Barbara Nicolosi’s Mary Mother of Christ has all its pieces in place, including Texas pastor Joel Osteen as Executive Producer.
Archives for May 2012
Justice Clarence Thomas at Gerasene 12?
May 21, 2012 by at 7:26 am
A Precautionary Tale
May 19, 2012 by at 2:28 pm
When I finally come down out of the mountains
I am holding hard to an empty whisky tumbler;
A frozen sprain in its side looks like vague lightning
Trapped in a glacier since the days of Genesis.
“You been up there too long,” one of my old neighbors says
As he meets me on the outskirts of town. He’s pulling
A wagon. “All your kin and blood is plumb dead, sonny.”
He says as we walked home. My house is bigger now.
“Your daddy and your ma got tired of waiting for you,”
My neighbor explains. “They had some more kids
After you cleared out that day you had your revelation.”
I thank him before he goes and close the door, walk
Through the cavernous halls of my childhood house,
And after confessing to the wallpaper about time
And the confounding of memories I find the back door.
Out in the yard, the wind blew on for so long
The trees are growing sideways. The dandelions
Must have sensed the futility that ransomed the spring
Because they all strike fey and tragic gestures,
Beseeching the crab grass to commit to a life of poverty.
As I look down at the dusty old whisky tumbler,
The sprain leaps through it and starts growing up
The bloodline on my palm. Before long, it settles
Down the middle of my wrist like it’s fixing for a fight.
There is no whisky in the house this day, and ghosts
Once swept its floors with the wind. Like a precursor,
A train in the next county is coming hard and fast.
Its whistle always sang the strangled anger of the Lord.
The house begins to rattle, and that’s when I notice:
“Yes, Lord, the ghosts are gone alright,” I pray.
The crucifix that hangs on the wall is made of rawhide;
It’s been there since the day my daddy smiled.
“But,” I continue, “at least they were kind enough
To dust my grandma’s teacups before they left.”
From the YouTube Music Video Archives: Lieben, Hassen, from Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss
May 19, 2012 by at 1:21 pm
“I love Richard Strauss. Rosenkavalier and Arabella most of all. Not Wagner. When I was at school in New York, my uncle took me to see Tristan, with Flagstadt. I was bored. But I’ll never forget Lotte Lehmen in the Marshallin. She was making her farewell to singing and to the stage, just as the Marshallin to loving, youth and Octavian. It was incredibly moving—I’ll never forget it … I always dreamt of being a tenor, a Helden-tenor you know, with my voice making the ceiling shake …” Conversations with Walker Percy, p. 247.
Strauss is perhaps most famous for such groundbreaking works as Salome and Elektra—ginormous, dissonant masterpieces that can be fairly tough going for the uninitiated. Beautiful, yes, but terrifying in a Greek Tragedy sort of way. Or even biblical.
But he also composed some amazing lyrical pieces. There’s aria by the Italian tenor in Der Rosenkavalier, and one of my favorites is the Harlequin’s aria from Ariadne.
As Mr Sunyata says in the comments, “In this far too short aria, this man captures perfectly the bizarre combination of satire AND serious music that (I believe) R. Strauss was seeking in this wonderful, wacky opera.” Too wacky to relate all the details of the plot, but a good subtitle is “The Consolations of Opera”.
So, not a Helden-tenor here, but a baritone, and a fine one at that.
Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen,
alle Lust und alle Qual,
alles kann ein Herz ertragen
einmal um das andere Mal.
Aber weder Lust noch Schmerzen,
abgestorben auch der Pein,
das ist tödlich deinem Herzen,
und so darfst du mir nicht sein !
Mußt dich aus dem Dunkel heben,
wär’ es auch um neue Qual,
leben mußt du, liebes Leben,
leben noch dies eine Mal!
Loving, hating, hoping, doubting,
all of joy and all of pain,
all these things a heart can bear,
over and over again.
but numbness to joy and sorrow,
pain deadened or hidden away,
these are fatal to the heart,
and I shall not have you that way!
From the darkness you shall rise,
even if to endure more pain,
but you must live your dear life,
Once again, live this time!
Gee-tar.
May 19, 2012 by at 7:55 am
My dear friend William Wilson, guitarist extraordinaire, has gone and plumb lost his mind, and is now posting tracks online for free. You, the listener, are the winner in this situation. But because the man has a wife and children, I will note that he also has items for sale. Tango for One is my favorite.
Divorce Seems to Be Treating Katy Perry Well
May 18, 2012 by at 7:53 am
Ah, yes. Marilyn Manson by way of Fairuza Balk in The Craft, with a dye job from the Holly Hobby Do-It-Yourself Candyland Collection. (Good to see she’s getting back to her roots. Whoop!) But on the plus side, she’s still staying close to her beads.
elsewhere
May 18, 2012 by at 7:39 am
oh, man. look, it’s full of dirty talk, but if you’ve been following the fifty shades of grey phenomenon, you really should listen to the reading gilbert gottfried gives it. but yeah, lots of dirty talk.
You Mean Like This?
May 17, 2012 by at 8:58 am
Oh, good grief, JOB. Why didn’t you tell me about this?*
*Meaning: how the hell am I just now listening to that CD you gave me?
Ars longa, caenum facile: Part II
May 16, 2012 by at 8:15 am
The frisson between porn and lit continues…
On the face of it, this case pivots on a trivial legal distinction – to wit: “that simply viewing child porn on the Internet is not enough to prove its procurement or possession.”
But it has it’s roots in the deeply inhaled myth that pornography is just another art form – and as long as the perveyor is not directly harming another, well, we all know art has no affect on it’s audience, right?
Sed contra est, what one bloke from Rockford, Ill. has to say about it all:
Libertarians put the case directly. We should enjoy the freedom to read or watch anything we like so long as no one has been demonstrably harmed. So, if a father of two little girls becomes aware that his next-door neighbor is addicted to virtual pornography depicting the rape, torture, and murder of little girls, it is none of his business. If people feed their imagination on images of sexual violence – as, by the way, so many sex offenders predictably do – this has absolutely no bearing on what kind of people they are or on the crimes they might some day be willing to commit.
What say you all?
Ars longa, caenum facile…
May 15, 2012 by at 1:09 pm
RIP Mike McGrady – aka one-part Penelope Ashe.
“It came after a night of reading ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ ” he later told Newsweek, “which I couldn’t put down because I was asleep.”
JOB
Picture Story
May 15, 2012 by at 8:03 am
It turns out there are five kinds of rum and over seven ounces of booze in a Zombie.
But at least it’s tasty!
Stormy weather ahead…
And the hilarious part is that I wound up with a Zombie because I asked for “whatever drink comes in the Easter Island head cup,” but the bartender followed my pointing finger instead of my voice and told me I would be getting a Zombie, when what I should have been getting was a Mai Tai. Naturally, I rectified the situation, because Easter Island.
Of course, by that point, I had exceeded my tolerance for tropical drinks to the point where I had to order a whiskey cocktail just to put my humors in order. However, it was thought that photography would be unkind.
Duck’s Dead
May 14, 2012 by at 10:22 am
First, there was Levon Helm
And now, another reason bluesmen around the globe ought to be singing, well, the blues…
Travis Naught, Pinsky, Frost, and “The Poet’s Next of Kin in College”
May 12, 2012 by at 2:13 pm
Travis Naught with his game face on.
Poetry is a young thing, as we all know. Most of the poets have struck their notes between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. That is just the time when you are in college and graduate school. It is in those ten years that you will strike your note or never. And it is very like athletic prowess in that respect. They are very close together…. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both.
[Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, Library of America, p. 771.]
So what does this have to do with Travis Naught? Well, consider the fact that Travis pursued grad studies in Sports Psychology and that he worked with the Eastern Washington University basketball program for ten years before he set that aside to pursue poetry more or less full time. Consider further that Travis is limited by Spinal Muscular Atrophy to a body that will never in this life be able to throw a ball or swing a bat — and Frost’s analogy takes on an even greater significance and poignancy.
Here’s a poem from Travis’s extraordinary book, The Virgin Journals which you all should buy a copy of if you haven’t yet. The poem is called “Lack of Physicality” and I think you’ll see how it ties into what Pinsky said about what Frost said and what I just said about Travis:
Lack of Physicality
It does not matter
That my body of work
Is less physical than yours
Because the number of words
Counted on my page
Are counted likeYour number of barbell curls
Each clever rhyme
Adds up like an assist
Bodies collide in a screen
At the top of the key
Rolling down the lane
A give and go style dimeAiming to win with each shot
Poised for action
Just like you
So take a look at my lines
See their double meaning
Forget everything about
What you thought you knew(The Virgin Journals, p. 21)
So listen up people. Forget everything you thought you knew about poetry and check out Travis Naught.
Where I Go on Wednesday Night
May 12, 2012 by at 11:05 am
Mark Anderson is my second cousin and a hardworking Spokane poet guy. (Mark and I are both 23rd great-grandsons of Chaucer, by the way. Someday maybe we’ll collaborate on The Spokane-turbury Tales.) The guy in the wheelchair is Travis Naught, another Spokane poet phenomenon, whose book I blurbed and with whom I did a reading recently. The author of the article is the father of a four-year-old boy who has the hots for my four-year-old daughter. (Keeping my eye on you, son.) “Intentional facial hair” is a fine turn of phrase.
The Boy of Summer
May 10, 2012 by at 3:12 pm
“Time for your aurul scrubbing, Ellen!”
May 10, 2012 by at 12:32 pm
Play this real loud – and with a glass of wine/whisky/gin already in you and another on the way let the sound flood you like sunshine through a large picture window in an Italian villa. If this doesn’t get your head right, nothing will.
p.s. Can you do that in high heels?
Childhood was cool.
May 10, 2012 by at 8:07 am
This is my brother’s Facebook header right now. The Captain America shield in the background is an old trash can lid, lovingly transformed lo these many years ago. With authentic battle damage!
The Girls of Summer (For Webb)