poets writing fiction & tender songs in slavic languages

Sybil Greate taught Snorckie the names of the strings by colors.  She herself was always a smiling brown study, arriving late for the lesson, almost too straight, Verchadet could not help thinking.  Miss Greate never brought her own too valuable fiddle.  She illustrated on Snorckie's quarter-size:
     "Little Baron, my fingers are too thick to hold down the right color," she said. --"I'm not used to your fiddle, but you must get used to it.--I'm surprised, Snorckie, why Snorckie, the red is flat.--Good, good, Little Baron, the blue sounds true.--O the green that's as if it had never been," and she would hurry to strain a peg, ending her sentence a minute later, "tuned."--"O but you must play with expression, dolce, sweetly, dolce that's Eyetalian for sweetly, Snorckie, and the white must be heard very, very bright!  Little Baron, will you ask your mother to give me that last note on the piano?"
     "What color?" Snorckie questioned.
     Verchadet accompanied him in a text of exercises called Scratch A While.
     Miss Greate also taught Snorckie "the notes."
     "Every good virtuoso," she told Snorckie who held his mouth open and Verchadet who watched the half-hour go by on the clock as her left eye -- the weaker one -- acquired crow's-foot, "studies theory.  Now this big round empty thing is a full moon.  And if you add a stem to it, it's a half-moon."
     "No, Miss Greate, my father who's a Greek -- or is he a Turk, Vechadet? -- calls that phi.  That line, let me show you," Snorckie said, applying great effort to Miss Greate's pencil, "goes through the center.  Or is it fee?" he asked exposing the Greek letter to Verchadet.  "Full fathom fi'," mumbled Verchadet.
     "No," Miss Greate interrupeted him gently, firmly taking the pencil out of his hand, "this is music -- it's different.  And this with a stem attached to a bright black darkened thing is a quarter-moon!"
     "Now don't tell me," Snorckie begged avidly, "don't tell me, Miss Greate, I know, this" he said pointing to a blank space of a staff, "is a new moon."
     Remember that Verchadet was only a mother that Little Baron had made his accompanist, and she had never read Pre-Youth.  All this musical moon kind of teaching was very hard on her.  After stretching patience over half a term of lessons, she came home one day and asked Baballo, "what do you teach?"  She had never asked him this, so that all he said Hamlet-like, or hammock-like as Snorckie would say who had seen the movie, for Baballo was rocked and racked continuously by passion, was: "Ha?!"
     "Is all education today moon and sub-moon?" asked Verchadet.
     "Moon Mullens, what do you mean?" said Baballo.
     "And the spectrum?  What about the spectrum?"
     "Are you out of your mind, Verchadet?" he quavered.
     "Don't quaver," she said, "my right ear is queasy as it is.  All I mean is, I shall soon be as moonstruck and as color mad as the dye industry."
     It was St. Valentine's Day and Baballo, who was not unromantic and sometimes not too slow at understanding Verchaudet, said: "Don't be that way Verchadet.  Isn't Snorckie learning the fiddle?"
     "He is, but not his color exercises.  Maybe I'm wrong.  With me, you hear him every evening don't you, he's up on Bach's Third Partita, but with Miss Greate he doesn't know green from red."
     "Tse-tse-tse-tse," said Baballo, looking like the poet-baron behind the Great Wall of China he felt he was at the moment.  "Waut a minute, Verchadet," he said, as he hurried upstairs.  A minute later he came down.  "Verchadet, St. Valentine's Day -- your poem!

We may be old-fashioned,
But -- we're impassioned.
When a fiddle string's red
Music is dead!
Then up with Johansen
Bach and his ensin
Or we'll be singing with colors
And painting red hollers
A note is a note
And comes from the throat!"

     "Stop, Baballo," Verchadet said.  "That makes sense.  I'm too run-down to make Tuesdays at four any more.  Snorckie's getting a man teacher!"

Louis Lukofsky, Little (1970)

Piotr Szczepanik, kochać ('to love'), poland (1966) 

Of uncleanliness, he was saying, there are, one must come to think, a good many kinds.  Or more, put it, than dirt on the hands.
     The wind shifted, slightly, pulling them down the lake and in toward the dock which he saw now as a line, black, on the water, lying out and on it.
     Not one, he said, not one sense would give you the whole of it, and I expect that continues what's wanted.
     But they sat quiet, anyhow, the woman at the far end, slumped there, and the length of her very nearly flat on the canoe's bottom.  The man kept upright, the paddle still in his hands, but he held it loosely, letting it slap the water, lightly, as the waves lifted to reach it.
     Nothing important, she said.  Nothing to worry about, and what about tonight?  We forgot that.
     He began to paddle again, but slowly, and looked back at her reluctantly, almost asleep.
     That doesn't please you, she said.  You seem determined not to enjoy yourself.
     Not that, he answered, and it had taken him, at that, some way beyond where he had been.
     Not so simply, he said.  You make it too easy.
     But why easy, she answered.  I don't see that it's not easy, any of it.  These people will hardly care to attack you personally.  They are all much too busy.
     Looking down at her, he found her laughing at him, and smiled himself.
     You are all so very serious, she said, all of you.  What is it makes you think the world is so intent on you at whatever age you are.
     Because I don't know, she added, just how old you are.  But you look young.  You look very young.
     He whistled, a little song, and looked back toward the dock which they now came to, bumping against it, and he reached out to steady them, and then pulled the canoe alongside for her to get out.
     Easy, she said.  Don't jerk it.
     He watched her swing out, a foot on the dock, then pull herself up, and clear, to wait for him.
     Help me pull it up, she said.  It might break loose.
     He got out and helped her lift it, and then pushed to roll it over, on the dock, easing it down gently, when her hands were clear.
     There, she said, now it will be safe.
     He followed her back along the dock, crossing at the end, another, and then up a path to where her car sat, shaded, by the trees.  She opened the door for him, and reaching in, spread a towel on the seat, then crossed round to the other side.  Sliding under the wheel, she leaned over and caught him with one hand, pulling him to her, to kiss him.
     For your sullenness she said, although you hardly deserve it.
     He pushed free and watched her start the car.
     Sometime you will have to answer me, she said.  Sometime there will be nothing else for you to do.
     They moved off quickly, along the road, and coming to another, swung in, grating, and up to the house, and stopped there and got out.
     Leaving her, he went to his room, took off his bathingsuit and dropped it on the floor.  To his right a mirror hung, on the wall, and he turned to look at himself, the whiteness, and then dressed quickly, and left the room.
     Here, she called.
     The voice echoed a little, finding him, and he followed it out to where she was sitting, waiting for him.
     There's not too much time, she said.  Would you like a drink before we go?
     He nodded and she got up, and went out.  Returning, she came to him and put the glass on the small table by his hand.  Then she went back to her own chair and sat down.
     Thanks, he said, and picked up the glass from where she had put it.
     But nothing at all!  Very happy to do it.
     He smiled, then drank, and put the glass back.
     This is a very comfortable room, he said.  Very airy, very nice and big.
     She nodded, quiet, and looked round at the walls, the high ceiling, then back at him.
     He wanted it this way, she said.  He did most of it himself.
     He looked away, turning, and settled on a picture which was across from him, a small one of some trees and a house.
     His favorite room, she said.  This and the shack were all he cared about.
     A damn shame, he said, to have just got it, and then to have to lose it.
     She didn't answer, and looked, instead, out the window, her head somewhat bent, and loose, and he watched her, quietly, letting the time pass.
     It makes me feel rather dirty, he said, rather stupid, if that's how to say it.
     It's not you.
     But it must be me a little, he said.  That I walk in on it.
     You don't.  There's nothing to worry about.
     She had got up and now looked at her wrist, the little band there, of one bright metal, and then at him, saying, it's very late.
     He followed her out and into the car, and starting it, she drove off quickly, hurrying because of the lateness.  Some cars were already there and they pulled in behind them, and stopped.
     It won't be bad, she said, or it won't be if you'll try to help a little.
     He shrugged and went after her up the path, waiting behind while she knocked, lightly, on the door. Abruptly it opened and he saw a woman smiling at both of them, reaching, to pull them in.  He let them talk, standing back, and then went in after them.
     You're the last, the woman said, but that's an honor?
     Yes, she said, and they went in, closely, following the woman, laughing, and he saw them all sitting in a ring about the room, the chairs all back against the wall, and going to one near the door, he sat down.
     Mr. Briggs, they said, and all laughed, is a strange young man!
     But he had not heard them, and only sat, placid, and again waited for a drink, thinking it enough that there should be one for him.  It came soon and taking it, he thanked the woman and lifted the glass to his mouth.
     Cheers!
     He sat back, more relaxed, and nodding to the man beside him, said, very fine, and smiled.
     There's not much hope for them, the other answered, if they won't make an attempt to see both sides.
     No, he said, I can't see that they will find any other way out of it.
     But it doesn't matter, she asked.  Who could care about such a thing.
     The sandwiches went by him, and reaching out, he caught one smiling, and put it into his mouth.
     The truth, the other said, is what rarely seems to be considered.
     But they had not heard either, and one woman now stood up, and looked at all of them, saying, to John.  Wherever he is.  They drank in silence.  A windy void, which he felt himself, lifting the glass, and drinking, then, with all of them.  It was love, she said, a very true love.
     From the next room the children's voices came, clearly, for they were crying, wailing, he thought, with a very specific injury.  Getting up, he said, I'll go, not thinking, and had gone through the door before anyone had noticed him.
     But, seeing him, they cried louder, screaming, and the woman was there behind him, and motioned him out.
     But no, she said, it's no use.  You bad children, go to sleep!
     Bewildered, he looked down at her, beside the bed, and younger than she who he had come with, he thought, but she will not allow me, she will not understand.
     We'd better go back, she said.  They'll go to sleep by themselves.
     In the other room they had got up, and stood only to wait for her, to say, goodnight, apologetically, and left.  She watched them go, blankly, and he stood beside her, trying, as he thought, to help.
     My party, she said.  There's no reason to leave.
     It's late, someone answered.  It's been very fine.
     The room cleared, slowly, the doorway crowded but at last empty, and they sat, the three of them, on the couch, looking after the others.  In the room behind them the crying continued and softened, finally, to die out.
     They're all asleep, he said, and turned, but could not see her face.
     Does it matter, he said.  I mean, does it matter in any way you can think of?
     But the woman had got up, and the other now raised herself, to lean over, and seeing him, laughed, and sank back.
     You make it sound momentous, she said.  You really prefer disasters.
     She smiled at him quickly, lifting again, but he had turned his head and she could not see him.
     Anyhow, it was a good party, she said then, turning to the younger woman.  There was certainly nothing wrong with it.

Robert Creeley, The Party (1960?) 

samonikli/самоникли ('the natives'), takav covek ('a person like that'), yugoslavia (1967)

1

I will forget everything and turn into pure nature, which forgets everything.  I will walk the animal and see where it goes.
     Outside, the dog waited but wouldn't go anywhere.  The dog was old and red and very tired.  It stayed by the house-door waiting.  Waiting for him, not waiting to go.
     Sign of the dog.  Or can he trust any sign, even to be a sign?  Wondering.  A long time.
     See it pass.  See the dog stay.
     What are you waiting for.  Dogs don't talk but this one did.  It said a word by pressing its head against his leg.  Unmistakable, indecipherable.  He hardly spoke that language, but didn't move his leg away.  This is called listening.
     The dog, roused once by his arrival on the terrace, settled down again.
     I will listen to everything and say nothing.  I will be the reciprocal of any natural thing, which says and says and never listens.  The heavens declare the glory of God -- but do they ever pause to listen?  Or is all the glory spoken at once, and only one word ever spoken.  Are the echo, jaws of the skies still trying to get the feel of what they heard just that once?
     Base surmise in a green time.

2

In another life he is a boat, or a man on a boat.
     When will I be a woman, to be the qualities and energies all my lives keep demanding of them?  What a woman I will be!  Glamorous and fierce and very true I'll be, true as sin and pots of basil fragrant in the sun.  My breasts will be a public treasure, and my footsteps, followed, will lead all beings to the arch where in half-light half-shadow truth tells its naked secret.  There is this and only this and it suffices and more than suffices, and if you want more, it is a sign you haven't truly tasted this.
     But he is a man on a boat, a scoured white deck, and his footsteps, naked, lead only here and there around the boat.  Followed for a long time -- assuming they left a permanent vestige -- his steps would reveal only the limits of the boat, the bounded nature of vessel.
     A boat is curious.  It goes everywhere, but on it there is nowhere to go.

3

Halfway to Portugal.  To Paradise.  Neither abstracted nor at ease, he scrutinized the sea.  Where is my little dog, where is my red dog?  No sun, and no dog.  Why am I always alone?  And why don't I mind it?
     Towards him coming now a sea-beast, crest over wave, spitting salt, coruscant with rubies and emeralds, glittery, with the glad cheapness of nature at her tawdry best, a belua, a sea-serpent on the make.  Coils and fins and vestigial hands, mighty dorsal plates, spine like a setting sun, maw like a ceremony of fangs, a piano of chromatic torture, gullet infested with darkness and a word coming out of it.  He has to hear it.  One more to listen to.  One more not to comprehend.
     And in the eye of the thing nothing worse than the blue haze of distances, or maybe all the distances in the world glinting in one little point above the lower lid, like a sapphire on a woman's hand or a ripe olive alone on a plate.
     He sighed and understood his predicament, without for a moment understanding why he was in it.

4

Was it a life at all, this thing he was living?  Serpent winding, to shun the bare sun's uneven power, and yet retrieve by night the ray's heat stored in rock or tarry roads.  Running towards and running from.  Desire and abhorrence dressed him in clothes he could not bring himself to take off, any more than a tree at nightfall, rustle though it please in the wind, can shake the clustering darkness from its leaves.  For both, for man and tree, a waiting must suffice.  Craving and loathing will both fall away in time, but he from whom they fall will seldom call that falling "morning."  And yet it is.

Robert Kelly, In the County of the Living (1994)

Marika Gombitová, koloseum, czechoslovakia (1987)

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν

time is in short supply.  the blog suffers neglect.  I apologize to you: I apologize to the blog.  soon I will blog more, in the meantime, here are some things:

first, please watch Les Blank's movie garlic is as good as ten mothers.  if you don't get a kick out of this I accuse you of having no charmedness gland.

garlic is certainly among the most powerful vegetables.  the tender shallots & wee ramps are lucky that garlic & onions get along.

now, maybe you already heard this, but the great, forgotten (actually, worse than forgotten, the bepunchlined) Bobby Womack has a new record.  Bobby Womack?  most definitely.  & it's really terrific, Damon Albarn produced it produced it (aka the dude behind the gorillaz), with another guy.   I think they made a really beautiful record, Bobby Womack singing over all kinds of cheesy bleepy contemporary-feel tracks.  his voice sounds like an old railroad cracking in the sun.

I'm really really digging the music video for this song.  I think it's so lovely & tasteful, retro without being smirking.  that should be the music industry's file-under for Bobby Womack more generally: retro comma non-smirking.  do yourself a favor, turn the lights off & give yourself to 5 minutes of this:

you will not need to know any russian to enjoy this beautifully drawn & delightful synth-scented soviet cartoon.  it is called летучий корабль, letuchij korabl', 'the flying ship'.  it tells the story of how little Ivan the chimney-sweep fell in love with the Tsar's daughter, Zabava, whose name means 'fun'.  here, here:

oh great news: there is strong reason to believe that R Kelly's long-delayed memoir soula coaster: the diary of me, will finally be published by Tavis Smiley in just under two weeks!  June 28th.  can we wait?  the title is so terrific.  the cover is hilarious.  R Kelly is five operas & a rhyming dictionary.

more soon!

the naacp will make you cry

I could seriously give a crap about the fucking president, but yesterday Benjamin Jealous, the president of the naacp, made a beautiful speech:

also, it's Sun Ra's birthday today.

happy birthday to Sun Ra.

now, one nice thing about the internet is that everybody's internet is different from everybody else's.  we each get our weird own internet.  & if yours is anything like mine, today it bloomed completely Dan Magers.  I don't know whether it was planned or what, but a Magersia Majora swept over the land, filling my day with the cracked vaudeville of Dan's great new book partyknife.

MIND QUEEF, A ONE-ACT PLAY BY HITLER

Technically, the dumpster in back is part of the Whitney.

I love, and just push my heart out.

I can't be psyched to play Guitar Hero,

because it reminds me that I can't play real guitar.

A manner of fashion that could transcend ten months

and become the fashion forever.

I am quiet and also very boring.

The idea, the list, the spiritual realm -- a litany, a soul sick

list plus

transcendent, gravity plus parallel

plus journaling plus lament.

Also Zem is NOT San Francisco's eco-fashion guru;

she is San Francisco's eco-lifestyle guru.

This is important.

this book torques violences & there's a kind of a great electricity.  how to live where the "stars are geometric-utopian / and fascist"?  what to breathe in the flashing instant of being recognizable?  yourself upside-down.  sometimes I too "think that I'm doing all this cross training / so I can do more cocaine".  Dan's book is funny & itchy & uncomfortably like being someone.  "the fantasy of infinite impact", for real.

by the way the book hits stores in a couple weeks & for now you can buy it here.

Every Day

Every day

in a little way

things are done.

Every morning there is

a day.  Every day

there is a day.

Waking up in a bed

with a window with light,

with a place in mind,

to piss, to eat,

to think of something,

to forget it all,

to remember everything,

perfectly, each

specific, actual detail,

knowing nothing,

having no sense of any of it,

not being a part of it,

all right for you,

all right, you guys --

echoes, things, faces.

is terrific, right?  is Robot Creeley, auf keurz.

 Twilight Thinkers

Athens was dying, and with it the worship of knowledge.  The great systems had run their course: limited to the conceptual realm, they rejected the intervention of torments, the pursuit of deliverance and of inordinate meditation upon suffering.  The declining city, having permitted the conversion of human disasters into theory, no matter what -- sneeze or sudden death -- was supplanting the old problems.  The obsession with remedies marks the end of a civilization; the search for salvation, that of a philosophy.  Plato and Aristotle had yielded to such preoccupations only for the sake of equilibrium; after them, such concerns prevailed in every domain.

Rome, waning, took from Athens only the echoes of its decadence and the reflections of its collapse.  When the Greeks exercised their doubts throughout the Empire, the latter's downfall and that of philosophy were virtually consummated.  All questions seeming legitimate, the superstition of formal limits no longer prevented the debauch of arbitrary curiosities.  The infiltration of epicureanism and of stoicism was easy: ethics replaced the abstract structures, bastardized reason became the instrument of praxis.  In the streets of Rome, with carious recipes for "happiness," swarmed the epicureans and the stoics, experts in wisdom, noble charlatans appearing at the periphery of philosophy to treat an incurable and generalized lassitude.  But their therapeutics lacked the mythology and the strange anecdotes which, in the universal enervation, were to constitute the vigor of a religion unconcerned with nuance, a religion originating more remotely than they.  Wisdom is the last word of an expiring civilization, the nimbus of historic twilights, fatigue transfigured into a vision of the world, the last tolerance before the advent of other, newer gods -- and of barbarism; wisdom, what we call sagesse, is also a vain attempt at melody among the environing death rattles.  For the Sage -- theoretician of a limpid death, hero of indifference, and symbol of the last stage of philosophy, of its degenerescence and its vacuity -- has solved the problem of his own death... and has thereupon suppressed all problems.  Provided with rarer absurdities, he is a limit-case, which we encounter in extreme periods as an exceptional confirmation of the general pathology.

is true, no?  is komrad cioran, of kvass.

I urge... that a poem is not wise, even if it is: that any wisdom which gets into any poem is solely a quality of the moment of time in which there might happen to be wisdoms.
      There are obviously seizures which have nothing to do with wisdom at all.  And they are very beautiful.
                                            Or maybe I don't believe it's "beauty," any more than I believe it's "light"... how Bill has it in "To a Dog Injured in the Street," that he and René Char both believe "in the power of beauty / to right all wrongs."  Maybe I think this is also partial, social, wisdom.

"It is time (love) is difficult, Mr.
Beardsley"

                 I'm so foolish.  A song is heat.  There may be light, but light and beauty is no the state of: the state is the grip of (and it is not feverish, is very cool, is -- the eyes are -- ow did they get that way?

                                          "He who controls rhythm
                                           controls"

          This wld seem to me to be the
          END
                    Otherwise, we are involved in
                    ourselves (which is demonstrably
                    not very interesting, no
                    matter
                    who

howdy yesyes bop, mais non?  Charlez Olson, quack quack.

& also now, please download & read this totally interesting thing.

more & better posts soon, I promise.

tell your friends.

Lev Rubinshteyn's dispatch from the moscow protests

I was really grateful & glad today to read the poet Lev Rubinshteyn's account of the ongoing moscow madness.  there's an english translation, which I'm not sure but I think maybe LR made himsef, but I didn't like it so I'm gonna make one too.  enyoy.

We're Just Getting Started
by Lev Rubinshteyn

First of all, here's what I saw, beginning from the moment I found myself amid a river of acquaintances and strangers being nudged and kneaded forward, the rude fists of "cosmonauts" at our backs.  They were barking like the cops in a soviet war movie: "keep it moving!", "no stopping!"  Hard to say whether you were in one of those movies or caught in an anxiety dream.

At some point, one of the cosmonauts, apparently someone high-ranking, silently pointed at me.  Immediately one of his junior officers approached me without a word, grabbed my arm just above the elbow, and started dragging me to a paddy wagon.  As luck had it, this was all happening in full view of a group of reporters, and within a couple minutes -- before we had made it to the jail bus -- my phone burst into unrelenting ringing.

To be completely fair, the guy who dragged me off wasn't some savage teenager.  He was a middle-aged guy who, while pulling me along, managed to ask, "So, you're supposed to be some kind of a writer, is that right?"  "Yeah," I replied.  "You could say that."  "So what do you write?"  "You know, books."  "Books -- nice," he said, not too convincingly.  Then he added, "I'm glad you're not resisting.  I've got a broken arm -- look, you people did this yesterday."  "We people?" I asked.  "And who are 'we people'?"  "Well, these people, the demonstrators*."  "Hm, do you think maybe there was no need for you to disperse these non-violent people?" I asked.  "We have our orders," he replied, "and we follow them."

I have to say, he seemed basically to be a pretty decent guy.  (I tried to be nice too.)  But our nearly friendly conversation dwindled as we reached the goal of our brief, but significant, travels.  Just as we got there, I remembered that I had a press pass in my pocket.  "Here," I said, "my credentials.  I would very much like to know on what grounds and for what reason I am being detained."  Having checked out my media pass, my interlocutor said nothing, just indistinctly waved one arm while releasing me from the other.  Suddenly, I realized, I was free.

My phone in the meantime had kept on ringing continually.  I managed to get the word out that I was OK.  I found out news of my arrest had made several radio and internet broadcasts, some of which had seasoned the report with a story of my being savagely beaten.  Luckily, that news hadn't found its way to the eyes and ears of my family.  I felt a little bit like that one Chekhov character who falls under the horse and briefly becomes, as we might put it today, a newsmaker.

I'm completely OK, thank god.  But a lot of other people, grabbed and tossed into wagons with outright rudeness, cruelty, even barbarity -- a lot of them are completely not OK.

People of every age and gender grabbed and thrown into police cars without rhyme or reason.

These "cosmonauts" seemed in the truest sense to be nothing but zombies -- their eyes empty & unpitying, they moved like robots programmed to do exactly two things: grab things, and drag them off.

In the streets yesterday, and at Bolotnaya the day before, the powers that be once again made unmistakably crystal clear, to their citizens and the whole world, what has been more or less apparent all along.  They, the authorities, have tipped their hand: they're aware of their own illegitimacy.  Indeed, no legitimate authority could be capable of carrying on with such cowardice, such cruelty, such cynicism toward the law-abiding citizens of its own country.

While people whose only crime was a considered sense of their own responsibility for the fate of their own country were being held in the squares and on the sidewalks, while they were being crammed into paddy wagons and lovingly stroked in the ribs by billy clubs, over there, across the toothed palisade that marks off the jail they're turning our country into, a syndicate of thugs was busy dropping a crown on the head of its ignominious godfather.  But we don't have the right to forget: like the rest of them, he's not just unbound by the law -- he's completely outside it.  Because they're not even thieves.  Just bitches.  In every sense but literally -- I personally have a lot of respect for dogs of either sex.

Watching this play out unreally all you can think of are those old newsreels where you see Warsaw in '39, or Paris in the 40's, or Prague in '68.  You want to cry from the feeling of historic hopelessness.

That's just how it is.  But looking at all the faces around you, young and not so young, seeing their total fearlessness and refusal to back down, even in the face of dully swinging nightsticks, you get overcome by a completely different feeling.  Even a certainty: this is all just the beginning.

*maybe interesting: the cop's word for protestor is митингующие, mitingujushchie, the present active participle of the verb митинговать, mitingovat', which in turn is the verb form of the russian adoption of the english word meeting, митинг.  but unlike english meeting, russian miting specifically suggests a political demonstration.  also, whereas the ng in english is a diphthong indicating a velar nasal consonant, in russian нг is pronounced as two consecutive consonants.  russian for shanghai is шаньхай, shan'khaj, where the ng sound of the chinese is pronounced in russian as a palatal n (ñ).

the sign says, "really, letting those same goats -- back into the garden?"

"the vast majority of political prisoners in russia are muslims...  fascism, anyone?"

(am I getting the tone of this right, russkies?)

"liberty is secured by public transparency"

"I'm not being paid off.  I'm a citizen of Russia and I will defend my constitutional rights."

"All are equal before the law (the rest is blocked)"

"I (cock & balls downward) the 2011 elections."

"I detest this government, deceitful and vile."

the detested OMON, as in, among other things, V. Pelevin's Omon Ra.

please don't forget however that the actual cosmonauts, literal cosmonauts, are the heroes of the people.

"where's my voice?"

"we must have clean elections!"

The Constitution of the Russian Federation

interesting to see so much constitution talk.  the words "constitutional tradition" don't conjure onion domes for most of us.  what a beautiful thing.  in russian they're called poppy domes, which is far sweeter.  congratulations to russia!

my taste runs, uh, pretty standard

lately, when I sign in to blogger to write a blog post, a beautiful, shimmering button appears, emblazoned with the glorious word: monetize.  that's right, friends, you might just be making me the big bucks right as we speak.

or maybe not.

it's tempting, tho, because I love money.  don't you just love money?  I wonder what enhancements the market might bring to bear on my humble bloglet.  goosebumps!  fledgling democracy aflutter in my fingertips.  you people have been freeloading long enough.

just joshing.  a few nights ago I chatting with a friend about this blog, & he said: one thing, it's a music blog but you never post any music.  he's right!  there's just so much to talk about.  but a lot to share music about too, so ok.  well I've been cooped up in the house a lot, doing a lot of work.  one thing I've been doing over & over again is listening to my bloody valentine.  here, watch this, on the biggest screen you have, real loud, built-in computer speakers strictly verboten (try headphones):

ooooh.  listen, the world can hardly benefit from one more person mentioning that I've noticed my bloody valentine are amazing.  clearly, we agree.  part of what's so interesting to me is that loveless, the 1991 record that's obviously their central work ("the rest is commentary"), just wrecked them -- they stopped recording almost completely & Kevin Shields, the band's leader, went crazy sort of Brian Wilson style.  & when you listen to loveless it's easy to understand what wrung them so severely, which is what still makes loveless such an effulgent cave, lush with martian mosses: Kevin Shields had decided to record it perfectly.

loveless is the sound of a band's absorption into the textural & rhetorical reality of the recording studio, much as Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room is the sound of a human voice being absorbed into the special acoustical tendencies of a particular room.  both feature a parallel reversal: fore & ground swap.  on loveless, the studio plays the band, using the actual instruments & voices as a resource thru which textural ideas can be articulated.

& it struck me that that makes Kevin Shields part of a tradition that exists I bet in all styles of music, a tradition of focusing on textures & their interrelated contours within the music, not instead of but with more focus than melody or harmony or whatever.  (language that might offend some of the actual music to be associated with it -- pardon my sarong).  in particular, I'm interested in that particular swap, where color overtakes harmony, orchestration uses composition to voice itself, a beat is an opportunity for textural & rhythmic overlay, the music becomes an articulation of the room.  I got to thinking & came up with a few favorites.

so one obvious example to me is J Dilla.  again, it would be silly to try & throw my hankie on top of the mountain of praise that exists for J Dilla.  it's always seemed to me that his musics beg for the resuscitation of that mainstay of '60's jazz writing, the adjective tasteful.  tantalizing to think where his omnivorous sensibility would've expanded to if he hadn't died in anguish when he was 32 of an exotic blood disease called thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura.  (nothing that starts with two thrombos can be good.  I gather ttp is essentially the formation of tiny clots within the blood, which appear thruout the body & tear on all its bloodways, cells & vessels alike.)

obviously I don't need to persuade anyone that J Dilla is the greatest.  here are some ways I like hearing him, tho.

so, if you were alive in the mid-90s, you presumably remember this song, & its Hype Williams video:

& verily, Busta Rhymes was born.

the beat to that song is by Rashad Ringo Smith, a big deal in his own right.  I like its haywire exuberance, the she's-gonna-blow energy that enlaces with BR's vocal delivery to keep it cranking onward in a sort of a victory march warped by the sun.

but now, here, click here to listen to J Dilla's remix of it.  the change is amazing.  Dilla assimilates all the quirk & urgency & somehow rearranges the song into what seems to be its most eloquent possible iteration.  he never rounds corners, but he finds sound-forms that just match.  there's the pleasure of distillation -- & distilling, they say, is beautiful -- & of "actual measure".

his palette is huge & there's almost never a false move.  nothing like this is a rock song of the rich-color-bursting-out-of-the-bag variety, sounding almost like any of a whole industry of tinsely sincerity music. except the sounds are all weighted revelatorily against each other in their twinkling, and lyrics are boiled down to their pure syrup.  it's just perfect.  the platinum elevators or whoever may have made this song but they never made it like this.  elsewhere, the condensation & lucidness of early work like get down (this song does so much just by the shape of its beat!) focus over his career into the ghost-swan textural assertions of over the breaks, about ten years later.

there's waaaay too much amazing Dilla music for it to make any sense that I try & post a good sampling of it here.  but I can't bear the thought of not also offering tipster, to me just an astoundingly sensitive & lovely &, yeah, tasteful piece of music.  also, dig dont say a word, another hip-hop instrumental that is also a perfect pop song from outer space, neon-sharp sounds streaking lushly thru a mist of resonances, the lead in the bass, the tempo Ray Charles perfect.  holy shit SO GOOOOOD.  ok ok, I'll stop.

no! I can't stop, not without quickly revisiting just a couple of the epochal rap songs he produced.  it says a lot that dynamite! by the roots, stakes is high by de la soul, & runnin' by the pharcyde were all produced by the same guy.  a lot, for one thing, about a community of musical collaborators.  & also about one person's terrific industry: hearing, rehearing, synthesizing sounds.

when he sailed off he left crates and crates of tapes, soundings-out & -thru of different songs, his own & other people's.  & there is good news in this department, which is nice.

o yeah &:

it seems natural that the final form of a lot of music oriented around textures, shapes, & shadings would be a recording.  in the slightly older days, we thought of these as 'compositions for tape', a category that for me embraces work like my bloody valentine's loveless & J Dilla's donuts as readily as poème électronique or anything.  it makes sense because when the final piece is a recording, the person making it has especially complete control over how the textures and colorations will blend.

but there's innumerable other ways to heat a potato.  & since today I seem to be blogging only about people who have received gigantic globs of critical adulation, I also want to listen to some Thad Jones.  Thad Jones was the greatest jazz arranger of all time (his little brother Elvin was the greatest drummer of all time.  sorry if this all sounds like saying my favorite painting is guernica but come on, there's nothing better.  their big brother Hank was also an ice-solid piano player.  the title of this blog post is going to be: my taste runs, eh, pretty standard.)  like Dilla, the Joneses came up in Holy Detroit, cult city of american musics.

it's not that there's anything wrong with Thad Jones's trumpet-playing (any more than what I said before was a dig at Kevin Shields's songwriting).  but it's his work as bandleader, and especially as an arranger, that drenches me in superlatives.  here, just listen to tiptoe off his 1970 record consummation, with the Mel Lewis orchestra.  the tones spin each other in odd chunks as weirdly shaped, & as cumulatively productive, as industrial machinery.  pieties to the furnace, ThJ does everything wrong, making a song not by thinking up a melody & chords & then coloring it in by the usual rules (put the trumpets in major triads, give saxes the basic chord with a little extra color stirred in), but by foregrounding deliciously wrong harmonic shapes & structures that build into the song's deepest spelunks.  instead of rules this has what someone called "sheer, wonderful life."

& if it's a beautiful glowy gray day where you are also, you might want to check out dedication, too -- the first song on consummation, and probably the most beautiful thing anyone will ever do ever.  those chords that start up just before minute 4!  (check out also the superparticular bass of Richard Davis -- oooooh yesss.)

alright, alright, I've been typing a long time, but I can't stop without throwing in one more outrageously wonderful texturalist.  I do not mean Bach, but I want to start by talking about Bach.

it's no specialer to love Bach than my bloody valentine, Dilla, or Thad Jones.  but, if I may transition from championing guernica to championing the mona fucking lisa, Bach's intellect was so wonderful, so expansively alive with secret doors, magic reversals, transcendent structures that somersault & snowball into transcendences of earlier transcendences, that it, well, it fucked music up royally.  Bach's ecstatic sternness hovers as the anima of european music for almost two hundred years.

the ricercar a 6 from the musical offering is exemplary.  the famous story is JS Bach's composer son CPE Bach (FML) was working in the court of frederick the great, king of prussia.  as the norton bach reader has it, frederick had been collecting pianos, a new invention, & Bach Jr wanted Papa Spoon Bach to get to play around on one.  so he finagled an invitation for Bach to come to court & perform -- we think of him now as a great composer but he was also a lifelong working musician & a legendary improviser.  in a gesture that I don't understand why we don't do this anymore, Frederick presented Bach with a little theme he'd written (by all accounts, nothing special), so that Bach could perform the astounding feat of improvising a 3-part fugue based on it.  once he'd done that, to the delight of the crowd, the king demanded a 6-voice fugue, which is a little like asking someone to freestyle a sestina, or toss up a waterbed out of toothpicks & sandwich bags.  Bach said he'd have to get back to him.

&, teutonic loon that he was, Bach toootally got back to him -- like, 6 weeks later, he sent him his musikalisches opfer, 'musical offering' -- a sublimely deranged fun-pack of complex musical games arising out of the theme Frederick had supplied.  Bach defied margins & shifted the partitions of musical form.  there are riddle fugues, scores of a very contemporary feel that consist of just a few bars of music & then instructions (in latin por supuesto) for how to interpret them into entire pieces of music.  (there is an underengaged moment for interpretation in these!)  there are crab canons, which play a melody backward against itself.  mirror canons, canons with epigraphs that turn them into flattering puns. basically, the awesomest thing you can imagine one teenager sending another in the mail.  & it's maybe some of the fullest sounding-out ever of the tonal system, an astoundingly acrobatic charge thru a thousand minds' worth of musical math.  as deep an exploration into everything as anything ever was, & the ricercar a 6 is by most accounts its culminating moment, the 6-voice fugue that Bach had promised King Meeeow.  amazing.

amazing, right?  but thing is -- Bach was not into colors.  Bach was the opposite of into colors.  I mean, I get it: lutheranism was a lot newer then, still had, I think, a lot more radical energy.  we make allowances for later artists' marxism or fascism & the attendant disciplines all the time.  I think to Bach colors were maybe a little redolent of catholicism, of soul-exploitation.

but Bach in his way like all of us was wrong, & colors is like seriously the best fucking thing.  that is why, at astonishing length, I am telling this story really as a way of bringing up the last color-texture music I want to listen to, & that is Anton Webern's.  Webern to me makes the first real answer to Bach, is the first to advance in response his own equally coherent other idea, & not something, like everybody till then, that ultimately on some level argues or converses with Bach.  & Webern, like Bach, is stylistically austere -- but Webern embraces the austere use of a wider palette of colors, textures, and techniques, while rejecting the rhetoric of tonality completely.  instead of the studio hearing the band out of the music, this is the texture hearing the tonality out of the fugue.  & this is most literally true in Webern's orchestration of that 6-voice crown in the musical offering, Bach's ricercar a 6.

suddenly, colors & textures come streaming into the cathedral.  & here it's just that cathedral -- Bach's composition, I mean -- that gives Webern room to make the tonal explorations he wants without loosing his modernist scruples.  he just adopts the space of Bach's fugue as a found room & hears his colors into it, color after color, spanning, turning, terrific.

Webern to me is exactly one of those musician who hears into a formal flux that teaches us so much about what we've been listening to.  in Webern's case, it's about the sound-world of the orchestra.  this is also really true of his two-movement symphony, which I always thought sort of pitches itself as a kind apocalypse of the whole symphonic tradition.  you know, beethoven this!  it's got a completely different logic from tonality, one even more exhausting.  or exhaustive.  anyhow, when a crowd one night at carnegie hall, impatient for Rachmaninoff, jeered at Webern's symphony, driving both Morton Feldman & John Cage to leave, they caught sight of each other on the steps, said 'wasn't that beautiful?', & started a conversation & became best friends.  & what the conversation was about was how great Webern had sounded in such a big room.  a story worth telling about colors in music.

I also want to talk about something completely unrelated, a topic that devoted readers & personal friends will know is near & dear to me.  this is the subject of suing the cops, an area in which there was big news the other day.  so, here's a flyover lesson in something (I think is) important.  when I write about legal developments, I always imagine myself before law school as my basic target audience.  please forgive a little legalizin'.

ok.  so.  you got rights.  or, at least theoretically, you got some rights.  (this is in the u.s., I mean.  I learned today on the internet that the blog has readers in russia & japan!  hi guys!  what's it like over there?)  for instance, the 8th amendment to the constitution gives you the right not to be subject to 'excessive bail' or 'cruel and unusual punishment'.  the 5th amendment gives you the right to 'due process of the laws'.  these rights are federal, because they come from the federal constitution.  you got rights under the constitution of your state too, sometimes the same ones, sometimes a little different.  if rights are granted to you under state laws, they're state rights.  (not to be confused with state's rights, a phrase bigots sometimes use hoping to make their violence smell like liberty.)

so, if you've been spending some time in the streets lately, you may have been seeing a lot of government officials violating the rights of a lot of your friends & their skulls.  the whole idea that rights exist is a response to the all-thirsting proboscis of sovereignty, which has a particular way of skulking into our beds while we sleep (or straight up our butts if we disrupt the smooth upward accumulation of capital).  let's do ourselves a favor & try to think of the government as lonely rather than apocalyptic.  whatever.  (hi guys!  nice sunglasses, btw.)

what a lot of people don't realize is that the court system is supposed to be a main protection against abuses of rights.  judges issue warrants to police and other government investigators.  habeas corpus petitions enable courts to review the legality of a particular prisoner's detention.  and there are two ways a person can sue a government body or official for violating her rights: one is called a bivens action, and one is called a 1983 suit.  (bivens actions are named after the 1971 supreme court decision bivens v. six unknwon named agents, which made them possible.  1983 suits are named after the statute that makes them possible, which is title 18 of the us code, section, you guessed it, 1983.)  a bivens action is a civil lawsuit for a federal government official's violation of a federal right, and & a 1983 suit is the pretty close state equivalent.

if you're not a person who's routinely abused and humiliated by the police, your countryfolk are.  these lawsuits kind of come to sand, tho.  you've already been humiliated, treated as an enemy by your government on the most local, sensitive level.  some clown in fitted blue peejays might decide to pants you anytime, in public, maybe at gunpoint.  these lawsuits play, at the very best, an infuriatingly slow part in any progress toward changing that.  but they are important if law is important, the book of what we mean to say or know we see.  they can offer us, speaking optimistically, some hand in drawing the daily, rough border between government conduct & people's actual rights.  they can also be a place to tell our stories.

naturally, the government isn't going to just accept a thwack in the proboscis every time we catch it secreting away our vital inner juices.  no, as legal doctrine in this area has developed, the courts have rolled out, shall we say, a robust line of defenses that are available to federal and state officials when they're accused of depriving people of their rights.  of these, the most common is the dread qualified immunity.  remember that "tonight I may eat tacos" guy in connecticut?  he claimed qualified immunity.  the bad guys from kent state?  they literally invented qualified immunity (or the supreme court invented it literally for them.)  it has more appropriate applications, of course, but my real point is that often these cases turn almost completely on the question of qualified immunity.  &, while the details can get pretty hairy, the basic nature of qualified immunity is simple.

government officials are immune from bivens and 1983 liability, even when they have in fact deprived people of their rights, unless a reasonable official in their position would have known that she was violating a clearly-established right.  that language is characteristically cockamamie, but it cleaves into two pretty tidy questions: was the right that got violated clearly established?  & would a reasonable government official have known that what she was doing was violating that clearly-established right?

José Padilla may be sort of a dillweed.  born in brooklyn & raised in chicago, he got pretty interested in terrorism in the late 90s & spent some time flying around the world learning about it.  on may 8, 2002, he was arrested at o'hare airport.   the warrant that empowered them to take him into custody identified him as a material witness in the criminal case that was still emerging from the events of september 11, 2001.  his lawyers quickly sued to demand a review of his detention.  but then, on june 9, two days before the federal court decision was due out, president bush declared Padilla an 'enemy combatant'.  despite sounding like a pretty meaningful phrase, it wasn't.  actually, nobody knew what it meant to declare somebody an 'enemy combitant' in 2002.  all they knew was it didn't mean 'criminal defendant' & it didn't rhyme with 'citizen'.  that was the point.

(by the way, that federal judge who never got to issue his ruling?  don't feel sad, it was none other than notorious racist & gobbering rectum-on-wheels Michael "Mickadoo" Mukasey, who in just five patient & dignified years would be promoted to attorney general.  who'da thunk.  arg arg monotone.)

Padilla was immediately flushed incommunicado into military detention.  bush set a horde of blessed blind monkeys flailing at winged typewriters, hoping one of them would write him a document that said "torturing enemy combatants is tops.  go crazy."  & in a very blessed & very flailing attorney named John Yoo, he got his wish.  Yoo was an assistant attorney general, & what he wrote has become notorious, a set of memos emiting smokescreen that made it sound like there was a lot of head-scratching going on about whether it was legal to torture enemy combatants.  but, I mean I guess so?  yah, go for it!

this was really great news for the people who really wanted to torture José Padilla.  before this it had sounded illegal, but there was no better reason for that than that it is illegal, unquestionably, all the way illegal, basically the most illegal thing possible.  now, a guy had written a piece of paper that said maybe it wasn't so illegal.  (I like to think that the first draft of Yoo's memo might've had a postscript that begins, "By the way, if you really think about it, how do we all know we're not actually dreaming right now?")  so, they tortured him.  they tortured him by holding shit in front of his face & making him smell it.  they subjected him to sensory deprivation.  they didn't let him sleep.  they told him they were going to murder him.  he says they dosed him on acid and pcp against his will.  they denied him access to doctors.  they didn't let him tell anyone where he'd been taken.  they didn't let his mom see him.

now it's years later, & José Padilla has filed a bivens claim.  he's suing John Yoo, alleging that Yoo "set in motion Padilla's allegedly illegal interrogation and detention, both by formulating unlawful policies for the designation, detention and interrogation of suspected 'enemy combatants' and by issuing legal memoranda designed to evade legal restraints on those policies and to immunize those who implemented them."  Yoo, of course, asserted qualified immunity.  oh, clutch.  & the big recent news is that a panel of 3 federal judges in the 9th circuit has just issued its ruling on his immunity.

& what the court found is that, yup, John Yoo is qualifiedly immune.  there are two reasons why.  the first is that the rights of enemy combatants were not, quo the court, clearly established at the time Padilla was tortured.  it has been the law since 2004 that citizens, even when they are detained as enemy combatants, retain a "right to be free from involuntary confinement by [their] own government without due process of law," that they are entitled to "a fair opportunity to rebut the Government's factual assertions [against them] before a factual decisionmaker", that their right to talk to a lawyer is "unquestionable", and that their detention must be "devoid of all penal character."  the supreme court set all these standards in its decision in hamdi v. rumsfeld, a case brought by Yaser Esam Hamdi.  Hamdi was another American citizen (born in baton rouge), held and tortured as an enemy combatant at the same time as Padilla.  his case prompted the supreme court to reinstate habeas rights & prohibit virtually every aspect of the manner in which prisoners like Hamdi and Padilla had been detained, thoroughly starved of due process.  but, the 9th circuit asks, how could these rights have been clearly established from 2001 to 2003, before hamdi was decided?

the second reason why Yoo is qualifiedly immune is that, even tho it is "beyond debate" that torturing citizens was illegal before 2001, and even tho the court does not disagree that the government did torture Padilla, it was not clear at that time that the treatment to which he was subjected was torture.  "The meaning of 'severe pain or suffering,'" the court notes, "was less clear in 2001-03."  thus, a reasonable official might not have known a right was being violated.  um, eureka?

this national game of hide-the-bruise makes me sick.  the unspoken corollary to this decision is that torture -- & of citizens -- is alright for the government to default to, particularly when it feels confused.  one cone of flurrying papers, arising from one desk somewhere in washington, can derange the entire conscience of government.  the lights just blink off.  this is a big trend in our judiciary.  you have the right to remain silent if you will speak to demand it.  you have the right to offer symbolic speech, but if it's dialectically effective we'll have to go hard literal with the nightsticks.  & you have the right not to be tortured, so long as we have already tortured you.

it's a sad day, for what law is supposed to want to be.  qualified immunity my clearly defined ass.  another victory for that same authority that shields the armed & depraved bureaucrats of the streets, the taco-mockers, the kent-state shooters, & now the willful stroke sufferers who just can't tell what they're looking at, voluntary zombies of our shame.  how's that for a room to be heard in.

o, not quite end.  a few things I wanted to share: I thought this article Marjorie Perloff wrote in the boston review was her at her best & really good fun.  I had knowne not theire were othyrs like me, oh, but yette theire arre.  & also, uh, you guys!  you guys!

did you actually read all this?  write me a blog comment.  call it a blomment.  you love it.  it's great.