I was listening to Dave Mandl's show Sunday night and he played Robert Wyatt. After the song I found Wyatt on my iPod and fell asleep listening and woke up with in my head and posted Wyatt songs yesterday as a result. It wasn't until lunch yesterday while I was looking for today's birthdays that I discovered that Robert Wyatt is sixty-nine today. Like winning one of the tiny lotteries that renews ridiculously and knowingly foolish embraced false hope in winning large lotteries.
- RIP Pete Seeger.
- UPDATE! Thunder requests Banks of Marble.
- UPDATE! Hamster sends along these Seeger links.
- UPDATE! Landru has songs.
- On the state of The State of the Left: This is the real problem with the current leftist infighting: rather than being too vicious, it’s not vicious enough. I’m not going to make prescriptions about how this stratum of contest can be reformed; it’s a useless husk, and its uselessness is affirmed by how seriously everyone involved takes it. Calls for unity and pleasantness in a State of the Left already clotted into paralysis miss the point entirely. If anything, more splits, more divisions; everyone knows that communist cells reproduce asexually. But if we are to have a pointless squabbling sideshow to left activism, the very least it could do is make itself interesting.
- Scenes from the Midwest.
- The four principles of prosperity.
- The other Las Vegas.
- I'd watch the motherfucking Grammys before I'd watch the motherfucking SOTU and I'd kill myself before I'd watch the motherfucking Grammys.
- The role of the poet-critic. Logan has never sung to me though I haven't given him a chance for over a decade at least.
- Here's the promised typograph from Shohir's book:
- The notes say: The immense red letters (migdal) are erected on Babel. Migdal translates as tower, but the word itself is derived from 'big' hence its literal meaning is something like 'an immensity.' The four letters of migdal are jumbled up, confused one is tempted to say, and lurking inside the tower, though clearly visible, are many other words, among which are: become larger or grown up, sickle, wave, meagre, fish, bear, heart, flag, dub, segregate, blossom, skip, roll up, confound.
- I like that on this silly map of state stereotypes Pennsylvania's is haunted, cause it is.
- Arvo Pärt interview. Now you know about tomorrow's music, or the next day, or the next day depending on whose birthday tomorrow I find at lunch today.
- NEW SWANS! Now you know about tomorrow's music, or the next day, or the next day depending on whose birthday tomorrow I find at lunch today.
- That was a gag, I posted about the new Swans last night, the Swans cascade will be the day after Arvo's pieces depending on birthdays I find at lunch in meantime.
- Anyone else's iTunes and PC get skeevied by the latest iTunes upgrade?
- The Pixies played Strathmore last night. Ponder that sentence.
- Prunella's latest playlist.
- That's Wyatt singing lead on this Phil Manzanera song:
OBSERVANCES UPON RETURNING
Christopher Bolin
I
The bats, in the hold of the ship, crossed back and forth, picking fruit-flies
from above the crates of food,
though only the few, eating lice from the stowaways' hair, would survive.
II
I remember the wall of your home, casting a bamboo skiff
across the water of the paddy
and freshwater mussels, unable to attach to the mere significance
of the world above, littering the bottom.
With my hemophilia, I needed the water to bear the weight of the leech.
III
How high were the terrace walls? The black necked cranes disappeared.
And our children will not believe that they existed here. They will say surely
you mean the cranes were carved on the temple stairs (as they were) and never
made a sound (as they had) and this is why you could do nothing to save them:
there was nothing to save.
And there was some wisdom in this, though it had not come to pass,
and we were happy we had raised such children.
