the last time we saw you you looked so much older...

in celebration of the great news that holly & marie will be seeing leonard cohen in atlanta(ditto my friend ken), i'm posting two oddball videos of obscure cohen songs(well, the first one anyway. it was never released in the u.s.)& this odd shot of cohen looking like al pacino circa cruising. the second song may be on cohen's next album. he did neither one of these songs in oakland.

BARBARA GUEST b AUGUST 6 1920

"Guest, who was born in 1920, died in Berkeley on the day after St. Valentine’s Day, 2006; she was a poet at all times close to, yet decisively out of synch with, the rites of lyric voicing. Indeed, her work, more than any other poets of her generation, enacted a "lyric negation," as critic Robert Kaufman has noted, singularly inhabiting and disavowing poetry’s ability to mime personal utterance. Guest’s unsparing aestheticizing created a new horizon for alyric verse in which saying cedes seeing, composition concatenates context, and palette elides figuration. For these reasons, she is the direct heir to Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and to the idea of imagination that she found in Coleridge and Stevens. I take Guest’s aversion to the lyric to mean that her work is not an extension of herself—herself expressed—that is, not a direct expression of her feelings or subjectivity, but rather is defined by the textual composition of an aesthetic space—herself (itself) defined. And while I would not call her Objectivist (or, in the parlance of another media, "nonobjective"), I think the link is there, both to the American Objectivist poets and to nonobjective painting.

No ideas only surfaces, no surfaces only words, no words only textures, no textures only contingent connections . . . The proofs of poetry often take a long time to develop.

In a period of American poetry in which the most visible and indeed much of the very best poetry has been written with hooks galore—whether outrageous or flamboyant or hip or morally uplifting, the arrogant or agonized or transcendent—Guest used no hooks. This allowed her to create a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, the flickering in translucent surfaces that we call painterly for lack of a term to chart the refusal of a pseudo-depth of field. It would be easy to dwell on the exquisite surface refraction in Guest’s work while eliding the significance of this insistently modulated diffusion and liminal warping and woofing." CHARLES BERNSTEIN

THIS WEEK'S WEEGEE

THE MAN HIMSELF ON 6TH AVE NYC.

JOHN CAGE b SEPTEMBER 5 1912

JOHN CAGE WITH DAVID TUDOR
"After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."

if we are mapping out various strains of modernism & its discontents, we'd have to start at least one line w/cage.

ANTONIN ARTAUD b SEPT 4 1896

Surrealism is above all a state of mind, it does not advocate formulas. The most important point is to put oneself in the right frame of mind. No Surrealist is in the world, or thinks of himself in the present, or believes in the effectiveness of the mind as spur, the mind as guillotine, the mind as judge, the mind as doctor, and he resolutely hopes to be apart from the mind. The Surrealist has judged the mind. He has no feelings which are a part of himself, he does not recognize any thought as his own. His thought does not fashion for him a world to which he reasonably assents. He despairs of attaining his own mind.
- Antonin Artaud

ROMARE BEARDEN b SEPTEMBER 2 1911

Sometimes I remember
my grandfather’s house
A garden with tiger lilies,
my grandmother
Waving a white apron to
passing trains
On that trestle across the
clay road.

—from "Sometimes," a poem by Bearden




this great artist was an astonishing everyman. in his off time, he played baseball in the negro leagues. otherwise, he was writing, exploring collage, working w/printmaking, wrote jazz standards, & probably cooked great calahoo. the number of great black artists in this country is huge & most are still unknown. how can we ignore a man who appreciated a truly funky fly butt & gave it to us unadorned.

check out these sites for a more complete presentation of this great artist's work. another one.

SHEILA LUKINS RIP

with julia child being celebrated coast to coast because of the film, julie/julia, the notice that sheila lukins, author of many cookbooks over the last few decades, i hope doesn't go unnoticed. ms lukins had a
great run as both a restaurateur & cookbook author. it's as a cookbook writer that she really made her mark. the first book, the silver palate cookbook, was a wildly eclectic collection of foreign cuisines & women's league cookbook recipes. oddly enough, the combinations worked & the book sold crazily as did several of her subsequent books.
we've been blessed w/fanny farmer & clementine paddleford & irma rombauer & julia childs, women who weren't star chefs but nevertheless changed the way america ate. ms lukins is right there on that list.