Art, Poetry, Politics

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”

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Muriel RukeyserThe first stanza is apt today given the stupid backwards direction misogynistic politicians are taking against women determining what they do with their bodies. Worse than that, the insistence by these self-hating assholes to linger and intrude and control and KNOW what women do with their bodies.

“The Speed of Darkness” by Muriel Rukeyser

        1
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

Resurrection music,     silence,     and surf.

        2
No longer speaking
Listening with the whole body
And with every drop of blood
Overtaken by silence

But this same silence is become speech
With the speed of darkness.  

        3
Stillness during war, the lake.
The unmoving spruces.
Glints over the water.
Faces, voices.     You are far away.
A tree that trembles and trembles.

        4
After the lifting of the mist
after the heavy rains
the sky stands clear
and the cries of the city risen in day
I remember the buildings are space
walled, to let space be used for living
I mind this room is space
this drinking glass is space
whose boundary of glass
lets me give you drink and space to drink
your hand, my hand being space
containing skies and constellations
your face
carries the reaches of air
I know I am space
my words are the air.

        5
Between     between
the man  :  act     exact
woman  :  in curve     senses in their maze
frail orbits, green tries,     games of stars
shape of the body speaking its evidence

        6
I look across at the real
vulnerable     involved     naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of history leading to this moment.

        7
Life is the announcer.
I assure you
there are many ways to have a child.
I bastard mother
promise you
there are many ways to be born.
They all come forth
in their own grace.

        8
Ends of the earth join tonight
with blazing stars upon thier meeting.

These sons,      these sons
fall burning into Asia.

        9
Time comes into it.
Say it.     Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

        10
Lying
blazing beside me
you rear beautifully up—
your thinking face—
erotic body reaching
in all its colors and lights—
your erotic face
colored and lit—
not colored body-and-face
but now entire,
colors     lights     the world of thinking and reaching.

        11
The river flows past the city.

Water goes down to tomorrow
making its children     I hear their unborn voices
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

        12
Big-boned man young and of my dream
Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat.
I am he am I?     Dreaming?
I am the bird am I?     I am the throat?

A brid with a curved beak.
It could slit anything, the throat-bird.
Drawn up slowly.     The curved blades, not large.
Bird emerges     wet     being born
Begins to sing.

        13
My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No.     Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?

Poetry, Writing

Do not go. I must go.

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Do not go.
I must go.
“You don’t have a complex, you have a cathedral.” said over the shoulder.
Not so. Simple.
It was shelter.
It was guileless.
It was free.
It was us.
It was me.
We know this.
Do not go.
I must go.

Art, Poetry, Reading

Poetry month: White Trash Haiku with Interpretation

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April is National Poetry Month, and for April Fool’s Day something funny and clever:

Fanny Chicken passed along this hilarious stream of white trash themed haiku her sister wrote up several years ago, with excellent interpretive notes that amplify the experience.

Annotations are an underutilized art form. An example of what you’ll get at the post:

Carnival’s in town,
Who’s that runnin’ the zipper?
Like to git with him.

Interpretation: Note how the lure of the carnival is enhanced by the enchanting possibility of new romance. In this haiku, one can almost hear the “clickity whirr” of the zipper ride. It’s as though the reader sees through the author’s eyes: A hansome, although oily-ish, traveling man who’s yearning for a reason to stay in one place for the first time since his release from juvie 7 years ago. Maybe she shall inspire such desire!

More White Trash Haiku with Interpretation

 

Art, Music, Opera, Science

‘Galileo Galilei’: opera ‘Memento’

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Saw the opening night of Portland Opera’s Galileo Galilei yesterday. At 90 minutes, it was more thought exercise than cathartic. Performers were fine, artistic design was really interesting (especially the seraphim costume for the opera-in-an-opera Eos – could have admired that for half an hour) but ephiphanies and the sublime never arrived.

The story felt based on about 1-2 paragraph biography of Galileo. Not much effort went into showing personality. A film I saw in high school did a better job of explaining the concepts of Galileo’s accomplishments and the sense of the person himself.

90 minutes without intermission. That was a good choice. Had it been longer, the opera might not hold onto people’s attention. That is the fault of the music and the words.

The music was not memorable. It was a 90 minute libretto. The plot and concepts all felt like blocks getting passed around. I did not feel within any of the characters. I mostly waited for the next visual (and there were many interesting ones).

Galileo’s life is presented in 10 chapters, in reverse chronology. To start he is feeble and expressing self-doubt about not having stuck to his earth-is-not-the-center-of-the-universe Copernican proof, or not being devout enough to the Catholic Church in renouncing science completely in his heart. Then we see him with gradually increasing vigor, the role handed off to a better vocalist (or maybe the music improved with more narrative once it moved from tiresome “the earth moves!” “no, the sun moves!” lyrics between Galileo and clerics). The final chapter is a boy Galileo taking in the spectacle of a really interesting opera about Orion. Then at the end the old Galileo is united with the boy Galileo rapt with wonder and they walk into a great brightness together.

But it’s the CONCEPT of old Galileo and the CONCEPT of boy Galileo walking together. I never thought: “Oh, how nice for Galileo to get this closure”. They were blocks at the end nudged into a bright white screen.

I proclaim from the second balcony “Je suis arriviste!” about opera matters. Portland Opera did an interesting job given the material, but the material was meh.

Art, Music, Pop Culture

Growing up (in 2002) and Peter’s bouncy giant zygote

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Summer 2002 at a mutual friend’s wedding, saw an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t spoken with in ten years. My main response? Shame. See, I had come to realize I had been a major drip, clingy, and utterly failed to see that a cross-continental relationship between two young people who could not afford to travel cross-continent (and my drippy behavior had already begun in-person) was a not-so-good idea. She saw that early on, I didn’t and kept on dripping long afterward.

BUT a Peter Gabriel concert tour was taking place that winter. After 17 years of Gabriel fandom, I had never seen him in concert. It had been 10 years since his last album. And it was coming to Seattle where my friend lived. I took two buddies along. She hosted and toured the three of us through fun corners of the city. It was fun. She was stalwart about being a tour guide to three goons. My mind kept going whoosh between past and present and I somehow managed to insert sentences in between urges to apologize for drippiness.

All that made me VERY ready for the Peter Gabriel concert. He’s one of the few artists I tuck in deep. My favorite song on his album up was Growing Up (which had the deepest groove) and I was delighted how over the course of the show the staging by Robert Lepage (who also works with Cirque du Soleil) had a huge overhanging egg. Then the egg covering fell away to reveal a round moon image projected from within. Then the moon’s covering fell away to reveal a giant transparent egg cell that lowered slowly onto Peter Gabriel as he inserted himself within it as the opening bars of “Growing Up” began. And then he moved around the stage in the zygote, and bopped up and down to the song.

The birth of my second child was pending in about four months. The song is about birth and engaging the world (like how we first learn to identify one point in space, then two, then three… I kept thinking about how my daughter would be coming into the world, ready to bop about (which came true). The female vocalist on the stage is Melanie Gabriel, Peter’s daughter, and her making way for her daddy’s strolling zygote was even more amusing.

It was a hazardous drive back, heavy rain and wind, VERY tired, the laughs back in the car exhausted after the first hour or so. But we made it alive, and after our early morning return a few hours later I joined one of my friends to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on opening day. A memorable, intense 24 hours.

Not quite ten years after THAT day, was listening to this album and this memory/anecdote came back. Most everything everyone says about Time is true, escpecially the word “funny”.

Below is a screen grab of a Google ad that came up while viewing the video above. Funny indeed, though I’d flip the genders in this case. Glad Google is pandering to the me from 20 years ago.

Pop Culture

Behind the times, catching up on celeb self-porn

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I’m about 3 weeks behind the rest of the world in discovering that nude/private cell phone pics of Christina Hendricks and Olivia Munn were “leaked” on the internet. Of course, my first impulse with a nearby internet device was to engage with you in deep reflection.

2-3 years ago I used to read PerezHilton.com daily and kept current on all the good and bad choices celebrities were making. Perez was funnier then, with his coarse white pen making dribbles of this or that fluid on celebrities. He then shifted to being buddies with celebs, and took a nicer tone which helped with getting in-depth exclusives but got rid of his scrappy humor. And the ads, ugh.

So I don’t check it now and rely more on cultural osmosis than a single source.

Are these photos taken by the starlets and leaked on purpose? It’s human nature to want to show what we got. And to have someone broadly desired and glamorous send something solely to YOU must be a thrill to receive (and to send) but…

Isn’t it not so much IF a starlet’s personal nude photos get leaked but WHEN? They are alluring/comical, but many times the photos also convey a personality with more range than what the starlet is known for. Like an audition.

Dude actors don’t seem to have this PR problem (opportunity?), dude athletes do, tho’. Okay, male politicians do, too.

Art, Reading

The Trial of Ulysses

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Watched this 50 minute (they make ’em that long?) YouTube video that I thought would be about U.S. Appeals Court Judge John M. Woolsey’s decision to finally allow Ulysses into the United States. It wasn’t about that. It’s a survey of Joyce’s time in Trieste. I liked it for that, too.

Interesting to see some of the living experts on Joyce whose names I’ve read in the past. They’re not how I ever pictured them, but they LOOK as they should look. Then I realized I’d never made any effort to picture them anyway. Some peculiar people, not a surprise. We Joyceans ARE a precious lot. Nice to see footage of elderly Sylvia Beach rocking the same haircut she had in her 20s!

Poetry, Reading

Watery memory

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Three days ago, I decided it had been decades since memorizing any poetry, and it was time to rectify that. What to memorize? I’d been studying The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and its part four, Death by Water, seemed easy enough. But I’m finding difficulty with three parts of it:

IV. DEATH BY WATER

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                               A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                   Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

For the LIFE of me, when considering Phlebas the precise words of the watery phrases escape me. They don’t stick. “the deep sea swell” “A current under sea”. I got “Entering the whirlpool” reliably but this is SO short and simple, it’s bothering me.

Wait. After typing this out, I got it now. Let me close my eyes and try reciting it again.

Good. Just did it two times in a row. Needed hand gestures, but got it.

See, internet? You CAN be remedial!

Politics, Pop Culture

Punch your heart, then ask for money?

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Kony 2012 joins an interesting year of social network activism. Awareness that the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure was driven by right-wing anti-women women leading to plummeting donations to Komen, and a rise in donations to Planned Parenthood. Making Rush Limbaugh apologize and costing him sponsors. Fascinating examples of how social networks can create a tide of public opinion to great effect.

In the last day or so, the world is suddenly concerned with a this terrible Kony warlord. And the entity that spread the word wants you — if you care for children and object to rape and murder and terror — to donate money to them and share with your friends the news and calls for donations. 43 million views on YouTube. 14.2 million on Vimeo. Astonishing.

Being engaged is important. Making a difference and helping those who struggle is important. But the effect of the video and the excitement of being part of a quick-response online movement has seemingly made many people’s critical thinking skills temporarily disengage. What is this group Invisible Children behind the video? Are they good or bad? Do they spend money wisely? I don’t have all those answers, but there’s a lot of cause for skepticism before forking over money. And they do ask for money, over and over again.

A critical mind about the Kony 2012 online fad in no way constitutes an endorsement of raising children to kill and rape their own family members, run drugs, and making life as shitty as possible for others.

P.S. – This article on Jezebel about this topic is really good.