carol the aphid eater

The one and only Mr. Mark Eitzel!!!

2010-10-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

e. e. cummings

2010-10-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

since feeling

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

it may not always be so

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be-
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

Hanne Darboven

2010-10-05T01:40:00.000-07:00

This is the Hanne Darboven project. You must see this!!!

http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs/darboven/project/

Hanne Darboven (born 29 April 1941 in Munich, died 9 March 2009 in Hamburg) was a German conceptual artist. She became best known for her large scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.

Hanne Darboven grew up in Rönneburg, a southern suburb of Hamburg, as the second of three daughters of Cäsar Darboven and Kirsten Darboven. Her father was a well-to-do businessman in Hamburg.

From 1962 to 1965 Darboven studied art with Willem Grimm and Almir Mavignier at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste. From 1966 to 1968 she lived in New York City, at first in total isolation from the New York art scene. In the winter of 1966/67 she met Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, representatives of Minimal Art. Soon afterwards her first series of drawings on milimeter paper with lists of numbers, which resulted from complicated additions or multiplications with calendar dates, hours and days of the week.

The inky fingered clerk

2010-09-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

His dumb ill-fitted glasses
Slide down his narrow nose
Quickly catching her profile
Bent in still repose
But as she turns toward the window
He sees her tiny smirk
And the way that she looks down on
The inky fingered clerk
The inky fingered clerk

He follows her as the sun sets
As the day turns into night
He counts all of her footsteps
Getting every detail right
As he creeps upon the ledge
And to his deadly work
He knows no one would suspect
The inky fingered clerk
The inky fingered clerk

As the blood drains from her face
And her skin turns into chalk
She hears one last stroke
Of her mother’s carriage clock
Then finally she is still
After one last feeble jerk
Cradled in the arms
Of the inky fingered clerk
The inky fingered clerk

The cops had only her body
Her hands and feet unbound
Not one single clue
Or evidence was found
No trail of blood leading
To where inky fingers lurk
Only treachery and cunning
And the inky fingered clerk
The inky fingered clerk

A Lecture Upon The Shadow by John Dunne

2010-09-05T04:53:00.000-07:00

Stand still, and I will read to thee

A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.

These three hours that we have spent,

Walking here, two shadows went

Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd.

But, now the sun is just above our head,

We do those shadows tread,

And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.

So whilst our infant loves did grow,

Disguises did, and shadows, flow

From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so.

That love has not attain'd the high'st degree,

Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,

We shall new shadows make the other way.

As the first were made to blind

Others, these which come behind

Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.

If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,

To me thou, falsely, thine,

And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.

The morning shadows wear away,

But these grow longer all the day;

But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.

Love is a growing, or full constant light,

And his first minute, after noon, is night.

…and why do I hate her

2010-07-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

…and why do I hate her?
She’s got the pinched face of a traitor
A liar
A fraud
She bleeds brown from the corners of her mouth
which wraps around her chalky skull filled with cobwebs connected to cunning
threads pulling her eyes this way and that
I hate her and I always will
And I will not hold onto it
This hate
As some have said
I simply will
I simply always will
Hate her
But not simply
I will hate her for all my days
I will give great parties in the name of my hate
And people
Friends
Will come to these parties and love me in spite of my hate
They will pity me for my hate
My friends
Pity me for my hate
…and why do I hate her?

Wine and Groucho Marx

2010-07-03T22:44:00.001-07:00

I really wouldn’t
I really couldn’t
I really shouldn’t
But here I am
With my glass raised aplomb
Feeling quite dignified in my reasoning
Why it was God who gave it to us was it not?
Of course following that logic, did not he, the inventor of hunger, sickness, death and war
Also have his hand in the making of summers and Groucho Marx?

Guillaume Apollinaire

2010-06-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

Guillaume Apollinaire

Born 26 August 1880(1880-08-26)
Rome, Italy1
Died 9 November 1918 (aged 38)
Paris, France
Occupation Poet, Writer, Art critic

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (French pronunciation: [ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]; Rome, August 26, 1880–November 9, 1918, Paris) was a French poet, playwright, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.

Hotels

The room is free

Each for himself

A new arrival

Pays by the month

The boss is doubtful

Whether you’ll pay

Like a top

I spin on the way

The traffic noise

My neighbour gross

Who puffs an acrid

English smoke

O La Vallière

Who limps and smiles

In my prayers

The bedside table

And all the company

in this hotel

know the languages

of Babel

Let’s shut our doors

With a double lock

And each adore

his lonely love

Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917, used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.

Born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky and raised speaking French, among other languages, he emigrated to France and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelica Kostrowicka, was a Polish noblewoman born near Navahrudak (now in Belarus). Apollinaire's father is unknown but may have been Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss Italian aristocrat who disappeared early from Apollinaire's life. Apollinaire was partly educated in Monaco.

Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators in that period included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, André Breton, André Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Alexandra Exter, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist movement.

On September 7, 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later. Apollinaire then implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning in the art theft, but he was also exonerated. He once called for the Louvre to be burnt down.

He fought in World War I and, in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple. He wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he coined the word surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes. Apollinaire's status as a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest spirit that ever existed."

The war-weakened Apollinaire died of influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

The White Snow

The angels the angels in the sky

One’s dressed as an officer

One’s dressed as a chef today

And the others sing

Fine sky-coloured officer

Sweet Spring when Christmas is long gone

Will deck you with a lovely sun

A lovely sun

The chef plucks geese

Ah! Snowfalls hiss

Fall and how I miss

My beloved in my arms

Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres cubistes on the cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.

Moonlight

Mellifluent moon on the lips of the maddened

The orchards and towns are greedy tonight

The stars appear like the image of bees

Of this luminous honey that offends the vines

For now all sweet in their fall from the sky

Each ray of moonlight’s a ray of honey

Now hid I conceive the sweetest adventure

I fear stings of fire from this Polar bee

that sets these deceptive rays in my hands

And takes its moon-honey to the rose of the winds

In 1907, Apollinaire wrote the well-known erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges). Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt.

Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), and more orthodox, though still modernist poems informed by Apollinaire's experiences in the First World War and in which he often used the technique of automatic writing, was published.

The Gypsy

The gypsy knew in advance

Our two lives star-crossed by night

We said farewell to her and then

from that deep well Hope began

Love heavy a performing bear

Danced upright when we wanted

And the blue bird lost his plumes

And the beggars lost their Ave

We knew quite well that we were damned

But hope of love in the street

Made us think hand in hand

Of what the Gypsy did foresee

In his youth Apollinaire lived for a short while in Belgium, mastering the Walloon dialect sufficiently to write poetry through that medium, some of which has survived.

A Curse Against Elegies by Anne Sexton

2010-06-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?
I am tired of all your pious talk.
Also, I am tired of all the dead.
They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:
the last empty fifth of booze,
the rusty nails and chicken feathers
that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,
the worms that lived under the cat's ear
and the thin-lipped preacher
who refused to call
except once on a flea-ridden day
when he came scuffing in through the yard
looking for a scapegoat.
I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you - you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.

George Saunders

2010-06-03T14:14:00.001-07:00

Born December 2, 1958 (1958-12-02) (age 51)
Amarillo, Texas
Occupation Short story writer, Journalist, College Professor
Nationality United States
Influences;
Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, John Updike
Official website

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ, among others. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian’s Saturday edition until October, 2008. Currently a professor at Syracuse University, he won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, Saunders received one of that year's MacArthur Fellowships, more popularly known as the "genius grant". His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007.
Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised on the south side of Chicago. He is a graduate of Oak Forest High School, located in Oak Forest, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. In 1981, he received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Speaking of his scientific background, Saunders said "...any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses."[1] In 1988, he obtained an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University.
Career as author

In his twenties, Saunders considered himself an Objectivist, but is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to neoconservative thinking.[2] From 1989 to 1996 he worked for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York as a technical writer and geophysical engineer. He also worked for a time in Sumatra with an oil exploration crew. Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program. In 2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly called a "genius grant". In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Saunders currently resides in Syracuse, New York. He is married and has two daughters. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope's Visiting Writers Series. His most recent book, a collection of recent non-fiction entitled The Braindead Megaphone, was published on September 4, 2007.While promoting The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders appeared on The Colbert Report and Late Night with David Letterman.

Saunders' fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism and corporate culture and the role of the mass media. While many reviewers are quick to mention the satirical tone in most of Saunders' writing, many of these same works also deal with philosophical questions of morality. The tragicomic element, concurrently devastating and wildly funny, has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, a writer to whom Saunders has acknowledged a debt.[17]

The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by Ben Stiller in the late 1990s and a film has been rumored to be in the works for several years now, to be produced by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions.[18] Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay for one of his stories from Pastoralia, 'Sea Oak'.
Books
Fiction

* CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) (short stories and a novella)
* Pastoralia (2000) (short stories and a novella)
* The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000) (novella with illustrations by Lane Smith (illustrator)) (New York Times bestseller)
* The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) (novella)
* In Persuasion Nation (2006) (short stories)

Non-Fiction
* A Bee Stung Me, So I Killed the Fish (2006) (promotional chapbook of essays, limited to 500 copies)
* The Braindead Megaphone (2007) (collected essays)

This is the official fan page;

http://www.georgesaundersland.com

A fabulous essay on homelessness in GQ.

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/200909/homeless-tent-city-george-saunders-fresno

carletta sue kay

2010-05-18T23:55:00.001-07:00

http://www.saucefaucet.com/csksongs

The Honey Mooners

2010-04-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

grimy as the walls on The Honeymooner's set
you think no one sees that shit?
stupid ass!
EVERYONE SEES THAT SHIT!
you're dirty
you think you can hide the shadows?
the shadows are far too fast
and even if you could...
well...why would you want to?
every man has shadows
some are lined with shit and shame
others? well why would i care about others?
i can scarcely stomach my own

Marc Riboud

2010-03-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

Is he a street photographer? Yes. Is he a documentary photographer? Yes. A photojournalist? A travel photographer? A portraitist? A fine arts photographer? Yes, yes, yes and most certainly yes.

French photographer Marc Riboud isn't easily categorized, because he's never specialized in any particular area of photography. There are some recurring themes and stylistic idiosyncrasies in his work, but the pictures fall easily into half a dozen different modes of photography. For half a century Riboud has been shooting highly personal images that appeal to a variety of markets. The marketplace, however, has never been uppermost in his mind.

Born in Lyon, France in 1923, Riboud became interested in photography at an early age. His father, a combat veteran of the First World War, gave him the dented little Vest Pocket Kodak that he'd carried on the battlefield. It seems Riboud was initially as intrigued by the personal history of the camera as he was by the act of photography. "The camera stirred my imagination," he wrote, "for it had its own story to tell: it had witnessed the mud and the courage, the suffering and the absurdity of the trenches." In a very real way, that attitude epitomizes Riboud's photography; his work is about personal stories as interpreted through the camera.

War came to France when Riboud was seventeen years old. He joined the French Resistance movement as an active member of the Maquis du Vercors and took place in several engagements. At the end of the war, Riboud enrolled in Lyon's Ecole Centrale, where he studied engineering. After graduating, he accepted a position at a factory in the nearby town of Villeurbanne and began a normal life. His interest in photography, however, hadn't diminished.

Riboud took a week-long holiday from his job to attend (and, of course, to photograph) a drama festival held in Lyon. What was intended to be a brief holiday never ended; Riboud decided not to return to the factory. Perhaps the time he spent fighting with the Resistance made the regimented life of an engineer employed by a factory intolerable, perhaps he felt his position didn't permit him enough of an outlet for self-expression, perhaps Riboud went temporarily insane—we don't know. What we do know is that instead of resuming his safe and secure position, he decided to devote himself to photography.

Riboud went to New York City for a short period before returning to France. He moved to Paris where he had the good fortune to meet another photographer, also a veteran of the war: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cartier-Bresson and his partners had founded the Magnum photography agency shortly after the war. He encouraged Riboud to keep working at his photography. A year later Magnum accepted Riboud as a member.

The unique approach of the Magnum agency allowed Riboud to shoot the sorts of photographs he wanted to shoot, while giving him a grounding in the actual business of photography. He learned he could actually sell the photographs he would have taken anyway. One of his first photographs for Magnum, a man applying a coat of paint to the Eiffel Tower, was published in LIFE magazine. Coincidentally, that photo became one of Riboud's signature images. It contains all the elements that characterize his style: an emphasis on graphic composition that works in balance with the human figures, who are always depicted with compassion.

Although his work for Magnum encompassed everything from portraits to photojournalism, Riboud never approached an assignment or a project with a political or social agenda. According to Riboud, photography "must not try to be persuasive. It cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it is changing."

With the support of the Magnum Agency, Riboud documented a lot of change. For the next few years, from 1955 to 1960, he found his way through India, Nepal, Mongolia and the Soviet Union. He drove a car from Alaska to Mexico, shooting photographs as he went. He became one of the first Western photographers to be allowed into China after the Cultural Revolution. Later he would document rebellions and civil insurrections and wars in Africa, Southeast Asia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Algeria.

Wherever he went, his work always stressed the human element. English boys playing cowboy in the streets of London. Workers in China taking a brief break for lunch. Pilgrims at the ghats on the holy Ganges in Bénarès, India. Peasant herdsmen in Mongolia. He also shot portraits—both formal and informal—of movie stars, politicians, and diplomats, but his best work was always of common people.

Riboud describes himself as a "shy" photographer, saying "I was torn between the fear of getting too close to people and another force that egged me on to get a closer look." Not surprisingly, over the years he has developed some strong opinions about the practice of photography. He takes his cue from René Char, the French poet who advocated people should "foresee as a strategist and act as a primitive." In other words, Riboud believes a photographer should mentally sketch out the scene in terms of composition, but must also be alert for the happy accident—the gesture, the turn of the head, the unexpected element—that turns an ordinary image into something extraordinary. "Surprises of every kind lie in wait for the photographer," Riboud has written. "They open the eyes and quicken the heartbeat of those with a passion for looking."

His best work reveals a finely-tuned sense of balance between rigorous composition and openness to the moment. Experience allows him to put himself in the right spot to take advantage of the unexpected element while retaining the strong sense of composition. One of his iconic images—a 1967 photograph of a young woman protesting against the war in Vietnam facing a stern line of armed troops standing before the Pentagon and presenting them with a flower—is a classic example of Riboud's approach. He saw the situation as it was unfolding, took a position that provided a solid composition, and then remained poised in case a photograph presented itself. That same approach yielded a perfect moment one morning in China as his train stopped at a station. It's not just a matter of being in the right spot at the right moment; it's a matter of knowing where that spot is in case the moment takes place. Riboud was aware that the windows of the train would act as frames and he was prepared when each of the frames was filled.

In 1979 Riboud resigned as a full member of Magnum, though he remains a 'contributing member.' He continues to shoot the things that interest him with minimal regard to the marketability of his photographs. His work hangs in museums in Europe and North America, his photos are published in magazines throughout the world, he has won awards from several international photography bodies.

At 85 years of age, Marc Riboud feels he still sees the world in the same way he did when he was 13, looking through the lens of his father's camera. He still approaches his work the same way, though by now he's done it so often that it's almost instinctive. Riboud says it best: "I photograph the way a musician hums."

The Mouth of The Hudson by Robert Lowell

2010-03-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

A single man stands like a bird-watcher,
and scuffles the pepper and salt snow
from a discarded, gray
Westinghouse Electric cable drum.
He cannot discover America by counting
the chains of condemned freight-trains
from thirty states. They jolt and jar
and junk in the siding below him.
He has trouble with his balance.
His eyes drop,
and he drifts with the wild ice
ticking seaward down the Hudson,
like the blank sides of a jig-saw puzzle.

The ice ticks seaward like a clock.
A negro toasts
wheat-seeds over the coke-fumes
of a punctured barrel.
Chemical air
sweeps in from New Jersey,
and smells of coffee.

Across the river,
ledges of suburban factories tan
in the sulphur-yellow sun
of the unforgivable landscape.

Marcel Broodthaer

2010-03-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

Marcel Broodthaers (January 28, 1924 – January 28, 1976) was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works.

He was born in Brussels, Belgium, where he was associated with the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionnaire from 1945 and dabbled in journalism, film, and poetry. After spending 20 years in poverty as a struggling poet[1], he performed the symbolic act of embedding fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête in plaster, creating his first art object. That same year, 1964, for his first exhibition, he wrote a famous preface for the exhibition catalogue;

"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. 'But it is art' he said 'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.' 'Agreed' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects." Broodthaers, 1964[2]

He worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage, often containing written texts. His most noted work was an installation which began in his Brussels house which he called Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968). This installation was followed by a further eleven manifestations of the 'museum', including at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle for an exhibition in 1970 and at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. For such works he is associated with the late 20th century global spread of both installation art, as well as "institutional critique," in which interrelationships between artworks, the artist, and the museum are a focus.

Broodthaers died in Cologne, Germany on his 52nd birthday.

Marcel Broodthaers was a poet and bookseller until age forty, when he turned to Conceptual art by creating a sculptural work composed of fifty copies of one of his poetry books, cast in plaster. He later became known for paradoxical word-image juxtapositions, as well as large-scale installations simulating museum exhibitions and assemblages made in part with eggshells, mussel shells, and European household goods. He also created paintings, films, performances, and sound pieces. In general, Broodthaers's work focuses on the ways in which social, economic, and institutional constructs influence and affect art's meaning.

Broodthaers's printed work consists of twenty-six individual prints, several in diptych format, and some twenty artist's books, mostly created to function as part of his Conceptual projects rather than as explorations of printmaking techniques. The diptych Museum-Museum presents Broodthaers's views on an institution of culture, which, he believes, decontextualizes art. Here identical bars of gold bullion are each stamped with an eagle, a reference to the "Eagle Department" in his fictional museum. On the left, they are labeled with artists' names, such as Mantegna, Ingres, and Duchamp, and on the right, with names of commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and chocolate. The bars along the bottom row of each panel carry the following captions: "IMITATION," "KOPIE," "COPIE," "FALSCH," and "ORIGINAL." By integrating issues of art and commerce, Broodthaers raises questions concerning the reduction of art objects to basic exchange commodities. Created for one of his mock museum installations, this print implicates museums for their role as treasuries of artistic currency and for their collaboration in the process of commodification as they act as guarantors of aesthetic values.

Raimond Livasgani

Tweaker Love

2010-03-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

On the TV an endless loop of cum shots with a voice over in Dutch
They never go out in the day and they always do way too much
Benny and Cesar, two inseparable, insufferable fools
A couple of real rag dolls stuffed with sand and straw and real plastic jewels
Benny, a young Buster Keaton got up in powder, brilliant and in his prime
Cesar, a whisper of a man, full of good intention and petty crime
They take on many lovers who only live inside of their heads
They’re all very handsome and of course they’re all very dead
He hates it when he looks at him that way
With his pretty mouth full of obscenities, lies and decay
You don’t think that I’m man enough well then baby just you try me
We’ll move out to the desert where everyone wears Chrystal crowns in the shit hole kingdom a.k.a. i.e.
Where the shit is always good and the endless day always bad
Always the same question, how can you miss what you never had?
Wrapped up in pink shower curtains and several rolls of packing tape
Cesar looks flushed, his skin red, his mouth agape
Twitching with a sudden doubt in his eyes a budding fear
“Ah fuck baby I’m sorry, I forgot you were still even here”

Sufjan Stevens

2010-02-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufjan_Stevens

Romulus Linney

2010-02-27T13:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v1n1/features/linney_r_81502/linney_r.htm

Pina Bausch

2010-02-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

Jim Lambie

2010-02-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

CASA de RETIRO ESPIRITUAL by Emilio Ambasz

2010-02-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

March Willows by Ben Belitt

2010-02-26T16:54:00.000-08:00

This kindling of sacramental color---El Greco's
collapsed Count, a cadaver of haze, the green
of a closed or an opening grave,

fillets under the bent
wands, diagrams of fountians
rising and falling in faintly sinister gases,

phosphorus and pistachio--
yields to its seasonal Summoner as the diamond
yields to the shock of the diamond-breaker's hammer.

Now the daft
ward of a mad song hacks at her laces
and spins in her farthingale's balloon

under the deckle of a mortuary tree
past Kedron and Babylon,
dangling her weeper's hair

and combing the primitive
leaf in valences and serrations---
a stonecutter's sense of the willow

chiseled in airy chartreuse.
O the mind breaks this way and that, says the Summoner,
of its own crazed weight, shows an anvil's

underside, as the catamount's breath is seen
a moment between the thunderhead in the snow
and a glinting of evergreen,

while the whole of the willow breathes like a heart,
turning its rag-bag of leaves,
one way, leaden, like the meat of the olive,

the other way, yellow; and the lute in the stone
is heard in its lunatic sweetness
in a rising and falling of branches:
"O willow, willow!"

Stutterer by Alan Dugan

2010-02-25T00:26:00.000-08:00

Courage: your tongue has left
its natural position in the cheek
where eddies of the breath
are navigable calms. Now
it locks against the glottis or
is snapped at by the teeth,
in midstream: it must be work
to get out what you mean:
the rapids of the breath
are furious with belief
and the tongue, as blood
and animal of speech,
to stop it, block it, or come clean
over the rocks of teeth
and down the races of the air,
tumbled and bruised to death.
Relax it into acting, be
the air's straw-hat
canoeist with a mandolin
yodeling over the falls.
This is the sound advice
of experts and a true despair:
it is the toll to pass the locks
down to the old mill stream
where lies of love are fair.

Big Louise Scott Walker

2010-02-13T23:24:00.001-08:00

She stands all alone
You can hear her hum softly
From her fire escape in the sky
She fills the bags 'neath her eyes
With the moonbeams
And cries 'cause the world's passed her by

Didn't time sounds sweet yesterday?
In a world filled with friends
You lose your way

She's a haunted house
And her windows are broken
And the sad young man's gone away
Her bathrobe's torn
And tears smudge her lipstick
And the neighbors just whisper all day

Didn't time sounds sweet yesterday?
In a world filled with friends
You lose your way

Andalucia

2010-01-28T02:13:00.001-08:00

you were hogging the stereo
it was your birthday
...and when i finally convinced you to let me put on a record
i did
john cale
andalucia
you hummed a few bars
and then left the room

Etta rawks my shit!!!!!

2010-01-26T17:25:00.001-08:00

http://daddypony.blogspot.com/2008/08/etta-james-rock-house-live-in-nashville.html

2010-01-02T17:47:00.001-08:00

Mitch Epstein

2010-01-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Mitch Epstein born 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts is an American photographer.

Epstein was a student of Gary Winogrand at The Cooper Union in 1972, after having attended the Rhode Island School of Design. While at Cooper, Epstein relinquished classical black and white photography to use color, which was, at the time, considered a slick tool of advertising. Epstein helped pioneer the redefinition of color photography as art form.

By the mid-1970s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. In 1978, he journeyed to India with his then wife, director Mira Nair, where he was a producer, set designer, and cinematographer on several films, including Salaam Bombay! and ''India Cabaret. His book In Pursuit of India is a compilation of his Indian photographs from this period.

From 1992 to 1995, Epstein photographed in Vietnam, which resulted in a large one-wall grid installation, along with a book titled Vietnam: A Book of Changes. Epstein's Vietnam pictures reveal the complexity of a culture molded by French colonialism, the American war, and western consumer culture. “I don’t know that Mitch Epstein’s glorious photographs record all of what is salient in end-of-the-twentieth century Vietnam," wrote Susan Sontag, "for it’s been more than two decades since my two stays there. I can testify that his images confirm what moved and troubled me then…and offer shrewd and poignant glimpses into the costs of imposing a certain modernity. This is beautiful, authoritative work by an extremely intelligent and gifted photographer.”

Having lived and traveled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in his adopted home of New York City. He managed to turn New York into a city that looked unfamiliar—as imagined as it was real—in The City, a series of pictures that was the first chapter in his American trilogy.

In 1999, he began what would become the second chapter of the trilogy. Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father's two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by the artist. The book, Family Business (Steidl), which combined all of these elements, won the 2004 Krazna-Kraus Best Photography Book of the Year award. Family Business is often cited as a seminal work of photography, as well as bookmaking.

The American trilogy was completed with a project called American Power. From 2004 to 2009, Epstein explored how landscape and society intersect in the United States via energy production. He photographed energy production sites and their environs in twenty-five states, often hounded by Homeland Security agents. These pictures question notions of power, electrical and political. The large-scale prints from this series have been exhibited worldwide and published as a monograph (Steidl, 2009). In a review for Art in America, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein "grounds his images...in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty."

Epstein is now collaborating with his second wife, author Susan Bell, on a public art installation based on American Power. American Power Public Art (APPA) will use billboards and transportation posters, as well as a website, to disseminate art and text to a broad public; and, in so doing, prompt environmental awareness and activism.

Epstein has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. In spring 2007, FOAM museum in Amsterdam exhibited a selection from Family Business and American Power. His additional books include Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 and the recent retrospective WORK. Epstein was a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany in spring 2008. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

carletta sue kay

2009-12-29T19:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.saucefaucet.com/csk/

rainy days and mondays by paul williams

2009-10-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

the rain as a running gag

2009-10-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

And now it comes
Like stepping into a bucket
You fall to your knees in prostration to a better punch line
You knew it was out there
And you knew that it would return
But not with such comic grace
Not with uncanny timing and effect
And now you are covered in it
But the rain is merciful
The rain as a running gag

Richard Hawley

2009-08-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

Wheel of Fortune

2009-07-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

That sound I try to avoid
The audience cries, “WHEEL OF FORTUNE!”
It sputters and scrapes in the periphery of my hearing
I don’t even have to force myself to not hear it
Which I do often, denying myself the acknowledgment of its frailty and fruitlessness
It could just as well be the fluttering of a bird’s wing which I try desperately to hear
But I couldn’t even if I tried
Everything is a blur
Everything is a slow heavy sliding of soundless iron
Soundless but still shrill in its imagining
That’s where you are now
Soundless in my imagining

out of my dreams by richard rodgers and oscar hammerstein

2009-07-10T02:20:00.000-07:00

L.A. Freeway by Guy Clark

2009-02-21T01:00:00.000-08:00

Baby Q

2009-02-04T01:39:00.000-08:00

A Whisper

2009-01-25T01:39:00.000-08:00

a whisper
behind my eyes
it vibrates and my eyelashes flicker
if it does not see what it says, then it feels what it means
it says, "soft"
it says, "pretty"
come away with me
sink
slow
submerging
warm, tickling the hair on my arms
pulling
resting on soft silky tentacles of moss and green
blue, hugging
my mother's satin nightgown
a hot summer's afternoon blowing over my shoulders
the cool crook of my memory telling me...
"you remember sleep...let's sleep now."

The Prayer that God heard

2009-01-20T00:04:00.000-08:00

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears - for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger - at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort - at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience - and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility - open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance - replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity - remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand - that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

Jacques Dutronc

2009-01-19T15:53:00.000-08:00

What a thrill I thought

2009-01-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

What a thrill I thought
To sock you in the stomach
Right in the guts
The o-shaped comic book mouth acquiescing as I might expect
Watching
Feeling
My fist pushing, twisting, t-shirt
White
Around my knuckles, pulling out globs of you
…of who you thought you were
Dough
…of who you said you were
Sticking to my fingers I, in a panic
Flick to the floor
Still parts will not come off
My fingers pop and mock
I think I might fall to the ground and scrape the residual of him off like mud
Splaying my fingers where dry
Crackling in the lines of my hands
Flakes of you come off
What a thrill I thought

This Bus

2009-01-10T03:35:00.000-08:00

This bus smells like death
This bus smells like urine
This bus smells like humiliation
This bus makes a big black cloud
This bus feeds my children
This bus wakes the baby
This bus has bullet holes
This bus is warm and dry
This bus knows no color
This bus could care less
This bus will take you away
This bus is full of sickness
This bus has heard many stories
This bus will take me home

Harold Pinter

2009-01-05T00:37:00.001-08:00

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE, Nobel Laureate (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008), was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, and political activist considered by many "the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation"

After publishing poetry as a teenager and acting in school plays, Pinter began his theatrical career in the mid-1950s as a repertory actor using the stage name David Baron. Beginning with his first play, The Room (1957), Pinter's writing career spanned over half a century and produced 29 stage plays; 26 screenplays; many dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays; poetry; one novel; other short fiction; and essays, speeches, and letters—many of whose manuscripts are owned and catalogued by the British Library. His best-known works include The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film, and his screenplay adaptations of others' works, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He directed almost 50 stage, television and film productions.[1] Despite frail health since 2001, he continued to act on stage and screen, performing the title role in a critically-acclaimed production of Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre, in October 2006.

Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts among ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past; stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory. Although Pinter publicly eschewed applying the term "political theatre" to his own work in 1981, he began writing overtly political plays in the mid-1980s, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life. This "new direction" in his work and his left-wing political activism stimulated additional critical debate about Pinter's politics. Pinter, his work, and his politics have been the subject of voluminous critical commentary.

In addition to the Nobel Prize in Literature and the French Légion d'honneur, Pinter received 19 honorary degrees and numerous other prizes and awards. Academic institutions and performing arts organizations have devoted symposia, festivals, and celebrations to him and his work, in recognition of his cultural influence and achievements across genres and media. In awarding Pinter's Nobel Prize, instigating some public controversy and criticism, the Swedish Academy cited him for being "generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century" and noted: "That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque' " ("Biobibliographical Notes")—a word he despised and found meaningless. Two weeks after having to withdraw from the honorary degree ceremony at the Central School of Speech and Drama because of illness and receiving it in absentia ("Degree Honour"), Harold Pinter died from cancer and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, in London

This is a link to Mr. Pinter's powerful and compelling speech given in honor of receiving The Nobel Prize in Literature.

Harold Pinter Nobel Prize Speech 2005. Art, Truth, Politics.

The Diplomat Part One

2009-01-03T16:51:00.000-08:00

I'm an all American boy
And that means I've got my shit together
An all American boy
I'm prepared at all times and in all states of weather
No one sees through my masque
or the thin ray of light that leaks out my eye
I don't take and I don't ask
I always bounce back, try after try
An all American boy
I see past the truth and I make things happen
It's a life I sometimes enjoy
I've got god on my side like all true madmen
Mad? Did I say mad?
Well it's not really exactly what I meant
And, if I may add?
Silly me! What am I saying? That's not what I meant!
My ruddy cheeks and crooked smile
Are well worth the wait and even the price
A master in the art of denial
A nod of the head will usually suffice

Sparks

2009-01-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

J T Colfax

2008-12-31T15:35:00.000-08:00

This is the press release for his video collection on Youtube;

"I bought a house in a town I found off the internet for it's cheapness. Got a 3 bedroom with huge yard for 28k. Five years later a huge storm caused me to find out I have a significant sized 80 year old tunnel under my yard. I creep and crawl around the neighborhood and also do as much library research as I can about it. Almost every vid I put up has SOMETHING to do with the tunnel or it's support systems (dams/pumps/wells). I am also a natural wierdo, so it all works out well."

Short Films by Mike Leigh

2008-12-30T00:26:00.000-08:00

Scotland Rawks Part Three

2008-12-29T18:33:00.000-08:00

Boards of Canada

Fire Engines

Josef K

Primal Scream

Bonnie Parker or Eleanor Roosevelt

2008-12-25T02:44:00.001-08:00

If I were a girl…
Would a few extra pounds be a crime?
Would I love without reason or without rhyme?
Would my bra straps show all the time?
Would I…could I ever be passed my prime?

If I were a girl…
Would I use even half of my brain?
Would I run off with a man to Spain?
Would I be the ball or the chain?
Would the storm inside me ever wane?

If I were a girl…
Would I shirk at the first wrinkle in my hand?
Would I beckon at your command?
On my deathbed will I finally understand?
Would I ever truly need a man?

If I were a girl…
Would I fall for every trend and every fad?
Would I Read every single Cosmo ad?
Would I Yearn for yet another drunken cad?
…or the father that I never had?

If I were a girl…
Would it be the house of pity where I dwelled?
Would I deserve every hand I was ever dealt?
Would I own every feeling that I ever felt?
Would I be Bonnie Parker or Eleanor Roosevelt?

Joan As Police Woman

2008-12-24T15:57:00.000-08:00

Which do I dread more?

2008-12-24T15:03:00.000-08:00

Which do I dread more?
The longing to call or the weight and pressure I must apply to stop myself from calling
I know that my heavy imagining cannot compare to the sound of your cement voice
The slow uncoiling of your resolve breaks like clay springs
“Finally!” you think but do not say
Never angry
Only waiting
“Hello son…how are you?”
I can smell the liniments, I breathe the salve
The slick purple knees shining like lily pads, brown and yellow firmament mounting the edges
I wish I could be in the warm sludge hammock of your hidden resentment that I concoct in my mind in order to assuage my own
I only wish you would say to me, “why don’t you ever call son?”
But you do not
And hovering above, clinging to the pale sapphire molecules of your Oxycodone mornings, every day you say to yourself, affecting her sweet Arkansan drawl, “Good morning son.”
Today I canned some peaches and killed those nasty worms in the tomatoes…you can sleep in this Sunday if you don’t feel like going to church

For The Birds

2008-12-24T01:56:00.000-08:00

The spoon bill and night heron
Cormorant and quail
Don’t need no taxi
No train and no rail
The redshank and curlew
Black kite and mute swan
Have spruced up their feathers
And now they’re all gone
This life is brutal
This life’s absurd
And this life is for the birds
This life is for the birds

The osprey and the kestrel
The goshawk and the jay
They know when to go
They know when to stay
The lesser spotted eagle
Has plenty self esteem
She knows it’s just a name
She knows it’s just a dream
And it goes by so quickly
All foggy and blurred
And this life is for the birds
This life is for the birds

At times it’s just easier to stay down
Bury my head in the sand and don’t ask why
Keep my feet planted on the ground
And watch the birds high in the sky

The teal and the mallard
The shoveler and hawk
Don’t break from exposure
Don’t break from the flock
They go with the wind
And get carried away
Into the cold dawn
Of a bright and brand new day
They only fly forward
No looking backward
And this life is for the birds
This life is for the birds

Some Famous Landmarks

2008-12-21T17:56:00.000-08:00

Have you seen that documentary called The Bridge? It's all about people who have jumped off of The Golden Gate Bridge to their deaths.

http://www.thebridge-themovie.com/new/index.html

It is horribly sad. It inspired me to write a song about people who chose to kill themselves. But not so simply, the people in my song aspire to take their final steps from famous landmarks.

Some famous landmarks

Lila is waiting across from The Louvre
She clutches a knife but she does not move
Then she’ll saunter inside
And gouge out the eyes of The…
Mona Lisa

She climbs to the top of The Eiffel Tower
She’s promised that this would be her finest hour
Then one final goodbye
And she’ll no longer try to be
A good girl

Ch.
Now she’s falling
She’s falling
She’s smiling
She’s smiling
She’s laughing
She’s laughing
She’s…

The Golden Gate Bridge is a great work of art
It leads to a city full of broken hearts
And Tom’s no exception
A real wall of rejection and he’s
A virgin

His feet are so cold and his eyes are so dead
He thinks of a story he’d recently read
He leans on the rail
A small baby fell
Accidentally

Ch.

Built by a famous Chinese architect
A real womanizer though you’d never suspect
Only twelve stories tall
But perfect for Paul ‘cause he’s
Not too picky

Everyone knows that people can’t fly
But it’s really quite easy to soar through the sky
Just one tiny step
And the secrets you kept are
All forgotten

Evelyn Waugh

2008-12-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy, Brideshead Re-visited was aired for the first time on American TV. It smelled a little queer, but for whatever reason, probably my family mocking me, I never got to see it. I recently rented it and loved it. How much did I love it you ask? Well I was inspired to write a song loosely built around it, lines from it, and the seemingly hyper Christianity of some of its main characters. I've named it after its author. I've also added some sexy shots of Jeremy Irons from the movie. Why not!

Evelyn Waugh

Verse One

Why it is that love makes me
Hate the world?
Is it a conspiracy…
I will never ever understand?
Or is it just somehow above me?
I feel as if all mankind
And god too
Are having some kind
Of cruel joke at my expense
And it’s just not what I would call Christian

Chorus

I am in an amorous stupor

Verse Two

Have I really succumbed to this?
Such horror!
Soul meets soul on lover’s lips
I would rather climb the highest peek
Than to fall clumsily in love
Now I can’t even dress myself
It’s a shame
I have become someone else
Quoting Shelley, Keats and Neruda
God save me, from my own pretension

Chorus

Bridge

I never thought that it would be me
Rambling, pathetic mess
I never thought that it could be me
Going on and on…
And on and on and on…
And on!

Verse Three

Kindly put me out of my
Misery
If you really must know why
Simply look at what I have become
It just simply ain’t a pretty site
La la la la…

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

Neruda

One Day Trip

2008-12-21T17:28:00.000-08:00

I was reading this review on a book by English photographer Martin Parr called One Day Trip. It is a book that I myself own which I love, so I was inspired to write a song about it, using actual quotes from the review which is quite good. The review is from a site called, Photo Book Guide, and if I could find the author of the piece I would surely credit him here and now. Well, anyway, here's the song and some pictures from the book.

One Day Trip

Between the white Cliffs of Dover and Calais
The thrifty English go to play
The lads are off to save on Stella Artois and Boddingtons

They don’t have to travel real far
And they get their pictures taken by Martin Parr
They pose for snaps with piss dripping down their legs

They sing, “Thank you Maggie,” and they always say “Please”
For chopping off our legs just below the knees
It’s just another holiday in France

Chorus
One day trip
We’re going on a one day trip
We’ll have a drink but just a wee nip
As we’re going on a one day trip

Excuse me sir but could I borrow your wheelchair
As you can plainly see I’ve got no more room there
And I’ve already broken a few bottles of red wine

It’s amazing what one will do to save on taxes
It’s amazing but the simple fact is
We’d have to pay triple that back home

That one’s an accountant, and she’s a go-go dancer
And his mom’s in Luton dying of cancer
Boy don’t forget your dear ma’s cigarettes

Chorus
One day trip
We’re going on a one day trip
Awful lot of drunkards on one bloody ship
Going off on a one day trip

We don’t blow 20 quid to cross the channel any more
Why when we can get it cheaper from an on-line store
And thank god for Tesco’s

We don’t spend the day with the English set
Instead it’s off to the Costa del Brava on a bright orange Easyjet
But it was good for a laugh

Nothing sadder and funnier than a good English drunk
The queen is dead and so is punk
I guess we’ll always have Glasgow

Chorus
One day trip
We’re going on a one day trip
One last bottle and one last sip
We’re going on a one day trip

Jenny Saville

2008-12-21T00:54:00.000-08:00

Jenny Saville (born in Cambridge in 1970) is an English painter and a leading Young British Artist (YBA). Saville is known for her monumental images of women, usually self portraits.

Saville gained her degree at Glasgow School of Art (1988-1992), and was then awarded a six month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where she states that she saw "Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in." She studied at the Slade School Of Art between 1992 and 1993. At the end of her postgraduate education the leading British art collector Charles Saatchi purchased her entire senior show and commissioned works for the next two years. In 1994 Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York.

Saville does not meet the usual public perception of the YBAs as she has dedicated her career to traditional figurative oil painting. Her painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens. Her paintings are usually much larger than life size. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings.
Torso2, 2004, oil on canvas, 360cm x 294cm, by Jenny Saville Saatchi Gallery.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients. Her painting Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers' third album The Holy Bible.

Saville works and lives in Sicily, and is a tutor of figure painting at the Slade School of Art.

Joseph Chaikin

2008-12-09T20:57:00.000-08:00

Joseph Chaikin (16 September 1935–22 June 2003) was an American theatre director, playwright, and pedagogue.

Early years

The youngest of five children, Chaikin was born to a poor Jewish family living in the Borough Park residential area of Brooklyn. At the age of six, he was struck with rheumatic fever, and he continued to suffer from resulting heart complications throughout his life. At the age of ten, he was sent to the National Children's Cardiac Hospital in Florida. It was during this period of isolation he began to organize theater games with other children. After two years in Florida, his health improved, and he was returned to his family, who had moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where his father had taken a job teaching.

Chaikin briefly attended Drake University in Iowa, and then returned to New York to begin a career in theater, studying with various acting coaches, while struggling to survive working a variety of job. He appeared as a figurant at the Metropolitan Opera, and gradually began to be cast in legitimate stage roles, going on to work with The Living Theatre before founding in 1963 The Open Theater a theater co-operative that progressed from a closed experimental laboratory to a performance ensemble.

Career

The Open Theatre's most famous and critically acclaimed production, The Serpent, was a unique creation developed largely from the actors' own experiences, using the Bible as text, but incorporating current events, such as the violence that plagued the 1960s. In 1969 Open Theatre performed Endgame by Samuel Beckett, with Chaikin playing the role of Hamm and Peter Maloney as Clov, at the Cite Universitaire, Paris, and in 1970 at the Grasslands Penitentiary, a fulfillment of Chaikin's desire to experiment with audiences who would be fundamentally and culturally different from cosmopolitan audiences.

In 1970- 71 Open Theatre performed Terminal by Susan Yankowitz, touring the production internationally as well as to many maximum and minimum security prisons in the eastern U.S. and Canada. The Open Theater operated for about ten years. Chaikin closed the Open Theatre in 1973 because he said it was in danger of becoming an institution. Although it achieved much critical success, Chaikin said: "I have rarely known a case where a critic's response to actors, directors or writers has expanded or encouraged their talent- I have known cases where by panning or praising, the critic has crushed or discouraged creative inspiration".

In the mid-1970s, Chaikin formed a company called The Winter Project, whose members included Ronnie Gilbert and Will Patton, as well as core members of the previous Open Theatre. Chaikin had a close working relationship with Sam Shepard and together they wrote the plays Tongues and Savage/Love, both of which premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre. They were commissioned to write When The World Was Green for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, and later, they wrote together War in Heaven. Chaikin was an expert on Samuel Beckett, directing a number of Beckett's plays, including Endgame at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Happy Days at Cherry Lane Theater.

Chaikin received six Obie Awards, including one for Lifetime Achievement, and two Guggenheim Fellowships.

His book, "The Presence of The Actor" was first published in 1972 by Theatre Communications Group, and a second edition followed in 1991. Based on his experiments with actors, the book includes exemplar notes, photographs, and exercises from Open Theatre productions, and records Chaikin's ideas about theater as a tool for social transformation.

Personal life

In 1984, a stroke suffered during open-heart surgery left Chaikin with partial aphasia. Despite this barrier to communication, Chaikin continued to direct and to create plays in collaboration with other writers, including John Belluso, whose disability-themed plays were produced at the Mark Taper Forum, Trinity Rep, Pacific Repertory Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Following Chaikin's stroke, several writers, including Jean-Claude van Itallie, Susan Yankowitz, and Sam Shepard, wrote plays specifically for Chaikin. Samuel Beckett wrote a poem dedicated to Chaikin entitled What Is the Word?. Overcoming some of the limitations of aphasia, Chaikin subsequently performed the poem as a monologue.

Chaikin was a lifelong teacher of acting and directing, and lived most of his adult life in New York's West Village.

Charles Avery

2008-12-08T23:12:00.000-08:00

1. The arts editor of The Scotsman newspaper wrote to me to draw my attention to the work of Scottish artist Charles Avery.

2. Avery's work overlaps with my Summerisle album with Anne Laplantine, my forthcoming Book of Scotlands, and my mother's history of the island of Mull, where our family comes from on her side.

3. Avery was born in Oban in 1973, brought up on Mull, and now lives and works in London. Since 2004 he's been creating an epic work, "the defining project of my life", a sort of anthropological survey of an imaginary island loosely based on a fantasy version of Mull, using drawing, topography, writing, portraiture, taxidermy of imaginary animals, maps, models and diagrams.

4. Avery is currently showing The Islanders at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (until February 2009).

5. The Island project resembles Paul Noble's Nobson New Town project, also beautifully drawn. And maybe Alasdair Gray's Lanark novel.

6. The Scotsman feature on Avery says he "spent his formative years on Mull and once described it as "the total basis of my subconscious". "A lot of writers say: 'Write what you know', so I've based it (the Island) on my direct experience, which is growing up on the West Coast of Scotland, some time in Edinburgh, some time in Rome and a lot of time in Hackney. You'll find a distillation of these in the works."

7. The Island is a parallel world, but not fantasy: "I don't want to it to look like sci-fi, or 'Hey, this is weird and wonderful!' I sometimes think, have the people who say these things actually looked? What is so weird about this place? There are a few weird animals, but nothing weirder than would turn up in Australia, they're just different, they're completely plausible. The gods are a strange-looking bunch, but if you look at all the gods human beings have evoked I don't think they're particularly weirder."

8. When The Guardian wrote about Avery they put one of their little Bluffer's Guide quizzes at the end, which said: "Move over YBA: He is part of a new generation of artists practicing under the banner of Altermodern. Alter what?: A term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism." (The Altermodern was covered on Click Opera here.)

9. Laura Cumming in The Guardian: "Many of the natives are addicted to the local delicacy, pickled eggs, which enslaves them to the island. Hunters in tweed jackets and shotguns search out a Kantian dichotomy while hawkers in the local flea market sell pictures of nude women for the price of peace of mind."

10. Avery went to Central St Martin's school of art, but was kicked out after six months.

11. Avery cites Jonathan Swift, William Blake, PG Wodehouse, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Beuys and Joseph Kosuth as influences.

12. On completion of the Islanders project Avery intends to publish the work within several large, leather-bound encyclopaedic volumes.

13. Frieze describes things seen in the Island exhibition: "Witness a taxidermied Ridable, a beast with the stature of a llama, the face of a dog and chicken’s feet. Marvel in disgust at a jar of the highly addictive local snack of Henderson’s boiled eggs pickled in gin. Or hear of the Islander’s most popular tourist attraction, the Plane of the Gods, where living Island deities can be visited."

14. Frieze continues: "A mixture of Cairo, New York and Avery’s own childhood home on the Scottish isle of Mull, the Island is peopled by faint, tetchy-looking women and gruff, wizened men who occupy a world where there is no distinction between imaginary and physical reality. Taking a range of philosophical theories as guidelines, Avery has created a sort of metaphysical ant farm. On the map of the mirrored archipelago that forms his world, clever puns abound: the Analitic Ocean, Cape Conchious-Ness, the Causeway of Effect. The noumenon – Immanuel Kant’s concept, which describes an unknowable thing that cannot be observed with the senses but only conceived of or believed in – is here a debated beast whose existence is unconfirmed but for which the Island’s hunters relentlessly search."

15. However: "Despite humorous moments in Avery’s writing and the seething life of his drawings, it at times feels like a cross between the obsessive detail of the Klingon Dictionary (1985) and the fictionalized ‘Philosophy 101’ of Sophie’s World (1991)."

Charles Avery's altermodern island

Charles Ray

2008-11-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

Charles Ray was born in Chicago. He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa with Roland Brener, who exposed Ray to many developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Caro and David Smith. In an interview, Ray spoke of his artistic education and early influences.

"Caro’s work was like a template; I saw it as almost platonic. The formal rules as taught by Brener were a kind of nourishment for me. The actual working in the studio was, in a sense, the expression. I was taught that the finished sculpture was maybe the end of the paragraph. Once a sculpture was completed it was critiqued and put back on to the scrap pile. This way of working taught me to think sculpturally rather than to think about sculpture. At this time in my life the historical context of high Modernism was really beyond my grasp. I saw Caro as super-contemporary. His work was, and is, so alive. It bridges the gap between the inside and outside of my mind. "

Ray recapitulated many of the developments in twentieth-century sculpture in his first show in 1971 with an installation entitled One-Stop Gallery. The show was comprised of a collection of small sculptures, resting directly on floor. Some of the works, in their attention to materials, were clearly inspired by Minimalist artists like Robert Morris, while two small constructed steel sculptures invoke the traditions taught by his teacher, Brener; they were even painted the same red as Caro’s Early One Morning (1962, Tate Modern). One-Stop Gallery would anticipate the tone for much of Ray’s work to come in its plumbing and reinterpreting of the canon of twentieth-century sculpture without having his own work appeal to any particular period or style.

Ray’s work is difficult to classify. Style, materials, subject, presence, and scale are all variable. What is consistent is as critic Anne Wagner put it, “In all his seamlessly executed objects, Ray fixates on how and why things happen, to say nothing of wondering what really does happen in the field of vision, and how such events might be remade as art.” This and the level of art historical awareness behind his works has led many critics to call Ray a sculptor’s sculptor. Nevertheless, his art has managed to find a large audience, thanks in part to its often striking or beguiling nature. His most recent work is marked by its extreme labor-intensiveness. With Hinoki (2007, Art Institute of Chicago), Ray had a mold made of a large rotting tree he found in California. He then hired a team of Japanese woodcarvers to essentially re-carve the tree in Japanese cypress (hinoki), a different wood than that of the original tree. In a forthcoming interview, Ray made it clear that the purpose of the piece was not to photorealistically carve an exact replica of the tree. “The tree had that beautiful interior that fallen logs have,” he says. “It happens when bugs eat out the hard wood, so you have this hollow thing. All I knew was that I wanted to carve that, I wanted them to have a sense of that interior [of the log] because it’s in there, even if normally it couldn’t be seen. So that was really important. And then I became involved with the outside as well…It mattered to me that somebody had looked at it, and I wanted to make it matter to you.” Hinoki took four years to carve of what was a ten year project: from the initial discovery of the tree in 1997-1998 to its exhibition in 2007.

Carl Andre

2008-11-06T17:37:00.001-08:00

a man climbs a mountain
because it is there
a man makes a work of art
because it is not there

carl andre

-

Andre was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and educated in Quincy public schools and at Phillips Academy Andover, where he became friends with Hollis Frampton and Michael Chapman. Andre served in the U.S. Army in North Carolina from 1955-56. He moved to New York City and in 1958 met Frank Stella in whose studio he developed a series of wooden "cut" sculptures.

From 1960-64 Andre worked as freight brakeman and conductor in New Jersey for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1965 he had his first public exhibition of work in the "Shape and Structure" show curated by Henry Geldzahler at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Andre's controversial "Lever" was included in the seminal 1966 show at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, "Primary Structures." In 1970 he had a one man exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and has had one man exhibitions and participated in group shows in major museums, galleries and kunsthalles throughout America and Europe to the present. Andre's concept of sculpture as "place" is of singular importance to the evolution of his work and to minimalist work in general.

In 1972 the Tate Gallery in London bought his Equivalent VIII (1966), popularly known as "The Bricks", which consists of 120 firebricks arranged in a rectangle, and which was an international succès de scandale. Andre also writes concrete poetry which has been exhibited in the United States and Europe, a comprehensive collection of which is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

While he is known primarily for his sculpture, Carl Andre also produced poetry from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s. Andre's poems, which were typed on a manual typewriter or hand-written, can also be read as drawings. They relate directly to the artist's three-dimensional work in that they incorporate the word as a compositional module, much like his signature use of bricks or metal plates. Loosely narrative in structure, the poems often include historical references and traces of autobiography. The poems obliquely evoke character and setting while incorporating various literary forms such as the sonnet, opera, or novel.

In 1988 he was acquitted (found not guilty) of murder in the death of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.

Bucking Bronco

2008-11-06T17:26:00.000-08:00

Maybe I shouldn’t let it bug me?
Stuck in my craw?
Is that the expression?
Sounds like some wet Victorian guttural abomination coming up in the devil’s throat
Feels even worse
Resentment exploits my lymph nodes
It jumps on the back of my hemoglobin, a bronco bucks and bolts to my brain, lassoing every good thought I ever had
Pulling it down into the muck
Watching its eyes fill with mud, shit and moss
Each involuntary gulp sucks …sucks…sucks
Hatred does not gag
Mud and vengeance only feeds
Maybe I shouldn’t let it bug me?

Black licorice jelly beans

2008-11-06T17:13:00.000-08:00

I went to bed hungry from this god damned diet
I had a dream that I ate everything in sight.
Mostly sugar
If I eat a grain I might as well eat a god damned plantation!
My boyfriend owns this piece of art that contains black licorice jelly beans in it
I thought I’d even eaten some of them
I wasn’t sure what the fuck had happened
If it was real or not
I counted the jelly beans…
not that I knew how many there were before
But I think they’re all still there

Brigitte Fontaine

2008-11-05T02:59:00.000-08:00

Two Resounding Questions

2008-11-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

Two resounding questions
Nagging
That never left my mind
Why in the name of god don’t you just leave him?
The other
Stop fucking!
Stop fucking each other!
Why don’t you just stop fucking?
I suppose the answer to both questions lye in the stupidity of there being two questions at all

I understand

2008-11-05T02:35:00.000-08:00

I understand
Or at least I think that I do
You remember those white muscled arms of his smeared with axel grease and dirt
You remember his black hair
Black as soot
The wings of a wet crow
You remember him singing, “Treat me like a fool,” one morning as our hound Goldie gave birth to seven dead pups
You remember all the ridiculous promises you never knew he wouldn’t keep
You fell for his religion, his games, his cock…
…his delusional forays into the green green wild
I understand
That I apparently don’t remember shit!
Or rather, shit is all I remember
I understand
Or at least I think that I do

Diane di Prima

2008-10-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York, a second generation American of Italian descent. She began writing at the age of seven, and made the decision to live her life as a poet at the age of fourteen.

She lived in Manhattan for many years, where she was known as the most important woman writer of the Beat movement. During that time she co-founded the New York Poets Theatre, and founded the Poets Press, which published the work of many new writers of the period. Together with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) she edited the literary newsletter The Floating Bear. In 1965 she moved to upstate New York where she participated in Timothy Leary's psychedelic community at Millbrook.

For the past twenty years she has lived and worked in northern California, where she took part in the political activities of the Diggers, lived in a late-sixties' commune, studied Zen Buddhism, Sanskrit and alchemy, and raised her five children. From 1980 to 1986 she taught hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry, in a short-lived but significant program at New College of California. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages.

She now lives and works in San Francisco, where she is one of the co-founders and teachers of the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts. Her current works in progress include Not Quite Buffalo Stew, a satire of California life; an autobiographical memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman ; and a book on Shelley as magician/poet.

Tim Hardin

2008-10-15T00:33:00.000-07:00

Timothy James Hardin (23 December 1941 – 29 December 1980) was an American folk musician and composer. He is best remembered for writing the top 40 hits "If I Were a Carpenter" covered by Bobby Darin and "Reason to Believe" covered by Rod Stewart, as well as his own uneven recording career.
Contents

Career

Hardin dropped out of high school at age 18 to join the Marine Corps. After his discharge he moved to New York City in 1961, where he briefly attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was dismissed because of truancy and began to focus on his musical career by performing around Greenwich Village, mostly in a blues style.

After moving to Boston in 1963 he was discovered by the record producer Erik Jacobsen (later the producer for The Lovin' Spoonful), who arranged a meeting with Columbia Records. In 1964 he moved back to Greenwich Village to record for his contract with Columbia. The resulting recordings were considered a failure by Columbia, which chose not to release them and terminated Hardin's contract.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1965, he met actress Susan Morss (known professionally as Susan Yardley)[1][2], and moved back to New York with her. He signed to the Verve Forecast label, and produced his first authorized album, Tim Hardin 1 in 1966. This album saw a transformation from his early traditional blues style to the folk style that defined his recording career. This LP contained "Reason To Believe" and the ballad "Misty Roses" which did receive Top-40 radio play.

Tim Hardin 2 was released in 1967 and contained one of his most famous songs, "If I Were a Carpenter".

An album entitled This is Tim Hardin, featuring covers of "House of the Rising Sun", Fred Neil's "Blues on the Ceilin'" and Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man", among others, appeared in 1967, on the Atco label. The liner notes indicate the songs were recorded in 1963-64, well prior to the release of Tim Hardin 1 by Verve Records. Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert, released in 1968, was a collection of live recordings along with re-makes of previous songs; it was followed by Tim Hardin 4, another collection of blues-influenced tracks believed to date from the same period as This is Tim Hardin.

In 1969, Hardin again signed with Columbia and had one of his few commercial successes, as a non-LP single of Bobby Darin's "Simple Song of Freedom" reached the US Top 50. Hardin did not tour in support of this single and a heroin addiction and stage fright made his live performances erratic. Also in 1969 he appeared at the Woodstock Festival where he sang his famous "If I Were a Carpenter" song. He recorded three albums for Columbia — Suite for Susan Moore and Damion: We Are One, One, All in One; Bird on a Wire; and Painted Head — none of which sold well. His output as a songwriter decreased and eventually ceased during this period, a circumstance blamed on his ongoing drug problems.

Later career and death

During the following years Hardin moved between England and the U.S. His heroin addiction had taken control of his life by the time his last album, Nine, was released on GM Records in the UK in 1973 (the album did not see a US release until it appeared on Antilles Records in 1976). He died of a heroin and morphine overdose, and is buried in the Twin Oaks Cemetery in Turner, Oregon.

Cosima Von Bonin

2008-10-13T15:56:00.001-07:00

The One and Thee Only Miss Ricky Lee Jones

2008-10-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962–September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer as well as a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wallace was best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest,[1][2] which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels (1923-2006). [3]

In 2008 Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."[1]
Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System, garnered significant national attention and critical praise.[citation needed] Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University. He later abandoned them.

In 1992, at the behest of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace applied for and won a position in the English Department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.

Wallace published short fiction in Might, GQ, Playboy, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Conjunctions, Esquire, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The New Yorker, and Science.

Wallace received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 1997. In 1997, Wallace was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews—"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6"—which had appeared in the magazine.

In 2002, he moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester, and focused on his writing.

Wallace's fiction was often concerned with irony. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction",[10] originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, proposes that television has an ironic influence on fiction writing, and urges literary authors to avoid irony. Wallace used many forms of irony, focusing on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unselfconscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.[11]

Wallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. His writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes — often nearly as expansive as the text proper. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in Octet as well as the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose talk show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, "but then no one would read it."[12]

The Delgados

2008-09-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

Never is an awfully long time

2008-09-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

Was the author of Peter Pan a pedophile?
November 19, 2004

Dear Cecil:

I have a friend who continually insists that various historical figures were pedophiles. She's made accusations against such diverse notables as Richard the Lion-Hearted, William Wallace, Julius Caesar, and James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. I find the accusation against such a beloved figure as Barrie particularly objectionable. I put it to you, O Great Dispenser of Wisdom: Was James Barrie a buggerer?

One might have phrased this a bit more delicately, Puf. Then again, what's the point? With the release of Finding Neverland, a film about the story behind Peter Pan starring Johnny Depp as Barrie, it's certainly the first question a lot of people will ask. So here's the answer: I don't think so. Of course, that's what I said about another guy with an unusual interest in kids, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), right before those pictures of naked little girls showed up. But I deal in the world of what's known.

A nicely understated account of the matter may be found in J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys: The Love Story That Gave Birth to Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin (1979). The seventh child of a Scottish weaver, Barrie possessed the two prerequisites of artistic greatness: talent and an unhappy childhood. Two things contributed significantly to the latter. First, he was short, barely five feet tall by age 17. Second, he ranked a distant second (if that) in the affections of his mother, whose favorite was his charming, handsome, etc., brother David, who was killed in an accident when not quite 14. James, then 6, attempted to console his desolate parent by adopting the mannerisms of the dead youth. On some level he never stopped, and in spirit remained a boy all his life.

Still, he was a boy who could write. Barrie moved to London in his mid-20s and enjoyed quick success, first as a journalist, then a novelist, and finally a playwright. Though shy and moody, he met a pretty (and short) young actress named Mary Ansell and married her in 1894.

The marriage was not happy. Barrie was later rumored to be impotent, but it seems more accurate to say he had little interest in sex. At any rate he never succeeded in getting Mary pregnant, though she was anxious for a child. Barrie too loved children--he just preferred to let other people make them. He and Mary began taking walks with their dog in Kensington Gardens, a park near their London home. He became a favorite of the children brought there by their nannies, entertaining them with his antics and stories about pirates and fairies. The children Barrie was fondest of were the young sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. He was an aspiring lawyer; she was beautiful and sweet. Barrie charmed Sylvia as he had charmed her kids and soon insinuated himself into the household, visiting frequently and joining the family on holidays, somewhat to the distress of Mary and Arthur. Ever in need of material, Barrie began incorporating his experiences with the Llewelyn Davieses into his work. The pirate stories he told the boys--eventually there were five: George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico--became the basis for his 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. It was unlike anything ever seen on the stage, among other things requiring an elaborate apparatus to permit the players to fly, but proved a huge hit in Britain and the U.S.

Barrie remained close to the Llewelyn Davies family. When Arthur and Sylvia died of cancer within a few years of each other, the playwright found Sylvia's handwritten will in which she requested that Jenny, the sister of the boys' nanny, help look after them. In copying the document for Sylvia's mother Barrie mistranscribed "Jenny" as "Jimmy," i.e., himself--unintentionally, according to Birkin. But even if he did it on purpose, family and friends agree he alone had the resources to take care of the boys, and he became their guardian. Judging from their correspondence, Barrie was part father to the five, part mother, and part . . . well, lover gives the wrong idea, but he was emotionally attached to a degree some found morbid, to George and Michael particularly. George was killed during World War I, however, and Michael drowned at Oxford in 1921. (Some suspected it was suicide.) Peter, who became a successful publisher, threw himself under a London subway train in 1960. You may think: these were troubled folk. Maybe so, but no evidence survives to pin the blame on Barrie, who died in 1937. As for pedophilia, Nico offered what, barring some shocking revelation, will surely stand as the last word on Barrie's sexuality, or lack of it: "He was an innocent--which is why he could write Peter Pan."

— Cecil Adams

Scotland Rawks Part One

2008-09-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

Average White Band

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Nazareth

The Fire Engines

Orange Juice

Franz Ferdinand

Primal Scream

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Momus

The Pastels

The Journey by Mary Oliver

2008-09-17T00:23:00.000-07:00

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

pistachio

2008-09-03T01:47:00.000-07:00

you're looking at the books on the shelf with your back to me
eating ice cream
when i look up your body half bends as you take a funny little kick at a table
and even though i can not see your face
this silly little half-hearted maneuver
tells me that you are happy
suddenly
i tell you to come to me
you lean low and kiss me
i am thwarted as i'd expected pistachio

Favorite Comics

2008-08-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Shop Assistants

2008-08-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

The Shop Assistants were an indie pop band from Edinburgh, Scotland, formed in 1984, initially as Buba & The Shop Assistants. The original line-up was Aggi (Annabel Wright, later of The Pastels), on vocals, David Keegan (guitar), Sarah Kneale (bass), Laura MacPhail (drums) and Ann Donald (drums). This line-up released one single, the now highly-collectible 'Something to Do' which was produced by Stephen Pastel. Stephen Pastel also contributed backing vocals.

Aggi left to be replaced by Alex Taylor. Soon after, the name shortened to simply 'Shop Assistants' and the first release under their new name was the Shopping Parade EP in 1985, whose track All Day Long Morrissey described as his favourite single of that year. This was followed in early 1986 with Safety Net, the first release on Keegan's 53rd & 3rd Records, which topped the UK Indie Chart, and the band recorded national radio sessions with John Peel and Janice Long of BBC's Radio One. The exposure they gained from the sessions enabled the group to have two songs to be voted into John Peel's Festive Fifty in both 1985 and 1986.

In 1986, they were featured on the NME's compilation C86 with one of their slower songs, It's Up To You, taken from Shopping Parade. Also in that year, they signed to Chrysalis Records's sublabel Blue Guitar for another single, I Don't Wanna Be Friends With You as well as their first and only LP album, The Shop Assistants. This spent one week at number 100 in the UK album charts, which gives the band the distinction of being the (joint) least successful act ever to hit the national charts. The LP album was re-released on CD in 2001, although it is now very hard to find.

The band split early in 1987, when Taylor left the group to join The Motorcycle Boy. After a two-year hiatus, the band reformed without Taylor in 1989 with Kneale on vocals and MacPhail on bass and the addition of Margarita Vasquez-Ponte of Jesse Garon And The Desperadoes on drums. With the new lineup they released Here It Comes and Big 'E' Power in 1990 before splitting again, Keegan joining The Pastels.

Ad Reinhardt

2008-08-05T02:31:00.000-07:00

An Artist, A Fine-Artist or Free-Artist

An artist, a fine-artist or free-artist,

An artist-as-artist,

Has always nothing to say,

And he must say this over and over again.

Especially in his work

What else is there to say?

In work or words

What in hell, on earth, or in heaven, is an artist up to

when he says he has something to say?

All artists-as artists say the same thing

The post- historic artist is the timeless artist-as artist.

The artist-as-artist is the post-historic artist.

The post-historic artist is the

artist aware of himself as artist,

aware of art-as-art,

aware of everything that is not art in art,

inside or outside art.

The only way to say what an artist- as - artist is

is to say what an artist- as - artist is not.

A fine artist by definition is not a commercial

or industrial or fashion

or applied or useful artist.

A fine, free or liberal or abstract artist

is by definition not a servile

or professional or meaningful artist.

A fine artist has no use for use,

no meaning for meaning,

no need for any need.

A fine artist has nothing to use,

has no need for any meaning,

and would not use himself or his work for anything

A fine artist by definition

does not use or need any ideas or images,

does not use or need any help,

cannot use or help anyone or anything.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea.

A good artist does not need anything.

From Art as Art, The selected writings of Ad Reinhardt (undated)

PLUMPYNUT

2008-06-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

Plumpynut is a high protein and high energy peanut-based paste in a foil wrapper. It tastes slightly sweeter than peanut butter. It is categorized by the WHO as a Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF).

Plumpynut requires no preparation or special supervision, making it easy to deploy in difficult conditions. Plumpynut is very difficult to over eat and keeps even after opening. It has a 2 year shelf life when unopened. The product was inspired by the popular Nutella spread. It is manufactured by Nutriset, a French company, that specializes in making food supplements for relief work in their factory near Rouen in northern France. The ingredients are: peanut paste, vegetable oil, milk powder, powdered sugar, vitamins and minerals, combined in a foil pouch. Each pack provides 500 Calories.

Plumpynut contains vitamins A, B-complex, C, D, E and K, and minerals calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, iodine, sodium, and selenium.

SCREAMERS

2008-06-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

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Poetry in prison

2008-06-18T04:46:00.000-07:00

Part One

When you made your mark
By Roland Fellows

When slipped out his
Cold and still electric body the
Steely hesitant scraping of your mark
The sudden taste of batteries in
His mouth and mine.
I remember a time when he was not afraid to say that he loved me
I remember when he recognized
This fear.
First he tried it on
A glove, a baseball mitt
Then he swallowed it
And it sunk to the bottom or is still yet sinking
And then he shunned all his love for me
The solid undeniable thump of his
Flesh meeting pavement as you looked one
Last time
And scurried away as frightened as he
When you made your mark

My boy, Raymond, Raymond Boyd Fel…he hated that name. Raymond Boyd! He told me that it had always been an embarrassment to him and surely I must have hated him to have so permanently affixed it to him. Raymond Boyd Fellows. I’m not ashamed. I will admit it. Believe you me...there was a time when I could not. My boy, he could make me feel real...dumb…stupid even. Like no one else ever could. And he knew it too. He could turn his hate in on me and I would subsequently make it my own. I’ve ground the sharpest tips of my teeth down on this very fact. He always had the power. And he knew it. How could a father hate his own son? How could a son hate his own father? It, is the only thing left..the only thing that I still hold. It is permanent. My son’s hatred for me.
I was a fool, with my “sins of the father shit!” He was 25 years-old before he could even tell me the truth. What a fool I was! A fucking fool! You know, when a father learns that his son is a...homosexual, it is like a slap to his face. I don't care who you are or what you are, an actual slap to the face. You know that you’ve done your very best to bring him up. You brought him up in the church and he knows the path to salvation, the road to righteousness. Raymond, my boy, he knew. But instead of offering him help, instead of extending to him, in his time of need, my own flesh and blood, a guiding, loving arm to bring him back to Jesus...I shuttered, and I shirked, and I gave way to human weakness and sought refuge in the word of God. And then I used the word of God so that I could, so that I would, not have to accept the truth.

His name was Thomas Caroline. He was born in the city of Paragould, in Greene County, Arkansas. His father worked for the railroad years before and his mother was somewhat of a celebrity in the county, known for her fine, award-winning embroidery. Thomas, it turns out was an average, not altogether exceptional boy who spent most of his days, in the summer, and in the winter, reading The Bible. The Saint Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, later to be known as the Missouri Pacific, employed his father until he was injured grievously in an inexcusably neglectful event forcing his father to seek subsistence from the state. His father festered without solace and in the end took his own life, leaving Thomas and his mother alone, together.
I suppose in some…ways, he and Raymond…had…that in common. Raymond was a very devout young Christian. He had a very, very, fiercely sincere heart and the lord was his one and constant love. I, understand, that Mr. Caroline led a similarly, sincere, life with the lord, both, washed in the blood of the lamb.
I had no use for it. To me, poetry was a thing of man. A concoction, a crafty concoction. Say what you mean I always told him. I always tried to be straightforward, and saw no reason why any man should hide behind words. Make a fact of it I say. Raymond would try, I recall now, many years before, to read to me, to try and coax a common bond from words, between us, words that only irritated me and left him staring coldly with those black eyes of his. Many times I heard distinct mumblings from his lips, though no specific consternation or disapproval could be discerned. But I felt it, full on and without fuss, his utter disgust in my lack of intellectual fortitude.
I nearly lost my footing that Saturday morning, nearly falling on the kitchen tiles. I nearly put my hand on the open flame reaching to the stove for balance. A half-page spread, of a picture, of him, holding out a scrawled on piece of paper, holding a book. This, Mr. Thomas Caroline it appeared had “won” some sort of community writing contest. He did not smile. He stood, in the picture, in one hand a book, which did not look unfamiliar to me, the other holding up the paper. I could see, although the newspaper was in black and white, the shape of some sort of ribbon. “Blue,” I thought. A blue ribbon.
The Cummins Unit, formerly known as Cummins State Farm is a 16,000 acre correctional facility located 28 miles south of Pine Bluff, off Highway 65 near the town of Grady in Lincoln County, Arkansas. It first opened in 1902 and has a capacity of 1725 inmates. Cummins Unit housed Arkansas’s death row until 1986, when it was transferred to the new Maximum Security Unit. And it was now to be the final stop for my son’s killer.

(Unfinished)

Landford Wilson

2008-06-17T01:33:00.000-07:00

Lanford Wilson (born on April 13, 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri) is an American playwright. As an openly gay man, his work has featured many gay themes and characters.

He was raised in the Ozarks until, as a teenager, he moved to California to live with his father, from whom his mother had been long divorced. He began his career as a playwright in the early 1960s at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village with one-act plays such as Ludlow Fair, Home Free, and The Madness of Lady Bright. He soon moved to off-Broadway with Balm in Gilead in 1965 and The Rimers of Eldritch in 1965. Wilson was a founding member of the Circle Repertory Company, (better known as Circle Rep) which began in 1969.

Many of his plays were first presented there, with long standing directorial collaborative partner Marshall W. Mason, including Hot L Baltimore, which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Obie Award, and Fifth of July, which later had a successful production on Broadway. Wilson's 1979 play, Talley's Folly won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Fifth of July, Talley's Folly, and Talley and Son are all part of the Talley trilogy cycle of plays, revolving around the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri.

In 2004, Wilson became a member of the American Academy for Arts and Letters.

In addition to writing plays, Wilson has written the texts for several twentieth century operas, including at least two collaborations with composer Lee Hoiby: Summer and Smoke (1971) and This is the Rill Speaking (1992).

Plays

* Ludlow Fair
* Home Free
* The Madness of Lady Bright
* Balm in Gilead (1965)
* The Rimers of Eldritch (1965)
* The Gingham Dog (1968)
* Lemon Sky (1970)
* Serenading Louie (1970)
* Hot L Baltimore (1973)
* The Mound Builders (1975)
* Fifth of July (1979)
* Talley's Folly (1979)
* A Tale Told (1981, later revised and renamed "Talley & Son")
* Angels Fall (1983)
* Burn This (1987)
* Redwood Curtain (1993)
* Sympathetic Magic (1998)
* Book of Days (2000)
* Rain Dance
* Wandering

Boys and Sondheim, a singularly most fabulous phenomonon

2008-06-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2008-06-16T23:39:00.000-07:00

Preamble

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,
The General Assembly

proclaims

This Universal Declaration of Human Rights

as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article I

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11

(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15

(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
G.A.

John Hartford

2008-06-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

It's knowin' that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleepin' bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowin' I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that have dried upon some line
That keeps you in the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind

It's not clingin' to the rocks and ivy
Planted on their columns now that bind me
Or something that somebody said because
They thought we fit together walkin'
It's just knowing that the world
Will not be cursing or forgiving
When I walk along some railroad track and find
That you're movin' on the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
And for hours you're just gentle on my mind

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother
'cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence
Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me till I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walkin' on the back roads
By the rivers flowin' gentle on my mind

I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin' cracklin' cauldron
In some train yard
My beard a rustlin' coal pile
And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands 'round a tin can
I pretend to hold you to my breast and find
That you're waitin' from the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
Ever smilin', ever gentle on my mind

John Harford (he would change his name to Hartford later in life at the behest of Chet Atkins) was born on December 30, 1937 in New York City to parents Dr. Carl and Mary Harford. He spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri. There he was exposed to the influence that would shape much of his career and music, the Mississippi River. From the time he got his first job on the river, at age 16, Hartford was on, around, or singing about the river.

His early musical influences came from the broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and included Earl Scruggs, nominal inventor of the three-finger bluegrass style of banjo playing. Hartford said often that the first time he heard Earl Scruggs pick the banjo changed his life. By age 13, Hartford was an accomplished old-time fiddler and banjo player, and he soon learned to play guitar and mandolin as well. Hartford formed his first bluegrass band while still in high school at John Burroughs School. After high school he enrolled at Washington University, completed 4 years of a commercial arts program and dropped out to focus on his music, however he did later receive a degree in 1960. He immersed himself in the local music scene, working as a DJ, playing in bands, and occasionally recording singles for local labels. In 1965, he moved to Nashville, the center of the country music industry. In 1966, he signed with RCA Victor, and produced his first album, Looks at Life, in the same year.

In 1967, Hartford's second album Earthwords & Music spawned his first major hit, "Gentle On My Mind." His recording of the song was only a modest success, but it caught the notice of Glen Campbell, who recorded his own version, which gave the song much wider publication. At the 1968 Grammies, the song netted four awards, two of which went to Hartford; just as importantly, it became one of the most widely recorded country songs of all time, and the royalties it brought in allowed Hartford great financial independence; Hartford would later say that the song bought his freedom.[1] As his popularity grew, he moved to the West Coast, where he became a regular on the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"; other television appearances followed, as did recording appearances with several major country artists. The success on "SmoBro" was enough that Hartford was offered the lead role in a TV detective series but he turned it down to move back to Nashville and concentrate on his music. He also was a regular on Campbell's and Johnny Cash's television shows.

Newgrass

During the years 1968-1970, Hartford recorded four more albums for RCA: The Love Album, Housing Project, John Hartford, and Iron Mountain Depot. In 1971, He moved over to Warner Bros. Records, where he was given more freedom to record in his untraditional style. There, fronting a band that included Vassar Clements, Tut Taylor and Norman Blake, he recorded several albums that set the tone of his later career, including the acclaimed Aereo-Plain and Morning Bugle. Of the former, Sam Bush said "Without Aereo-Plain (and the Aereo-Plain band), there would be no newgrass music."[2]

Switching several years later to the Flying Fish label, Hartford continued to participate in the experimentation with nontraditional country and bluegrass styles that he and artists such as Bush were engaging in at the time. Among his recordings were two albums in 1977 and 1980 with Doug and Rodney Dillard from The Dillards, with Bush as a backing musician, and featuring a diversity of songs that included "Boogie On Reggae Woman" and "Yakety Yak".[3]

Hartford's Grammy-winning Mark Twang features Hartford playing solo, reminiscent of his live solo performances playing the fiddle, guitar, banjo, and amplified plywood for tapping his feet. At the same time, he developed a stage show, which toured in various forms from the mid 1970s until shortly before his death.

Hartford went on to change labels several more times during his career; in 1991, he inaugurated his own Small Dog a'Barkin' label. Later in the 1990s, he switched again, to the Rounder label. On that label and a number of smaller labels, he recorded a number of idiosyncratic records, many of which harkened back to earlier forms of folk and country music. Among them was the 1999 album, Retrograss, recorded with Mike Seeger and David Grisman, offering bluegrass takes on such songs as "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay", "Maybellene", "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Maggie's Farm".

He recorded several songs for the soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou, winning another Grammy for his performance, and made his final tour in 2001 with the Down from the Mountain tour that grew out of that movie and its accompanying album. While performing in Texas in April that year, he found he could no longer control his hands due to a more than 20 year bout with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and his career was finished.

Though Hartford is considered a co-founder in the newgrass movement, he remained deeply attached to traditional music as well. His last band and last few albums reflect his love for pre-bluegrass old-time music. According to an interview with Don Swain, he described his love for the rare and nearly forgotten fiddle tunes of the Appalachians and Missouri foothills.

The dichotomy is one of the most attractive characteristics of Hartford, that while he was on the leading edge of expanding the boundaries of traditional music, he remained deeply connected to the roots of American folk music as well.

Steamboating

The culture of the Mississippi River and its steamboats captivated Hartford from an early age. He said that it would have been his life's work "but music got in the way," so he intertwined them whenever possible. In the '70s, Hartford earned his steamboat pilot's license, which he used to keep close to the river he loved; for many years, he worked as a pilot on the steamboat Julia Belle Swain during the summers. He also worked as a towboat pilot on the Mississippi, Illinois, and Tennessee rivers.

During his later years, he came back to the river every summer. "Working as a pilot is a labor of love," he said. "After a while, it becomes a metaphor for a whole lot of things, and I find for some mysterious reason that if I stay in touch with it, things seem to work out all right." His home in Madison, Tennessee was situated on a bend of the Cumberland River and built to simulate the view from a steamboat deck.

An accomplished fiddler and banjo player, Hartford was simultaneously an innovative voice on the country scene and a thrilling reminder of a vanished era. Along with his own compositions, such as Long Hot Summer Days and Kentucky Pool, Hartford was a voluminous repository of old river songs, calls, and stories. He could spend hours talking about the glory days of steamboating or demonstrating the lead calls that the river's most famous chronicler took as his name, "Mark Twain" (or "two fathoms"). Hartford was also the author of Steamboat in a Cornfield, a children's book that recounts the true story of the Ohio River steamboat The Virginia and its somewhat comical beaching in a cornfield.
Final years

At the time of his death, Hartford was also working on the biography of the blind fiddler Ed Haley. Hartford's album Wild Hog in the Red Bush is a collection of Haley's tunes. Hartford also provided narration for several of Ken Burns' documentaries.

Hartford was given a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

From the 1980s onwards, Hartford struggled with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. On June 4, 2001 at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, at age 63, he died of the disease.

In honor of his work, he was given a posthumous Lifetime Achievement award by the Americana Music Association in September 2005.

Works

Hartford recorded more than 30 albums, ranging across a broad spectrum of styles--from the traditional country of his early RCA recordings, to the new and experimental sound of his early newgrass recordings, to the traditional folk style to which he often returned later in his life. Hartford's albums also vary widely in formality, from the stately and orderly Annual Waltz to the rougher and less cut recordings that typified many of his later albums.

Aereo-Plain and Morning Bugle are often considered to be Hartford's most influential work, coming as they did at the very beginning of a period in which artists such as Hartford and the New Grass Revival, led by Sam Bush, would create a new form of country music, blending their country backgrounds with influences from a number of other sources. His later years saw a number of live albums, as well as recordings that explored the repertoire of old-time folk music. He sketched the cover art for some of his mid-career albums, drawing with both hands simultaneously.

Hartford is remembered as an influential and pioneering artist. Never bound by the limitations of one genre, he recorded wherever his interests led him. Performing and recording until his illness rendered him incapable of continuing, Hartford contributed a vast and unique body of work to the library of American music.

Discography

* 1967 Earthwords And Music
* 1967 Looks At Life
* 1968 The Love Album
* 1968 Housing Project
* 1968 Gentle On My Mind
* 1969 John Hartford
* 1970 Iron Mountain Depot
* 1971 Aereo-Plain
* 1972 Morning Bugle
* 1976 Nobody Knows What You Do
* 1976 Mark Twang
* 1977 Dillard-Hartford-Dillard
* 1977 All In The Name Of Love
* 1978 Headin' Down Into The Mystery Below
* 1979 Slumberin' On The Cumberland
* 1980 You And Me At Home
* 1980 Permanent Wave
* 1981 Catalogue
* 1984 Gum Tree Canoe
* 1987 Clements, Hartford, Holland
* 1987 Annual Waltz
* 1987 Me Oh My, How the Time Does Fly
* 1989 Down on the River
* 1991 Hartford and Hartford
* 1991 Cadillac Rag
* 1992 Goin' Back to Dixie
* 1994 The Walls We Bounce Off Of
* 1994 Old Sport
* 1995 The Fun of Open Discussion
* 1996 No End of Love
* 1996 Wild Hog In The Red Brush
* 1998 The Bullies Have All Gone to Rest (accreditato a Jim Wood e John Hartford)
* 1998 The Speed of the Old Long Bow
* 1999 Retrograss
* 1999 Good Old Boys

Jean Nouvel

2008-06-12T02:53:00.000-07:00

Jean Nouvel (born 12 August 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008. A number of museums and architectural centres have presented retrospectives of his work.

Robert Gober

2008-06-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

Robert Gober is an American sculptor, who was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, September 12, 1954. He studied at Middlebury College, Vermont and the Tyler School of Art in Rome. He lives and works in New York City. He is best known for his sculptures, but also has made photographs, prints, and drawings and has curated exhibitions. He has had exhibitions of his work in Europe, North America and Japan. One of his most well known series of works was of sculptures of sinks. He has made many sculptures of everyday objects, showing familiar things as well as strange ones.

His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs, and has themes of nature, sexuality, religion, and politics. The sculptures are meticulously handcrafted, even when they appear to just be a re-creation of a common sink.

His work is in many museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Menil Collection and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He represented the United States at the 2001 Venice Biennale and has had several one-person museum exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Dia Center for the Arts, New York. His work has also been included in five Whitney Biennials. In 2007 there was a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Schaulager in Basel. The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive book of his sculptures entitled Robert Gober. Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007.

Somebody Loves Me by Jack Chick

2008-06-06T02:00:00.000-07:00

Zaha Hadid

2008-06-06T01:46:00.000-07:00

Zaha Hadid was born October 31, 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. It was with Koolhaas that she met Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois School of Architecture in Chicago, guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knolton School of Architecture, at the Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.

A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid's winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong (1983) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994). In 2002 Hadid won the international design competition to design Singapore's one-north masterplan. In 2005, her design won the competition for the new city casino of Basel, Switzerland. In 2004 Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Previously, she had been awarded a CBE for services to architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2006, Hadid was honoured with a retrospective spanning her entire work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In that year she also received an Honorary Degree from the American University of Beirut.

Michael

2008-06-05T21:32:00.001-07:00

Part One

Feeling pretty useless, worthless right now. Thought I would try to write something. Writing this without the slightest idea of what to write. Then, I remember this, something I wrote when I thought I had something to write about. It is called, Michael.

Thursday afternoon.
The southern California sun is undeniable.
Golden.
If one could see from beneath a shroud?
I’m in the back of the van with keyboard and cello, somewhere in Orange County, beneath the Orange Curtain as they say. I get a call from an old friend. But I miss it so I have to listen to his message.
I don’t have a chance to call him until I get back home to San Francisco.
I call Michael. His father’s had a series of heart attacks and is on life support. Michael sounds somewhat upset. He manages to tell me what’s happened and then falls apart at the end.
I tell him I will call him the next day. He and his sister are trying to figure out what happens next. What to do. The next day I call him and they’re still trying to figure it out.
At the end of our conversation, he seems to falter again, becoming even weepy. I don’t know what to say to him, so I say goodbye.
Two days later I get the call. He and his sister sat in the room with him as the nurses and attendants removed all of the equipment. It was 5:30 in the afternoon. The sun was just barely receding, loaming around the tops of the mountains. He and his sister sat in the room until 9:30 the next morning, when suddenly, their father ceased to exist. He lay there, a silent memory, becoming smaller and smaller and then seemingly tucked away.
I talk to Michael until it seems he is finished. We talk about old friends and how we used to get into fights. Go looking for fights. Girls. Boys. He says that it’s to be a traditional Jewish funeral. I’ve never been and I immediately think about the wooden coffin. The yarmulke. I think about my own father. I’m pretty broke so I can’t really afford to go back down to So Cal. I feel shitty about it. Michael offers to pay for a flight. In the end, he and his sister talk me into it. I feel badly because I don’t want to be a burden on them, especially at this time in their lives. Quietly Michael whispers into the receiver, “hey! If it means anything, my dad left me a shit load of cash.” I say, perhaps overly so, “really? That’s awesome.” Michael says, “I’d rather have my dad.” I feel shittier now. We agree that I will fly down for the funeral and he will drive me back to S.F. He needs to take a drive and get away from it all he says.

I wrote this exactly one week ago today.

Micheal got up early this morning while I was still asleep, the sun not yet up, and drove back home.

I had every intention of writing a story that might be funny. Sad…and funny. I was sure that in writing what I considered then to be prologue, by story’s end, would wind up being, in the very least, “messy.” Sad, funny…and messy. I was convinced, that once Micheal and I got to San Francisco, it would be one endless taxicab ride to the strip clubs where he would, as he would put it, “get laid.” I would pay the entrance fees and watch an “international” parade of debutantes; bad, bad girls flashing their tits and plotting, conjuring up ways to make their daddies smile, paternal and otherwise. He’d spend close to two thousand dollars on couch dances and maybe a good hard rub, only in the end to fall deeper into a black vortex of shame, hatred and regret. In my story, I’d concocted what could only be called over-embellishment, when late one night, Michael and I would score some ecstasy and really, “bare our souls” to each other. We always had, I don’t know why it should have changed over the years, done these things. How many late nights I’d spent with him arguing anything and nothing at all, marveling in each other’s uneducated intellects. How many times I’d recall, staring at the top of his shining bald scalp, all the cruel, fucked up things my father had said about, “The Jews!”

In truth, there were only a couple instances that might be found to be of any humorous bent.

One;
Getting drunk with his family, who, in the past, have been pretty much tea-totaling “re-formed” Jews. I hadn’t seen his sister in at least ten years. She and her husband, a year before had undergone gastric bi-pass surgeries, and were now basking in their new lives of thinness. Truth be told, his sister scared the shit out of me when she showed up that first night. I could not believe what I was seeing. For a useful bit of comparative thought, though I usually shutter at such derisive and unimaginative measures, just imagine, a stick next to a tree, and you will begin to imagine the magnitude of my reaction to her startling wait loss and undeniable transformation. We’re all sitting around in the back yard of his sister’s newly financed, “dream back yard,” complete with swimming Jacuzzi and water falls, when I find myself altogether suddenly engrossed in a slightly inebriated conversation with his sister’s husband about Calvin and his years at Bob Jones University. That reads as if Calvin attended this notoriously “flat headed” school. Never my intention. But the wine, straight from the central valley I’m told by his sister, continued to pour. Tongues waggled, toes twittled, a few toasts to the dearly departed. Silence. And then more silence.

And

Two;
The Rabbi recited the 23rd Psalm, first in Hebrew and then in English. But not the standard King James Version, no, it was of a decidedly more modern translation. So, those in attendance, who thought it necessary or perhaps even required to recite aloud, found themselves accidentally mumbling like a teenage girl who thinks she knows the words to a popular song, at times lost. I felt stupid in my disposable yarmulke. Now and then, someone would look up and then peripherally for some sort of assurance. Blessed Assurance I believe is what they call it. For once, I felt like my father’s son.
An old lady chorus group, which called themselves The Angels Choir, sang an old diddy called, “Always. “ I don’t know if it was the song or the sad drooping lilac’s singing, bound to grace, inescapably, but I did cry. But every single one of them saw right through me. They did not see my tears. I do not know why I think they would. They saw right through me and out past the stain glassed windows whose normal depictions of The Stations of The Cross were now covered with simple and plainly painted clay Stars of David. The coffin was wood, covered with strangely bright orange and red lilies. Too bright, I thought.

Part Two

And then I found out, apparently, on the morning of the funeral, that I was to be one of the poll bearers. This was fine. I’d never done it before. I figured, why not, if not just for the experience. And it WOULD have been just fine, just fine. If, that morning, if upon waking, before anyone told me of my entailed duties, I hadn’t smoked three whole joints!

When the hearse arrived I was summoned by the funeral director to hither come, so I hithered accordingly. He was a pock marked little man with skin the color of pale yellow cheese. He wore tinted aviator glasses and his cheap shirt was at least one size too big. His collar looked comical and if you looked too closely you might see some small speck of dried blood just on the crease. I thought it really strange to be suddenly carrying the remains of a beloved family member, of a beloved friend, along with five other men, none of whom I’d ever even met. A quick perusal saw one extremely tall bald man, a well-dressed, youngish black guy behind me, and a thin man with salt and pepper hair in a very bad suit, navy blue, behind the black guy. Then across the way, standing with the tall guy were two guys whom I cannot for whatever reason recall at all. We were quickly, one might call it, “on-the-job-training,” instructed as to what to do next. Whilst this was happening, in an unexplainable attempt to avoid eye contact with the others, I looked over and saw a rather large mound of dirt, covered with a green astro-turph tarpaulin, and next to it, a most undeniable hole. There was shining, chrome…stainless steel, metal scaffolding stationed around the perimeter of said hole, and beneath it, framing the rough edges, were long wooden planks. Then I saw the rabbi, and not just the rabbi, but another guy who it turned out was the director and caretaker of this specific Jewish part of the cemetery, now both standing on the boards, as if to test their strength. And these were not large men. In fact, they were quite small. The boards sprung up and down with a certain comical BOING! I surmised further that from where I was standing, I would be forced to carry the casket with my left hand. I thought I’d take a quick survey of these nameless strangers to try and find out who would like to switch with me since I was no southpaw. But buy then it was much too late. The funeral director, bony hand like a bleached poplar branch outstretched, swung open the back of the hearse, reached in and unscrewed a stainless steel latch that bracketed the casket to the hearse floor. We were told to stand with our carrying arms inward and to face forward. This was easy enough I thought, although once the weight of the thing was separated from the horizontal bracing of the hearse it became considerably heavier. I felt suddenly very week. Why didn’t I get on the right side! I would surely drop the damned thing and then no amount of cleverness could explain everyone’s subsequent horror. But by then we were halfway to the grave. As we approached, suddenly I realized that the mound of freshly unearthed soil was piled much too closely to the actual grave. We were less than three feet away when suddenly I froze. All eyes were on us. I realized then, that we were to walk up and onto the boards. This just couldn’t be. We would surely snap the wooden planks into, causing the whole thing to collapse, and subsequently we would all land somehow less than respectfully square in the middle of irretrievable and repugnant regret. Standing dead still now, only a few feet from the grave, suddenly the funeral director gave a motion for us to change positions. And then, as if trained professionals, somehow all six of us did just that, and suddenly found ourselves facing one another, staring dead into each other’s eyes, all twelve of our hands bone white, now bracing the coffin. Once we got to the edge of the grave, I heard someone say, “Step up and onto the boards.” I turned to the funeral director whose lips were tightly pursed and seemingly stained purple. Next, holding tightly to the casket, all six of us turned our bodies sideways and slowly proceeded to navigate, inch by inch, across the boards. I felt sort of silly walking this way, and if not for sheer necessity, I might have even found it all quite humorous, like those racy black and white cartoons from the 30’s depicting black faced vaudevillians doing voodoo dances and singing about Alabama or The Devil in Ole Black Joe. Once the weight of not just the tall bald man, the young black guy, the two aforesaid and hitherto anonymous men, the guy with the salt and pepper hair in less than attractive attire, myself and the casket were completely, that is, the full weight, on the planks, I felt them, the planks, suddenly give, slightly. This was it! I panicked! But just as my stomach sank and I swallowed real hard, we somehow continued on and across the length of the grave, finally making it all the way across. And then leaning clumsily forward, the six of us held our breath as we let go of the casket, letting it fall onto the straps which miraculously caught it and held it in place, taking the burden from us. The six of us disappeared into the crowd never to see each other again.

And then, just as I thought the worst of it was over, just as the rabbi turned the shining silver crank to lower the casket into the grave, everything suddenly stopped. The coffin froze. It would go no further.

Part Three

My name is Michael Blume. I have recently been made an orphan. In the literal sense only I suppose. Can a grown man be called or call himself an orphan? I’m in San Francisco. I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning, early I guess. I think I just got off the bus at the wrong place. I’m on Van Ness and Market. I stand at the bus stop. A green trolley rolls on at a snail’s pace but somehow sounds thunderous from the rails below. The wind is really whipping up a fury. I am a lousy Jew. We used to call it reformed. I guess some still do. I don’t know shit about…Judaism? Is that what it’s called? I’d ask my dear old dad if he was still with me. I’d call him up and I would say, “hey dad! Why is it exactly that I don’t know squat about being a Jew?” He’d mumble something into the receiver, all insulted and shit, and probably hang up on me. Or else he’d make a joke. A really bad one. He’d say, “Son, did you know that we had relatives who died in Auschwitz?” I would pause and say, “No dad! Are you kidding? No I didn’t!” He would pause, chuckling, I can hear his exact chuckle right now, and then he’d say, “yeah! They fell out of the guard tower!” This is the extent of my Judaism! Ah now! Ah shit! Now look at that cunt! I bet she could…oh I just know she could suck a fat nut out of my balls! Just fucking look at her! Fucking whore! Who’s paying your rent honey? I start walking toward downtown, what I think is downtown anyway. I need to buy myself a warmer coat. Leave it up to me to get stuck trying to buy myself a coat in freezing cold San Francisco. And that’s exactly what I’m gonna do too. I will not, I promised myself, I WILL NOT go to the clubs. Besides, it’s freaking Monday afternoon. The hot ones aren’t even working yet. But you can never tell. Most of those places nowadays have a rolling stock of fresh pussy in shifts like a Chrysler plant. I really am a horrible person. Listen to me! My dear old dad would probably be making like a fag dancer turning pirouettes in his cold grave if he could see me now. I’m disgusting! I’m a fucking pig! I'm supposed to be mourning here! In mourning! Whatever the fuck they call it! I don’t even know what they call it! That thing Jews do when someone dies and they rip up their clothes or whatever? What a fucking dick! I guess these days...they don’t rip their clothes up anymore? The rabbi gave my sister and me these little black silk pins to wear in our lapels, had a torn piece of silk ribbon or whatever. And of course I’ve freakin’ lost mine already. Dad would have known what they call it. What a worthless piece of shit I am! I could be walking forever! Geez! Where the hell am I? Fuck it! I call the cabby over. “Mitchell Brothers!” I say without taking a beat. The driver drives on in even less time. The next thing I know I’m in a toilet stall trying to get a rubber on my dick. I put ‘em on just in case I have an accident. Some of these little girls can really get me worked up. This place is famous for it.

The rabbi quickly got to his knees, lowering his head nearer to the coffin, as he briskly waved his hands under the casket feeling blindly into the emptiness for some unforgivable obstruction. Crisscrossing his arms beneath the coffin in a fevered and suddenly panicked motion, he looked like a magician out to prove something or perhaps the rabbi thought someone…or something was…holding up the proceedings…for some reason. Then, there was a short sigh of relief when finally the casket slowly began to move again.

This cunt thinks she’s gonna get every fucking penny in my pockets. Fucking whore! Probably will. Look at her. Can’t be a day over twenty. Bet she knows a trick or two. Next thing I know I’m in a back room. These girls really know how to take care of you. She won’t let me touch her cunt but she’s okay with touching me. Through the jeans of course. She’s got my dick worked up and in my pants. She’s gathering up the fabric around my crotch and I swear she’d put it all up in her filthy hole if she could, jeans and all. Ah gees! This one’s really giving it her Union all today. Ah gees! But it’s too late. All unbeknownst to her, she’s pulled the rubber off my dick and I’m cummin’ in my jeans. FUCK! I walk outside the club, watching myself in the reflection of the brass doors as I take my jacket off and wrap it around my waist so no one can see the cum stains. FUCK!

Back at his sister’s new house I learn the whole story, what actually happened at the graveside. It appears that ten years earlier, when they’d buried their mother, somehow the director of the Jewish cemetery and the people, who do the actual burying, put their mother in the wrong spot. Or…that is…they marked it wrong with the headstone. At any rate, the morning they dug the grave for their father, they found the coffin, that is, the remains of their mother, in the same hole. While his sister retells of the horror, I find myself staring into her fancy waterfall in her new swimming Jacuzzi, suddenly recalling something that happened to my own family years before. My father was downright indignant with the funeral director I remember; as they’d somehow managed to misspell my grandfather’s first name on the headstone. I rest my arm on the table and notice that I’ve managed to get a little sun burned these last few days. Then I recall the face of the rabbi as he attempted to make right a very wrong situation, his face getting redder and redder.

A Birthday by Christina Rossetti

2008-05-07T04:17:00.000-07:00

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Anywhere I lay my head, or, Scarlett Johansson's a god-damned pig!

2008-05-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

My nerves are shot.
I haven’t slept in three days. My acid reflux is white hot
I’d kill for the tiniest bump of blow.
Scarlett arrives on the dot. She’s decked out from toe to head in coal black Demuelemester. She wears no lipstick. I think this altogether and entirely too sexy. Too much. Too much. We’re here on Pink’s patio doing her first official interview for her up-coming debut cd release.
Scarlett seems a bit frazzled as I greet her dressed in Van Noten’s fall line.
Vive Les Antwerp Six!
A sudden screech tears through the alley as I look up and realize it’s Scarlett’s driver in a black 1969 Jag tearing down the back alley and onto La Brea. I see the hat the driver’s wearing and recognize him in a flash. A couple months earlier he was, for whatever reason, one can ONLY assume, driving Laura Dern around in the same 69 Jag, which I thought odd since Laura usually drives one of those real shit-pig road hoggin’ SUV’s that rot the ozone and murder our children’s futures. I remember the car, I remember the hat, but I remember him especially. It was in West L.A. at some crap Mexican restaurant where I heard him screaming at Ms. Dern about a 20 dollar bag of coke. I mean honestly, you are the academy award nominated actress daughter of academy award nominated actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, just pay the fucking guy his 20 bucks for fuck sake you cheap snarky cunt! I pull the chair out for Scarlet who smiles demurely as I notice a tiny sugar booger nestled and somehow defying gravity squarely in her right nostril. I’ve been in this sort of uncomfortable situation before, but trust, although certainly uncomfortable enough, Scarlett's blow hole, it’s nothing compared to listening to Richard Gere going on and on ad nauseum about his holiness the dali lama all the while doing your damndest to NOT notice the Scharffen Berger on the back sides of his white linen shorts whilst he serves you ice-cold mojitos in the library of his Aspen hideaway. Splurge on a little dry cleaning Richard or learn to wipe properly.

I decide to not mention it to Scarlett, her tiny white critter dwelling within, but before I even had the chance to say a single word, Scarlett bolts for the rarely empty line at Pink’s counter. I have a direct visual line and I can see her through the kitchen standing on Melrose and I think to myself, “My god man! You are about to interview the one and only Miss Scarlett Johansson!” I think to myself, “If only I were a straighty I would hit that shit fo sho!”
Finally Scarlett, darling Scarlett re-appears after spending another fifteen minutes in the toilet out back, whose keys I had to fetch from the Salvadorian or whatever, queen up front who constantly flirts with me whenever I’m here….some nights…late. Whatever.
But first things first, as Scarlett sits and the…oh goddamn! As if it wasn’t bad enough before, the nocturnal nose goblin seems to have grown exponentially now, twice the size it was before. I think to myself, “Girl! How big ARE your nostrils! Goddamn!” I think of a time when that syphilitic hag Babs Walters and I were having a contest, high on tequila and benzos, to see how many beans we could put up our noses. She wound up winning after sucking up enough legumes to make a lovely cassoulet. But I digress.
Scarlett seems now suddenly…sad.
Now, I am known in Hollywood for my absolutely ineffable capacity for compassion, my golden empathetic heart and profuse selflessness. My charity is well known and often compared to that of say…an Audrey Hepburn or a…Peggy Guggenheim, and…oh here I go again but damnet! OKAY? I WOULD, I really really would actually go to Darfur, I WOULD, if it weren’t for that damnedable Angelina Jolie stealing the idea from Chloe, and how I would be subsequently, and in no uncertain terms cut off from certain other parties if I were to ACTUALLY go there, and…but now, at this very moment, to be quite frank, I can not somehow find it in me, this beneficent…altruistic heart for which, among many other interesting facts, I am famous the world over, as Miss Scarlett Jo hasn’t so much as offered me a single fucking key bump of her shit, when it’s obvious, quite obvious that she knows that I know that we know all the same people! I mean it’s not like I wasn’t up all night in god damned Malibu listening to that uber self-important Gena Rollands ranting about “her god damned Jew lawyers and agents!”
Before I either drolly, or banally, hint at a bump of her blow, suddenly, Scarlet slams her hands down onto the white plastic patio furniture and darts for the front counter again.
Now, before I comment on what I saw next, allow me to explain one thing. I have been frequenting Pink’s Hot Dogs since I was in Junior High School. I’ve simply adored their spicy ambrosia-like chili, and their specially manufactured Hoffy Hot Dogs that SNAP when you bite into them, for years, just like everyone else. Everyone else since 1939 in fact. Back before they had an all-girl staff, flirtatious Salvadorian queens included, they had these old men, brash old fuckers who used to scream at you if you didn’t speak up loud enough or simply skip over you and go onto the next customer. Before they named their menu items (all pretty much a variation of the classic weiner and bun configuration) names like; The Martha Stewart dog, or The Rosie O’Donell dog, or the Hugh Houser dog…who the fuck is Hugh Houser anyway! Before, when they only carried a particular type of soda imported, from of all places, Israel.
As Scarlett Johansson finally sat, I noticed that two of the Salvadorian workers, eyes diverted to the ground, were standing behind her. Together, the three of them had five plastic trays piled high with food. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! It was vile and disgusting! What a fucking pig! Scarlett Johansson’s a god-damned pig! She had four MULLHOLLAND DRIVE DOGs (I don’t know about anyone else out there, but I personally don’t want to eat anything named after Mullholland Drive, and nor would you if you’d been with me the time Carrie Fisher made me pull over to the side of the road at around three a.m. one fine Easter Sunday morning so that she could go take a dump and get some…I don’t remember…some sort of shrubbery cuttings in the back of Farrah Fawcett’s backyard), 3 Lord of the "RINGS" Dogs, what looked like 3 of the aforementioned Martha Stewart dogs, 2 bacon burrito dogs (two Hoffy hot dogs with a stack of bacon, American chesses, onions and a enormous plop of their world famous chili wrapped up and grilled in a giant flour tortilla) several baskets of their special onion rings, a couple orders of French fries, a bucket of cole slaw, and what looked like two six packs of the aforesaid jew pop.
I thought, “What’s up Scarlett Jo? Did your mama not feed you when you were a kid? Are you going to need the key to the toilet again…real soon…for WHATEVER reason?”
And then without another moment wasted, she proceeded to shovel it all into her mouth. She sort of growled at the two Salvadorian girls whose eyes were as large as mine were now, as the girls slowly backed away from the table mumbling quietly in Spanish.
“Well, err…Scarlett Johansson, tell me about your brand new cd you’ve just recorded!”
Her face is now smeared with crusty, rusty-brown chili and melted American cheese, and instead of the lovely woman turning nonchalantly with the tiny pearl earring, like in the movie, her face looked more like a baby’s shitty diaper. I tried to recall lovelier images of her; the beautiful Charlotte in Lost in Translation, the lovely Rebecca in Ghost World, the irresistible Nola in Match Point, but I just couldn’t! It was like the pink elephant in the room…the fucking pink elephant! Except in this case, the pugnacious pachyderm is Scarlett Johansson pounding pepperoncini and pastrami post haste!
“So, it’s been said to be part My Bloody Valentine/David Bowie-esque, with equal parts Velvet Underground, Nico era, meets Jane Birkin and…”

Then I saw it. It was absurd. It was…just…absurd. It was quite frankly, also, I must admit, quite miraculous! Now, the Columbian nose cluster was somehow the size of a jellybean. How the hell did she breathe! It hung precariously to the very end of her nose as if a grape. Not to mention the thick, viscous, mountain of food she’d become, or, rather morphed into within the last three minutes or so. She was turning into fucking Jaba The Hut before my very eyes. Who am I kidding? She made Jaba look like Francois Hardy's 12 year-old sister locked in a celler!
And then, as if a Persian kitty on a silk pillow, the docile and dainty Scarlett Johansson says, “oh I enjoyed myself very much. You know David…David Bowie is actually on it!” “The record”, she says.
When she opens her mouth to speak, it’s as if a ray of beautiful sunshine illuminates her every breath. She is the loveliest creature on god’s green planet. But then, you connect the face to the voice and it’s like you’re looking down the manhole of a Paris sewer. Quite wretched really.
I watch her. I know she’s saying something. It’s all too sweet. And then suddenly I pity her. It’s just my way. She’s clearly one big hot mess, but honestly, who knew!
I say to her, “congratulations on your recent engagement.” She’s to marry the actor Ryan Reynolds whom I don’t have the heart to tell her I’ve recently spotted at The Hollywood baths on Ivar, dressed in nothing but a surgical scrub top, a violet wig, and an orange jock strap. And, if he wasn’t as talented and as important an actor as he is, and I mean that, I wouldn’t have fucked him that night in the bathroom of The Monica Fourplex near the third street promenade.

But by now, Scarlett Johansson is one gelatinous blob forming, dripping from the shoulders down to the hot asphalt of Pink’s patio, bright ORANGE! It’s like a giraffe had diarrhea and shat out an orange heap of Hollywood A-list star-studded poo. Yes, that’s exactly it. A giraffe, on the corner of Melrose and La Brea just shat next to me and somewhere on the top of this massive mound of giraffe shit is what now looks like a fist-sized ball of cocaine, resting there, hanging from the oh so very very precious nose of Scarlett Johansson.
Suddenly the black 69 Jag appears. The guy, the driver, jumps out of the car and runs over to where I’m sitting. He begins screaming, “Miss Johansson, not again! Fuck! Not again!” He shoots me a look, as if I were to blame, “Could you help me get her into the car please!” “Not without a has mat suit and a 20,000 dollar retainer buddy.” And I thought her fiancé, Ryan Reynolds, star of The Amityville Horror (remake) and Van Wilder (his co-star Tara Reid, a complete heroin addict, clepto and sometimes cutter) was a sloppy pass around party bottom…I mean, just look at her! She’s just GROSS!”
But finally, I relent. I and several other unfortunates, sans driver who suddenly had to make A PHONE CALL, somehow manage to scoop Scarlett Johansson up and back into the back of the black 69 Jag.
I decide that I will just make up a story. My deadline is this Friday. In it, Scarlett Johansson drives me to The Getty and together with several other triple A-listers, have a private listen-to of the aforesaid debut cd. Afterward, Scarlett drops me off at my place in WEHO where actor/future husband of aforesaid actress waits for me in my lobby with a bouquet of yellow jonquils and the CUTEST PUPPY DOG SMILE!

Jim Goldberg

2008-04-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Precise Moment

2008-04-28T03:19:00.000-07:00

i should know the precise moment when you stopped loving me
only today i recognized that you might
you could have been gone now for all i know
i might have woken up like in some sad country song to find a cold cup of coffee and tire marks in the gravel
instead we walk down the same windy streets
we finger the same books
at the same book store
everything is the same
but your lips are a little colder
they forsake your quiet unspoken truth
i recognize their frigidity
yet in bed at night while you sleep i kiss your back
i wonder if in your slumber
are my lips cold too?
do they chill you to the bone?
figuring into the folds of your legs i seek the warmth that we still share
oh god please dont ever leave me
oh god please love me the way you did before

Jens Lekman

2008-04-28T00:51:00.001-07:00

Jens Lekman recorded and released much of his material privately from 2000 to 2003 on CD-R. Because one of his songs during this time was entitled "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song to the Blind Girl", Lekman was mistakenly referred to as Rocky Dennis for a while (the song was actually written from the perspective of the main character of the 1985 film Mask). Lekman says that it was a "mistake": "someone thought that was my real name cause I had a song about him, and then radio picked up on it, and I never had a chance to change it".[2] He put the confusion to rest with his Rocky Dennis in Heaven EP (2004).

His self-released 7" vinyl EP Maple Leaves caused a big stir in 2003, mainly due to sound files circulating on file sharing networks. When the same EP was released on CD by the Swedish independent label Service Records in the autumn, he was already a well-known name. The songs "Maple Leaves" and "Black Cab" (TV Personalities)were heavily played on Swedish national radio. He soon signed a contract with the American label Secretly Canadian for releases outside of Sweden. Heavy touring and his debut album soon followed.

His first album When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog was released in 2004, and consisted of recordings made between 2000 and 2004 (some tracks had been previously released independently by Lekman). The album attracted attention among the alternative music press in both Europe and the US. The song "You Are The Light" was a successful radio hit, and a video received some rotation in the Nordic MTV and ZTV. In Sweden the album reached #6 in the national chart. Lekman was nominated for three Swedish Grammies, three P3 Guld and three Manifest awards, as well as dubbed album of the year by Nöjesguiden.

A concert film shot from Lekman's sold-out show with José González at Göteborg's concert hall in December 2003 was broadcast by Swedish national television two times in 2005. In June 2005, a compilation CD of Jens' first three EPs, with extra tracks, was released as Oh You're So Silent Jens. Lekman also has a cover of Scout Niblett's "Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death" on Secretly Canadian's SC100 compilation.

His newest album Night Falls Over Kortedala was released in Sweden on September 5th 2007 and worldwide on October 9th, 2007. The single "Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo" preceded the album's release.

Live performances by Lekman have differed in style; at times he has performed alone with only a guitar and a CD player, sometimes doing a cappella versions of his songs, while at other times he has been accompanied by a choir and string quartet. Recently, he has toured with an all-female back-up band, dressed mostly in white, that provides basic rock instrumentation as well as horns and backing vocals.

Vanessa Beecroft

2008-04-28T00:42:00.001-07:00