Listen

Listen,
if stars are lit
it means - there is someone who needs it.
It means - someone wants them to be,
that someone deems those specks of spit
magnificent.

And overwrought,
in the swirls of afternoon dust,
he bursts in on God,
afraid he might be already late.
In tears,
he kisses God's sinewy hand
and begs him to guarantee
that there will definitely be a star.
He swears
he won't be able to stand
that starless ordeal.

Later,
He wanders around, worried,
but outwardly calm.
And to everyone else, he says:
'Now,
it's all right.
You are no longer afraid,
are you?'

Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means - there is someone who needs it.
It means it is essential
that every evening
at least one star should ascend
over the crest of the building.

1914

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Miscellania

The tenor, Roberto Alagna, stormed off the La Scala stage on Sunday night after singing Celeste Aida. He has produced what a critic called "a rather laboured B flat", and the gallery has erupted in boos.

to hear how it's sung without the laboured B flat: listen here.

*****

Prostitutes in Ipswich are being given money by police and drug workers to stop them risking their lives by touting for business on the streets.

Why not just turn the police stations into brothels and let the Council earn a few extreee to offset increased council taxes?

*****

White Vase
Felix Dennis

Two figures on a sofa, side by side,
The stench of bitter almonds, smoke and sweat;
A man who ate no meat lies with his bride.

Fresh tulips and narcissi cast aside,
A white vase tipped; a chiffon dress splashed wet.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side.

The room is hushed, its spell defies the tide
Of history ­ no servants enter yet.
A man who could not paint lies with his bride,

Her spittle flecked with glass and cyanide,
Her buckskin pumps beneath the blue banquette.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side.

The brimstone face grown slack and glassy-eyed,
Its shattered skull concealed in silhouette.
A man who blamed the world lies with his bride.

Outside, the spring has come while worlds collide.
Here, blood and water drip in grim duet.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side:
A man who ate no meat lies with his bride.

(The first Millionaire Poet?)

*****

6e Festival International du Film de Marrakech


"What a Wonderful world" est le deuxième long métrage de Bensaidi après "Mille Mois" qui lui a valu plusieurs prix internationaux. Le film sera présenté à Marrakech en avant-première marocaine après une participation au dernier Festival de Venise et le Festival du Film Francophone de Namur. La sortie du film est prévue pour le mi-décembre au Maroc et en France.

http://www.maghrebarts.ma/cinema/images/wakeup_morocco.jpg

Wake-Up Morocco est également le deuxième long métrage de son auteur, Narjisse Nejjar, déjà titulaire d'un prix du meilleur scénario de la 3éme édition du festival de Marrakech pour son oeuvre "Les Yeux Secs".

*****



THE SHELF LIFE OF EXPATRIATE SOULS

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
-- Thomas Wolfe

I waited years for the sequel.
We left off with a man
armed with desire, that slinking word
that means anything is inexcusable.
That man was also armed
with the innate sense of not knowing
what there wasn't to know.
So what could we have told him?
Watch out for the future
lest time at the moment
be stolen?

Slavishly I selfishly
filled those years of hours in between
with words and photographs of memories
no dictionary could house,
no pub crawl could summon,
no thinking man's game whose
rules could be broken without consequence
like a shattered mirror
could be played
until the grooves wore out
and the teteh, teteh, teteh
of the needle stuck in submission
rambled on like a litany of rules
in a bureaucrat's laundry list
of don'ts, conveniently leaving off
the do's and blues to follow.

Here the sacred heart unbeknownst
to the screedish hue of night owl
drinkers and hopelessly in love
with semi coherence beneath
a blanket of liquor and worn out
fingerprints of dying
leaving a semisonic clatter
of gysum-coloured tablets to ponder.

*****

When I tore the bandages away
I expected the new and improved
sequel; the dying breed of brooding
could horde themselves elsewhere.
This was my night off.

I hadn't contemplated hospital lighting
being not one for hospitals
or morbid gazing listening to the soft
sneaker soles of nurses consoling.

I'm not dying, it's him.

That is how I shall comfort myself.

*****

Where else could we be but
this unmistakably blurry misery,
these half-shrung dreams hung
like tattered underwear
on a clothes line strung
from the middle of nowhere
to eternity?

When I bust out of this death palace
it'll be through the double-bolted doors,
a mad dash into the recess playground
to play with matches, put dirty objects
into my mouth, drink to success,
toast the years spent bending the shape
of this body that they say is but a
shell of the soul to be cast away
like dreams because in essence
it is the dreams that are dying
not the man himself.

*****

The business of writing the sequel
is that of a fry cook - toss together
yesterday's specials and add a little
coriander and garlic to taste,
don't waste a minute concocting new
spaces that will get filled with
someone else's blanket advertising:
This is no one else's world
once the lights are dimmed
and we begin to fear the loss
of electricity.

This moment is a magnet attracting
every sense of the world. We will go
hand in hand into a sea of indistinction
until we emerge, wet and delicious
with the taste of selfishness
in our mouths.

Our lines will always be the same:
She says, he says, or vice versa.
Our lives will always be the same:
they will always end in dying.

So what to make of ourselves
so made up to look like others?

This one says he can fly, another
stands mute so the others can speak.
Well, I've got news kid, the others
can speak regardless
and they will speak without regard
for you standing mute
and they won't stop
whether or not you're here to hear them.

******

My sequel will begin with a fade in:
a man holding an unbroken chain of men
some of whom are blessed,
some of whom are merely heathens.

The voice over that you are hearing
is that of a man who is dead,
long gone, affixed in the head
by years of recording lines such as these.

I live. You live. He/she/it lives.
We live. You plural live. They live.

Happily ever after is impossible
unless the ever after is going to happen
happily and sooner than you think
because very few came for the first showing
and even less to the sequel.
This life's reel spinning again and again
in the empty movie house
showing no one what nothing is.

via steven kasher gallery