Loch Ness Monster



Not much for concert announcements but this should be a good one. Tix go on sale 2day.

Puedo Escribir Los Versos...



Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo : 'La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos'.

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oir la noche immensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos arboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto al amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque ésta sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

Pablo Neruda

Once More For The Auld Boys



Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. None has more consistently tried to find his poems impersonal. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: wrote poetry under four names - his own and three 'heteronyms'. Not pseudonyms: they are imagery poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro dos Campos and himself; each strongly distinct from the others.

Looooouuuuu



It's not that I've ever been a Lou Piniella fan, but this photo seems to capture everything that is wrong with the world in one pair of eyes.

Oblivion



(Korobushkin Evgeniy, "Oblivion". Oil on cardboard. 1990. 75x61)


"At the end of conversations, that precipice breached, the craving to be in
another culture gnaws at you. Go home to the bones. The carcass has been picked clean and thereafter, the only destination is oblivion."

from: The Diaries of Witold Kamerisky, notebook 12, page 113

Poète, auteur et metteur en scène de théâtre...


"If our life lacks a constant magic
it is because we choose to
observe our acts & lose ourselves
in consideration of their imagined
form instead of being impelled by
their force."

— Antonin Artaud

*****

Paris de nuit, 360 degrees panoramic view...

*****

Meanwhile, US President Bush was over in Asia to give everyone yet another reason to burn flags and start riots and blow shit up.

Nice depiction by our fav cartoonist, Steve Bell, on Bush's visit to India:


(gracias, Fat Buddha

And when he'd had his fun in India, he was off to Pakistan to play some cricket against the (yes, unbelievable but true,)Islamabad College for Boys.



It's a wonder pity he was only hit once.

Vive Victor!



"Let us have compassion for those under
chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves?
Who am I & who are you? Whence do we
come & is it quite certain that we did
nothing before we were born? This earth is
not without some resemblance to a jail. Who
knows but that man is a victim of divine
justice? Look closely at life. It is so
constituted that one senses punishment everywhere."

- Victor Hugo

*****

Meanwhile, back in Gotham City...


"The Killer Whiskey Returns.

A single drop of the old drink of "usquebaugh-baul" was described by the travel writer Martin Martin in 1695 as powerful enough to affect "all members of the body".
He added: "Two spoonfuls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose; if any man should exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life."

Saramago, Pessoa


Saramago's _The Year of the Death of Ricardo
Reis_, etc.

so, three "moments" so far.

1. Which is it? Over the great nakedness of truth, the diaphonous
cloak of imagination or Over the great nakedness of imagination, the
diaphonous cloak of truth?

2. When he "meets" dead Pessoa, he's told about death: "the usual period
(of death) is nine months, the same length of time we spend in our
mother's womb...Before we are born no one can see us yet they think
about us every day, after we are dead they cannot see us any longer and
every day they go on forgetting us a little more...

3. "You wrote yourself that a poet is someone who pretends. We utter
such intuitions without knowing how we arrive at them...is it the poet
who pretends to be a man or a man who pretends to be a poet."....?

(that's only within the first 100 pages...)

Capitalism Is Savagery (exerpts of a speech given by Hugo Chávez at Gigantinho Stadium during the 2005 World Social Forum.)

This is not the same Latin America of even five years ago. I cannot, out of respect for you, comment on the internal situation of any other country. There in Venezuela, particularly the first two years, many of my partisans criticized me, asking me to go faster, that we had to be more radical. I did not consider it to be the right moment, because processes have stages. Compañeros, there are stages in the processes, there are rhythms that have to do with more than just the internal situation in every country, they have to do with the International situation. And even if some of you make noise, I will say it: I like Lula, I appreciate him, he is a good man, with a big heart, a brother, a compañero, and I'm sure that Lula and the people of Brazil, with Nestor Kirchner and the Argentine people, with Tabarez Vazquez and the Uruguayan people, we will open the path towards the dream of a United Latin America, different, possible..."

noted - Chavez refers to Uruguayan poet/writer, Mario Benedetti, who wrote, amoung other gems, Te Quiero which has one of my favourite lines in Spanish this side of Alfonsina y El Mar...

"si te quiero es porque sos
mi amor mi cómplice y todo
y en la calle codo a codo
somos mucho más que dos"

*****

It's not spring yet but time for spring cleaning, albeit only within the bloggers section of the links, getting rid of dead sites, sites which are no longer relevant, sites which well, just don't stimulate any more. And all, not bourne out of some altruistic sense of duty to readers, merely sleepless at 3 am and knowing it was long overdue. Even added a few new ones.

One thing I rediscovered in the course of this action was Chez Lubacov -- which contains music I've been streaming all night/morning from Radio Lubacov whose contents one quickly runs out of superlatives to describe.

*****


He interrupted himself frequently, circular, a vulture waiting for the carcass of misplaced thoughts to ease out its last breath. He had a need to talk, perhaps for the reassurance that he was there, perhaps because he was too bored with the conversations of others and didn’t trust them to steer towards the right topics, driving through pylons instead of around them...

*****

Shout out to Rein Bier, auld mate with a new website.

*****

Lastly, the ale festival at The Bartons Arms was a stumbling smash - what vague pieces can be recollected of it anyway...

Bruce Cockburn: Pacing The Cage



Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it's pointing toward
Sometimes you feel like you live too long
Days drip slowly on the page
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage

I've proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip's worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in
Powers chatter in high places
Stir up eddies in the dust of rage
Set me to pacing the cage

I never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
All that I could pillage
All the spells that I could sing
It's as if the thing were written
In the constitution of the age
Sooner or later you'll wind up
Pacing the cage

Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can't see what's round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land
For the coming of the outbound stage
Pacing the cage
Pacing the cage

Do you feel as though you’ve been especially summoned, that there is a
special calling for you as an artist? Are you particularly aliented
with a pronounced sense of being misunderstood by conventional wisdoms,
bourgeois moralities? He was asking me these questions, he the
unemployed poet, the aspiring artist, the man who couldn’t simply
allowing himself to drown in his drink and keep quiet about it.

What’s the point anyway, I ask pointedly. Isn’t this all some crutch
you use to get through your daily misgivings your dissatisfaction with
yourself in comparison to the accomplishments of the others? What
purpose does your art serve other than a selfish mechanism of petty,
egotistical indulgences?

What purpose does my art serve? He spat with incredulity. What purpose
do YOU serve, if we are speaking about purposes. What is YOUR utility?
Is there some very special yet hidden trait woven into your genomes that
will come to fruition and blossom in the latter years of the
righteousness of your purpose?

Calm down, Didier, I caution as other patrons are looking at us out of
the corners of their eyes like dogs at strange noises. What I mean to
ask is what purpose do you propose your creativity to be used for other
than yourself?

Why should my creativity serve any purpose other than for myself, he
asked, clearing his throat of Gitanes phlegm like a plumber snakes a
clogged toilet. I suffer enough from my choices, they make sure I do
suffer indeed for not being one of their productive members of society…I
could never calculate the psychological damage brought down upon me by
seeing the contempt in their eyes. And why then do you think I drink?
Who wouldn’t under these circumstances? What are you saying, simply
because I cannot subordinate my art into acceptable consumerist values
like writing commercial jingles about disposable diapers or creating new
superlatives for the unique comfort and absorption of a particular brand
name sanitary napkin, I should crawl into my preternatural cave to
wallow in my own isolation, fed on disgust, shat into neat little
pellets that can be easily swept up and disposed of as if I never
existed?

He was easily excitable this evening, either in a particularly foul mood
or unreceptive bowels jingling in his subconscious. In any case, the
monologue was spat forth with great intensity, with barely a breath
drawn. And just why are we suffocated with this doomed sense of having
to justify ourselves and our utility to others? Do you think the pimply
teenage bagging groceries in the Carrefour hypermarché is pissing
himself over his lack of purpose? A paper-shuffler, lost in a
bureaucratic labyrinth of spread sheets and interoffice memos is
scratching his head wondering why he hasn’t yet soared to the heights of
his corporate manager, fluent in corporate technospeak, the gibberish
dialect of managerial monkies?

This silly question of yours, questioning the purpose of my forsaking
the chain gang of subordinates, pacified by television soma, beaten into
submission by the overwhelming nature of keeping up, this is nothing to
me. I laugh at it. I am proud of being a poet, a craftsman. Proud of
not being nothing, beautiful for it, in fact. Look, Gautier once wrote
that only things that are altogether useless can truly be beautiful;
anything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some
need and the needs of man are base and disgusting as his nature is weak
and poor. - so I tell you, I am proud to be nothing. There is nothing
else to be.

Working Class Hero
John Lennon

As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me.

She Proved Me Wrong

No!
There are not little birds that sing,
they are begging.
They want a piece of that
Democracy.

No!
She tells me, don't fold
your clothes in a heap and
piss in the open space,

I need you,

she repeats, only this time louder
as though it were a different language
and saying it louder was the translator.

No!
I can't take it any more!
(or maybe just a little on the side.)
Gimme what I don't know that I want!

No!
They say, "you can't do that."
No?
Why not?

Because you will end up in prison,
that's why.
You might end up in prison with AIDs too.
You might end up in prison
Yeah and when you do, you dunno what
is possible.

No!
The mother says, this guy is no good,
I won't let my daughter...
yet
until
you give me some yourself.

No!
these are just the photographs,
not the memories.
I remember it better than being.

No,
she said it was fun.
And it was.

No,
not really.

The Line

It wasn't always a clever line.

How many hours did I polish it with beer?
How many faces did I come across
before I landed, there, before you
ready to recite?

Oh yeah, this was a line
I'd been working on for weeks
in front of mirrors, on the subway,
lying on the beach.

So when I arrived, blown in by direction
and two feet in front of another,
precariously, I arrived knowing
every line back and forth, upside down,
to and fro, left to right and right to left.

And you were already painted,
ready for war, blood on the lips,
expectant, one leg crossed over another,
toying with the straw in your drink.

I've got a line alright. Clever it is.

Just wait and see.

Weightlifting



Let me try to bench press 100 kilos
of hope.

I fucked it all up somehow.

Hope was too fucking heavy.

And so were all the people relying on it
who caused me grief because hope was
on the corner of Nowhere and Never
and carrying them all
on my back was heavier
than I'd imagined

Let me try a dumbell curl of 35 kilos
And while I strain, snakes come out of my hair,
blood bursts through my eyes, all
the little symbols
that I'm doing something wrong.

When I lift weights like love, the
knees buckle; I'm doing squats
of love
and the sweat is pouring out of me
and the strain is all but unbearable.
That could be 300 kilos
but that's too much woman to love.

Let me try a set of rowing 50 kilos
to my chest and back to my ankles and back
to my chest,
somehow not the same as sex,
weightless as it is.

The weight of the world is a feather.

The world is too big to contemplate,
not any heavier than an atom -
Adam, atom, too big to contemplate
in world as light and weighty as ours.

Let me try to lift peoples' spirits,
100 kilos at a time.
I max out, turn in, shut the eyes,
grimace as though I were really trying.

Yet nothing moves and maybe Sisyphus
is to be admired because he got
the rock rolling anyway.

The spirits are heavy.
Keeping them up is a struggle
no matter how many weights
I lifted on the way up.

*****

also want to take this opportunity to asking anyone reading this to have a look at another blog I find interesting:

Last Call.

Bits and bobs, baby. Bits and bobs.

4th Anniversary



Lorca - Part One of A Poet in New York - Dawn

Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.

Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those that go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge to rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.

*****

Seen Better Days



Charles Bukowski - Young In New Orleans

starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, mabye it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my small dark room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something about
that city, though:
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the lights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
]me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy mabye
is not so bad
if you can be
that way:
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.



George Gordon, Lord Byron - The Destruction Of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd,
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Kaboom!



FILL FULL

What we know of ourselves are fitted
weekly in spouses and children and jobs
meakly reflecting.

What I am, I can fit on a thumbprint.
The Government can tell you that

and almost everything about me
but who I am

wihout being fitted properly
into the scheme of things
or in the realm of knowing
THIS is the way to go,
not THAT.

*****

And when I relax, I tire like a cat.
If they let me out of the box
I will run fastest
for the cars.

*****

No wait, those are dogs.

*****

Lately, they begin to appreciate me.
They comment on my clothes:
"oh what a nice rack you have"
or,
"great ass, think you'll bring some home
for me?"

Yeah, I say.

There's a big ass in your face
and it's called America.
Come and fuck it.

*****

So when it's down to the chips
and the dreams are counting
down to reality; one two tick tock
I will be.

There for this little, tiny
shadow
when you and I
were playing for all the marbles.

*****

Kaboom!

Steve Bell

KATRINA

Let me capitalise on the suffering
of other people who, well, suffer.

Hey!
I've got two gallons of water,
I've got a splendid set of ribs,
I've got a pair of balls,
lips.

Everything that desperation needs.

Let me remember for you
in case you forget
I am here to help you.

Let me capitalise on the suffering
of other people who, well, suffer.

Let me stop you. Don't leave.
Don't even think about it.
I've already locked all the doors
and all the windows.
You stay what you are
and don't move.

Slowly, day by day,
you remember
I'm in charge.

Let me capitalise on the suffering
of other people who, well, suffer.

I like you people. You are
my story,
my living,
my bread on the table
to feed the mouths of my children
and fund their educations so they can
grow up just like me;

hungry for your suffering,
thirsty for your reality,
ready, always ready,
to report on your misery.

Where's The Fats?



Of all the New Orleans stories, this one strikes me most: Fats Domino is missing.

Perspective: It's ironic in a way: how many civilians killed by terrorism from 2000-present versus how many civilians killed by mother nature from 2000-present.

Whose god should the world be fighting?

Hopefully, ole Fats is just off on a bender somewhere and out of harms way.

The City of New Orleans
by Steve Goodman

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin' trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we'll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
And all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.