tell it to me slowly

Dear Words you Want to Hear,

Your song for today is here.   Another 45 version.  Ready to play it in my new Untrained Orchestra?  Don't practice too much, or we will have to change the name!

Sacred Calf

Dear Little Dogies,


You know, I could report to you every day about the marvelous things I see behind the wheel of my automobile.  A few evenings ago, I passed a particularly lovely slope, just after a sweeping horseshoe curve, that I have often seen remarkable sights in- coyote, vultures, some cattle now and then, a shrub, windwolves. 

On this particular evening it was being traversed at a complementary angle by a cream colored spotted cow with a beautiful, brand new calf by its side- the lowering sunlight shone on it's new face, and oh! what a sight!  So new, and so pale- all soft grey spottings at its head; it was an absolutely sacred cow.  This calf could turn you into all kinds of believers, it was that beautiful. 

I tried to fix it in my mind forever, so I could return to it and that moment over and over, because it was a moment that had no doubts, had no questions, no anticipations, no desire- it was a moment that was just full, just right. 

I have seen so many things like this, and I fight like crazy with my mind and senses to save them, but they often fade a bit, and they gather doubts, and they become lost often permanently.  What a terrible, awful pity this is.















PS  Are you aware that dogie (as one hears in the cowboy guitar songs) means a 'motherless or neglected calf" according to Webster's?

Let me hold your hand.

Hand stencils, Sulawesi.

 



Dear Nearby,

I am trying so hard to funnel the goodness of my words into the touch of my hand.  I figure that if I say nothing, I cannot be misunderstood.  If I say nothing, I cannot offend.  If I say nothing, I cannot wound accidentally.

When you feel the light of the sun or the moon, do you receive the ages also?  Does that light shine on you with the force of all the world that came before?  The ancestral beings?  Are they also contained in the air we breathe?  My success in reaching you depends upon so much that I do not know.

Perhaps the life I have is actually in large part yours.  Perhaps all those people over there are responsible to us.  What we say here may matter very much.  Take extreme care and please use caution in speaking.

Song for Today

Dear Old Enough to Know,

Gaze a gazely stare at the gayageum, here.  I wonder if we can get one on Ebay?  It might be just the thing for our all girl band.  Although, I think we will need two of them, to get those layers of sound- or a thingummy that can record one track and add it to another.

Even more?!

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Fausses rayures.

Hello Listener,

To answer your question, I give you the Song for Today. 

Charming!

 

 

 

Photo credit: Kimberley Bursic.

Dear Watchful,

Oh, I know, I know, the charm of French bread!!  What a world, and what marvelous people are in it, right now, this minute, ready to show you something you simply must see.  This last few weeks I have witnessed so many things you would love to see, but not everything is easily sent to you electronically.  Just this morning, on the dried stalk of the sunflower, the mating pair of Scrub jays were sharing a moment so intimate that I blushed at watching.  There was the 611th page of giant ball of yarn novel with all manner of different ends sticking out from the windings.  There was a Tiger Swallowtail on a lavish blue violet iris.  And, oh! the wildflowers this Spring!  What can I say that might fit their immensity?

Ah, but what of what I can send to you?   A colleague and I have begun a little platform, a venue, a space for things.  We call it the Idea Lounge, and it Pops-Up, like things do these days.  It's a kind of free college, and it recently featured a screening of excellent animated shorts by

Jan Švankmajer.  Here are the links to the five films, plus a bonus film by an animator that influenced Švankmajer.

 

A Game of Stones, 9 min 1965: https://vimeo.com/99961406
Meat Love, 1 min 1988:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Xqnmk5Zic
Flora, 20 seconds, 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np-kFkDLT7k
Dimensions of Dialogue, 12 min, 1982:  https://vimeo.com/12073562
Darkness Light Darkness, 8 min, 1990:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXQIPv9vNh0

Charley Bowers:
It's a Bird , 1930, excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4I15-7L0ss

 

Who can you be now?*

Dear Flâneurs,

What have you been lately?  I have been here, mostly trying to be a sort of maverick dilettante.  I discovered, by accident of course, a new thing you can be, if you tire of strolling the city streets: a gypsetter.  Give it a try. It's more or less what it sounds like: a self-styled gypsy with the bucks to really get around (the jetset part of gypset).  I found it in the usual places I haunt; the gin joints, the two-bit hotels, the roller skating tutorials.  It might just suit you.






*Who Can I Be Now?