springing?

Heya Bunnies:

Been running around like a lil old nut! 3 cities in 3 weeks and on to #4. Been having fun traveling but now the cold bug (a.k.a. too many airplanes) has grounded me for the weekend...I'll live.

Sunny and pleasant in Brooklyn! While I was out getting even more orange juice I saw lots of hipsters and regulars making the rounds, too.

Mine over the season included Norf Cakalak, Oh HI! Oh and one of the beautiful cities on earth, Chi-town. That place is crazy gorgeous. Brooklyn New Yorkers are not generous with out-borough praise but this place is an astounding gotham to behold. No wonder the new Batmans are shot there. It's totally retro-futuristic. This is a *detail* of the Harold Washington Library (yay HW! One of the unsung heroes that aided our current president's ascent.) The picture after the detail is the building.

Keep in mind: this is a *library*:
































Got a chance to see a show, catch up with arty friends and hang out with the sophisticated and downright perky Kimiko Hahn. Super fun!


















Last night, I saw this lovely band: Melvin Gibbs' "Elevated Entity". If y'all know Melvin you know the roof was raised!















A great project. He's one of the great New York musicians (we'll claim him) but we have to share him with the rest of the planet, especially with the crew he's got for this project. Here's an overview --

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/musician.php?id=15988

And he's a Gemini. I claim all of the twins (except the Bush parents, Guiliani and anyone I don't agree with). Spring is our season coming up.

So I was happily thinking these fond thoughts and happened to be laying about in my sickened state and ran into Michael Moore's film, SiCKO (sp). That movie is one heck of a tear-jerker and a very deep meditation.

Got me to thinking that the concept of "insurance" is really deep! Both SiCKO and this whole AIG thing makes me think of the relationship we have with the concept. I came across this joke from an insurance education page:

Comedians often joke that, “it shouldn’t be called life insurance. It should be called death insurance because it doesn’t pay unless you die. And even then it still doesn’t pay you; it pays everyone BUT you!” (http://www.ensurance.com/lifeInformation.asp)

That's kinda what Moore's film is dealing with and that the taxpayer bailout frustration is about. Feeling exploited and vulnerable. If you haven't seen the movie in a while, it's worth another look. Bring your hankies...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6555965314375016580

(Some of the links might need pasting, btw)

But with the warm weather other possibilities seem feasible:

Happily [excerpt]
by Lyn Hejinian

What is not is now possible, a ponderable
You muse on musing on—so much now but you do
You can rearrange what the day gets from accidents but
you can’t derive its reality from them
The dot just now adrift on the paper is not the product of
the paper dark
Nearly negative but finite it springs from its own shadow
and cannot be denied the undeniable world once it is
launched—once it’s launched it’s derived
Tonight sounding roughly it isn’t quite that only words can
reason beyond what’s reasonable that I drop my eyes to
Something comes
The experiences generated by sense perception come by the
happenstance that is with them
Experiences resulting from things impinging on us
There is continuity in moving our understanding of them as they appear
Some which are games bring with them their own rules for
action which is a play we play which we may play with
an end we value not winning
The dilemmas in sentences form tables of discovery of
things created to create the ever better dilemma which is
to make sense to others


(hope Lynn doesn't consider this too much of an abomination of her poem...I used the Poets.org website to cut & paste from.)

In like Flynn...the Lion!

(If you read the subject heading with a New York accent, it rhymes!)

Well dahlinks, the last few weeks have been kinda interesting and the new month is keeping yours truly a'hoppin'... This'll be a little long. Just pretend I wrote 3 and put them together -- which is basically what I did.

Couple weeks ago I got a chance to see two really yummy mainstream films just before Oscar's Day, Milk and The Wrestler. (Still got lots of catching up to do in this regard, obvs.) Milk was one of the most endearing an elegant films I've seen. Just lovely and Penn was astounding. Such a nice light touch and he made me ask my favorite types of questions when I'm watching a film: "*That's* the guy from 'Mystic River'/'We're No Angels'/'Dead Man Walking'? Really lovely storytelling from Van Sant. I saw it with one of my buddies and we had to get T shirts afterwards, we were so giddy!

The Wrestler's tone was very different, gritty. Mickey Rourke was almost unbearable to see. Just heartwrenching. I didn't get a T-shirt that time but another friend of mine and I did take away lots of food for thought. I saw the film as more of a meditation on aging but that might just be because I don't care about sports not even contrived ones. Without that 'distraction' it was easier to look into the trajectory of this modestly hopeful character stubbornly plodding forward. After the movie I saw the comedian Marc Maron's new live show "Scorching the Earth". Very intense. My brother and I saw the first draft of it in Brooklyn and it's definitely gotten stronger. Raw, unapologetic and toward the end Marc reads this letter he wrote (that's all that I'll say about it -- see it yourself) but prefaces it by saying that he looks just as 'bad' as the person he wrote it to. An understatement. If you see the internet show he does w/ Sam Seder, the performance is like a more combative and raw version of his persona on Break Room Live.

Well that was a couple weekends ago...

Last weekend I hung out at Duke for the Infection in the Sentence experimental poetry conference. Got to hang out with my buddy Fred, jazz musician/poet and bon vivant Cecil Taylor, Brent, Christian, Eileen and lots of folks it's been good to see and been to long to see including two -- Susan and Cecilia -- whom I'd seen last at the surreal Helen Adam reading last year. Well you can find the whole list of participants of the conference (except for Kamau B who couldn't attend due to illness) on the Duke U website by googling the search terms. Lots of fun and way too much food. Quite yummy fare in the south and I swear the plates are bigger in North Carolina! I also got to see a grown up soon-to-be-former teen I know who looks like a lady and everything! I remember when her age was in the single digits. Ah, time fleeting thing.

Speaking of academics, I got a mo to check out a talk at my lovely Institute that featured theorist Randy Martin. It was a great talk and those dancer types sure are lovely and demonstrative! They really can fill up a space! During a really fun lunch organized by Jon Beller, I found out that back in the day Mr. Martin had also met/took classes with an actor I've long been a fan of: Bill Irwin. (His presentation as George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" was an exhultant character study.) That's some crazy 1 degree of separation stuff right there!

Snow came in this month and I barely dodged it in the air, I swear! My plane touched down before the snow fell. Phew!
Even though 'the weather outside is frightful' -ly cold, feels a little like spring is around the corner. That Puxatawney Phil was right again, I hate to admit but in NY at least, it's sunny!

I'm traveling a bit now and hope to send off another missive soon in higher double digits!

Tracie

A Word dropped careless on a Page
by Emily Dickinson

A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria --


I Sing the Body Electric
by Walt Whitman (first stanza)

1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.


A Noun Sentence
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah

A noun sentence, no verb
to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed
after making love ... a salty perfume
or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy
like the sunset at your strange windows.
My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding
my need, hesitant between two doors:
entry a joke, and exit
a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid
the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I
as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall,
chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity
toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows. Wishing
for the present tense a foothold for walking behind me
or ahead of me, barefoot. Where
is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where
is futility? Where is the road to the road?
And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present
tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate
and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam
of speech the dots on the letters,
wishing for the present tense a foothold
on the pavement ...