Everyone should own this album, the album of the year: Diagonal.

Interlude #4

I think it was the gold tabby or maybe the lean black cat. Or maybe both, I can't tell. Did you have one or two cats? I cut it with my knife along its side and wrapped it in a towel and hid it underneath the bushes. He just wouldn't die. I kept crying and hoping each spasm would would be the one that would let me sleep. I tried to save his life but couldn't stop cutting. You walked inside our house holding the blue towel. I thought I'd brought it in and washed it. I thought I'd put down the knife.

Interlude #3

Grocery store, half empty, haunted, inching closer to death, smells of rot. Hanging a tuxedo in the employee area for the corpse to have something to dress himself in when metaphors fail. Walking home, chimes ring and the wind picks up and branches beat against windows and passing company becomes craven allies and fair weather friends. Midnight dalliances marking time, three to a bed but one to dance. No one ever comes when they say they will.

Interlude #2

Drawing maps, building a geography. An overpass here, a fast food drive thru menu on the side of the road boarded up and left alone, the restraurant long since faded into shrubbery faded into forest. Hints of music, a measure there and a measure there, decorate the trees like tinsel.

Interlude

Coltrane's Blue Train playing through the speakers. The dishes are being washed, the hum of water threatening to overpower and at the same time intertwine with the music. Lunch cooking on the stove top, another chime in the chord. As always, remembrances lay heavy, tainting and fulfilling, a snare and high hat girding it all. A different geography is formed from these disparate strands.

Romancing The Stone, I guess...

I'm not sure what I want or even what I'm supposed to write here, on days like this. Last year was a video clip of Jawbreaker but this year leaves me wanting. The desire to reflect upon passions spent or passions yet to be spent just doesn't seem to move me. I seem to be in one of those moods.
Let's give Tadeusz Rozewicz, "...a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order" (Czeslaw Milosz), something to say, to plant his mark:

Draft of a Modern Love Poem

And yet white
is best described by gray
bird by stone
sunflowers
in December

love poems of old
were descriptions of the flesh
described this and that
for instance eyelashes

and yet red
should be described
by gray the sun by rain
poppies in November
lips by night

the most tangible
description of bread
is a description of hunger
in it is
the damp porous core
the warm interior
sunflowers at night
the breasts belly thighs of Cybele

a spring-clear
transparent description
of water
is a description of thirst
ashes
desert
it produces a mirage
clouds and trees move into
the mirror

Lack hunger
absence
of flesh
is a description of love
is a mondern love poem


But maybe a poem is not your thing. I mean, really, are we sixteen years old living in the 1920s? I think not! What are mere words when we have songs! Songs! Let's lower the lights, ligt a candle and open a bottle of wine. Look deeply into the eyes of the one you love...



I'm bored. Have a happy valentine's day...

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)

Joe!

Well, well, well. Right now I am actually using this letter as an excuse to procrastinate learning lines, not that I wouldn't write you anyway-it just becomes more sweet when it's used to combat another encroaching evil. I say evil but I really do love the play I am in. It's called Crow and Weasel, and I am a Mountain Lion and a Grizzly Bear & stuff. I am now officially an English Major. I was flipping through a copy of American Poetry Review and I noticed some new stuff by Yehuda- "I am not like a flat, wily spatula"-I thought he was dead; I guess not. I have yet to run out of steam in my Leonard Cohen infatuation. My favorite are his psalms-Book of Mercy. That was all rather desultory. Please forgive. Tell me if you're taking any classes this semester. Or what you're generally up to. I am not going to go on anymore. I will, however, close with a poem I wrote the day before yesterday.

I found this letter in a stack of papers that haven't been looked at, paged through, pored over, studied, reviewed, or tossed aside in over seven years. I didn't even realize I still had this letter, one of two surviving records of the correspondence carried on between a handful of artistes scattered through out our fair country after graduating from high school. Reading it, I remember how taken I had been with the writings of Yehuda Amichai, the first Israeli poet to write in colloquial Hebrew. It's hard to believe we'd write about poets in our letters and then include our most recent attempts to ape our betters with barely literate scribblings of our own. It seems so quaint, so naive. As if anyone outside of university english faculties had any care in the world for poetry anymore.
Anyway, I re-read this letter this afternoon and knew, in the twelve years that had elapsed since the writing of this note, that Yehuda Amichai had to be dead. And dead he was, for eight long years. My hero, my idol, the Thomas Wolfe to my poor, poor Kerouac had been dead for nearly a decade and I never knew. What a poor disciple I make.
So let me set things right on this day, eight years, four months, and four days after his death:

Yehuda Amichai, born in Germany in 1924 but raised for the most part in Palestine, was a soldier who fought in too many wars. He was a poet who loved, too much, his country and his wives. He could not escape or, to an extent accept, the fact that he never faced the pogrom that ravaged through Europe in the 1940s. He was the first poet to write in the newly resurrected Hebrew language and helped pull it kicking and screaming out of dusty tomes and scrolls. He was emotional, but emotional like Sam Spade: always putting up the brave face, the cold front.

National Thoughts

Caught in the homeland-trap of a Chosen People.
A cossack fur hat on your head, you--
Offspring of their pogroms. After those things,
As ever.
For example, your face: slanted eyes
Of sixteen-forty-eight, forty-nine, thine. High
Cheekbones of a Hetman, chief plunderer,
But the mitzvah dance of Hasidim.
Naked on a rock at dusk,
Under the water canopies of Eyn Gedi,
With closed eyes and a body like hair. After
Those things, as ever.

Caught in a homeland-trap:
To talk now in this tired tongue,
Torn out of its sleep in the Bible: blinded,
It totters from mouth to mouth. In a tongue that described
Miracles and God, now to say: automobile, bomb, God.

The square letters wanted to remain
Closed; every letter a locked house,
To remain and to be enclosed in a final D
And sleep in it forever.

(from Poems of Jerusalem)

Diagonal - Diagonal (2009)

Wielding the influence of King Crimson, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, and Harvest Records brand of progressive rock as if it had the same cultural cachet as Gang of Four or Wire, England's Diagonal deliver an album delightfully retro yet still undeniably contemporary. In this time where Post-Punk has been aped to the Nth degree for nigh on 20 years now, it's good to see someone digging out muscular prog and pastoral folk and using it as a weapon to hammer us out of our musical complacency.

A.C. Newman - The Slow Wonder (2004)

"he was tied to the bed with a miracle drug in one hand/in the other was a great lost novel..." - The Miracle Drug

When Mass Romantic, the first album from Canada's New Pornographers, came out it was, like, the summer of 2001 I think. I remember rocking out to it in my living room through the Sony PlayStation and the TV 'cause we didn't have any portable CD players. The doors and windows were open and I was drinking gin and tonics. My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism was still ironic. I was heavily into power pop and anything that had random syllables like "ba," "fa," or "la" for lyrics. It was all the crumbling remnants of the twee period I'd gone through during the last year, year and a half.

Then a couple of planes crashed into The Two Towers, inadvertently causing my house to burn down and, by the time Electric Version, their follow-up album, arrived, so had my need for power pop and The New Pornographers.

Fast-forward a few years and I'm sitting at the poker table chasing a King high flush with one more card still to be dealt. Needless to say I'm on edge with all my money on the line and Jason yelling at me in one ear and Trey in the other. There's some kinda spazzy hardcore playing and I can't fucking think. Then Jeff changes the music. The A.C. Newman solo album that had been out for a year and a half maybe and which I'd heard once, if at all, and wrote off. More of the same. This time it was manna from heaven. I felt relaxed, placed my bet and let the final card come. The Ace. My King high flush became an Ace high. I had the nuts. Bets were made and I took 'em all.

For ten minutes, The Slow Wonder was the greatest album ever made.