Tuesday, April 30, 2019






THOMAS BERNHARD from The Loser

In theory we understand people, but in practice we can’t put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn’t possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.

Monday, April 29, 2019

DENISE LEVERTOV - "Aware"

When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.

Sunday, April 28, 2019

GEORGE ORWELL from 1984

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

Saturday, April 27, 2019

MARK DOTY from Dog Years

When we talk about this unconditional acceptance, we are really describing a fixity of devotion, a deep reliability. The source of this is, in part, the dog’s lack of agency; they really cannot do otherwise than to love us, can they? The contract that we enter into is one that dogs take with ultimate seriousness.

People may choose - often, sadly, do - to abandon them, to relinquish our side of the bargain, but dogs do not regard this as a choice; they intend, one might say, to honor this pact with all their hearts, or perhaps the less anthrocentric way to phrase that would be to say that in part a dog simply is an intention to be with you, to be conjoined.

Thus they are the pattern of fidelity - Fido! - the very template of enduring loyalty, of love without any prospect of abandonment.

Friday, April 26, 2019


YATAO
"Walk of the Turtle"

-----






WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS from A Report From The Bunker

Nobody’s busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don’t worry about what they’re doing in South Korea and places like that.

It’s like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who’ve got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes.

Now we must ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.

Thursday, April 25, 2019


Nina Simone and Redd Foxx in 1959 by G. Marshall Wilson
RYŌKAN

Slopes
of Mount Kugami –
in the mountain’s shade
a hut beneath the trees –
how many years
it’s been my home?
The time comes
to take leave of it –
my thoughts wilt
like summer grasses,
I wander back and forth
like the evening star –
till that hut of mine
is hidden from sight,
till that grove of trees
can no longer be seen,
at each bend
of the long road,
at every turning,
I turn to look back
in the direction of that mountain

Wednesday, April 24, 2019



OSCAR WILDE

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019


LOS PARECIDOS
(English: THE SIMILARS)

Isaac Ezban
Mexico, 2015
NOTORIOUS
____________________

Alfred Hitchcock
USA, 1948
WANG WEI - “Temple Tree Path”

This narrow path beneath the great trees
is edged darkly with thick greening moss.

We keep it swept clean before the gate, in
expectation of wandering mountain monks.

ART OF THE JAPANESE BAMBOO FLUTE
Hideo Osaka



AT LAST
Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Last Call Records, 1998

Monday, April 22, 2019

SAMUEL BECKETT from The Unnamable

Decidedly this eye is hard of hearing. Noises travel, traverse walls, but may the same be said of appearances?

Sunday, April 21, 2019





DOROTHY PARKER

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.
Can move mountains, raise the dead, and speak the universe into existence with a single word.

Needs your money.
For God so loved the world ...

Saturday, April 20, 2019

WILLIAM STAFFORD - "Listening"

My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.

Friday, April 19, 2019

LI BAI - “Cold Clear Spring at Nanyang”

A pity it is evening, yet
I do love the water of this spring
seeing how clear it is, how clean;
rays of sunset gleam on it,
lighting up its ripples, making it
one with those who travel
the roads; I turn and face
the moon; sing it a song, then
listen to the sound of the wind
amongst the pines.

Thursday, April 18, 2019

GWENDOLYN BROOKS - "A Sunset of the City"

     Kathleen Eileen

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite 
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer 
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone. 
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes. 
I am aware there is winter to heed. 
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs. 
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my 
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief, 
And small communion with the master shore. 
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin, 
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry 
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

ERICH FROMM

Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

SAMUEL R. DELANY

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

Monday, April 15, 2019


DOUBLE CONCERTO IN A MINOR FOR VIOLIN AND CELLO, OP. 102 (1887)
CLARINET QUINTET IN B MINOR, OP. 115 (1891)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Renaud Capuçon, Gautier Capuçon
Capuçon Quartet, Paul Meyer
Myung-Whun Chung, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester

Virgin, 2007



Henryk Tomaszewski - 1964 - Polish poster for Urok Szatana (La Beaute du Diable)

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
“The Blue House”

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create…draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.




Sunday, April 14, 2019


LA BEAUTÉ DU DIABLE
(English: THE BEAUTY OF THE DEVIL)
René Clair
France, 1950


URSULA K. LE GUIN from Always Coming Home

There’s no right answer to the wrong question.

Now what do we do?

Saturday, April 13, 2019



BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY
Bryan Singer
UK, 2018


MICHAEL LONGLEY - “Swans Mating”

Even now I wish that you had been there
Sitting beside me on the riverbank:
The cob and his pen sailing in rhythm
Until their small heads met and the final
Heraldic moment dissolved in ripples.

This was a marriage and a baptism,
A holding of breath, nearly a drowning,
Wings spread wide for balance where he trod,
Her feathers full of water and her neck
Under the water like a bar of light.

Friday, April 12, 2019

Thursday, April 11, 2019

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
____________________

Federico Fellini
Louis Malle
Roger Vadim
France/Italy, 1968
W. S. MERWYN - “The Silence of the Mine Canaries”

The bats have not flowered
for years now in the crevice
of the tower wall when the long twilight
of spring has seeped across it
as the west light brought back
the colors of parting
the furred buds have not hung there
waking among their dark petals
before sailing out blind along their own echoes
whose high infallible cadenzas only
they could hear completely and could ride
to take over at that hour
from the swallows gliding
ever since daybreak over the garden
from their nests under the eaves
skimming above the house and the hillside pastures
their voices glittering in their exalted tongue
who knows how long now since they have been seen
and the robins have gone from the barn
where the cows spent the summer days
though they stayed long after the cows were gone
the flocks of five kinds of tits have not come again
the blue tits that nested each year
in the wall where their young
could be heard deep in the stones by the window
calling Here Here have not returned
the marks of their feet are still there on the stone
of their doorsill that does not know
what it is missing
the cuckoo has not been heard
again this May
nor for many a year the nightjar
nor the mistle thrush song thrush whitethroat
the blackcap that instructed Mendelssohn
I have seen them
I have stood and listened
I was young
they were singing of youth
not knowing that they were singing for us

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

IKKYU SOJUN

After ten years in the red light district
How solitary a spell in the woods
I can see clouds a thousand miles away
Hear ancient music in the pines

Tuesday, April 9, 2019



SAMUEL BECKETT from Molloy

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

Monday, April 8, 2019

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
____________________

I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hate in the world is religion and organized religion. Absolutely convinced of that. And I think it should be - religion - treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.

So when I say that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity.

It says we can’t be moral without “Big Brother,” without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. It means we must be afraid.

We must also be forced to love someone whom we fear - the essence of sado-masochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the Master/Slave relationship. And that it knows death is coming, and can’t wait to bring it on.

I say that is Evil.

And though I do, some nights, stay home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and this ultimate stupidity.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

PANIQUE
____________________

Julien Duvuvier
France, 1946

HALLOWEEN
David Gordon Green
USA, 2018



SELF-PORTRAIT

Saul Steinberg
HAROLD PINTER from The Caretaker

Listen. I’ve lived all my life in the air, boy. You don’t have to tell me about air. What I’m saying is, there’s too much air coming in that window when I’m asleep.

Saturday, April 6, 2019


BILLY JACK
Tom Laughlin (as TC Frank)
USA, 1971
KO UN - “New Year’s Full Moon”

Bitter cold day, the new year’s first full moon,
a special day.
One housewife, busy from early morning,
knowing that beggars will be coming by,
puts out a pot of five-grain rice in anticipation
on the stone mortar
that stands beside her brush-wood gate,
with a single side-dish of plantain-shoots.
Soon, an ancient beggar comes breezing up,
makes ready to spin a yarn but finally
just pockets the rice and goes on his way.
If only we had 360 more days like today in a year!
His bag is soon bulging.
As he is leaving the village, his turn made,
he runs into another beggar:
glad encounter!
You’ve no call to go there, I’ve done em all!
Let’s us celebrate a Fool Moon too!
Snapping dried twigs, they make a fire
to thaw themselves by, then
producing hunks of rice from this house and that,
the two beggars set to,
choking, laughing with mouths full.
Soon bands of magpies hear the news
and flock flapping around.

Friday, April 5, 2019



ORNAMENT OF ABHIDHARMA: 
A COMMENTARY ON VASUBANDHU'S ABHIDHARMAKOSA 
Chim Jampaiyang
Translated from the Tibetan by Ian James Coghlan

Wisdom Publications, 2019
Library of Tibetan Classics Vol. 23



CONCERT PIECE FOR 4 HORNS AND ORCHESTRA, OP. 86
Robert Schumann (1849)

John Elliot Gardiner
Roger Montgomery, Gavin Edwards, Susan Dent, Robert Maskell,
Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique


BORN LOSERS
Tom Laughlin (as T.C. Frank)
USA, 1967





ERICH FROMM

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

Thursday, April 4, 2019


SYMPHONY NO. 1 IN C MINOR
Anton Bruckner, 1866
-
Eugen Jochum
Dresden State Orchestra
Deutsche Grammophon, 1966





STOREY'S GUIDE TO RAISING DAIRY GOATS, 4TH ED.
Jerry Belanger and Sara Thomson Bredesen



AQUAMAN
James Wan
USA, 2018




THOMAS MERTON from Disputed Questions

But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things a he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence.

Wednesday, April 3, 2019



FORTY GUNS
Samuel Fuller
USA, 1957

A. A. MILNE

I used to believe in forever, but forever’s too good to be true.

Tuesday, April 2, 2019


DakhaBrakha from Free Ukraine
Live in the KEXP Studio - Seattle, WA - April 23, 2017
  • Vesna
  • Carpathian Rap
  • Monakh
  • Baby

NINA GARENETSKA
Vokals, cello, bass drum

MARKO HALANEVYCH
Vokals, darbuka, tabla, didjeridoo, accordion, trombone

IRYNA KOVALENKO
Vokals, djembe, bass drums, accordion, percussion, bugay, zgaleyka, piano

OLENA TSYBULSKA
Vokals, bass drums, percussion, garmoshka

Host: Darek Mazzone

Concert "Hop Project" live in Ivano-Frankivsk Philharmonic on November 12, 2012

DakhaBrakha (UA)
Nina GARENETSKA - vocals, cello, bass drum
Iryna KOVALENKO - vocals, jambe, percussion, bass drum, strings, bagpipes, flute, bull, accordion
Olena TSYBULSKA - vocals, percussion, bass drum, accordion
Marko GALANEVICH - vocals, darbuka, tabla, didgeridoo, trombone, accordion

PortMone (BE)
Oleksiy VIANCHUK - bass guitar
Serhiy KRAVCHENKO - percussion, drama machine
Oleksiy VORSOBA - accordion

DenFilm Media Studio
Denis OVCHAR - cameras, installation

-----

Концерт "Хмелева Project" наживо в Івано-Франківській філармонії  12.11.2012

ДахаБраха (UA)
Ніна ГАРЕНЕЦЬКА - вокал, віолончель, басовий барабан
Ірина КОВАЛЕНКО - вокал, джамбе, перкусія, басовий барабан, жалійка, волинка, флейта, бугай, акордеон
Олена ЦИБУЛЬСЬКА - вокал, перкусія, басовий барабан, гармошка
Марко ГАЛАНЕВИЧ - вокал, дарбука, табла, діджеріду, тромбон, акордеон

PortMone (BE)
Олексій ВЯНЧУК - бас-гітара
Сергій КРАВЧЕНКО - перкусія, драм-машина
Олексій ВОРСОБА - акордеон

DenFilm media-studio
Денис ОВЧАР - камери, монтаж


 


ZBIGNIEW HERBERT - “Dream Language”

when I sleep
like everyone
before dawn rises
I wind the clock

I sink on a white
ship
waves wash me
from the white ship
I look for keys
I kill a dragon
which laughs
I light a lamp
but above all
I chatter

I suspect that
we all dream in images
but I spin
all these crazy yarns
as if sleeping
in a mound
of narrative

but that is what
dream language
should be like
a fine language
with a long arm
airy
it flouts grammar
phonetic principles
a language of mockery
a language I don’t know

when I sleep
in the cat’s place
the bronze body
is pierced by a shudder
we moan like a melody

when I sleep
in the cat’s place
sometimes my body
is pierced by a shudder
a melody like a moan
audible to the ear

at such times
dream language
closes itself off
independent
of weariness

pure
a language of sweet dread

Monday, April 1, 2019