29 November 2011

In Wild Strawberries the dreams are a ripoff of Maya Deren's - a Piri' Miri Muli' exclusive I think - and this conclusion to the evening nap was a ripoff of that. I was to receive an award and was fitted in a cross between a hussar's uniform and a toucan - which I was convinced was a dig at me except as I walked around the apartment complex I saw others with the same outfit. I had a hooded sweatshirt that was hanging out of the uniform but couldn't find my apartment to take it off and leave it there. I started to walk around and then got very lost, to the point where I would need to take a bus back, I was soon in a country town, and there was a garden on a hill with steps with labels but they were for the plants, above the garden was signs and banners for the post office, school, and hospital, and I saw that there was one for the mausoleum which was perfect because I could navigate by mausoleums, except here the mausoleum wasn't for anyone in particular it was just a mausoleum which makes my mausoleum navigation system inoperable. So someone who was with me suggested hiring a bicycle excursion to Vermont and back, since when it returned we would get directions back to the award ceremony, no impulse to ask any directions outside profit motive, and in the carpeted new unfurnished office of the tour guide we were given corn chips but this large growling dog parked underneath us and wanted all the corn chips, was given a lesser corn chip but wanted ours, this dog was I suspect the anthropomorphic incarnation of my concerns from earlier in the afternoon.

17 November 2011













When Kant heard the news of revolution, he interrupted his walk. Goethe continued his. How pretentious of them both!

-Aragon, Treatise

15 November 2011

such a
i
r as arms-

wind re
ading me
th-moon
light

09 November 2011

Videos from Saura's Fados are starting to pop up, like this which starts with Grândola until Chico Buarque's head pops up and sings the Brazil-themed "Fado Tropical": "this land will fulfill its ideal/ and still recall an immense Portugal," interspersing both songs with footage from Portugal's Carnation Revolution.



Grândola, which signaled the start of the Carnation protests when played on the radio after midnight, is here matched with pictures from the Arab Spring:



Caetano Veloso, who once told a stadium that mass aversion to experimental literature was "a sphinx," here sings the Amália Rodrigues classic "Estranha Forma de Vida" ("strange life form/ my heart..") with Amália's eye pictured on the back wall. Rodrigues, who adapted lyrics from poets like Pedro Homem de Mello and David Mourão-Ferreira to music, wrote "Estranha Forma de Vida" originally as a poem:



Amália's version from 1961:



I have been gradually posting the Saura-Vittorio Storaro videos from a while back that I watch repeatedly and was watching this one today. Alosno (Huelva province, Spain) is 248 miles from Cadiz, closer to the Portuguese border than Seville, 381 miles from Lisbon, really in the middle of nowhere but close enough to Portugal to be influenced by fado in subject matter and song structure while the melody and percussion are firmly flamenco. Storaro switches from low key lighting to high contrast for "and the break of day" as Nietzsche didn't say in Daybreak: She filled my glass while she spoke of three winters ago and for five nights and days.

03 November 2011

Wednesday night when the texts want
a function they grab one we stopped
where Neither Fashion Nor Denial on
her grave was mourned from a chariot
above the ghosts of the loggers still
sawing away the antlers on the empty
picture frames eating soup marked
for export I asked him to paint the bus
orange and now it's an orange the
cadets moved the mountain I think
of Dean Moriarty but speak of the
function again where the mountain
had been in the shade marked below

its function like the floating pages
disguised as leaves am to cover
the footprints those i don't know

or they were racing on tv sets
when the children were counting logs
west to east and back again water
is branded like tear drops on the backs

glass that isn't there seen through
the mountain down by by way it