mend the facile JAPE
before a crowd's AHEM
pyramid PERU
i ride on wild EMUS
taunt feculent LOUT
myself no mean OGRE
carol of UREA
silent glistening TEAL
missed mosquito DRAT
dancing on a tightROPE
this stunt never APED
in any YouTube TEDS
perilous AMEN
in the digital MINE
nothing shapes our ENDS
little screens for a NEST
chances of frith · SLIM
idiota LOCI
viddy but ICON
these alibis are MINT
meet truth with a SLAP
i want the final LURE
of functioning ARMS
king smog king drug king PEST
wild HARES
of the free AGENT
written only RECTO
gifts of the cage where can ENTER
but STORK
tomorrow-LARVA
infests diverse AREAS
where it's not, one REELS
to see the confusion-WAVE
make war on all compASSES
SATAN
wood mask AGAPE
these temporal TAPAS
try to say termites dwell APART
in NESTS
(via)
Now that i have the second volume of UFO, the short-lived fin-de-Sixties British TV series, are there no more worlds left to conquer?
(via)
David Bowie: "Girl Love Me" (from Blackstar, 2016)
Cheena so sound, so titty up this Malchick, say
Party up mood, naddy vellocet round on Tuesday
Real bad dizzy snatch making all the homies mad, Thursday
Popo blind to the polly in the hole by Friday
Where the fuck did Monday go?
I'll go to this pig-and-pot show
I'm sitting in the chestnut tree
Who the fuck's gonna mess with me?
Girl loves me
Hey cheena
Girl don't speak
Girl loves me
Hey cheena
Girl don't speak
Where the fuck did Monday go?
I'll go to this pig-and-pot show
Where the fuck did Monday go?
You viddy at the Cheena
Truth is me with the Red Rock
You be loving little zipshot
Devotchka want ya goloss
Spatchka want the Russian
Swear to dead fun is dang dang
Viddy viddy at the Cheena
Girl loves me
Hey cheena
Girl don't…
(via)
This morning i listened again to Linda Ronstadt’s live cover of "Hurts So Bad"--already a great song, she breaks & bathes it in atomic fire--& i thought, this has duende. (So might the sorcerer know when his efforts to evoke have been crowned with success.) And it reminded me of that other great singer & song, Melanie Safka’s "Candles in the Rain" (IMHO the very pinnacle of 60s rock--), which would surely have lifted up the Pentagon itself, had a bright god & not the Demiurge been in charge of stuff like that.
All its occurrences, isolate like lightning strikes, nilpertain sheer artistic excellence: even, contemptuously so. Lorca says as much in his famous essay. Bly calls it "dragon smoke" & that’s as good a name as i can think of in English. (Never mind that no one can smell it & there aren’t any dragons.)
I started to think of instances from various media. Of course, the things i like i like for different reasons, & even famous masterpieces aren’t necessarily famous for having that quality. Recently Keats’s "Ode to Autumn" came up in a discussion; the ending of that, & especially his "Ode to Melancholy." Somehow that reminded me of my own poem, "The Dead King Hunts and Eats the Gods,"--not something i often have achieved, but in that one i do (& it feels like someone else wrote it). El Greco’s View of Toledo & just about anything by Van Gogh, but I would single out his Night Café with Pool Table.
(via)
Unexpectedly, Rudyard Kipling: "Epitaphs of the War: The Coward"—in only two lines. And those lines from "Au Lecteur" by Baudelaire that have always haunted me, "Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas,/ Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent." Likewise, "Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,/ That here, obedient to their laws, we lie" --Simonides, as translated by William Lisle Bowles. Strictly speaking, haiku are supposed to not be haiku unless this happens. (One can wish.)
The "shower of gold" chess game… (--i almost think there is more duende in chess than in English poetry.) Cliché as it has become, the beginning of "Scheherazade" by Rimsky-Korsakov. (Then his orchestral training kicks in.) But is there duende in greater-length works, except for at moments? I will grant much of the Aeneid, Book VI; "Of Being Numerous"; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (alas, more than his Duino Elegies--!). And just about anything by R A Lafferty, who seems to have it at his fingertips. All six of Bartok’s quartets, & even moreso Berg’s Lyric Suite.
Concerning the latter, i have many times told the story of how i first encountered it. I was in Vienna, at a classical concert, starting to nod off after a day spent walking around the city. Suddenly the air changed, as if a storm wind had entered that close chamber. I sat up bolt-upright & felt like i’d just drank three cups of coffee. It was the most amazing thing i had ever heard. (After that, i went to the first record store i could find & bought my own copy, lugging it around with me in my suitcase till I returned to the US.)
(via)
It wasn’t much different when I wandered into the one-man show of Master Shen-Long at the Trammell Crow museum. There are marks, & there are marks. But perhaps our pockets these days are empty of gold coins to fling, or we no longer expect to find excitement in anything that our artists & bards can come up with. (The Zeitgeist is not without consequence.) I wouldn’t say that it’s even wise to make that one’s chief artistic ambition. (Vincent again.) Yet to take up the vocation without that awareness, would be ridiculous. The openness that precedes, yes, that can be cultivated, up to a point...
Perhaps it is best to think of it as one of the hazards of the job.
(via dualvoidanima on tumblr)
"We still do not know their language. We think they think we are too stupid to learn it and we know they know they are probably right." (via The Page blog)
(via chernobylandpripyat on tumblr)
"In 1913, funny numbered boxes appeared at each crossroads, those allowing to deposit the dead rats."
(pripyat via)
"Walter Benjamin: 'Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.' " --Hari Kunzru in Granta
(cropped pic of jupiter from current probe juno flyby)
"I’m responsible for you to be safe and sound and not glow in the dark after your tour." (via feuilleton)
(painting by karen angelica of the "stemmons witches" via memories of dallas on fb)
"The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse." --Nick Land
It starts with the Woofus.
First, we can see now how solastalgia is entirely congruent with hüzün (cf saudade: "Thus saudade might be a better description than nostalgia for the appeal of homebrew: the sub-culture within retro gaming that makes new games for old systems. In this evocation of what never was homebrew games are inherently transgressive to actual history. They show what could (perhaps should) have happened but did not and they make the case that this alternative history was at the very least possible thanks to their existence as technological artifact being 'proof by construction'."). Sepia, etymonarchical vocabularies...
"Depressive anhedonia" & vaporwave aesthetics go together like chocolate & peanut butter.
(via)
Watching The Wizard of Oz again on the big screen, reminds me again how "inside" & "outside" are a story. We are not *inside* some hyperobject called Climate Change. There's no sepia world on one side of a tornado & a technicolor world on the other. They interpenetrate, uncannily. Every creature is a Woofus.
