Culture Clash

A Prayer for the Dead

May 16, 2012

. The poet Stewart Kestenbaum, who lives in Maine, lost his brother Howard in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. A Prayer for the Dead The light snow started late last night and continued all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother was [...]

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How We Lived On It (50) – The Daughters

May 12, 2012

. Music: Tim Story, “The Daughers,” from Shadowplay. Art: Elizabeth Colomba    Related articles Being In and Out of Time (sadredearth.com) How We Lived On It (49) – The First Hippie (sadredearth.com) Jazz Is: 38 – “Nature Boy” (sadredearth.com) Eating Poetry (XXXIV) – Time Is the Fire (sadredearth.com) Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post [...]

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Jazz Is: 39 – Blue Rondo à la Turk

May 11, 2012

. Giving Los Angeles (or West Coast) cool jazz a whole new meaning. These guys simply take wing. The Dave Brubeck Quartet on ”The Lively Ones” television show, first broadcast July 25, 1962. Related articles Forgotten Gems From The Dave Brubeck Quartet (npr.org) My music playlist for today (May 6, 2012 edition) (viewfrommiddleclass.wordpress.com) Take Five by [...]

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Being In and Out of Time

May 9, 2012

. Losing yourself in the moment. Living in the moment. Living by losing yourself in the moment. Being in time. Some good writing from Tim Kreider. When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head [...]

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How We Lived On It (49) – The First Hippie

May 5, 2012

. “When I was young, I dreamed of a boy searching for God. Now I am old, and I dream of God searching for a boy.” The focus of yesterday’s Jazz Is, the vocal standard “Nature Boy,” was written by eden ahbez. This is not like saying written by Johnny Mercer or  Jimmy Van Heusen. ahbez [...]

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Jazz Is: 38 – “Nature Boy”

May 4, 2012

. For a marvelous contrast, sample both of the versions below of eden ahbez‘s famous jazz ballad, “Nature Boy.” The first is a classic, serenely tasteful rendition by Nat King Cole, who first performed and recorded the song. The second, longer performance is the stunningly inventive rendition arranged by Ross Burford and Connaitre Miller for Howard University’s Jazz [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXXIV) – Time Is the Fire

April 28, 2012

. There are few poems that move me as much.  In its avid desire to reclaim from the fire all of particularity, “the smallest color of the smallest day,” it simply burns. Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ Calmly we walk through this April’s day, Metropolitan poetry here and there, In the [...]

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Language Is So Unstable, You Don’t Even Know What I’m Talking About (Do You)

April 27, 2012

. Hyperbole is a commonly used word that is actually a classical rhetorical device. We recognize it is as exaggeration for effect, which is distinct from by temperament, which no doubt leads to the tall tale, then the outright lie, then corruptions of the spirit, the flesh, and  the soul, and finally the fall of [...]

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Jazz Is: 37 – Nina Simone, “Love Me or Leave Me”

April 26, 2012

. Just take this as an add shot to your morning espresso. Related articles Here, There & Everywhere: Jazz at the Federal opens (irom.wordpress.com) Jazz For Young People: What Is New Orleans Jazz? At Jazz At Lincoln Center (bxcheapskate.com) New Orleans Jazz Sensation’s New Album Highlights a Montage of Music Culture (pr.com) Share Tweet Subscribe [...]

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We’re Waiting for Godot

April 25, 2012

. ESTRAGON:(having tried in vain to work it out). I’m tired! (Pause.) Let’s go. VLADIMIR:We can’t. ESTRAGON:Why not? VLADIMIR:We’re waiting for Godot. We caught the penultimate performance on Sunday of the Michael Arabian directed Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum. It was a truly superb production of which the Los Angeles Times’s Charles McNulty [...]

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“The Don Draper of Existentialism”

April 24, 2012

. Albert Camus is having a moment. He should have more of them and always. To be French, though, in these United States, since Lafayette, has always meant to be as recherche as the word; to be an existentialist, for a long time now, so passe (and so freaking French); and to be left, in [...]

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Jazz Is: 36 – White Tie & Reefer

April 18, 2012

. Cab Calloway and “Reefer Man.” My favorite part is watching his hair fly. And here’s a little background on the Cab: Prince before Prince. Related articles Cab Calloway Sings “Minnie The Moocher” (treeofmamre.wordpress.com) Video Proves The Power Of Music: Dementia Patient Loves His Cab Calloway (towleroad.com) Cab Calloway Song On iPod Awakens Senior In [...]

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How We Lived On It (48) – Ave Maria

April 14, 2012

. Write text here… Related articles How We Lived On It (47) – Two Ways of the World (sadredearth.com) How We Lived On It (46) – “The Caging Of America” (sadredearth.com) Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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A Günter Grass Manifesto

April 9, 2012

. Ezra Pound is noted, finally, for living the last decade of his life – after his indictment for treasonous, antisemitic broadcasts in support of Mussolini, and his confinement to the asylum of St. Elizabeth’s – in near silence. “I know nothing at all…. I have even forgotten the name of that Greek philosopher who [...]

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How We Lived On It (47) – Two Ways of the World

April 8, 2012

. The exquisite ”If,” by Michael Nyman, from the 1995 Japanese anime film of The Diary of Anne Frank, is here performed in recital by the Michael Nyman Band and Welsh contralto Hilary Summers. The music’s poignant  beauty gains measure in the sublimity of the recital setting: the human aspiration to transcendent height and aesthetic refinement joined in [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXXIII) – Left Behind

April 1, 2012

. An Elegy: December, 1970 Edgar Bowers Almost four years, and, though I merely guess What happened, I can feel the minutes’ rush Settle like snow upon the breathless bed— And we who loved you, elsewhere, ignorant. From my deck, in the sun, I watch boys ride Complexities of wind and wet and wave: Pale [...]

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Zou Bisou Bisou

March 26, 2012

. My God, how soft they are! But tell me, do you know What that means, between us, What does “zou bisou” mean? It means, I confess to you, But yes, I love only you! Kiss kiss kiss etc. My God, how soft it is! But no need for bushes in the month of August [...]

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Jazz Is: 35 – Take Five Walla

March 24, 2012

Recorded at Sachal Studios, Lahore, Pakistan – the premiere of Take Five’s Official Video. www.sachal-music.com (Hat tip: friend Janet) Related articles CineFile – The City (sadredearth.com) Eating Poetry (XXX) – “Every telling has a tailing” (sadredearth.com) Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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“The One”

March 21, 2012

. Before there was The Moonwalk, there was “The One,” James Brown, subject of a new biography by that name by RJ Smith. Writes Janet Maslin in her New York Times book review, So the reader who knows little of Mr. Brown’s story may not instantly grasp why that story is so mesmerizing. For that [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXXII) – The Ecstasy of Unreasoning Happiness

March 11, 2012

. Patricia Hampl’s fine essay in the spring The American Scholar,  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge, surveys the background to Fitzgerald‘s “The Crack Up” essays, published  in Esquire in 1936. She finds in the controversial product of Fitzgerald’s attempt to write himself back from personal and authorial oblivion a meeting point in consciousness between poetry and [...]

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The Higgs-Boson Particle: That Which We Call a Rose

March 8, 2012

. So physicists it seems, both at Tevatron and CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider, may be closing in on the Higgs-Boson, or “God,” particle. Except, it seems, that many scientists are unhappy about that nickname. “I hate that “God particle’ term,” one member of the CERN team in Europe said last December. “The Higgs is not [...]

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