Later

From the University of Texas at Austin, Design Your Own Anti-Procrastination Plan, a page of useful strategies.

That (In)famous Line

My essay on a line from Van Dyke Parks' lyrics for the song "Cabin Essence" is now up at Jan Jansen's website, Van Dyke Parks. "Cabin Essence" is a song from SMiLE (words by VDP, music by Brian Wilson).

The line in question,

Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield

has become a touchstone for thinking about SMiLE. "Over and over . . ." piqued the antagonism of Beach Boy Mike Love, who insisted that VDP explain what it meant. VDP preferred to let his work speak for itself. Conflict over the lyric content of SMiLE--a far cry from, say,

I'm gettin' bugged drivin' up and down the same old strip

--was one of many factors in the breakdown of the original SMiLE project. This line from "I Get Around" is of course wonderful in its own right, but by 1966 Brian Wilson was gettin' bugged drivin' up and down the same old strip and was interested in pursuing new directions in his music.

You can read the essay by clicking here.

From the Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl
This site has photographs from the files of the Farm Security Administration and interviews with men and women who experienced the Dust Bowl.

Voices from the Dust Bowl
This site documents life in the Farm Security Administration's migrant work camps.

Jim Jarmusch: favorite books

From an audio clip included with the Criterion Collection dvd of Down by Law:

I love the book Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. I like Flaubert's novels, especially Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education. I like pretty much anything by Balzac. I like Proust. I love Orlando Furioso by Arisoto. I love the Divine Comedy, especially the Inferno. How about Hamlet? Anything by William Blake. Rimbaud, Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. I love the New York school of poets, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, David Shapiro, Ron Padgett, Frank Lima, et cetera. I love Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel. I love Rilke, Neruda, Pierre Reverdy, Mallarmé, Georges Bataille, Blaise Cendrars, his poems and his novel Moravagine also. I love books like The Woman Chaser by Charles Williford, Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, James M. Cain's Serenade. I love the book The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain, one of my favorite books ever written. Luc Sante, one of my favorite writers, The Factory of Facts and of course Low Life. Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York, soon to be a major motion picture. I love Michael Ondaatje's writing, especially the book Coming Through Slaughter. I love the novels of Samuel Beckett, far more than his plays. That's just a start anyway. They're some of my favorite books.

Jim Jarmusch's films include Coffee and Cigarettes, Night on Earth, and Mystery Train.

Bobby Short

From the New York Times:

Bobby Short, the cherubic singer and pianist whose high-spirited but probing renditions of popular standards evoked the glamour and sophistication of Manhattan nightlife, died today at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was 80, and had homes in Manhattan and southern France. . . .

Mr. Short liked to call himself a saloon singer, and his "saloon," since 1968, was one of the most elegant in the country, the intimate Cafe Carlyle tucked in the Hotel Carlyle on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There for six months each year, in a room where he was only a few feet away from his audience, he sang and accompanied himself on the piano. Although he had said that last year's engagement would be his final one, he reversed himself in June and extended for 2005, the 50th anniversary of the club.

Over the years, Mr. Short transcended the role of cabaret entertainer to become a New York institution and a symbol of civilized Manhattan culture. In Woody Allen's films, a visit to the Carlyle became an essential stop on his characters' cultural tour. He attracted a chic international clientele that included royalty, movie stars, sports figures, captains of industry, socialites and jazz aficionados . . . .

His social status sometimes overshadowed his significance as a jazz pianist, singer and scholar. Mr. Short dedicated himself to spreading an awareness of the African-American contribution to New York's musical theater. In his pantheon of great American songwriters, Cole Porter stood side by side with Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, and Waller's sometime lyricist Andy Razaf, who wrote the words for "Guess Who's in Town?", his unofficial musical greeting.

You can read the Times obituary by clicking here. (Use mediajunkie as your name and password.)

Apocalypse Then

For anyone in the "downstate Illinois" area, there's a terrific exhibit at the Krannert Art Museum, "Apocalypse Then: Images of Destruction, Prophecy, and Judgment from Dürer to the Twentieth Century." From the museum website:

Presenting five centuries of art inspired by apocalyptic writing and thought, this exhibition includes woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and interpretations of the Book of Revelation by Dürer, Gustave Doré, and Odilon Redon. Other works in the exhibition reveal how apocalyptic imagery was used by artists as diverse as Georges Rouault, Rockwell Kent and Philip Guston to illustrate their political, social, and personal reactions to war and revolution, and William Hogarth, William Blake, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns reacting to the inevitability of evil and death.

Organized by Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

For me the most exciting thing was unexpected--Jasper Johns' Skin with O'Hara Poem (1963-65), a print that I've known only from relatively tiny reproductions.

The Krannert Art Museum is located at 500 E. Peabody Drive in Champaign, Illinois (phone 217-333-1860). The museum is open on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9 to 5; Wednesday from 9 to 8, and Sunday from 2 to 5. Admission is free, with a suggested $3 donation. The exhibit closes on April 3, 2005.

Speak, Memory

Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence. The first card of the triplet is encoded as a person, the second as a verb, and the third as an object. For example, when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old public-school headmaster in a suit of armor. The more vivid the image, the more likely it is not to be forgotten.

From an article on the U.S. Memory Championship. You can read the entire article by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Near South

The Chicago-based magazine Near South just published its fifth issue (Winter 2005), a mixture of poetry and prose, including eight poets and one dramatist responding to "Blue in Green," one of the five pieces on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. My contribution, a poem called "Early Music," is dedicated to my dad, who had me listening to Kind of Blue when I was a three-year-old kid in 1959.

In this issue I especially like Evie Shockley's blue and green lines:

                 blue spring grew green a cash crop ::
ballads fuel a blown fuse future--

There's no website for Near South, but a copy of the magazine ($5) can be had from

Near South
c/o Garin Cycholl
3617 W. Belle Plaine
Chicago, IL 60618

"Some Enchanted Evening"

Teaching Marianne Moore's "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing" and Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West" ("Arranging, deepening, enchanting night") made me remember this more modest prose-poem (of mine):

Some Enchanted Evening

                                 for Ron Padgett

light

silence

unfolds

I am making a list of words never to use in a poem. Now I am taking a mental picture of it to send to my folks. The next thing to do is develop. The outcome is clear, with a good background (the family tree). And now for the envelope. Its mental flap unfolds with surprising volume. "Silence!" says the librarian. "More light," whispers Goethe.

"21 for 21"

From today's New York Times:

The homemade video captures the first hour after the stroke of midnight when the birthday boy turned 21 and could legally drink.

His friends thrust shots at him in a booth at the Bison Turf bar and taunt him to drink, shouting obscenities and chanting his name as he tosses back one after the other with beer chasers. After 30 minutes and the 13th shot--a Prairie Fire, or tequila with Tabasco--he vomits into a metal bucket, provided by the bar, the birthday souvenir taken home by so many 21-year-olds before him. Then he resumes his drinking.

"It's the best time of his life," a friend slurs to the camera. "We've all done it. It's a tradition."

The tradition is "power hour," or "21 for 21," as it is known in some other places across the country: 21-year-olds go to a bar at midnight on their birthdays, flash newly legal identification and then try to down 21 shots in the hour or so before the bar closes, or as fast as possible.

It can be a deadly rite of passage.

You can read the rest of this article by clicking here.

[To read New York Times articles, use mediajunkie as your name and password. Or visit bugmenot for a working name and password.]