Monday, June 22, 2015
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Vonnegut on politics
“Nobody
in this country is happy but the rich people. Something is wrong.
I’ll tell you what’s wrong: We’re lonesome! We’re being kept
apart from our neighbors. Why? Because the rich people can go on
taking our money away if we don’t hang together. They can go on
taking our power away. They want us to be lonesome; they want us
huddled in our houses with just our wives and kids, watching
television, because they can manipulate us then. They can make us buy
anything, they can make us vote the way they want. How did Americans
beat the Great Depression? We banded together. In those days, members
of unions called each other “brother” and “sister,” and they
meant it. We’re going to bring that spirit back! Brother and
sister!... We are going to band together with our neighbors to clean
up our neighborhoods, to get the crooks out of the unions, to get the
prices down in the meat markets. Here’s a war cry for the American
people: “Lonesome no more!”’ That’s the kind of demagoguery I
approve of.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Playboy Interview”, in
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Dell Publishing Co., N.Y., 1974,
p. 274.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
William S. Burroughs' final journal entry, dated August 1st, 1997
Love? What is it?
Most natural pain
killer what there is.
LOVE
William S. Burroughs' final journal entry, dated August 1st, 1997
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Sonia Sanchez's challenge from within the Black Arts movement:
Thursday, June 11, 2015
CALLE PRINCIPE 25 (poem) - José Tolentino Mendonça - Portugal - Poetry International
CALLE PRINCIPE 25 (poem) - José Tolentino Mendonça - Portugal - Poetry International
José Tolentino Mendonça
CALLE PRÍNCIPE, 25
Perdemos de repente
la profundidad de los campos
los enigmas singulares
la claridad que juramos
conservar
pero tardamos años
en olvidar a alguien
que sólo nos miró
la profundidad de los campos
los enigmas singulares
la claridad que juramos
conservar
pero tardamos años
en olvidar a alguien
que sólo nos miró
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Matana Roberts, Pov Piti - YouTube
Matana Roberts, Pov Piti - YouTube
Love the (Keith) Tippettesaque quality of the Star Trek backing vocals on this one, though the riffage also recalls another one of favourite British arrangers, Mike Westbrook. The sound world and its transition remain wholly, singularly Roberts' own and rooted as always in the Af-Am tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKVq4_lBgzY
Love the (Keith) Tippettesaque quality of the Star Trek backing vocals on this one, though the riffage also recalls another one of favourite British arrangers, Mike Westbrook. The sound world and its transition remain wholly, singularly Roberts' own and rooted as always in the Af-Am tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKVq4_lBgzY
Saturday, June 6, 2015
from my all-time favourite Taiwanese Existentialist Horror Musical that makes Lynch look a lot less looney! -- The Hole. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg9HeUPN3-I
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Thomas Amyot on Thewall and the School of Mendoza....
“He
raves like a mad Methodist Parson; the most ranting Actor in the most
ranting Character never made so much noise as Citizen Thelwall ...
his action seems to have been learned at the School of Mendoza [the
foremost pugilist of the period] & Co. If it had not been for the
feebleness of his Person, I sho[uld] almost have been led to suspect
that he was going to beat his audience out of doors –” Thomas
Amyot in Penelope J. Corfield and Chris Evans, eds., Youth and
Revolution in the 1790s: Letters of William Pattisson, Thomas Amyot
and Henry Crabb Robinson. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1996, p. 138.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
can't beat Revolutionary Letters, the radical Beat that lives on.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVLPU9bnyMY
Monday, June 1, 2015
Erasmus, speaking as the voice of Folly: “Poets aren't so much in my debt, though they're admittedly members of my party, as they're a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and god-like life they assure themselves, and they make similar promises to others. 'Self-love and flattery' are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion [...] Of the same kidney are those who court immortal fame by writing books. They all owe a great deal to me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulterated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don't seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death, and whatever remaining disasters there may be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or another purblind scholar.”
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