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HEAVEN'S GATE
Michael Cimino
USA, 1980
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
CHRISTIAN WIMAN
"All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
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All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being …
All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
my beautiful, credible friends.
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Tuesday, May 30, 2023
ESSEX HEMPHILL
"Black Beans"
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Times are lean,
Pretty Baby,
the beans are burnt
to the bottom
of the battered pot.
Let’s make fierce love
on the over-stuffed,
hand-me-down sofa.
We can burn it up, too.
Our hungers
will evaporate like-money.
I smell your lust,
not the pot burnt black
with tonight’s meager meal.
So we can’t buy flowers
for our table
Our kisses are petals,
our tongues caress the bloom.
Who dares to tell us
we are poor and powerless?
We keep treasure
any king would count as dear.
Come on, Pretty Baby.
Our souls can’t be crushed
like cats crossing streets too soon.
Let the beans burn all night long.
Our chipped water glasses are filled
with wine from our loving.
And the burnt black beans-
caviar
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Monday, May 29, 2023
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ARIEL YELEN
"Vibrating Rows of People"
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This small effort
Because this little singing
This little sound
Small song
This fathomless effort
This voice which comes from the gut
This soft effort at making song
This effort at song
This effort to make song which birds do effortlessly
What birds do effortlessly
This tiny bird
This tender worthy effort
And sometimes it is no effort
No effort to sing
Sometimes I’ve had a drink or two
Sometimes it’s effortless to make song
If enough people sing in a group
If I’m part of that group, I cry
I am holding a thing that breathes and makes sound
Where song comes from and goes to ookie
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Sunday, May 28, 2023
FRANK O'HARA
"Music"
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If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.
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Saturday, May 27, 2023
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G. K. CHESTERTON
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Can you not see that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
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Friday, May 26, 2023
MELVIN DIXON
"One By One"
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They won’t go when I go. (Stevie Wonder)
Live bravely in the hurt of light. (C.H.R.)
The children in the life:
Another telephone call. Another man gone.
How many pages are left in my diary?
Do I have enough pencils? Enough ink?
I count on my fingers and toes the past kisses,
the incubating years, the months ahead.
Thousands. Many thousands.
Many thousands gone.
I have no use for numbers beyond this one,
one man, one face, one torso
curled into mine for the ease of sleep.
We love without mercy,
We live bravely in the light.
Thousands. Many thousands.
Chile, I knew he was funny, one of the children,
a member of the church, a friend of Dorothy’s.
He knew the Websters pretty well, too.
Girlfriend, he was real.
Remember we used to sit up in my house
pouring tea, dropping beads,
dishing this one and that one?
You got any T-cells left?
The singularity of death. The mourning thousands.
It begins with one and grows by one
and one and one and one
until there’s no one left to count.
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Kara Walker
THE WELCOMING COMMITTEE (2018)
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"There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists."
Thursday, May 25, 2023
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CARRIE FISHER
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I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience, and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture.
I don’t hate hardly ever, and when I love, I love for miles and miles. A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should have a capital and its own currency.
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CARRIE FISHER
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You know what's funny about death? I mean other than absolutely nothing at all? You'd think we could remember finding out we weren't immortal. Sometimes I see children sobbing at airports and I think, 'Aww. They've just been told.'
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CARRIE FISHER
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As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people don't.
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Wednesday, May 24, 2023
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Red Angel" from Tremendous Trifles, 1909
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I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad for children, that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if they are true because it frightens them. If you kept bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul.
The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. The point of the story and the point of the reader's feelings is not that these things were frightening, but the far more striking fact that the hero was not frightened at them. The most fearful of all these fearful wonders was his own absence of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and asked the devils to drink wine with him.
At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.
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Tuesday, May 23, 2023
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WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
"Possibilities"
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I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.
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Monday, May 22, 2023
DENIS O'HARE
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I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That's more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think always have more than simply the fright aspect.
When you think of Grimm's fairy tales, they are deeply, deeply psychological. They're so powerful, so bloody, and really, really disturbing. Think about five-year-olds reading that stuff. Even 'Little Red Riding Hood' is a really freaky story. Grandma is gobbled up by a wolf, and the wolf is going to eat the girl. That's scary stuff.
I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde's - 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' 'The Selfish Giant.' The latter is probably my all-time favorite.
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Sunday, May 21, 2023
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Palladian Ensemble
TRIOS FOR 4
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Handel - Trio Sonata in F Major, HWV 389
Telemann - Trio Sonata in G minor, TWV42:g9
Leclair - Ouvertura In G Major, Op. 13 No. 1
Handel - Trio Sonata in B minor, HWV 386b
Quantz - Trio Sonata in C Major, QV 2:Anh. 1
Telemann - Trio Sonata No. 5 in A minor, TWV 42:a4
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Saturday, May 20, 2023
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RICHARD HOVEY
"Verlaine"
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AVID of life and love, insatiate vagabond,
With quest too furious for the graal he would have won,
He flung himself at the eternal sky, as one
Wrenching his chains but impotent to burst the bond.
Yet under the revolt, the revel, the despond,
What pools of innocence, what crystal benison!
As through a riven mist that glowers in the sun,
A stretch of God’s blue calm glassed in a virgin pond.
Prowler of obscene streets that riot reels along,
And aisles with incense numb and gardens mad with rose,
Monastic cells and dreams of dim brocaded lawns,
Death, which has set the calm of Time upon his song,
Surely upon his soul has kissed the same repose
In some fair heaven the Christ has set apart for
Fauns.
Friday, May 19, 2023
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Thursday, May 18, 2023
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