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Evan Parker pointed me to this.

He says: “Rumsfeld had a very bad way of dealing with national defense, but if you apply what he’s said to improvised music, it begins to make a lot of sense.”

How do you find the unknown unknowns?

The Speech

I would like to take this importune titty to announce that I always knew I was great as I am simple. Being a hot young news item was never on my nightstand, but when you’re hot, I’m you. I’ll hammer with you here: I was always sincere. That, I believe, is the plaquebird in my secret pudding. If you want the recipe then buy my book, tapes and video. I couldn’t say it clearer than in three mediums. Haven’t I won the golden humble award six years running like the nose of an elderly dope fiend? Try that on over your tights, Superman. I bet you slice it into the woods every time and wear a dress at home and bogart all the jujubes. Go to hell, please. Just straight there like a speeding bullshit from a fake planet. Can’t you see with that x-ray business that I’m trying to audience these noodles here? Imparted a right-from-the-gut success story: From My Bowels To Your Inbox–that’s the stuff. Sells like electric underwear.

-by Justin Courter

April 2010: Martin Heslop, Philippe Melanson and I played a couple nights at Upstairs – the jazz club in Montreal. It was the beginning of spring and the sun was starting to excite everyone. After this particular evening, we went bowling nearby until the early morning. You can hear it in the music – the beginning of long nights and the coup against winter.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/12751739″]

The Queen of the Belgians

Commemorating Astrid’s death
The Belgians made a postage stamp
That my father prized, for her face
Like my mother’s, Thirties-beautiful,
Serene around its edges.

I’ve got it in my album now
A thing handed down, like advice,
For me to find in the face
Of a queen at Europe’s edge
What it was my father found.

Queen Astrid, that my father
Put in an album for her face,
Is puffed into my thoughts by love.
It stands there like the heart of all I know.
I am the age my father was.

-Douglas Dunn
From ‘New Selected Poems 1964-2000’,
Faber and Faber Limited, 2003, p. 12.

I like to think that Douglas Dunn worried easily away at this image of Queen Astrid’s face, bringing it up again and again in each verse, turning it this way and that until he landed unexpectedly on what he could never have imagined he was looking for – the realisation that he is turning into his father. Had he, of course, set out to reach that conclusion he may have never got there. This unmechanical repetition, newly thinking the thought each time it reoccurs, slowly heightens the meaning that emerges. When the poem finally takes an unexpected turn into the culminating image of the poet as his father, this image is amplified by a chorus of Queen’s faces.
-Jonathan Burrows, A Choreographer’s Handbook, Routledge, 2010, p. 11

To my friends who struggle with doubting their work: there’s a great passage on anxiety and art in Night Studio, A Memoir of Philip Guston, by Musa Mayer (the artist’s daughter).

“When my father [Philip Guston] returned from a week of tests at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore once, he wrote to Dore Ashton, ‘I thought my organs were rotting away, but no–all in fine shape. I’m supposed to lose weight, stop booze, stop smoking and have no anxieties about life and art. Imagine! I didn’t bother explaining to him that my whole life is based on anxiety–where else does art come from, I ask you?'”

Musa Mayer contextualizes this with a passage from art critic Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object.

“‘The anxiety of art is a philosophical quality,’ Harold Rosenberg concludes, ‘perceived by artists to be inherent in acts of creation in our time. It manifests itself, first of all, in the questioning of art itself. It places in issue the greatness of the art of the past (How really great was it? How great is it for us?) and the capacity of the contemporary spirit to match that greatness. Anxiety is thus the form in which modern art raises itself to the level of human history.'”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg2EJO9zwws&w=640&h=390]

“We think that we dance to music. But I’ve noticed more and more that that’s not what I do, and I don’t think that’s what I see other people do. I see them hanging and falling always around the music, but never grasping hold of it. We worked a lot on this piece trying to find a way to perform it where we’re not marching in step, not like an army going ‘crunch, crunch, crunch’, but rather that the counterpoint between us is somehow in all the spaces around the marching.”
-Jonathan Burrows

I came across these two strangely parallel poems in the October and February issues of Poetry Magazine.
I love the animal references, Ostriker’s use of the word legato, and Young for his “Hello, / oceans of air.”

The New Optimism
by Dean Young

The recital of the new optimism
was oft interrupted, rudeness
in the ramparts, an injured raven
that need attendance, pre-op
nudity. The young who knew everything
was new made babies who unforeseeably
would one day present their complaint.
Enough blame to go around but the new
optimism didn’t stop, helped one
pick up a brush, another a spatula
even as the last polar bear sat
on his shrinking berg thinking,
I have been vicious but my soul is pure.
And the new optimism loves the bear’s
soul and makes images of it to sell
at fair-trade craft fairs with laboriously
knotted hunks of rope, photos of cheese,
soaps with odd ingredients, whiskey,
sand, hamburger drippings, lint,
any and everything partaking of the glowing
exfoliating cleanup. And the seal
is sponged of the oil spill. And the broken
man is wheeled in a meal. War finally
seems stupid enough. You look an animal
in the eye before eating it and the gloomy
weather makes the lilacs grow. Hello,
oceans of air. Your dead cat loves you
forever and will welcome you forever home.

###

April
by Alicia Ostriker

The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing their e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting their pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in their brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals’ piss at their feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singing along in all the wastebaskets

Unreleased recordings of Marathon from 2010. Recorded by Tim Gowdy at Chromatic Audio.

Philippe Melanson – drums
Martin Heslop – acoustic bass
Gabriel Lambert – guitars
Adam Kinner – saxophone

[soundcloud width=”100%” height=”165″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&show_playcount=false&show_artwork=true&color=76190a” url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/504493″] Marathon 2010 EP by Adam Kinner

A typical thaw day in March. There were cannoli on the counter and lasagne in the oven. Gab decided to bring the whammy guitar to overdub and it was like some kind of breakthrough that we all knew would change ‘Lift, Bend, Thrust, Pray’ forever. When we recorded the vocals in that song we were all lined up against the back wall, yelling into the drum overheads, trying to remember what Martin said about the directives: ‘It’s sort of all that you need to do in life.’