Yet Another First Aid Kit

I have to say it: this is some of the best raw talent I've come across in years, which is why I'm posting yet another video by First Aid Kit. They are as good as all, and even better than some, of their musical influences listed on their Myspace page. If there ever was an IT, these girls got it in spades. It be as simple as that. Oh yes.

You Tell Me Everything, Anything True

I hope these two Swedish sisters are still rockin' it in flannel. I love their earnest expression; it only serves to magnify the beauty of their voice and appearance.

Listen to more on myspace: First Aid Kit

The cover the girls are singing is "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" by Fleet Foxes. I'm also a fan of the Fleet Foxes' song "White Winter Hymnal," a video of which is posted below.

Abduct This

A reiteration, a reminder, a position that still holds true.

When I wrote in my earlier post, "I don't give a shit about love", I meant with regards to partnership/relationship and most especially marriage. I don't envision my future in the context of relationship or partnership. I envision creativity, travel, money and time to romp with my kids. I never picture it (my life), at least not since my divorce a couple years ago, including someone else. I admit this will probably change. When it does it will have to be unobtrusive and natural, like the day I develop fish gills and can finally breathe under water [perhaps like a Thunder Queen with an Ocean King]. That's the kind of natural fit required--the difficult to come by but not impossible natural. For now relationship of any sort feels stifling. Like it was a year ago, it's far from my mind and at the bottom of my heap of priorities.

When I entertain the idea of possibly partnering up again, I envision two homes interconnected or close together like Diego and Frida. I'm very needy when it comes to space; I need a large daily dose of time alone and privacy or I get cranky. The opposite is true too, which makes balance in a relationship so fucking difficult. I want you when I want you and I want you to go away when I don't. Yep, and that makes people feel damn good (joking). Timing is everything and hardly ever convenient. These days I horde my time and space and privacy [I still do, and I'm all the happier for it.]. Is this part of the whole midlife crisis, too? If you have the answer, do tell.

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Abduction is the name given to the logic of retro-induction by C.S. Pierce. As noted by Rosalind E. Krauss in her book The Optical Unconcsious:

ABDUCTION
Rule: All the beans from this bag are white.
Result: These beans are white.
...Case: These beans are from this bag.

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Image: "You're Still Not Listening" by Mike Scofield

Text source: Art On Wry blog post "I See An Earthquake in Your Future" published March, 2008.

Where the nose goes, the tongue soon follows...

If you love wine, I recommend following this wonderful blog: Alfonso Cevola's "On The Wine Trail in Italy".

Be sure to scope out all the links! Enjoy!!

Even Now There's a World "Next To Normal"

New York Times - Theater

"Fragmented Psyches, Uncomfortable Emotions: Sing Out!"
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 16, 2009
No show on Broadway right now makes as direct a grab for the heart — or wrings it as thoroughly — as “Next to Normal” does. This brave, breathtaking musical, which opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theater, focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives.

“Next to Normal” does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts. READ FULL REVIEW

Multimedia:
Audio Slide Show (Recommended)
Video/Songs (My pick: "I Am The One")

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Nicholas Hughes - RIP

From Today's New York Times

US
"A New Chapter of Grief in Plath-Hughes Legacy"
By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: April 12, 2009
The news of the suicide of Sylvia Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, has cut through two distant and disconnected worlds in vastly different ways. (Read Full Article)

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Coincidently, I had just been discussing Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes with a friend earlier this week. News of Nicholas's suicide, set against the backdrop of his mother's legacy, stirs up thoughts of Spalding Gray's passage into 'that good night' in 2004. It's not that I think their mothers' suicides brought on or informed their own, at least not directly. But I don't see them as being entirely separate either. The simple fact that each took their life--mother, then son--creates an immediate correspondence: the son's suicide inadvertently reflects his mother's, thereby throwing our gaze back onto the past, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, indirectly, upon the face of the earth, and in so doing allows the solar principle to reveal itself to us once again, anew.

--AM

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"The monster, now in a box, who...'looked me right in the eyes and said, How shall I do it, dear? How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?'..." (Monster In a Box, Spalding Gray)

Anguish of Fate - Pierre Reverdy & the Rise of the Avante-Garde

A brief introduction:

Reverdy became known in literary circles, frequenting the avant-garde group consisting of such wellknown artists and writers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque. With these and other artists, Reverdy helped develop cubism and surrealism. In 1917 he founded the monthly literary review, Nord-Sud, which drew together the first cubists and surrealists. The review featured many innovative authors, including Apollinaire, Jacob, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupault. (Read More)

Suggested Poems:

• Anguish of Fate
• Path
• A Heart Divided

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Source: PoetryFoundation.org
Image: Promotional Still from Robert Florey's 1927 film Love of Zero

The ABC's of DaDa (in 3 Parts)

The Dada movement was a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society. Dada was an international movement, and it is difficult to classify artists as being from any one particular country, as they were constantly moving from one place to another.

Dada thought that reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and irrationality. However, this could also be thought of as the logical side of anarchy and rejection of values and order; it is not irrational to embrace the systematic destruction of values, if one thinks them to be flawed.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art - it was "anti-art". It was anti-art in the sense that Dadaists protested against the contemporary academic and cultured values of art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning - interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. Ironically, Dada became an influential movement in modern art, a commentary on order and the carnage Dadaists believed it wreaked. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy them.

A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. It was a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."

While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.

By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of "Degenerate art" that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

Dada is a named influence and reference of various anti-art and political and cultural movements including the Lettrists and the Situationists.

Part 1

Part 2: "I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.* We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry." (Read/See More)

Part 3: "I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without importance." (Read/See More)

Robert Sward - The Kite

THE KITE

I still heard Auntie Blue
After she did not want to come down
Again: she was skypaper, way up
Too high to pull down. The wind
Liked her a lot and she was lots of noise
And sky on the end of the string:
And the string jumped hard all of a sudden,
And the sky never even breathed,
But was like it always was, slow and close
Far-away blue, like poor dead Uncle Blue.

Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time. I was afraid to pull it
Down. Auntie Blue was in the sky,
Just like God. It was not my birthday
Anymore: and everybody knew, and dug
A hole, and put a stone on it
Next to Uncle Blue's stone and he died
Before I was even born; and it was too bad
It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.

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Letter – April 4, 2009

Funny that I cannot recall how I stumbled upon that web page [where I first read "The Kite"]. What I remember is being so enthralled that I immediately emailed the link to another poet-friend of mine recommending that he read your work. He, too, discovered what I had, and we spent a portion of a lengthy afternoon conversation discussing the potency of these lines:

Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time.

Especially when framed against the last:

It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.

Your poems, in my view, seem to naturally prevail in that fundamental movement Jean-Michel Maulpois ascribed so eloquently in Modern French Literature to "Grand Vent," a poem by Jacques Dupin; i.e., "To move painfully towards the highest which is also the emptiest, to direct oneself towards the scarce, the rare, nay, the unbreathable. The purpose is to climb towards an air burrow or a kind of open sky deposit where the inside of man himself up there, very high, becomes a landscape where the obscure and the secret unfold in light."

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Bibliographic Sources & Useful Links:

"The Kite", Robert Sward copyright (c) 2003, "Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems," Coffee House Press, second printing.

"Collected Poems, 1957-2004," Black Moss Press.

Learn More:
RobertSward.com
The Red Room – Robert Sward
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Confluent Tragedy

I can't help but wonder if one fueled the other. Perhaps there's no connection at all except that both center around institutions and events involving immigrants & immigration.

1) Immigrant detainee dies, and a life Is buried, too: NYT (Article from today's paper)

New York, April 03: The hand-scrawled letter from a New Jersey jail was urgent. An immigration detainee had died that day, Sept. 9, 2005, a fellow inmate wrote in broken English, describing chest pains and pleas for medical attention that went unheeded until too late. READ FULL ARTICLE


2) Report: 2 taken in cuffs from deadly Binghamton shootings

Story Highlights (READ ARTICLE)

• Four people killed in shooting in Binghamton, New York, source says


• CNN affiliate WBNG-TV reports 12 people killed; 2 men led away in cuffs


• There may be 20 to 40 people taken hostage, source says


• Shootings occurred at American Civic Association, which helps immigrants, refugees

NOTE: In pathology, confluent (adj) is a "merging or running together so as to form a mass, as sores in a rash."

Sonata - An Animated Short

Sonata, an animated short film about a brief and fleeting moment in a man's life, was the thesis project of Vancouver Film School student Ryan McDougal.

The song "Comptine d'un autre été: l'après-midi" by Yann Tierson and can be found on the soundtrack for Amélie.