The doors to this church—the church of gospel music—are always open.
You don’t need to believe anything to enter. All you need are ears to hear.
Brooklyn All-Stars (featuring Joe Yawn), “No Cross, No Crown,” live
More? Here.
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lagniappe
reading table
even the pine tree
I planted grows old!
autumn dusk—Kobayashi Issa, 1803 (trans. David G. Lanoue)
I could listen to this—just the drum track, even—all day.
Booker T. Jones with The Roots, “Everything Is Everything”
Live (recording studio), The Road From Memphis (5/11 release)
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lagniappe
reading table
spring peace—
after rain a gang war
garden sparrows
—Kobayashi Issa, 1795 (trans. David G. Lanoue)
(Want to improve your life immeasurably? For free? Without side effects? Sign up for Issa Haiku-a-Day. Your inbox never had it so good).
*****
Alcove
Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump
of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.
And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.
—John Ashbery (Planisphere [2009])
Have you heard of Brandt Brauer Frick?
—Rachael Z., the 20-something stylist who cuts my hair
The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, live (rehearsal), Germany (Berlin), 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
reading table
Teenager
Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?Shed a tear, kiss her brow
for the simple reason
that we share a birthdate?So many dissimilarities between us
that only the bones are likely still the same,
the cranial vault, the eye sockets.Since her eyes seem a little larger,
her eyelashes are longer, she’s taller
and the whole body is closely sheathed
in smooth, unblemished skin.Relatives and friends still link us, it is true,
but in her world almost all are living,
while in mine almost no one survives
from that shared circle.We differ so profoundly,
talk and think about completely different things.
She knows next to nothing —
but with a doggedness deserving better causes.
I know much more —
but nothing for sure.She shows me poems,
written in a clear and careful script
that I haven’t used for years.I read the poems, read them.
Well, maybe that one
if it were shorter
and fixed in a couple of places.
The rest do not bode well.The conversation stumbles.
On her pathetic watch
time is still cheap and unsteady.
On mine it’s far more precious and precise.Nothing in parting, a fixed smile
and no emotion.Only when she vanishes,
leaving her scarf in her haste.A scarf of genuine wool,
in colored stripes
crocheted for her
by our mother.I’ve still got it.
—Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak; Here [2010])
*****
five desert-island poets
Tonight, at a club on Chicago’s west side (The Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western), New Orleans dance music reigns.
Big Freedia & The Queen Divas
“Double It” (with Galactic), live, San Francisco, 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Azz Everywhere,” live, Portland (Oregon), 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
TV show (Last Call with Carson Daly), 9/28/10
Vodpod videos no longer available.(Yo, Rachael—thanks for the tip!)
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lagniappe
[I]nside New Orleans, the genius of sissy bounce is how perfectly mainstream it is; in the world beyond, the genius of sissy bounce is how incredibly alternative it is.
***
The first of Freedia’s three successive New York gigs in May began with a preshow bounce dance class, which should give you some idea of how far from home Freedia and [Freedia’s D.J. and de facto manager Rusty] Lazer were. But “every night it got better,” Freedia said. “They was all on the Internet, posting up the pictures, like ‘If you missed last night, OMG, you missed a party.’ Each night it built, and the last night” — at a traveling dusk-to-dawn festival known as Hoodstock, held on this occasion in a raw space in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn — “it was just unbelievable. Five hundred people in there. Everybody was dripping wet. The walls was dripping wet.”
Any doubt that that space, like any space in which Freedia performs, quickly belonged to the women in the crowd may be dispelled by a story Lazer laughingly told about a blog post he’d seen the day after their Hoodstock set. It consisted of two photos taken at the show, and their captions: in the first, a group of women were horizontally p-popping in what amounted to a flesh pile. “To the men,” the caption beneath it read, “we don’t need you.” The second photo depicted a woman at the same show sitting on the floor while a man prone in front of her performed a sexual act that might traditionally be described as submissive. “But we like having you around,” the caption beneath that one read.
What strikes Lazer most about the dynamic at these shows, though, is not how unexpected it is but how familiar. Long before he started D.J.-ing, he was a drummer in a series of rock bands; he is old enough to have come of age in the latter days of punk. And when he started playing shows with Freedia almost two years ago — when he started witnessing, over and over again, a same-sex group taking over the dance floor in order to perform an ecstatic act of physical aggression that is both exceptionally demanding and socially unacceptable in other contexts, at the behest of music that’s ritualized and played at seemingly impossible tempos — it all began to remind him of something.
“It’s as if punk had been reinvented for women,” he said, smiling. “I remember going to punk shows when I was 13, slam-dancing, stage-diving. It was a kind of reckless abandon, something you really couldn’t stop yourself from doing. If the girls weren’t just outright afraid of being in there, there was somebody literally shoving them out of the way. Now it’s exactly what was happening when I was young, but in reverse: the girls literally push the dudes right out of the middle. It’s just pure empowerment, physical aggression that’s not spiteful or vicious. I think it’s no accident that the slang term for a gay kid in New Orleans is ‘punk.’ It’s pretty rewarding.”
—Jonathan Dee, “Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap,” New York Times Magazine, 7/22/10
*****
reading table
even the stone-hard camphor tree
devoured
by insects—Kobayashi Issa, 1822 (trans. David G. Lanoue)
*****
radio: last call
Ten straight days of Bach, on WKCR-FM, conclude tonight at midnight.
music clip of the day 