The cash machine is blue and green For a hundred in twenties and a small service fee I could spend three dollars and sixty-three cents On Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes
I wonder why we listen to poets When nobody gives a fuck How hot and sorrowful This machine begs for luck
All my lies are always wishes I know I would die if I could come back new
I want a good life With a nose for things A fresh wind and bright sky To enjoy my suffering
A hole without a key If I break my tongue Speaking of tomorrow How will it ever come?
All my lies are always wishes I know I would die if I could come back new
I'm down on my hands and knees Every time the doorbell rings I shake like a toothache When I hear myself sing
All my lies are only wishes I know I would die if I could come back new
I would like to salute The ashes of American flags And all the fallen leaves Filling up shopping bagsJEFF TWEEDY
the german choreographer & dancer died on tuesday at 68yo. i'd just seen talk to her, the almodavar film. her dance plays a big role in that film, a film i found deeply moving. i hadn't cared for almodavar at all. this film was a different experience.
anyway, dance played a role in my courtship of ann. she is/was a dancer. she remembers choreographing dances in her head & in the privacy of her room when she was four or five years old. on one of our first dates, she & i saw merce cunningham's incomparable group at zellerbach hall. somehow i'd found out she loved cunningham &, tho i didn't know his work well, i did know quite a bit about john cage(his long time companion)& jasper johns & robert rauschenberg(who'd designed many sets for merce's company). i remember after the show her saying, in awe struck admiration, "what a fantastic vocabulary he has!" she doesn't remember saying this & insists it isn't something she'd say but she did. i know this because it opened up a way of thinking for me that hadn't existed. actually, i didn't have any meaningful way of thinking about dance(unless the dancers were strippers)& ann's simple sentence of wonder allowed me, ever so slightly, an access to that world. if we take "vocabulary" to mean "a repetoire of communication" & understand that it constitutes the ground floor of communication upon which different combinations & variations build towards meaningful expression, then each gesture, each jump, each combination is saying something. it is our job as an audience to be watchful & open since we are being addressed. what makes cunningham so rich is the array of gestures & combinations he uses. the fact that the music isn't there to support these gestures makes things more interesting. the fact that the vocabulary has been arrived at by chance operations(like cage's music or burroughs' cut-up novels)only stresses the infinite possibility of communication.
bausch uses music as support, which is fine. that's certainly more traditional but her project is definitely based in modernist expression too. she went through a period where she was accused of being more "theatrical" & less concerned about dance per se. she had no problem w/this criticism, saying that these aspects of dance had to be explored & made sense of to see where dance could then proceed. she came out on the other side of that exploration energized. the dance at the beginning of almodavar's film, where two women w/eyes closed careen around a stage filled w/chairs & tables & a single male runs around pushing things out of the way of their circumnavigations, is a powerful example of her work. so is this take on stravinsky, the great modernist.
"Sarah wanted everyone to know that she’s not having fun and people are being mean to her and she doesn’t feel like finishing her first term as governor." maureen dowd
i think this is really simple. this person isn't capable of anything complex. she's representing the smallest percentage of what's left of the republican base. she's the proverbial snowball. history has shown over & over that whoever becomes the front runner this early out won't even be standing come convention time. just ask rudy about that.
the great numbers crunching site, fivethirtyeight.com, had an article yesterday about palin & why she incites such hatred. i was in complete agreement since it pretty much went along w/what i'd been saying about the republican party these last few months: palin reminds everyone of bush, the denseness, the crassness, the incompetency. they speculate that there are maybe three possibilities for her resignation:
"There seem to be three* basic theories to explain why Sarah Palin decided to quit:
1. She's simply burned out; 2. There's some kind of "other shoe dropping"; 3. She's so crazy she thinks this could actually help her for 2012, 2016, etc."
before i'd read the piece, my first thought was #2. greed & craziness don't burn out, they can take a lickin' & keep on tickin'. i don't think it would be some big scandal(say, that trig really WAS her daughter's child)that would constitute the "other shoe dropping." i think it could simply be her failure to "govern" the state she was elected to govern. since a governorship is mostly nuts & bolts, failure to perform is much easier to demonstrate.
it's hard to imagine any political operative seriously thinking her resignation would help her come 2012/2016. sure, she'll make some cash & maybe even a few more contacts but that's about it. maybe she'll get a gig like huckabee & be ever present on the fox network. that's ok too. i think she has less of a chance of turning even that into an advantage, unlike huckabee. the more the electorate sees this snide, winking loon, the more they'll start looking elsewhere for leadership. i think the country has gotten pretty tired of the ignorance that she now represents. campaigning w/o any real solutions to the problems the country faces & relying solely on emotional social issues was karl rove's strategy way back when & it worked then. barely. it didn't work in '08. i don't think it will for palin in 2012. that ship has sailed.
for the last couple of years, i've been lucky enough to have been in new orleans just about now(calendar-wise). i'm kind of missing seeing nancy falling in the street & off the bed in the hotel room. i'm kind of missing the food too. i haven't cooked much n'awlins food lately & i was struck by how much like spanish paella this recipe was. anyway, it was mighty tasty.
Henri Cartier-Bresson once said of him in the early 1930s, "We all owe him a great deal"
i can't think of too many photographers who worked w/as many techniques, sought out such diverse subject matter, & who had such an eye for composition & frame, a classical modernist, i suppose. it's not hard to see him in almost every photographer's work since.
In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.
