Anodyne
Monday, November 30, 2015
 

Left Out Family Man

"I have 2 boys age 4 and 2, a 10 year-old veteran long-haired chihuahua, my wife is expecting in less than 6 weeks and we don't even have a car big enough to fit 3 carseats in the backseat. We know Christmas is right around the corner and we're trying to keep our account from hitting the negatives and a roof over our head. As a man and head of my household, I need a miracle."

Not to be outdone, Adrian Walker, Odradek and the vampires all plot crowd-sourced internet fundraisers of their own!
- posted by cjb @ 9:17 PM
Thursday, November 26, 2015
 

Winter sunflower, 2015
- posted by cjb @ 11:05 PM
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
 

The Guilty Demos

"Barry Gibb — vocal, guitar
Blue Weaver — keyboard
Albhy Galuten — synthesizer, drum machine
Engineer: ?
Producer: Barry Gibb about October 1979, Criteria Recording Studios, Miami 

Not intended for release, these are demos of songs submitted to Barbra Streisand for her upcoming album. Barry sings all the vocals in falsetto so that they are in Barbra’s range, with instrumental support from Blue and Albhy. These recordings were a new middle stage in the record-making process, between the rough work tapes by the songwriters and the finished recordings.

Demos of ten songs were released on iTunes in 2006."
- posted by cjb @ 10:30 PM
Sunday, November 22, 2015
 

Bernadette and Odin, 2015
- posted by cjb @ 9:49 PM
 

Time machine, 2057: there I am in the last scene.
- posted by cjb @ 9:33 PM
 

Painter, 2015

White: a blank page or canvas. His favorite – so many possibilities.
- posted by cjb @ 8:38 PM
 

"Your cat is set to OFF when you first take it out of the box."
- posted by cjb @ 6:01 PM
Saturday, November 21, 2015
 

"He arrived attired in well-worn high-top sneakers, jeans whose major characteristic was that they looked comfortable, and a sports coat whose better days had been years before. He carried what must have been the world's largest jock bag, crammed with newly-purchased bottles of wine that did not quite fit into the zippered closing. He sat down behind a long table with the other writers and managed to behave conventionally for about half the discussion. Then, apparently able to stay put no longer, he leapt up, walked around to the front of the table to be closer to the audience, and paced back and forth, gesturing and talking. The other three writers (none exactly shrinking violets) tried to interrupt but finally lapsed into what might have been either respectful or overwhelmed silence. It was one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever seen."
- posted by cjb @ 9:29 AM
Thursday, November 19, 2015
 

Sunday
By the blue
Purple yellow red water
On the green
Purple yellow red grass,
As we pass
Through arrangements of shadows
Towards the verticals of trees
Forever
By the blue
Purple yellow red water
On the green
Orange violet mass
Of the grass
In our perfect park
Made of flecks of light
And dark
 
And parasols

People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On an ordinary Sunday....
- posted by cjb @ 10:22 PM
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
 

- posted by cjb @ 10:14 PM
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
 
Islands in the Stream

"So they were childish and childlike. Forgive them. They wrote a dozen of the finest songs of the twentieth century. The Bee Gees were children of the world."

[....]

"This airtight upbringing informed their insularity, their prickly, defensive behavior, and many of their deeply strange early recordings: songs like 'Holiday' (no. 11, ’67) and 'I Started a Joke' (no. 6, ’68) suggest they were beamed down from another planet, aliens who had been given tiny scraps of information about what pop music was all about and were bravely trying to piece it together."

Everyone assumes that I would naturally sing Steely Dan songs at karaoke, but the few songs available to my (incredibly limited) vocal range basically consist of "I Started a Joke," Barry/Barbara's "Guilty,"  & "Fanny."  (Also James Blunt's "You're Beautiful," about which the less said the better)
- posted by cjb @ 9:27 PM
 

- posted by cjb @ 8:34 AM
 
Reading Chris Nealon's Heteronomy -- the first contemporary poetry to click with me since Parkway -- & here's his new chapbook The Virtuous Ones, free, a gift, & it seems that he loved Pete too:

Peter Culley I thought you should know —

The day after you died I took Parkway with me into the woods

     Or, well ... it was Rock Creek Park 

I fell asleep contentedly beneath a tree, around the halfway point —

I wasn’t dreaming quite — my sleep was not that deep — 

But in the quiet I could hear you approach

I heard you telling me that you’d liked reading backwards, as a child

I felt you were describing, in case I wanted to try it, how you’d
     learned to write those lines like brushed-up nap on a trampled
          carpet, fresh again —

     You know I’ll never have your mad skills

But I’m taking you with me into the woods

- posted by cjb @ 8:09 AM
Monday, November 16, 2015
 

Barry Gibb, "Heartbreaker" (Demo for Dionne Warwick)

Relevant to the next exhibition's pictures.

"Not one of them explained how an artist can be said to intrude on her own invention." (George Bowering, probably misremembered, on Ethel Wilson)
- posted by cjb @ 11:39 PM
Thursday, November 05, 2015
 

Now lacking: any reason to visit the Condescending Prick Regional Art Gallery.  I recall the Chairman of the Board descending from his cloud to address the working masses many years ago, and his theme: business is hard; the Board makes complicated decisions so that you proles laboring down below don't have to.

On my shit list ever since, & not getting off it any time soon.   
- posted by cjb @ 12:07 PM
Tuesday, November 03, 2015
 

"What are representations used for? They explain one thing by means of another. The object we want to understand is the 'thing': the thing-in-itself, the source. The object that we know quite a bit about already, to which we compare the source via a representation, we call the standard object.  It is the site of appearance, the target."  (Avner Ash & Robert Gross, Fearless Symmetry: Exposing the Hidden Patterns of Numbers)
- posted by cjb @ 9:30 AM
Monday, November 02, 2015
 

"Part of our agenda was to create an atmosphere that dissociates the listener from the original work. Many of the songs begin and end with ambient, instrumental sections that do very little to reflect the Steely Dan originals. We were hoping that when the chord structures and vocal melodies from the original appear in our interpretation they will be considered relative to our noisescapes, not the '77 version."

"I knew when you sent it to me you were letting me know it was finished and you weren't entertaining any changes."  (L. recollected in conversation)

YOU MUST WORK HARDER TO WRITE POETRY OF EXCELLENCE

holes which are then patched over
with similar stuff
take from elsewhere (Peter Culley)

Aja by the Darcys

Up on the hill
people never stare.
They just don't care.
Chinese music
under banyen trees,
low thrum, harsh
metal stutter, a
garbage truck
reversing fast
back up the lane,
its warning beep
Josie's first three
bars--
- posted by cjb @ 10:43 PM
 

"Super awesome go-to misogyny, boys! Good job coming up with another reason why none of us would ever want to actually meet up in person with people that anonymously hang around a Steely Dan message board."
- posted by cjb @ 8:36 AM

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