****
sometimes someone shows me, actually shows me, a way to write. a way to be. sometimes, if i'm really lucky, that person is already a friend. and they can rock pucci. my mother totally rocked pucci. i'm just saying.
jesus was a sailor
Now suzanne takes you hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From salvation army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
I usually don't read the io9 comments, because sci fi geeks say dumb things often, but i could not help myself on this star trek thread. then i read this hilarious comment and i thought that comments would be more funny if you would just write them all. is that a job?
hilarious comment
xo chad
Oh I love the coal
I love the way you’re waiting
I love your kind patience
I told you this day would come
Did you think I’d leave you here
Forever
How long can dust wait
Ask the moon
But ask him soon
***
some thoughts on seeing a hawk in the park, while snow came down and made the city quiet and i crunched along through the traverse and watched people appear and disappear again in the intermittent white-out. Every moment we would move forward, this glorious city, this precocious city, faithless. a little lost. stunned by a perfect, miraculous landing on the river. and now the weather. looking from the west side there was no east side to see, you could make an even more wide ground of being for yourself along the paths. i pretty much know where i am in the park all the time, (not strictly true. the rambles. i always get turned around in the rambles. it's not even funny) reaching the bethesda fountain is always, still, a sort of enormous pleasurable shock. not in a long time. it's been a few years. i was a quiet and curious traveler.
The thrill of him.
His smooth, pale throat and enormous obvious wing span. the eyes. who knows how he sees. and i saw him and slid to a stop, my limbs tingling a bit from the cold. secret stuff. whatever you want. i'm really old-fashioned. this is totally thrilling, and my little spirit practically vibrated in a silent, triumphant shout. "OH LOOK AT YOU"
we hung out for a bit digging each other.
and then he flew away. lifted himself up in that incredibly powerful and weird slow-down of time that's both physical and imagined—he wasn't there. the essence of him still rang out like light—an older, wilder psalm—in that place, but he was gone. and.... that was that. the after image of him lifting himself off the branch burned. it was like looking into a fire... well, it was like the whole history of my kind, if i was good enough, if we sang sacred poems to each other when night falls and forgave each other and loved, was irrelevant. not the right question, the answer was in him. and my walking in the park. the two or three people that had gathered in different places around me to watch, who startled like me in an uncontrollable, involuntary step forward, unfrozen in time, and the snow. and everyones barefoot and back from who knows where or when (maybe from Samarkand after the marches thru the mountains with Alexander), your heart is hammering to break free. i suppose if a debt has been paid to my peace, that's where it was.
no Slouching Towards Bethlehem anywhere to be found, just my heart in my throat and broken open again.
i laughed. i don't know what to tell you.
feeling a little weird and off and bleak today. probs i blew my mind out again which is totally possible! could be i just finished writing a "self-appraisal" for something which actually? is hysterical. my utter and total earnestness is a miracle of conviction and like sending friends favy links and awesomeness and right-on positivity. let me just take this opportunity to write you a BOOK PROPOSAL on SUCK IT CHARLENE I HAVE BEEN TO ME.
please. take a moment and read the comments. go ahead, kitten.
i think i just scared myself to death. oh my god i'm so freaked out and tired from writing this unbelievable meltdown of good news: love, life, me and everything and beauty. in fact, i'm completely surprised i didn't throw in a 5 page footnote about how much i love my cats, because that would have been totally relevant according to me. well why not. book report by jennie A+. fuck. now i don't have a thought in my pretty little head. what started this? Q: please list what you consider your top three accomplishments over the past year. A: 1. fuck if i know. 2. everyone in my life is still alive because i am insane and they all survived. Good Job. 3. oooOoOOobama. why not just include the lengthy sidebar on the Miracle On The Hudson (US AirWays) because that was beyond comprehension. holy shit which 6th aetheric plane of can-do positive auric vibes & unicorns and puppy and fluffy bunnies heaven did this come from?
I MEANT EVERY WORD. I AM EXHAUSTED NOW. TOO MUCH..jpeg)
cat in aretha hat
***
"kinda freaking out. thanks for twittering to bon iver! i was getting ready to buy it all day today. but now that i'm listening to it now ("just like the present to be showing up like this"), i'm buying it for tomorrow. so i can listen to it all day: "i know we will, that secret that you know, that you don't know how to tell, it fucks with qdmfklj and it teases your head, but you know that it's good, girl, cause it's running you with red" (not quite sure if that last bit is actually right). and just now getting to the reprisal, where that secret "you" know becomes the secret "we " know. which means someone beside "you" already knows the secret that they didn't know in the first chorus. all because of a great little song." WB
"...And she continued, as in “Poem of Commitment,” to mingle the “conflictual elements” of outraged witness and lyrical beauty:
Because cowards attack
by committee
and others kill with bullets
while some numb by numbers
bleeding the body and the language
of a child
. . . . . . . . .
Who would behold the colorings of a cloud
and legislate its shadows
legislate its shine?
Or confront a cataract of rain
and seek to interdict its speed
and suffocate its sound?
Or disappear the trees
behind a nomenclature
no one knows by heart?
Or count the syllables that invoke
the mother of my tongue?
Or say the game goes the way
of the wind
And the wind blows the way
of the ones who make
and break
the rules?
. . . . . . . . . .
because
because
because as far as I can tell
less than a thousand children playing
in the garden of a thousand flowers
means the broken neck
of birds
I commit my body and my language. . .
And throughout her ardent, abbreviated life, she did."
Taken from Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Foreword copyright 2005 by Adrienne Rich. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press. (all of the forward online here)
***
for no other reason than i miss you more than my life. i loved your body and your language. thank you for giving me mine.
"i know obama will disappoint me, i know that he is not progessive, i know that he will not be as friendly to queer folks, to the poor, to artists, and to the working classes as i would like , i know that he will not be as forward about peace as he should be, i understand that he will be unable to live up to the weight of history, and i am profoundly nervous about the messianic energy that envelopes him, i know that it means something that he is internationalist, that he is young, that he knows the digital divide, and that he causes discomfort and xenophobia among the far right wing, and that he might signal the death of the american theocracy that has strangled the empire for the last decade.
and pete seeger singing the fourth verse of this land is my land, still sends shivers up and down my spine."
(via Tangerines in a Red Net Bag and
Best Live-Blog of Inauguration?
all links via MatthewG. dude, how do find all this?
ok but the civil rights/LGBT section of the white house website is suddenly electrifying, and yes, we're an empire. would it be so bad if the empire ended? if we became a compassionate and beautiful place?
"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint."
Obama's Inauguration Speech
ok. community responsibilty sounds good.
anybody notice the paul of tarsus name-check?
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Chapter 13, verse 11
i just realized that i'm too old for the Youth Ball (celebrating 18-35 y/o). that's hilarious. I Am A Man Now.
The Need To Believe
Daniel Pinchbeck
“As long as there is one beggar left in the world, there will still be myth.”
Walter Benjamin
pretty breath-taking tribute.
my emotions are all over the map, too
Dance for Obama
"Life imitated a musical when these folks randomly busted into song immediately following the We Are One Concert at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18, 2009. I was told my rehearsal notice was lost in the mail.
This is really, really great."
"Yeah. All the Whos in Whoville just got their Christmas back from me."
mattgaymon
also from mattgaymon
Inaugurating Multiculturalist White Supremacy - ie bye roommate, have fun in DC!
“Living in a history of racism, genocide, and everyday suffering is a heavy thing, and moments of optimism are preciously rare. This is why the historical burden is multiplied for those who care to address the euphoria with a different kind of urgency: to move against the visceral sentimentality of the moment and insist, over and over again, that optimism endorses terror when its premises are removed from—and therefore unaccountable to—liberation struggle in all its wonderful forms. It is worth restating that the historical point of departure for liberation politics is uncompromising opposition to a racist/colonialist/imperialist state (regardless of who leads it), and a willingness to pursue wild but principled ambitions for the sake of achieving the political fantasy of radical freedom. Herein, the pending inauguration of an authentically multiculturalist white supremacy entails, at best, a change of leadership for a mind-numbing apparatus of normalized repression and mass-based social violence, the one that capably imprisons well over 2.5 million people (most of them poor, Black, and Brown) in cages all over the world and will kill well over 2 million Iraqi, Afghani, and Palestinian civilians (through a combination of blockades, bombs, and “diplomacy”) in the span of less than a generation. This apparatus is the one thing that will not change, even as some entrust the Obama administration with the arrogant hopes of a reduced global body count.”
***
fuck me. my emotions are all over the map. i think we live in a wild and principled time, all evidence to the contrary, even if it doesn't feel like it, there are small and awesome surprises in the quotidian. keep dancing and keep yelling and spontaneous broadway musicals. people are freaking out and thrilled and laying it all out, every fucked up statement and/or censorship has more of chance to be transparent then ever. and obama is going to have to deal with that deeply misguided "between one man and one woman" bullshit sooner than later—i actually think there's a loophole there. that's really cool. but goddamn, please separate church and state. it's not gov'ts job to re-imbue people with a sense of spirit, it's our job and it's as simple as love thy neighbor. neither of those religious figures should have been part of the program. i think obama is a good man, i think these series of extended idiot and tone-deaf moves re:LGBT issues don't bode well, and to some extent i think this administration will not be all that different from the last 8 years. i.e. obama backed israel in gaza. i think i won't be so happy about his foreign policies. he knows exactly what he's inherited. but the dancing and singing and the collective bananas right now? i am so with that.
and thanks, MatthewG for the links and the thoughtfulness.
"i'm still looking forward to the sense it makes. you have a book to write. now that you're sitting on the bottom basking in some kind of light that suits you. take care of it. be how you are. i was actually thinking about that secret of how we are, and how we have to find space for it to play that i wrote about after seeing "the lives of others." antony's new album is FANTASTIC. and there's a moment where he sings about being in the light. and says the secret in me grows. or something to that effect. let it grow. don't be afraid. patti said so." WB
Like This
If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,
Like this.
When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
Like this.
If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God’s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.
When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.
Like this.
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it means
to "die for love," point
here.
If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.
This tall.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.
Like this.
When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.
Like this.
I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.
Like this.
When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.
Like this.
How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?
Huuuuu.
How did Jacob’s sight return?
Huuuu.
A little wind cleans the eyes.
Like this.
When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he’ll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us
Like this.
From ‘The Essential Rumi’, Translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
"I did not buy this sweatshirt with NORTH STAR imprinted on the front because: I found it on sale. It fit. I am a Minnesota hockey fan. Look at me and guess again." june jordan
ok i realize this is a little weird but i've been listening to shearwater on repeat for a few days, freaking out about it, and the song "St. Mary's Walk" is both beautiful and completely wrecks me. also, NO IDEA who writes the post-ups for iTunes. "basking in it's own chilliness..." (omg WHAT). or "...and beneath the soft exterior of Meiburg's vocals lies a heathen beast just waiting to be named."
and you know, who am i to judge. you read my site. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT.
the poem i started out with for this doesn't quite do it. it's a little twee, if beautiful. i wish i'd started it with the lyrics to this song that's been dissolving me. they're rough as hell. so is the song. i hope you find it.
Claire lives up on Saint Mary's walk with her mother
I live down on Philomel by the harbor
And I hate the ocean
And I hate the ocean
And I hate the ocean, oh well
Claire says she'd throw me overboard then that she loves me
And then she kisses me on the mouth and says I'm ugly
And I hear the ocean
And I hear the ocean
And I hear the ocean roar
The water pulls around the pier, dark and rusted
And I know the kindest face with a sailor's eyes still can't be trusted
But I feel the ocean
And I feel the ocean
And I feel the ocean swell
i'm also listening to motown-era stevie wonder, and that one sea shanty hüsker du did. so, you know, who the fuck knows.
oops. my bad. it was "i'll be there" by the jackson 5 Reach Out I'll Be There-The Four Tops-1966. and patti sang happy birthday to someone in the crowd.
and we all sang with her. yikes.
here it is from 12/30/08. so cute.
i am wondering about that wolfgang tillmans quote now... maybe suzanne will send it to me, after she vacuums? i love him. his first love was astronomy.
anyways, found this interview with him online:
DE It strikes me that in all your images everyone looks as though they want to be loved. Even the guy doing what the title of one of your photographs says he’s doing in man pissing on chair (1997).
WT What connects them, I think, is that, even though they are confident, one gets a sense of their awareness of their own vulnerability. The depiction of other people is terribly fascinating, and even more so if it’s a psychological undertaking or a lifelong focus on single people, like a few friends of mine who I have photographed for many years now.
DE So intimacy is crucial too?
WT Yes, because it connects us to the physical world, and there is, of course, a deep loneliness in us all. I find people interesting when they have a sense of their own fragility and loneliness, and that’s something that I feel alive in a lot of people, but many of them have problems embracing this or accepting it.
DE Which is fair enough, don’t you think?
WT Sure! The title of one of my first books is For When I’m Weak, I’m Strong (1996), and it’s not that I can always abide by that, or that I’m always living that.
DE Your abstract works also reflect this fragility too.
WT But, it’s a resilient fragility, I hope. Of course, a sheet of paper can be both an image of a person and a metaphor for a person. I truly appreciate the modest contemplation that completely gives in to the circumstances as they are. I don’t see anger as the only driving force for change – concentration can be an equally powerful state of being.
sdfghjkl;'
hahaha
here's some great stuff:
shearwater and here
thanks, karen. (oh HELLO CARLA BRUNI)
if you like the songs, support the artists... spread the word and buy.
"We can do that. Be oxen."/wealth of promise
Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
- Louis MacNeice
Siona (from whiskeyriver
***
i'll get my thoughts together in a few... one thing i will say is this quote below has popped up more than a few times in the last week. so i should mention it. here it is:
"Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking." – Antonio Machado
***
also.
patti smith. well. how do i say this? yes, it's the year of the ox.
"As we move into a new year we also move into the Chinese year of the ox. The ox is the sign of fortitude and hard work. Nothing will come easy; no quick returns, no fast cash, no high profile investing, no great losses. Prosperity through work. Work that strengthens the heart."
We can do that. Be oxen."
my nickname in college was "ox", so i get quite a kick out of that.
the kindest thing she said, in a career marked by kindness (have you read Please Kill Me? There is some really funny shit in that book. Penny Arcade's monologue about Patti is great. And everybody practically falls apart when she gets married and moves to detroit. Patti also, kind of, she falls off the stage and breaks her neck. what a way to say "i'm outta here, ladies"), was at the end. During a show that glittered with happiness and rest and songs she hadn't sung for awhile. and her gloriously broad and dazzlingly inclusive smiles between songs. her smiles are her presence (and you can smile back), you're also there as someone with as strong an empathy for her as she has for you. "don't be afraid. do not be afraid. don't be afraid." over and over again. "do not be afraid."
thank you, patti. I won't be.
i think she also said, with a raised eyebrow to someone in the crowd or to herself, i might have misheard "i alone, come to tell thee." we must have seemed blankly ecstatic, in total adoration (kind of stupid with it), enough for her to repeat it. and then, "didn't anybody read moby dick? 11th grade."
so this year's number is 11, a majestic number as it turns out, and the line is "I only am escaped alone to tell thee" from the epilogue. hilariously, from the NYT:
"When Herman Melville, in"Moby Dick," attributed the line "I only am escaped alone to tell thee" to Job, he was referring to the Book of Job, and not to the character. Actually this line was uttered in the Bible by four separate messengers to Job. There is quite a difference between having the victim cry that he has escaped alone and having a servant tell the victim of the latter's losses.
In the article about the reading of "Moby Dick" ["Moby Dick' Marathon: Meanings Surface in the Wee Hours," Opinion Page, Oct. 11 ] , the line, slightly misquoted, is attributed to Job himself. It was perhaps a misconception of Melville, too, that escaping alone constitutes the testing of a man as to his faith in the Almighty. That the ways of Providence are inscrutable we cannot deny. That therefore we must bless Providence, come what may, is more open to inquiry (as is, incidentally, the meaning of the term ''Moby''). RENA G. KUNIS Bellerose "
okay? got it? thank you, rena g. kunis
it is so very very very wonderful to be here, with you. here at the end. with no prophecy, and no fear.
oh, a little bit more. it's so hard to get across what happens. i'd been skimming through some of the essays in the back of a newish wolfgang tillmans book, and found a quote from him. to paraphrase: he has to love, or be in love with the people and places he photographs, there has to be some form of love and fragility and friendship. he says, "not to seem corny..." or something like that. i was struck dumb by it. of course. so much so—what keeps me— i never make humble statements (or if i do, well...) like that—utopian and true and ephemeral as soon as said, at least not out loud. i loved it. what have i been so angry about? do i really care? i love his photos; his world. i know it really well, because it's mine. i mean, it's true. but there is something about that again that makes you feel like you've never been there before. part of what keeps you coming back. there's something about it that keeps compelling me there. oh exactly, the idea of love has always flickered around completion, which is not the case and as the case by case goes, is not true, ever.
patti sang my favorite song, pissing in a river.
Should I pursue a path so twisted ?
Should I crawl defeated and gifted ?
Should I go the length of a river
[The royal, the throne, the cry me a river]
Everything I've done, I've done for you
Oh I give my life for you.
Every move I made I move to you,
And I came like a magnet for you now.
(yes, please) Everything I've done, I've done for you/Oh I give my life for you./Every move I made I move to you,
that's true. it's so personal, what she's singing. between her and us. that's the point of all of it. there's always some moment in a show when that's really and absolutely true. there are people who name this world as holy, again and again, as participatory, even when no one listens, silently or the hell with it, out loud. in the work they make. in the people they love, the constellations. when they dance or write and play. over and over and over. a shift will happen in or out of frame, between breaths, in a nighttime landscape of berlin, the line of men waiting in the street leaning on one another smoking cigarettes. her generosity is who she is, who we are if we have any engagement with life, or who she's become and lived into being. it's been really hard, it's been glorious, and there's more work to do. now let's sing this four tops song. it really is breathtaking, and there's no trick to accepting what she gives, there's joy in it, because you know how in that moment of transfiguration (i'll be there—a kiss). it helps to know that she's lived and done and loved as hard as anybody does. what patti does, and this is not to take away from her at all, but she opens that place in you, that "place of life", that affirmation. and she asks what that place asks. she's been through it. she recognizes you.
i was just reading something on Paul Celan.
"...Celan reflected in his experiences as a Holocaust victim, saying, "Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss."
so that's what we're up against? find the essential thing, know in your heart that that word "essential" is already broken or more fragile then anyone wants to really feel, the person or love or art or language; the song that remains secure against loss. do good work. it's nice to share this thing with love, alive and dead, the things we leave for each other secure against loss.
amazed to stumble
where gods get lost
beneath
the southern cross
***
oh, wow. p.s.
i just finished reading sasha's great article on Bon Iver. it's a fantastic piece.
Into The Woods: the Bon Iver sound
i guess we're all sort of experiencing this through.
As Vernon began to tell the crowd that he doesn’t much like encores, and that the band was almost out of songs, an audience member started shouting back at him. (Town Hall is the last room in New York where you would expect anyone to shout.) The man’s complaints were about the economy, layoffs, and New York’s general malaise, and they were soon drowned out by a round of applause and laughter. Vernon responded, “I didn’t hear everything you said at the end there, but it seemed really heartfelt.” With this weird and upbeat moment in the air, he invited the crowd—as he does at every show—to sing along to the song that I find it hardest to get through unscathed, “The Wolves (Act I and II).” The audience was asked to sing five words—“what might have been lost”—which signal the song’s shift from a series of chords that ring without any clear time signature to a steady 3/4 stomp that uses those five words as a main motif. The recorded version doesn’t approach the ruckus that Bon Iver made that evening; as we all sang along, the band pounded harder and harder, blending in little eddies of feedback and clatter. Those words are what get me—joined with melody, they seem like a summary of the entire album, especially with that highly conditional “might.” Trying to keep track of everything lost? Or celebrating what wasn’t? When the band was done, and the crowd had filed out, I was still in my seat. S/F-J
****
pps. i almost forgot. she sang "kimberly".
"Oh baby I remember when you were born/It was dawn and the storm settled in my belly/And I rolled in the grass and I spit out the gas/And I lit a match and the void went flash/And the sky split/And the planets hit...And existence stopped/Little sister, the sky is falling/I don’t mind..."
"Land" establishes an eerily malevolent sexuality in the opening build leading to the rape scene, then the wild surge, each word an explosion, of "Suddenly/Johnny/gets a feeling/he’s being surrounded by/horses!/horses!/horses!/horses!" and then into a raw, tearing chorus of "Do you know how to pony" from the old Chris Kenner hit "Land of a Thousand Dances." After that the song takes off almost literally into space, Patti’s three vocal tracks weaving in and out of phase, merging splintered images as if by magic: "He picked up the blade and then he pressed it against his..smooth throat/and let it dip in/the veins/to the sea/of possibilities/it started hardening/to the sea/in my hand/and I felt the arrows of desire..." all rising in one raging floodgate of sound and image to explode in choking death chillingly envisaged, life ebbing with one decelerating drumbeat to "Elegie," a gust of pure melancholy stilled just short of whole anguish in Patti’s finest vocal and the loneliest piece of music since Nico’s "Elegy To Lenny Bruce."
And even more than that. Patti’s music in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching. With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, or the Dylan of "Sad Eyed Lady" and Royal Albert Hall. It’s that deeply felt, and that moving: a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock’n’roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. And only born gamblers take that chance.--Lester Bangs
"the elk is such a dick"
"oh don't be scared! we ARE fucked! but you know, who cares? can you REALLY care? why are you not eating a sandwich?"
"...No one if you lift the rain
from the bucket & fling it back into the sky says
hey it¹s raining again"
Michael Robbins
also, here.
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