Elegant Taiwan mansions update

Nina Simone

I don't know if I could ever adequately describe all the things that make this song the magnificent work of art that it is, but something occurred to me listening to it this morning, and I think to a certain extent it's true of all great black art in America. I believe that the song belongs to, sings to, humanity on three levels: to all of humanity, to black people specifically, and most of all to any child whose true being has been hurt by the weight of history. It is heartbreaking to notice what must be a common experience for black girls and boys in their childhood: to belong to a society that in big ways and small tries to make you feel that you are somehow unworthy of care. Nina Simone gave the world something incredible and special, a dignity rooted in humility and love that belongs to anyone who needs it, but might have been lost were it not shared through her music. The possibility of true, private, unassailable happiness is something that should be offered to every child. In this sense, as a person with a soul in need of such help, I am so grateful.




I do believe that great power can be drawn from this simple gift of self-esteem. Once empowered a person can be capable of having a great voice in the world and can hold those responsible accountable for the damage they've done and to say "enough" to the abuse of any more children by a racist society.




And it doesn't hurt that she was so glamorous, intellectual, and beautiful.

Oldsmobile dreamboat

This Kan Mikami song from 1972 is incredible.

Hi. Ornette Coleman went home last week, and I've been thinking about him a bit. When I first seriously started checking out jazz records, it was Ornette and Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. I think there's some real beauty in his sounds.

I played "Una Muy Bonita" to get myself warmed up.


Then I played "The Golden Number", a duet with Charlie Haden, because it is elegaic and stunning. This song absolutely kills me and has one of the records I turn to late at night sometimes, when I need to eff the ineffable, I have wept with this song playing on numerous occasions.


It's true that Ornette's sessions could be a bit maddening and you really had to be in the right mood to listen to alot of his music, but he was earnest in trying to access some seriously esoteric places and should be considered on the short-list of Ontological Heavy Lifters.


The man came up with the description "Free Jazz" and pioneered an art form that is only difficult because the work of revealing hidden beauty in the universe is difficult. It can be a lonely, bewildering thing.


And that is the value of true difficult art: when it is beautiful, it is an utterly unique beauty, fragile, fleeting, discovered almost by accident -- like the fact of human life in the universe. And when you find that sublime moment you feel lucky and euphoric. This experience of music through Ornette Coleman has made me a better human being and given my life meaning.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume.

Landscape with Perseus and Andromeda: From the “Mythological Room” of the Imperial Villa at Boscotrecase.

Thinking

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you."
— A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Antanas Sutkus

Antanas Sutkus. Jean-Paul Sartre in Lithuania. Nida, 1965

Antanas Sutkus. Mother's hand, Vilnius, 1966

Antanas Sutkus. Song festival. Rabbits in a dressing room, Vilnius, 1970

Keizo Kitajima 19. September 1983 Ost Berlin

"To say goodbye is to die a little." -Raymond Chandler

Inside the great Neolithic tomb at Knowth, Co. Meath, Ireland which was built in c. 3000 BC

Bison sculpted from mammoth ivory. Found at Zaraysk, Russia. About 20,000 years old

"Die Schaedel-Pyramide bei Tebah in Africa" published in Meyer's Universum ..., 1838

TIDE JEWELS
The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish

The Moles

GREAT Australian band >>>>

DEATH PUNK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hPnZUMBwA&index=11&list=PLHruxBLyJ9YdV0ZWjHv0HxKFTrM8Qkk4E

<--GEZA X

FRENCH...>>

Book shopping today, for more MArk Strand:

Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
Man and Camel
 Collected Poems http://www.bookdepository.com/Looking-for-Poetry/9780375709883 "Looking for Poetry also contains the simple and haunting poems of the Quechua Indians." (!)
Weather Words
 

One roars with pain, the other pours with rain. Lambert and Butler Cigarette Card, circa 1930

  TODAY'S CRUISING AROUND IN THE CAR MUSIC:

Acid factory in Luban, 1909

Pink Fairy Armadillo The pink fairy armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) or pichiciego is the smallest species of armadillo (mammals of the family Dasypodidae, recognized by a bony armor shell), first described by R. Harlan in 1825.[4] This desert-adapted animal is endemic to central Argentina and can be found inhabiting sandy plains, dunes, and scrubby grasslands.

THE CLEAN PART ONE 1978-1988

Dora Maar, Silence, 1935-1936

The Line Of Best Fit by Choon!! on Mixcloud

Wednesday morning: PART 2

Mark Strand (1934 - 29 November 2014)

I was in the bathtub when Jorge Luis Borges stumbled in the door. “Borges, be careful,” I yelled. “The floor is slippery and you are blind.” Then, soaping my chest, I said, “Borges, have you ever considered what is implicit in a phrase like “I translate Apollinaire into English”? or “I translate de la Mare into French”? that we take the highly idiosyncratic work of an individual and render it into a language that belongs to everyone and to no one, a system of meanings sufficiently general to permit not only misunderstandings but to throw into doubt the possibility of permitting anything else?”

"Yes," he said, with an air of resignation.

"Then don’t you think," I said, "that the translation of poetry is best left to poets who are in possession of an English they have each made their own, and that language teachers, who feel responsibility to a language not in its modifications but in its monolithic entirety, make the worst translators?

Wouldn’t it be best to think of translation as a transaction between individual idioms, between, say, the Italian of D’Annunzio and the English of Auden? If we did, we could end irrelevant discussions of who has and who hasn’t done a correct translation.”

"Yes," he said, seeming to get excited.

"Say," I said. "If translation is a kind of reading, the assumption or transformation of one personal idiom into another, then shouldn’t it be possible to translate work done in one’s own language? Shouldn’t it be possible to translate Wordsworth or Shelley into Strand?"

"You will discover," said Borges, "that Wordsworth refuses to be translated. It is you who must be translated, who must become, for however long, the author of The Prelude. That is what happened to Pierre Menard when he translated Cervantes. He did not want to compose another Don Quixote – which would be easy – but the Don Quixote. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes. The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against the Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it was almost impossible.”

"Not almost impossible," I said, "but absolutely impossible, for in order to translate one must cease to be." I closed my eyes for a second and realized that if I ceased to be, I would never know.

"Borges…" I was about to tell him that the strength of a style must be measured by its resistance to translation.

"Borges…" But when I opened my eyes, he, and the text into which he was drawn, had come to an end.

— Mark Strand, Translation, from The Continuous Life (Knopf, 1990)

Wednesday morning:Aftermath of Nothing in Particular