"

"Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?"

Come, let me write. And to what end? To ease
A burth’ned heart. How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy daily vexing care?
Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please.
Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.
But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
What idler thing then speak and not be hard?
What harder thing then smart and not to speak?
Peace, foolish wit! with wit my wit is marr’d.
Thus write I, while I doubt to write, and wreak
My harms on ink’s poor loss. Perhaps some find
Stellas great pow’rs, that so confuse my mind.


Sonnet 34 of "Astrophel and Stella"
by Philip Sidney (1554-1586)


To continue with my not-so-daily posting of poetry, this was taken from an E-mail sent each day by Poetry Daily during April celebrating National Poetry Month. A contemporary poet selects a poem and then waxes forth on why.

Margret Rabb chose the poem above and says this, "As a quick review of all the reasons not to write, I find sonnet 34 of Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella sequence nearly ideal. When Astrophel, the star lover, sets out to write – presumably of his love for Stella yet again – he begins instead to interrogate himself about the capacity of language to hold and convey his emotions – in effect, to question the whole enterprise. Ironically, as the doubts themselves are written and answered they become evidence of the power of words to create complex and double emotional states. Like love, then, language is shown to be mysteriously organic, its meaning not subject to strict control and lying outside the boundaries of one-to-one correspondences. This disease is published indeed."


She goes on. To get a poem complete with its' own exegesis in your email for the rest of April go here. There is also a daily prose feature.

"C'mon Everybody"

It's not poetry but it's fun. I found this on a music blog and then could not find my way back. I should always remember to leave a bread crumb trail while surfing the web.

"April is the cruelest month..."

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of
stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

--Billy Collins

I think I first heard the lines for the title of this post from the T.S. Eliot poem either from one of my Korean teachers while in the Army, or from a book passed on by my more literary brothers (and sisters) in arms, or I ran across it in a Peter DeVries novel. All of these are possibilities I am just not sure which occurred first.

I know for certain that I was not exposed to Eliot in high school. In fact for most of my life I had managed to avoid modern and contemporary poetry and it was only in my thirties that I began to fill that void. There is much to be wary of, especially in this town, but I won't mention any names. I wanted to start doing this a week ago but as the man says "...time enough and the world...". I chose Billy Collins because he is one of my favorites and I wanted to share audio of this poem to make a case for the importance of hearing poetry, whether it is by listening to or reading it aloud. It is also cool to hear the poem in the author's voice. I will continue to share poems and links to the best of my ability for the remainder of the month.

"Nostalgia" - Billy Collins

Another lame effort to keep my blog updated

Tron
by freres-hueon

The Tron video came from a link on Wired. Things are little slow today. So I took a trip back to '80s.

Muxtape

More ways to waste time at work online are probably not needed but this is a cool site along the lines of Imeem. It is been much discussed on the music blogs. Even New Yorker columnists are doing it.

Largehearted Boy pointed out this (snarky) favorite.

Rock Art

So I was following my Google Reader divining rod around the web and came across a collection of music blogs at the L.A Times, Soundboard. One of the posts was about rock show poster art booths at SXSW aka Flatstock. This post linked to the American Poster Institute where I found the above Calexico poster. It reminded me of all the great posters that were done for the Fillmore in San Francisco for the Bill Graham shows and some of the great ones still being done such as the ones for the Drive-By Truckers. Below is Calexico covering Alejandro Escovedo from the album Por Vida. Alejandro will be here in Iowa City next week.

"Wave" - Calexico (Alejandro Escovedo cover)

Raconteurs

I first saw this on I Am Fuel music blog. Unlike Joe Biden I (almost) always cite my sources. The second album of Jack White's side project is on sale today.

Domo Arigato Manny-san!

"Manny being Manny" is already in mid-season RBI form. A clutch Manny Ramirez hit in extra innings with two men on gives the Red Sox a 6-5 win on Opening Day in Tokyo. Papelbon had a shaky save giving up a run in the bottom of the 10th but then shut the A's down with 2 men on. I did not get up at 5am to watch this game. I did get up in time to see them from 4th inning until the 9th but had to go to work. I was following the game on my computer until I was called away for a meeting. I only found out they won a few minutes prior to posting this.

"Say Hello to My Little Friends."

My friend Eric, with his son Samuel Charles, and his wife Sue's shoulder.

My friend Josh and his son, Samuel James...

"Happy Easter" is not a phrase that rolls off of the tongue without pause. Nevertheless it is a holiday usually spent with family so instead of contemplating the irony of that greeting I will move on to baby pictures. I have been meaning to post these birth photos from close friends who both had baby boys whom were named Samuel. Which is kind of cool because even if though they don't know each other yet they could spend the next 15 years in the same school system as best friends. Eric has a good post on his Myspace blog about their experience which is worth reading. Happy Easter!

UPDATE: I forgot to give a shout out for the Beach Drink Easter crew down in AZ. Wish I was with you guys again this year. It snowed here.

Cat Power

As the glacier retreats from Iowa City leaving a moraine of salt and many decimated roads I long for the frenzy of March Madness and the opening day of Major League Baseball (Red Sox on ESPN today at lunchtime hmmm) as the true first signs of Spring. In the meantime I jam out at my desk or read about Russian poets in San Diego.

Check out the amazing live recordings of Cat Power over at Aquarium Drunkard. It is another edition of The Black Session from French radio’s France Inter. Most of the songs are from her latest covers record, Jukebox, but I think my favorite is her original song "Song to Bobby". I initially thought it was a song by Bob Dylan instead of perhaps the tribute to him that it may be. Anyway these Black Sessions are cool. I have an older one of The Eels where I thought the mood was enhanced by the French DJ introducing the songs. I had no idea what he was saying but how chic it felt. The link below is to the original album version of the song. Compare it to the live one over at AD. There is a lot of energy in the live show.

"Song to Bobby" - Cat Power

UPDATE/Correction. - It was supposed to be Song "to" Bobby not "for" him. Excuse the prepositional lapse. Here is a song by written by Dylan she did cover.

"I Believe in You" - Cat Power

Band of Founding Brothers

Somehow this post did take first time around. I watched the first two parts of the HBO mini-series "John Adams" last night. This was after watching the HGTV Dream Home give away go to some extremely underwhelmed woman in Solon, Iowa.

This series is a sufficient enough reason not to cancel HBO as soon as "The Wire" ended its fifth and final season last week. There are some dramatic licenses taken naturally but it follows the McCullough biography fairly well so far. It makes use of the wonderful and voluminous correspondence between John and his wife Abigail, sometimes turning them into scenes of dialogue. I am looking forward to the next five parts of this series.

Doisneau: Underground Press

Robert Doisneau, Clandestine Press, Quartier Opera, Paris 1944.

Were I to fall in love all over again, it would be
with this low ceiling, with the calm faces
of the two men going about their craft,
and with her, now twisting towards them,
beautiful, defiant and free.

Because we forget how beauty was once itself
and nothing else, how it held its stellar
moment in attic and cellar.

Because that is what beauty is, this compact
with time and the silence of concentration
on one subversive operation,

that requires courage and sacrifice
and never comes without a price.

by George Szirtes
Poetry, February 2008


Szirtes' has several poems as response to certain scenes from World War II. There are several more at the Poetry Magazine website. This is my favorite of the bunch. Although the one called Latrine with the first line of the poem ("Four poilus in a wood austerely shitting." ) is a very close second.

UPDATE: I added a few more music links.