Your footsteps are the path, and nothing else;
there is no path, paths are made by walking.
Walking makes the path, and on looking back
We see a trail that never can be walked again.
Traveler, there is no path,
Only a wake in the sea.
- Antonio Machado
Proverbios y Cantares
As long time Chet Baker fans, we can't wait to view this one:
OCTOBER 26 - NOVEMBER 1, Fri - Thurs at 7 & 9:15pm
LET'S GET LOST
(Bruce Weber, USA, 1988, 35mm, 119 min)
In the 1950s, Chet Baker's jazz trumpeting, edgy, intimate crooning and pretty boy good looks epitomized West Coast "cool."When famed photographer Bruce Weber caught up with him three decades later, time and drug addiction had ravaged his life and angelic beauty with deep valleys and crevasses. LET'S GET LOST artfully intercuts gorgeous black and white footage of the gaunt latter-day Baker, with images of the young jazz trumpeter in iconic 1950s early television and film appearances and photographs by William Claxton. Shot by Weber and cinematographer Jeff Preiss during what would turn out to be Baker's final year, the film also includes interviews with friends, family, lovers and associates. This transfixing, bittersweet portrait of the jazz legend won the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. Nearly 20 years since its premiere and nearly 15 since it has been seen in any medium, we're pleased to present a brand new 35mm print of a recent restoration done by Weber himself.
"It's the music doc as film noir, with a vampirish city-of-night gleam that suits the subject and his darkly romantic sound."-Jim Ridley, THE VILLAGE VOICE
OCTOBER 26, Fri at 7 & 9:15pm
NOT AVAILABLE ON VIDEO
If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
. . . one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
. . . of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
. . . somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
. . . at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."
- Richard Brautigan
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
via whiskey river
I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic; in Erwartung (Waiting), a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest; I am waiting for no more than a telephone call, but the anxiety is the same. Everything is solemn; I have no sense of proportions.(...)
Waiting is enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy); I suffer torments if someone else telephones me (for the same reason); I madden myself by the thought that at a certain (imminent) hour I shall have to leave, thereby running the risk of missing the healing call, the return of the Mother. All these diversions which solicit me are so many wasted moments for waiting, so many impurities of anxiety. For the anxiety of waiting, in its pure state, requires that I be sitting in a chair within reach of the telephone, without doing anything.(...)
The being I am waiting for is not real. Like the mother's breast for the infant, "I create and re-create it over and over, starting from my capacity to love, starting from my need for it": the other comes here where I am waiting, here where I have already created him/her. And if the other does not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting is a delirium.... (more)
via the incomparable wood s lot
A poem should be palpable and mute
as a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
- Ted Berrigan
also see Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish
via whiskey river
This is just so much dorky goodness that I have to post the full entry. From Kottke.com:
I might be shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but the table of contents for the newest issue of the New Yorker is usually available on Sunday on newyorker.com, the day before the issue hits the newsstands and arrives in subscriber mailboxes. All you need to do is hack the URL of the TOC from the previous Monday. Here's the URL for the April 23 TOC:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/23/toc_20070416
"2007/04/23" is the date of the issue and "toc_20070416" refers to the date of the posting. This then is the URL for the April 30 issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/30/toc_20070423
At right is the cover for tomorrow's issue, which includes Adam Gopnik's piece on the Virginia Tech shooting, a new piece by Atul Gawande, and Anthony Lane's review of Hot Fuzz. Monday's New Yorker on Sunday is usually only available to the select few of the Manhattan media elite who are sped their new issues hot off the presses. Now everyone can have a similar experience on the web.
Enjoy.
Vers la fin d'un discours extrêmement important
le grand homme d'Etat trébuchant
sur une belle phrase creuse
tombe dedans
et désemparé la bouche grande ouverte
haletant
montre les dents
et la carie dentaire de ses pacifiques raisonnements
met à vif le nerf de la guerre
la délicate question d'argent.
(Near the end of an extremely important discourse
the great man of state
tumbling on a beautiful hollow phrase
falls over it
and undone with gaping mouth
shows his teeth
and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning
exposes the nerve of war
the delicate question of money)
Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire
There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch
But it's a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight
Stay here at the flame's core
- Rumi
via Whiskey River
"A poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him."
- Dylan Thomas
via Whiskey River
I'll be at a conference all weekend, so I won't be able to make it to this one. If you go, send me a report:
"One way of spinning this is to say that my daily experience is often spontaneous and exciting. Not fragmented and intimidating, but unpredictable, continuously new. I may lose track of things, or of myself in space, my line of thought, but instead of getting frustrated I try to see this as the perfect time to stop and figure out what I want or where I am. I accept my role in the harlequinade. It's not so much a matter of making lemonade out of life's lemons, but rather of learning to savor the shock, taste, texture, and aftereffects of a mouthful of unadulterated citrus."
- Floyd Skloot
In the Shadow of Memory
via whiskey river
I've been wanting to post this manifesto for weeks. The riff off David Salle's "The Paintings Are Dead" is implicit and hilarious. And the paintings are some of the best of the year. Nice work, Daniel.
The Paintings Are Alive - Daniel Mendel-Black
1. The paintings are not dead. They do not celebrate ruin, they are what is still standing after the necrophiliac bloodbath, they are just as alive as everything else culture tries to destroy.
2. In horror movies like Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974) or John Carpenter’s answer to Ronald Reagan’s death culture, They Live (1988), it is much more thrilling when things are alive that shouldn’t be.
3. These paintings are meant to convey unstable, collapsing spaces whose highly charged and perilous depths beg for empathy, even if they are images one might want to think twice before entering.
4. My intention is that the paintings are totally unapologetic, and, yet, their outcome is undeniably fragile. Chance is a major factor. Each painting is really only an accumulation of possible events. It’s hard, for that reason, to take full credit for their final outcome. My only honest claim is to invent the set of circumstances that ultimately allows the painting to happen.
5. The paintings are vertical like figures. There is something very human about being able to put your arms around something very intense.
6. These paintings are reconceived in terms of the larger cultural spectacle without allegory, or any idea that looks backwards for its own relevance. I want them to be the symbolic language object come-to-life, the way it is impossible to ignore something that stirs in the ashes, not dead, but rising from the death of everything that has been poisoned and made extinct around it.
7. The idea of painting as an ahistorical symbol, standing outside of time and thus able to comment on painting as a whole, can only exist if history is not dead. You can’t have it both ways.
8. Today's Neo-classical worshipers of objectivity can keep their eternal, loveless vigil over the history of abstraction for themselves. Beauty is not something deep-frozen and passive in a sacred vitrine, like the antagonist’s collection of virgin corpses in a horror movie. I want these paintings to demand one’s attention like an intelligent consciousness alien to one’s own.
9. Ugly painting is not more democratic and humanist than any other kind of painting. Any argument that makes its claim of being radical solely by way of taste can only do so by means of outdated social theories that willfully ignore the singularly enfranchised sensibility that mainly supports such art. These paintings are meant to be flawed perfectly like anything else one would want to grow to love.
10. I want my paintings to be dramatic. These paintings are made with the belief that deep down inside we must know that nothing but death stands still. The transcendental object love of the exterminating angel is over-rated. For me, it seems that any idea of drama in abstract painting would want to embrace the potential vertigo such painting offers.
11. I am drawn to extreme contrasts, often contradictory, like, for example, the polarity between innocence and brutality, discord and balance, insides hung out, the guttural and rational, or the sympathetic dissonance of super high- and low-registers in bands like the Melvins or Thrones.
12. These paintings are meant to challenge the basic psychoanalytical faults underlying our most trusted mythologies — as an affirmation of the idea that concepts always already contain their own opposite counter-meaning. In order to lend significance to their own point of view, the ideologue must love their enemy as much, if not more, than they love themselves, which is a self-hating principal. These paintings have no ideology.
13. I am interested in representing the collapsing and derelict sense of form that is particularly characteristic of the dilapidation of fixed structures and its correlation in the larger cultural debate — underscored by our ongoing national political crisis of conscience — around the fundamental dysfunction and fragility of the belief systems we most freely subscribe to.
I've been in a cello mood lately. Perhaps it's the weather forcast. Perhaps the cold that's going around. Or maybe the fact that I've come to terms with not going to NYC for the Armory party [sorry Stac]. Poor me...
"“But when the melancholy fit shall fall / Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, / That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, / And hides the green hill in an April shroud; / Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose." -- John Keats
Regardless, here is the lovely and talented Jacqueline Du Pré performing the 1st movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto. Enjoy...
Thanks Wit for this update on one of my favorite projects soon to be coming out of one of my favorite towns:
"Another film due to start shooting in Laugharne, Newquay and Swansea this year, has the working title The Best Years of our Lives.
It will star Welsh actor Matthew Rhys as Dylan Thomas and Keira Knightly as his childhood sweetheart, Vera Phillips, in a movie based on a screenplay written by Knightley's mother, award-winning playwright Sharman Macdonald. Lindsay Lohan will play Dylan's wife, Caitlin.
The movie will feature Dylan carrying on with both women, a three-in-a-bed romp and a supposed lesbian fling.
According to Sharman Macdonald, the film "charts the complex emotional bond" shared by Dylan, Caitlin, Vera and her eventual husband William Killick.
It features an alleged attack on the poet's temporary home in New Quay, West Wales, by Killick, involving a machine gun and the detonation of a hand grenade, said to have taken place when commando Killick returned from World War II action, only to hear neighbourhood gossip about his wife's behaviour. He was cleared of any criminal behaviour by magistrates.
Dylan's daughter Aeronwy, whose famous father died when she was just 10, says the menage a trois tale is 'pure speculation'."
Link: icWales - Latest Dylan film based on Milk Wood.
via WIT
PANEL OF POETS: Sherman Alexie, Chelsea Rathburn, Richard Wakefield and Eric McHenry present "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rhyme": a roundtable discussion and reading of formal poetry.
7pm // Richard Hugo House // FREE
via Seattlest
Fog never lifted today, dammit!
"I called Han Shan in the fog - there was no answer -
The sound of silence
. . . - is all the instruction you'll get."
- Jack Kerouac
Desolation Angels
via whiskey river
| While I am working up an appropriate response to Jim Harrison's article in the NYT today: Feed The Poets - Books - Review - New York Times. I'm enjoying this little ditty via Neatorama: | |
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When Victor Hugo [wiki], the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer’s block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he’d have nothing to do but sit down and write. |
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Ernest Hemingway [wiki] did not only write A Farewell to Arms, he also said farewell to clothes! The inside dirt is that Hemingway wrote nude, standing up, with his typewriter about waist level. Indeed, there might be a nudist streak in the Hemingway genes: Ernest’s cousin Edward Hemingway opened Britain’s oldest nudist colony, a nine-bedroom chateau called Metherell Towers, back in the 1930s! |
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Perhaps it’s not so surprising that D.H. Lawrence [wiki], who wrote the controversial (and censored) erotic book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, liked to climb mulberry trees, in the nude, before he came down and wrote. |
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James Whitcomb Riley [wiki], America’s "Hoosier Poet," had his friends lock him up in a hotel room to write, naked, so he wouldn’t be tempted to go down to the bar for a drink. |
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French poet and author Edmond Rostand [wiki], who is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac, was sick of being interrupted by his friends that he took up working naked in his bathtub. |
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Apparently Rostand wasn’t the only one with this bright idea - Benjamin Franklin [wiki] also liked to take baths. In fact, he liked to take "air baths," where he sit around naked in a cold room for an hour or so while he wrote. |
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Mystery writer Agatha Christie [wiki], whose books have been translated in 40 languages and outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, liked to write anywhere, including in the bathtub! Sources: A Blank Page by Sam Elmore, In The Nude by So Many Books, Literary Life and Other Curiosities by Robert Hendrickson, Dressing to Write by Bibi’s Beat. |
Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.
Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opium, codeine, laudanum and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.
Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,
bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.
And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you.
--Amy Gerstler
I bow before your genius, Amy...
My name is Daniel Flahiff and I'm the editor here at (incli)NATION a blog about art, architecture, music, technology and a few other things. Mostly Seattle, Los Angeles and NYC, but not exclusively. Artists, inventors, philosophers, engineers, conspiracy theorists, novelists, poets, and filmmakers. If you like what you read, subscribe!
(incli)NATION is: Daniel Flahiff, editor :: Dorothy D., Akira Rabelais, and Bryan Schultz...
