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| James Huckenpahler |
| Love, Love and a few other things: |
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Art and love
Paul Kennedy, my photography teacher when I was in college, told me:
"You make your best art when you're in love."
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Always See Your Face, by Love on the High Fidelity soundtrack.
Wonderful brass section – I'm not sure how to describe it. Mellow? Flat? Subdued? Bittersweet... someday I'll make a piece that looks like the song sounds.
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Poker
A few nights ago I was listening to Colby talking about why he loves to play poker: thinking n moves into the game so as to outsmart your opponent; thinking one move beyond the other person's expectations. A little later it occured to me that this could be a metaphor for writing about/talking about art. Maybe George Hemphill and some of our other poker players could follow up on this next week.
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To Twenty-first century and back again:
My nostalgia has worn off and I'm back in the twenty-first century, listening to Magnetophone, Crunch and Autechre again. Just bought the new Cornelius album, Point – kind of a Japanese version of Beck, or Wagon Christ, borrowing all kinds of crazy textures from different contexts and recombining them with the plastic seamlessness at which the Japanese are expert. While I was in NYC yesterday, I picked up a great compilation of Japanese experimental sound material; The disk, Batofar Cherche Tokyo, was produced in conjunction with an experimental music festival and Club Batofar in Paris. Despite the predominance of tech, a lot of tracks have guitars on them. Perhaps this is a trend: another disc I picked up [just for the cover, and because it was $7 used], empties, by dosage was also guitar-heavy, and I picked up a copy of Overnight by Chessie – more guitars. My pet theory: as electronica and microsound get more composers involved with texture, they are also looking for instruments with more expressive interfaces, and guitars fit the bill.
The ascendancy of 'virtual' works is on its way out - over the next few years, maybe decade, I think there's going to be a shift away from the purists who make art that excludes old techniques and technologies, to artists who create hybrid works incorporating old and new ways of making [and seeing] things.
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| Laura Cooper |
| Personal Soundtrack: |
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In celebration of Valentine's and in the interest of reprogramming my personal soundtrack – an integral part of my process now stuck on Abba's Dancing Queen for a month – I decided to make a compilation disk charting the phases of love. It’ll make a great gift (I reasoned) for all my friends (what was I thinking?!). 3 hours and a few hundred cds later, my enthusiasm waned. Depressed, he left me, he beat me, I'm lonely, I'm miserable songs – there was no end. If I have to ask him to take out the garbage one more time songs were scarce. Nonetheless, examining my music, and the phases of my relationships, from a different perspective was more fun than I’d imagined... |
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Phase 1, The Seeker:
first pick, Somebody to Love, Queen (1976). The choir-like chorus, Freddie, the fever-pitch won me over again. Ten years ago I’d have chosen something like Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue. After seeking, and finding, a few that should have remained lost, Somebody to Love pointed out the laughable, and ludicrous in my previous L-o-v-e relationships. It also reminded me what it was like to see Freddie Mercury live for the first time in his white leotard, 1977, the We Will Rock You tour. I wanted to be Freddie, still do. This might explain why most mornings my subconscious drags me from sleep to Abba’s Dancing Queen.
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Phase 2, Enamored, or the are you still breathing? phase (not to be confused with the I want to choke you phase which comes later):
On more than 1 occasion, I actually found myself checking my partner's breathing in the middle of the night – just to make sure – which brings me to Lost in Love by Air Supply (1980). Every portrait of everyone I've ever been in love with was generated during phase 2.
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Phase 3, Disenchanted:
"Put your sox on mama now, cuz your feet really stink." Brak from Space Ghost’s Musical Bar-B-Que (1997).
Laura: "I think we've been together for 7 years, maybe 8. Do you count the dating years, or just the marriage years?"
Pat: "I count every single moment."
Disenchantment often leads to creative inertia, followed by a period of time spent in statusquoland. Mental note to self not to worry, all of the resultant screaming leads to phase 4...
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Phase 4, Ambivalanche a.k.a. I want to choke you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, get out!:
"So I'm gonna leave you. I'd like you to leave me to leave you. But lover believe me. It isn't because I don't need you, you know I don't need you. All I wanted was to be wanted. But you’re drowning me deep in your needs if you needed la la. La la la. La la la la la la la la la." Momus, I Want You But I Don't Need You, (1997). My best writing usually comes out of phase 4.
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Phase 5, Regret or Oh my God, I miss you, I want you back, what have I done?, Please, please, I’m sorry!!:
Tough phase for a first pick. I think it would have to be Without You, Nilsson (1972) (because I first owned it on an 8-track compilation that included Bobbie Sherman and Donnie Osmond. Without You came right after Puppy Love and the emotionality of it all was nearly too much for my pre-teen raging hormones to bear). Before I ever fell in love, all of my music put me in a perpetual state of phase 5. Somehow, my pre-teen, pre-love broken heart was a precursor to the pursuit of creative expression stemming from bad relationships. Talk about melodramatic – what the...? Might be reaching a bit there. But that string of Ps sounds really nice.
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| Kimberly Gladfelter |
| Cynical Romantic |
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Enough Time Has Past That It Is a Sweet Memory
In the cupboard is a shelf of memories. There are shells from the beach. Letters in faded envelopes. There is a little wooden box with a penny, some old rose petals, and a wisdom tooth. And, there is a book of poetry that was a gift from a boy whose love once filled my heart. I took the book off of the shelf and thumbed through. It had been so long that I had forgotten about the flowers picked from the roadside of a Las Vegas desert. They were tucked between poems for safe keeping, for finding and remembering. They marked a poem he once read to me.
who knows if the moon's
who knows if the moon's
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky - filled with pretty people?
(and if you and I should
get into it, if they
should take me and take you into their balloon.
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people
than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited, where
always,
 it's
Spring) and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves.
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HORROR-scope
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22):
Congratulations! You have been selected to receive a FREE GIFT by the Prayer Warriors, a team of telepathic do-gooders. Our research has determined that you are a wise romantic fool with a beautifully broken heart and a kaleidoscopic soul. For mysterious reasons that are patently unfair, you have never actually collected all of the sweet, tender adoration you've earned. Which is where our FREE GIFT comes in. To claim it, simply go to sleep this evening as usual. During the night the Prayer Warriors will induce in you a dream of the smartest love you have ever experienced. When you wake up tomorrow you will know exactly what to do to raise your Love IQ by 20 points!
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Chemistry 101
Two best friends had a code word. The word was Sodium. They discovered it during Chemistry class. Two bright, but silly high-school girls studying the periodic table obsered the abbreviation for Sodium was Na. What better code word could there be for "Nice ass."
"Could you pass the sodium," and they would dissolve in peels of laughter.
Later that year, a note was passed in the same Chemistry class. Elaborately folded, then unfolded. Just like millions before and after it, but like no other because of what it contained. The note read, "It happened."
The act had little to do with love. But chemistry and a little sodium had everything to do with it. It was the first of many lessons about chemistry.
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I went home yesterday for a quick and long overdue visit with my family. I came bearing gifts. Laundry. An annoying cough. And, pictures of my mom and dad's wedding that I had had framed for them.
Five pictures from an occassion that took place 35 years ago. Pillbox hats and white cotton gloves. Silver punchbowls and a red convertible with streamers. She was nineteen and he was twenty-one.
I must have looked through the picture books of my parent’s wedding a million times. I even wore my mom's wedding dress as a Halloween costume when I was ten. (See picture of Brother and I above.) But, now, looking at those pictures, I can see so much more than I ever have before.
I see the innocence. There is a picture of my mom and dad toasting over the punchbowl and my mom’s face is full of carefree laughter and my dad is trying hard to be composed.
I see the fearlessness. With her arm thrown over her head and the bouquet suspended in mid-toss, the bride looks directly at the camera. There’s no looking back.
I see the affection that they had for one another and for each other's family. Another picture remembers my mom and dad showing my Great Grandmother the rings. Both of my parents are gushing before her. When my mom looks at that picture, she says, "I miss that lady."
I also see what they could never have seen from that vantage point. The children. The challenges. The demands. The differences yet to be discovered. It wasn't always easy. There were times they almost called it quits.
But it is thirty-five years later and they are still together. And, I think they are having their second "honeymoon" now that the kids don't live in the house anymore
Chemistry. Compatibility. Committment.
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No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don’t never give up on love.
-Excerpt from Just Don't Never Give Up on Love, by Sonia Sanchez
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| Beth Joselow+Tom Mandel |
| valentines from beth and tom: |
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BLUE MOON
Most of what I learned about love I learned from false love. But I did not learn it until true love came along. When I met Tom, he was reading his poems for an audience at the much-missed Bick's Books. Right away I heard someone speaking my language. I wrote down one of his lines and thought of it as a directive:
Quit anyplace steeped in postponement.
I still have the piece of paper. When I showed it to him years later, he didn't remember writing it.
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TRUE LOVE WAYS
The lobby of the Carleton Hotel in Karachi is filled with children tonight; there is some kind of party going on. When Beth walked in the door that raining night in '90 I knew her right away. The little girls are dressed beautifully; lots of them, even teeny ones, are wearing high heels, and there is that lovely clatter of high heels on a marble floor. The crowd was small, and she was in a room full of friends. I was among strangers. The boys are more running around boylike from one end of the lobby to the other or up and down one of the circular staircases rising from it. Beth was wearing an oversized purple leather coat. There is a way of being with someone that is not the same as working hard at it but is giving your all to it, called love. I've come home late from dinner on a beautiful breezy night by the ocean, and now I push the elevator button. I was a boy running around back then, tho in my late 40s. Now, in my late 50s, I'm still a boy running around I guess. A small boy walks up to me and begins talking in Urdu, about the elevator, the button, the red LCD arrow pointing up, how great it is to be his young living self, those kinds of things that come from a 3 year old, and I gesture and nod and smile but I don't speak, because I don't want to break the connecting thread with a foreign language, and he looks up at me, puzzled that I'm not answering him with my own story, the one I'm telling here. When Beth walked in the door that night in her oversize purple leather coat and greeted her friends but not me who was a stranger I knew her right away. I recognized her from the pool of light she was in and by the blow to my forehead that in an instant took life away from me and gave it back only different. The elevator is a glass tube rising through the center of the circular staircase to frame scene after scene among the little girls with their dark hair and their dark eyes in their high heels grabbing each other, whispering, looking away and around, clattering their heels on the patterned black and white marble of the stairs. I didn't feel I gave a very good reading, I was self-conscious and distracted, no my mind was elsewhere it was right there in a concentrated point and like an archer in the dark who when the light comes on sees a bullseye but is sure he never bent his bow I asked her to see me the next evening and she said yes, okay. The door to my room is along a gallery overlooking the marble-floored lobby where the kids are patterns of constant movement and their parents also beautifully dressed talk softly in small groups of mostly men among men and women with each other. So I didn't sleep that night and staggered thru a tourist day and when the hour came she was wearing the same oversize purple leather coat. It was late afternoon, night was falling, there was a little rain, and we set out together. In my room I want to check email once more before retiring and she says 'true love' and my heart fills with joy. My heart was filled with joy.
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PIECE OF MY HEART
I never read love stories. I scoff at romantic movies. For a long time I used to think that love had to hit you like lightning, become an obsession, make you do things that you thought were a little bit bad. I used to think love rescued us. I used to carry around a quote from Lou Andreas Salome that said, "Love means knowing of someone whose hue things must take on" if they are not to seem strange and frightful. I don't want things to take on anyone's hue anymore. I am happy with my own hue. I don't want anyone to rescue me. I have rescued myself. I don't want to be obsessed, or to have adventures, other than this one big exciting adventure that is my life with Tom. This is my hand in glove, my yin and yang, my reserved seat in the rocket ship.
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LA VIE EN ROSE
Love is what you owe the world not the one you love, but not all are prepared to pay what they owe which you can only do with what you have, how simple is that? Love is love not in being love but in being what you give when you give love. I sound like Gertrude Stein. You live love when you give love. Or Sting. Not an essence but an effort not an effort but a gesture no a gesture and not a texture but a token, spoken. And to the sinuous central European syntax of Lou Andreas Salome, a great hero of 20th century life, my memory adds Arletty's mystery smile in Children of Paradise, saying 'C'est si simple, l'amour,' a phrase whose sybilant start turns to embrace the universal sound of pleasure, mmmm, ammmmour. Pleasure to give, for the pleasure to live, how simple is that?
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COME AND GO WITH ME
Briny sea full of life, ripples going out to children, parents, sisters, brothers, friends - everyone you carry with you. Vast. Not endless, but vast enough. Love is the impulse to say take me with you. Or come with me. Or let's go. Let's go.
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![Patrick Murcia [with Sarah Finlay!]](../images/02_02_14_SandP.jpg) |
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It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds would always remind him of the fate of unrequited love.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Love in the Time of Cholera
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the great advantage of being alive
(instead of undying) is not so much
that mind no more can disprove than prove
what heart may feel and soul may touch
--the great (my darling) happens to be
that love are in we, that love are in we
and here is the secret they never will share
for whom creates is less than have
or one times one than when times where—
that we are in love, that we are in love:
with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do
(for love are in we am in i are in you)
this world (as timorous itsters all to call their cowardice agree)
shall never discover our touch and feel
--for love are in we are in love are in we;
for you and i am and we are (above and under
all possible worlds) in love
a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time—
no heart can leap, no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea
for love are in you am in i are in we
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...entre fijeza y vértigo, tu eres la balanza diáfana
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I suffered while I was writing these misnamed "sonnets;" they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant and discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver, or crystal, or cannonfire. But—with great humility—I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.
-Pablo Neruda to Matilde Urrutia, from One Hundred Love Sonnets
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Separation
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color
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| Sherene Offutt |
My Most Influential Loves:
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The way I love, the things I love, my aesthetic, my expectations, the palette of my life, my vocabulary of sound and images, the stuff that turns me on... these early relationships explain a lot. |
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Brother Robert
Brother Robert was my mother's best friend's brother. He owned a carnival... at least that's how I remember it. His visits always included gifts of candy apples and plastic carnival toys that, to me, were priceless treasures. He introduced me to Silly-string which, to this day, I believe is one of the worlds GREATEST inventions! He often had a collection of Freak Show props in the back of his pick-up truck. Leading me by the hand, he would take me down to the driveway, along the way whispering tales of the exotic anomalies he was transporting to the next big show. This prelude would ignite such excitement and imagination in me that when we finally reached the bed of the truck, and he lifted me up to peek under the tarpaulin, my imagination would breath life into the paper mache figures and jars of undetermined specimens. I loved him so much... He was this huge, gentle creature with large, dark, rough hands, and and smiling eyes. At the carnival, he always made sure that I managed to win a prize, even though I was way too small to even reach the gaming counters, somehow I won and left believing that I had accomplished it myself. With Brother Robert I could go on the scariest rides... even the haunted house... I wasn't afraid of anything when I was with him.
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Linfred Gahymen
Despite the name, Linfred Gahymen, was the most romantic 9 year old ever! He called me 'sweetheart' and introduced me to the thrill of love letters. In one of his more impassioned letters he requests that I "ask him to do dangerous stuff" so he can prove his undying love for me (you should really read the original; I've included a scan of it above.) I carried this letter with me EVERYWHERE, for what seems like an eternity. I thought that I would die when I couldn't find it after having dinner out one night. My Mom and the waitress, obviously understanding the power and importance of a letter such as this, went through the trash in the kitchen. The letter was found later, probably in my mother's purse, as she was always diligently dating and archiving everything, which I appreciate now, but used to drive me crazy... I digress... Our romance, Linfred's and mine, consisted of evening bible school, chasing fire-flys in our PJs, running around in the creek behind our houses, riding bikes, and acting-out epic adventure-dramas with the gaggle of kids that grew-up with us on Rocky Road. When I moved away he said that he'd "cry for a week" and, "I hope you will never forget me" ...
Linfred, the adopted child of a Mennonite family that lived up the street from me, was an older man, being a whole year my senior. He dreamed of being a truck driver when he grew up, and it was clear early on that he wasn't destined for the seemly life his parents were hoping for. I ran into him at a shopping mall when I was about 16… I can't remember what we talked about or if we exchanged numbers, but I never saw him again. Last I heard he had done some time in jail.
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My Brothers (Johnny and Billy)
The 1970's were the only time that my brothers were really part of my life at the same time. But even then they were these mysterious creatures. I knew that they were not adults, but of some magical age where they got to do adult stuff and still behave like children. I pined for them then, wanting to be a part of this world, to know their secrets, to be part of the action.
Johnny always had the backyard full of cars to wash, my mom's gold Monte Carlo with the white vinyl top, his wife's (yes, he was only 16) baby-blue Nova, and his white Lincoln Continental. Johnny loved cars, all kinds, you would frequently hear him yelp "it's a classic, man." Johnny was always wearing a T-shirt with Marlboro reds in the pocket, and a great big smile. He had this wonderful laugh that kinda seeped out of one side of his mouth.
Billy was crazy. I remember him riding up the road on the hood of a buddy's car. He lived at the beach, had a waterbed, and was always talking trash about something. Billy was blond and had a way of making people believe anything that he said. He made crazy art... sexy robots doing freaky shit on a planet where flowers blossomed into bare-breasted women, and giants climbed over the horizon. He was prolific, covering the walls of any residence he took-up with outrageously detailed murals.
I carry a torch for my brothers. It's a kind of painful, unrequited love that can't possibly be explained. I had them so briefly and incompletely. I think of them both everyday.
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Frank Gorshin (The Riddler)
The TV show, Batman, was running in syndication when I was a kid. It appealed to me on a number of levels: the colors, the wacky costumes, and the whole bad-guys-kidnapping-hot-babes element, or hot-babes-being-bad-guys-kidnapping-good-guys... either one worked for me. The Riddler was this delightful fiend in a crazy question-mark suit (yea, I know, he wore green tights and a pink sash too, but it was the suit that did it for me – although I don't mind the tights)… he was hot as a firecracker! I know what you’re thinking – "there’s no accounting for taste" – but I don’t care, I LOVE THAT MAN! I may have been 7, but I wanted to be that hot babe tied to an enormous circular saw at the mercy of the Riddler!
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Howie Mallot and Larry Haines
We moved to the country when I was 10. A traumatizing event for a parochial-school-girl raised in patent-leather shoes. My only friend was Howie Mallot, a very big autistic boy who lived across the street. Howie was a teenager, but he functioned at a much younger level. It was kind of like being friends with the abominable snowman from the cartoons, you know the one that squeezes the life out of Daffy Duck, stoking him heavily on the head, and calling him "George" while saying how much he loves him... THAT was Howie. He was always springing from nowhere and scaring the daylights out of me... but he was my friend and somehow I managed to SURVIVE his love.
There was me and Howie, and an unlikely third-party, Larry Haines. Larry was an 8th grader and he was one of those guys that all the girls love and all the boys want to hang out with. We rode the bus together and he lived near me, well, in country terms he lived near, it was a few miles down the road. Obviously, we NEVER spoke at school, or on the bus for that matter... as he was 13 and WAY too cool and I was 10 and WAY uncool! But one day when Howie came to visit, he had Larry with him... and then there were three. We were always together. I remember Howie and Larry showing-up at the door late one night. My Mom walked with us up to an old cemetery. Larry kept brushing his arm against mine in the dark and kinda touching my hand... this was my first experience of someone touching me that made me want to touch them back... it was exhilarating. After that night, Larry looked at me a little differently on the bus. When we were in the pool we would go under the water, stare at each other, and hold hands for as long as our breath would hold out. We never discussed this ritual... it was just what we did, how we expressed ourselves, and it was perfect.
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| Bernard Welt |
| Five movies to watch with your Valentine: |
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Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
For those of us of a certain age, this was the first movie that made a one-night stand in a foreign city seem unspeakably romantic instead of kinda slutty. And maybe the first totally believable female character we ever saw at the movies. L'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour. Sayonara, baby.
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The Dybbuk (Michael Waszynsky, 1938)
I'm not going to argue with anyone who says that Vertigo is the greatest necrophiliac romance ever filmed. But not as many of you have seen this literally haunting love story: the possessiveness in romantic love is played out as actual possession. Plus you finally hear for yourself that Yiddish is indeed the language of love.
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Law of Desire (Pedro Almodovar, 1987)
I saw this 6 times the week it came out. I suppose this is what movies like Moulin Rouge wish they were: something fiercely entertaining that hits you with a big old wallop of romance while showing you how utterly ridiculous it is. And still one of only about three movies ever made that depict a gay romance without being profoundly embarrassing to straight and gay folks alike.
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Les Enfants du Paradis / Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, 1945)
This is the mother lode, the most romantic movie ever made. Everyone in it rises to the status of some kind of transcendent allegorical figure; there's no time to consider the psychology of love when the scale of romance seems cosmic and mythic. If anyone is more compellingly watchable than Jean-Louis Barrault, it must be Arletty, his unattainable love. Newly available in glorious DVD for hours of sublimely melancholy home viewing.
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Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)
Because sometimes, even if it seems like you're made for each other, things just don't work out.
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It was in the fall, the leaves were turning, and the air had that familiar crispness to it. Hunting season was open. My grandfather loved the ritual of the hunt, - the getting up while dark, checking your supplies, loading the dogs, and driving for miles (when all we really needed to do was walk out in our back yard). He sometimes packed a bottle of whiskey, "just in case," he would say. As a kid growing up without a father, my grandfather was larger than life (at least in my kid's mind). I wasn't sure how men acted, but I figured if I watched my grandfather, I might turn out ok. I mean, hunting and fishing were about as man-like as it got, I thought.
This was going to be my second year going squirrel hunting, with my first being a total washout on the account that my grandfather had made me take a .22 with the idea that it would make me a better shot. The only idea it really gave me was that hunting squirrels with a .22 was a lot like playing video games: lots of shooting at quickly moving targets with no blood (I missed). This year he had decided I could take a 16-gauge shotgun. "Son, you won't miss with that".
Well, I did.
No amount of firepower seemed to bring squirrels down, just a lot of tree branches. My grandfather was/is a great shot. So he took this personally. He once killed a big horn sheep at 1,500 yards. He had me target practicing each day after school in preparation for opening day. And I was "pretty good for a momma's boy," he joked. So after several trips, lots of buckshot and no squirrels, he concluded that the sights must be way off. So he gave me his gun. More tree branches, no squirrel.
"It just doesn't make sense, you hit cans at 75 yards with a .22 during practice, but out here, you can't hit the side of a barn," he would say.
The last trip we were to make that year began as usual, at 4am. It was dark, and there was a light snow beginning to fall.
"I think this time, I am going to take you where I know we won't miss." I knew this meant even a longer drive, and even a further walk. I smiled. In the cab of his truck, we piled in: my grandfather, two dogs, and me. What I remember most to this day, is the smell inside. It must be what time well-lived smelled like. Musky, slightly exotic, and warm. He started the truck in his usual way, - no need for the ignition - just roll start it, and we were off. During both the drive, and the walk in, he never stopped talking about past trips. It was if the only reason to go was to try to make tangible past trips by recounting them. It seemed to be a kind of incantation. Sometimes he would repeat the same stories twice or three times during the season. I seemed not to mind.
We walked to a crest, and my grandfather whispered, "I think you are going to get one today". On cue, a squirrel darted across a branch not twenty yards in front of us. But beyond that was another, at about 75 yards. I sighted my gun on the further away one, and squeezed the trigger. This time, nothing but the squirrel fell. A clean shot. "That was a helluva shot, damn near perfect," he said excitedly. As we made our way over to the limp, and still squirrel, not one word was said.
Finally, after reaching the dead animal, and examining the "damn near perfect shot", he looked me in the eye and placed his dry , worn hand on the back of my neck, and simply said, "Son, next year, you can leave your gun at home."
I smiled back, and said, "Thank you."
We never spoke of it again.
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| Peter Ferko |
| Baby Love, My Baby Love, I Need You, Oh-Oh I Need Your Love |
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Love as a Pursuit
I once wrote a song whose first line was, This could have been sex. My clever drummer, John Zidar, noted the irony: "You used sex as a metaphor for love, which everyone knows is a metaphor for SEX!" Lack of love (or sex, for that matter) drives many a lyricist. I'm no exception. I continue to wonder if it's possible to write a good love song or if as listeners we're too cynical for a new My Funny Valentine. It's been encouraging to hear songs like Teenage Dirt Bag, Meet Virginia, and She Likes Me for Me (not because I sing like Pavarotti...). They're cute, but still lack the sincerity of the best love songs of the 40's.
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Love as an Answer (with capital 'A')
I love when someone figures out a hip way to infuse popular art with an idea about the big love, fundamental love, universal love. Classic examples that come to mind are songs (whose names I may have wrong) by George Harrison (My Sweet Lord), Tears for Fears (Seeds of Love), Steve Windwood (Higher Love), Todd Rundgren (Love is the Answer).
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Love as an Aesthetic
I love the way some things look and I can't stop taking pictures that capture it. I love the way some things sound and I can't help drifting back to those chords, instruments, and effects. I love the way it feels to sing a C above middle C and feel the room vibrate. I love when those love ... um...resonances? come into my senses and overwhelm me. |
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Bang on a Can All Stars
I have mentioned them before, but check out this group of new music masters. They have several albums out. They have moved to number one on my live music list after an amazing performance at Lincoln Center. |
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Aimee Mann
Now James is cringing that I'll criticize his listening habits when I have been on an Aimee Mann bender for two years. I re-watched Magnolia this week. I was Dee-lighted to discover that the first line of Deadly from the CD Bachelor No.2 is actually used as a line spoken by the coke head to the cop at the end of their first date:
Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again.
As for using Napster, I'll just let St. Peter deal with you at the Pearly Gates...
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| Carole Greenwood |
| 5th degree burns: love is the single most important thing that affects my practice, every day: |
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note: this whole thing was my idea, but in retrospect i have to admit that these are the hardest '5' i have ever written. i've thought about them over and over all week - in the same way that one contemplates the idea of the 'beloved.' if i really wanted to know the answer, i wouldn't be asking such difficult questions...
so, here goes..truth or dare... |
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motherlove
this one is the easiest.
the love one develops for a child can be the single most transforming event in life. loving your child is unconditional. it exists forever and requires nothing back from them. and like the grinch, your heart grows ten sizes in one day, virtually overnight, developing new capabilities and empathy that had been previously unimagined, untapped & impossible. the hours are long but the rewards are immeasurable. and while the elements of love that fuel the poets - lust , desire, passion - are pretty much unrelated, the return is much greater and more solid than the adult stuff.
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in love
some friends and i were discussing this concept, this phenomenon - and we found it scary. being in love preys on your insecurities - it requires this heightened level of emotion and attention that preclude eat, sleep and work. amd while we are tempted by the drug... we decided to prefer the more long term version of love - like the consistency and solidity of one who understands and accepts you like no other. looking back on past relationships - i don't know if i was really ever in love - perhaps just running on the fumes of some imagined ideal. |
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love food for valentine's day
- red velvet cake
- oysters on the 1/2 shell
- beet and tomato 'gazpacho' served warm with grilled, smoked lobster
- handmade pasta ribbons with garlic, preserved lemons and butter
- banana cream pie
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fantasy
i lived in paris for nearly 2 years, while i was in cooking school.
the entire time i was there, i harbored a secret fantasy of kissing under the willow tree at the end of the ile st. louis. to this moment, i cannot see a photograph of that place without that thought. |
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sadlove
my favorite love poem is a very very sad one by pablo neruda.
it holds in its verses everything that love is meant to be, everything it promises.
puedo escribir - tonight i write
(translated by w.s.merwin)
tonight i can write the saddest lines.
write, for example, "the night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."
the night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
tonight i can write the saddest lines.
i lover her, and sometimes she loved me too.
through nights like this i held her in my arms.
i kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
she loved me, sometimes i loved her too.
how could one not have loved her great still eyes.
tonight i can write the saddest lines.
to think that i do not have her. to feel that i have lost her.
to hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
and the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
what does it matter that my love could not keep her.
the night is starry and she is not with me.
this is all. in the distance someone is singing. in the distance.
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
my sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer
my heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
the same night whitening the same trees.
we, of that time, are no longer the same.
i no longer love her, that's certain, but how i loved her.
my voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
another's.
she will be another's. as she was before my kisses.
her voice, her bright body. her infinite eyes.
i no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe i love her.
love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one i held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that is has lost her
though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that i write for her.
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| Jason Gubbiotti |
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In the mood for love
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Setting the pace
Later we had toast, took turns sitting on the windowsill
Like two fields of wheat, sent signals across the kitchen, sharp and sweet.
I found her on a night of fire and noise
Wild bells rang in a wild sky
I knew from that moment on
I'd lover her till the day I died
And I kissed away a thousand sorrows...
sneakin' a kiss
on the fire escape
a little game of pup tent
with a blanket and a broom
my mind is taking photographs
of every little thing
exhibit # 2......
a piece of white chocolate.
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A poem
Rosemonde
Longtemps au pied du perron de
La maison ou entra la dame
Que j'avais suivie pendant deux
Bonnes heurs a Amsterdam
Mes doigts jeterent
Mais le canal etait desert
Le quai aussi et nul ne vit
comment mes baisers retrouverent
Celle a qui j'ai bonne ma vie
Un jour pendant plus de deux heures
Je la surnommai Rosemonde
Voulant pouvoir me rappeler
Sa bouche fluerie en Hollande
Puis lentement je m'en allai
Pour queter la Rose du monde
Rosemonde
A long while on the steps
My fingers blew kisses
To the front door of the lady
I'd followed over two
Good hours in Amsterdam
The canal was deserted
The embankment also and none
Saw the way my kisses found
The lady I gave my life
One day over two good hours
I christened her rosmonde
Wishing to remember
Her mouth a Holland flower
Then slowly went away
Seeking the world rose
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Public love
Last week in fivethings, I wrote briefly about how I felt towards President Bush's State of the Union Address. I expressed that I did not agree with many of the positions that he took against certain countries in the world. I am not saying that I am for certain countries creating weapons of mass destruction; I was stating that his comments were very aggressive and threatening, not just towards Iran, Iraq and North Korea but to the rest of the world.
I also made a comment on "this is how we got into this situation..." by referring to "extreme nationalism" and how it resembled Nazi Germany in WWII. I was not saying that our president is the Hitler of this century, because he is not. I am saying that our government is walking in territory that it probably should be leave alone. Our government has assumed the role of not exporting American/Christian values into the middle east, rather, the US government has taken on the position of being the mentors of the world, especially the middle east. For instance, about a month ago, the cover of Newsweek had an image if Bin Laden with the statement "How do we reform the Middle East?" and the answer to that is we don't! 1/6 of Bush's speech dealt with domestic issues, and think it is time for us to start thinking about homeland issues again.
Last week when fivethings came out, a good friend of mine e mailed me about his concerns with my statements. He asked me "...what is wrong with extreme nationalism?" In the case of our country at 2.11.02, our current government should not be telling the rest of the world how to run their countries and believe that our methodology will work for every society and culture. For America, our approach to governing works pretty well for our community, but it will not work in parts of the world where the military, the state and religious center are all under the same rule
On a personal level, I love this country. As an American, I have certain rights that may not exist in other parts of the world. I am able to express my thoughts freely either on a website, in a gallery or over a cup of coffee with a friend. We are also people of privilege that are situated into a system that allows us to operate on many different levels of understanding. We are a community that reads poetry, attends exhibitions of Vermeer, and has opportunities to see the National Symphony Orchestra. If we were all living in a place where our daily needs were about pure survival, most of us would never even think about being an artist, writer, musician because it just would not be an option.
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Lines to Fanny by John Keats
O, for some sunny spell
To dissipate the shadows of this hell!
Say they are gone, - with the new dawning light
Steps forth my lady bright!
O, let me once more rest
My soul upon that dazzling breast!
Let once again these aching arms be plac'd,
The tender gaolers of thy waist!
And let me feel that warm breath here and there
to spread a rapture in my very hair, -
Oh the sweetness of the pain!
Give me those lips again!
Enough! Enough! It is enough for me
To dream of thee!
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a personal love
As one can see, my entries on love have been stolen from songs, poems and for a moment semi objective thoughts towards our government. When I think about love though, I think about details. Details in the sense of accidental embraces, the perfect sentence placed at just the right moment. I think of little flickering moments from ten years ago or two months ago.
My brain is also infiltrated by memories of old friends that I have not seen in 7 years. Love is a strange thing though and I find it exist in so many ways in my life, anywhere from family, friends, a place to the more obvious association with Valentine's Day is the love for an individual. |
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