Tango in Oslo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4JP6bX7fo&feature=related

Red Moon

Toil, for you cant find relief
In the drunk-evening songs
Your mates sing by the mejhi;
Bound yourself in knots,
As irregular migrants filter
through government offices
Sweat, salt, skin:
Opium-feckled eyes.
Hold,the reins of your desire
On xewali-fragrant autumn dusks;
No point venturing out
Into the cold-blooded dwellings
of security posts
Only the half-dead roam
the curfewed streets
On nights like these.

Notes:

mejhi: a traditional bon-fire lit mostly during the Assamese festival of Magh Bihu in January.
xewali: (Assamese word) an edible flower, also called, night-flowering jasmine.

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.

- Jean Baudrillard

"Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" and speculative moo-moo

by David Hume, ed. by Dorothy Coleman:

"What peculiar priviledge has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions: But sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion."

and Heidegger has something to add too: "questioning is the piety of thought".

so let us doubt, reinvent and question all we have been told to accept. since half baked knowledge is no good, and we have passed that golden age of ignorance, one might as well go the whole hog!

Now is the time to manifest
Madness
Full Circle.
One has to rein
the Mind
to Focus.

And came upon these lines on a poet's webpage:

Art demands constant toil, incessant work, and undistracted time.

"Until you reach your liberated and free self, isolated from the constricting selves of others, you will not accomplish anything. Art is strongest love. It avails itself only to those who thoroughly surrender their whole existence to it."
- Forugh Farrokhzad

Highway City Rodeo

Handle bars on the reins
of a slow-moving jet-plane.
Troggling humpledy a’times
Et serpentine s’times.
All roads are marked in blue and white
and green signs,
yet It loses its means
to various ends.

Mechanics with smoth-clayed faces
Kids with potty flairs.
Baba in snake-skin suit (attire)
Powdered chalk on the face.

Love in the back-seats
of its carriages
And across
these aisles.

30 May’10

Scraps from a dialogue diatribe

On reading 'Paradise Lost', by Milton~

Aesthetics: Eve's spine is harmony.
Ethics: But was the snake historically grievanced?
Metaphysics: Thy will always be done.
Feminist: Revolution- death to the sexist tongues.
Avantgarde: Two-ness= 1ness+ otherness.

Adam: Where am I?
Milton: You are why the apples are savoury.

nonsense verse, mindscaping earnestly:)

To My Valentine-Ogden Nash

More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That’s how much I love you.

I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.

As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That’s how much you I love.

I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.

I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,
That’s how you’re loved by me.

Poker PotLuck, a scene re-enacted.

Scene: Sunny morning. A colonial club in Maymyo, Burma. two gentlemen shake hands, exchange names, Byron, an experienced pokerface urges Ballistic, the curious newcomer, novice-at-poker to the table. ...

52 cards unfurl,

Byron: Should we deal than?
Ballistic: I have dealt in microfinance in detail.
Byron: Lay them cards, mate. Lemme show you the Royal Flush, first.
Ballistic: O brimmingbroomsticksbloomsburydale, you are of noble blood, after all!!!
Byron: Foul!

Delight!

Let all your fantasies fly
To a bower-garden under
the window.
Lots of green;
and mauve flowers,
smooth petals and
soft pollen on the tips of tendrils.
Kite-flying festival
Overhead,
In autumn’s titillating temperatures;
we hug closer in
our bower-tower
and gaze out at the painted
blues skies dotted
with multiple bearded sheep
stretched out on a vast canvas
for our hungry eyes.

23 Oct’10

Ambers and Woodsmoke

Inhale, Exhale,
The mist turns a shade heavier;
As the story unravels mystically
High notes of bird- song
fill the stealthy time:
One catches the wayward breezes
Who whisper erotically
at doorsteps,
woodsmoke smell mingled with pungent sweat
water-diluted brushes of black paint
smudged with charcoal stiffs…


Fire crackles,
Colors explode,
Senses heighten,
As our feet dangle
on the edges of our dreams.

August'10, Vattakannal.

time warp looking glass

time is in a loop, i am in a warp
in a strip that can be
continuously replayed,

like a new vibrant dream,
like, a strange explorative landscape,
like a powerful work of art,
a hollow scream inside your visera,
waiting to burst out
flow through you raptured,
and,
rock gently the ruptures
of faith and desire.

In the name of the Destroyer

Today the forget-me-not blooms
anticipating its monsoon;
Dogs announce the advent of a restive summer;
This season, summer outsmarts spring
And monsoon is a wayward witch.

This watermelon seller wanders around the old city
Singing with a parched throated voice
Of oriental princesses bound by a curse
and of the estrangement of Nature.
City-dwellers hear his refrain
Their tastebuds tingling with a known thirst,
a desire for the here and unknown beyond..
Flesh, seeds and rind
might just quench these primitive urges.

Harlequin dance-theaters
with a twist of magpie-like flitting romances,
high on tales of raconteurs cooling off,
stealing time to smell the scents of flora and fruit:

a desert dust always mixed in the air.
No sea in sight
The (hot) earth will swallow these waterdrops…

Soundtrack for a Revolution Trailer

Want to see this movie on the African American Civil Rights Movement, with great music as background score..

Chef Bora and Little Paradise :)

http://www.timesnow.tv/Aromas-from-Assam---Part-1/videoshow/4345760.cms

the other

Trinkets at the market-square
10-odd money changers,
One lone ATM.

White, brown, yellow,
(haha, correction please)
Intermingle and experience
In a tenuous existence.

Shrines for living gods
And a repertoire of symbols:
Drum bells, jambo, chants
Prayer beads of a turquoise color.

Refrains of a meditative melody
Giving glimpses of sensitive lives
Viewed from other quarters.

- sushmita kashyap
- 24th May, 2010

something i composed on a still standing bus. crap. but critique. it
is prose n poetry now. i should work on turning it into poetry.

omnium-gatherum

Krishna

The East was crowned with snow-cold bloom
And hung with veils of pearly fleece:
They died away into the gloom,
Vistas of peace—and deeper peace.

And earth and air and wave and fire
In awe and breathless silence stood;
For One who passed into their choir
Linked them in mystic brotherhood.

Twilight of amethyst, amid
Thy few strange stars that lit the heights,
Where was the secret spirit hid?
Where was Thy place, O Light of Lights?

The flame of Beauty far in space—
Where rose the fire: in Thee? in Me?
Which bowed the elemental race
To adoration silently?
---George William Russell

Cat's Dream

How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings--
a series of burnt circles--
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.

I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.

I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
like a tiger's great-grandfather,
and would leap in the darkness over
rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.

Sleep, sleep cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
and the great ruff of your tail.
--- Pablo Neruda (Translated by Alastair Reid)

Lines to be embroidered on a Bib
(or) The Child Is Father Of The Man, But Not For Quite A While

So Thomas Edison
Never drank his medicine;
So Blackstone and Hoyle
Refused cod-liver oil;
So Sir Thomas Malory
Never heard of a calory;
So the Earl of Lennox
Murdered Rizzio without the aid of vitamins or calisthenox;
So Socrates and Plato
Ate dessert without finishing their potato;
So spinach was too spinachy
For Leonardo da Vinaci;
Well, it's all immaterial,
So eat your nice cereal,
And if you want to name your ration,
First go get a reputation.
---Ogden Nash

A Farewell

Good-bye: nay, do not grieve that it is over—
The perfect hour;
That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,
Flits from the flower.

Grieve not,—it is the law. Love will be flying—
Yea, love and all.
Glad was the living; blessed be the dying!
Let the leaves fall.
--- Harriet Monroe

À Bas Ben Adhem

My fellow man I do not care for.
I often ask me, What's he there for?
The only answer I can find
Is, Reproduction of his kind.
If I'm supposed to swallow that,
Winnetka is my habitat.
Isn't it time to carve Hic Jacet
Above that Reproduction racket?

To make the matter more succint:
Suppose my fellow man extinct.
Why, who would not approve the plan
Save possibly my fellow man?
Yet with a politician's voice
He names himself as Nature's choice.

The finest of the human race
Are bad in figure, worse in face.
Yet just because they have two legs
And come from storks instead of eggs
They count the spacious firmament
As something to be charged and sent.

Though man created cross-town traffic,
The Daily Mirror, News and Graphic,
The pastoral fight and fighting pastor,
And Queen Marie and Lady Astor,
He hails himself with drum and fife
And bullies lower forms of life.

Not that I think much depends
On how we treat our feathered friends,
Or hold the wrinkled elephant
A nobler creature than my aunt.
It's simply that I'm sure I can
Get on without my fellow man.
---Ogden Nash

Lines on the Mermaid Tavern

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host's Canary wine?
Or are fruits of Paradise
Sweeter than those dainty pies
Of venison? O generous food!
Drest as though bold Robin Hood
Would, with his maid Marian,
Sup and bowse from horn and can.

I have heard that on a day
Mine host's sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer's old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new old sign
Sipping beverage divine,
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
--- John Keats

Goody for Our Side and Your Side Too

Foreigners are people somewhere else,
Natives are people at home;
If the place you’re at
Is your habitat,
You’re a foreigner, say in Rome.
But the scales of Justice balance true,
And tit leads into tat,
So the man who’s at home
When he stays in Rome
Is abroad when he’s where you’re at.

When we leave the limits of the land in which
Our birth certificates sat us,
It does not mean
Just a change of scene,
But also a change of status.
The Frenchman with his fetching beard,
The Scot with his kilt and sporran,
One moment he
May a native be,
And the next may find him foreign.

There’s many a difference quickly found
Between the different races,
But the only essential
Differential
Is living different places.
Yet such is the pride of prideful man,
From Austrians to Australians,
That wherever he is,
He regards as his,
And the natives there, as aliens.

Oh, I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends,
The foreigner tells the native,
And we’ll work together for our common ends
Like a preposition and a dative.
If our common ends seem mostly mine,
Why not, you ignorant foreigner?
And the native replies
Contrariwise;
And hence, my dears, the coroner.

So mind your manners when a native, please,
And doubly when you visit
And between us all
A rapport may fall
Ecstatically exquisite.
One simple thought, if you have it pat,
Will eliminate the coroner:
You may be a native in your habitat,
But to foreigners you’re just a foreigner.
--- Ogden Nash

Balloons

Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish--------
Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!
Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free
Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.
--- Sylvia Plath

"the copy paste"

Steve Biko: revisited

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiE6IHz6sw4

Monty Python football.. Greek and German philosophers on the field

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8&feature=related

"Imperfect Archives" at 801 Projects poignantly portrays the past

By Carlos Suarez De Jesus


Sitting at a work table, Nereida Garcia Ferraz hands out recipes for boniatillo con queso to a throng of strangers cramping her installation at Little Havana's 801 Projects.

For the Cuban-American artist, the traditional sweet potato dish was the type of comfort food that made the frosty Midwestern winters bearable during her youth.

"Nitza Villapol's cookbook was one of the few things my 76-year-old mother, Juana, was able to bring with us from Cuba when we came to Chicago in the '60s," Garcia Ferraz laughs. "For me, those recipes and dishes were as nourishing as a kid growing up in those brutal Chicago winters as were the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault when I studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago later on."

Her work is on display in "Imperfect Archives," an all-woman group show that also includes work by Amalia Caputo, Consuelo Castañeda, Liz Cerejido, Ana Albertina Delgado, Odalis Valdivieso, Eugenia Vargas Pereira, and Angela Valella.

Garcia Ferraz, Castañeda, and Valella organized and curated the show. Another bond the participants share is that some of them recently lost their mothers, while others are coping with moms living with debilitating illnesses.

The exhibit examines the use of archives through books. For these artists, the book remains a powerful catalyst that inspires fantasy, nostalgia, and considerations of earthly and political concerns. The conceptual mishmash features installations, works on paper, photography, paintings, and video and sound pieces created during the past year.

Perhaps most remarkable is that the overarching subtext of the show reads like a fragmented codex strongly binding the women to their mothers.

The artists also stubbornly refuse to concede that books will soon go the way of the dodo or eight-track tapes.

"Books will last forever," Garcia Ferraz intones. "They are the first things we carry with us when we end relationships or when we experience different aspects of our lives. Most anyone can remember the titles of their favorite volumes that have been lost, stolen, or even chewed by their dogs."

She goes on to compare people to dog-eared tomes. "If you think of it, each of us is like a book in different clothes," she says, skidding on the banana peel of cliché. "But while each of us in the exhibit has very different lives, we are still joined by the same passions and have parallel visions at the same time."

In addition to handing out her mother's favorite recipes, Garcia Ferraz created an installation in a room she painted in a dark, tarry tone. She covered the walls with striking black-and-white photographs of the show's participants in grandiose poses as if they were literary figures from the past.

At the room's center, she sits at a table, erasing text from a book about 16th-century Italian paintings. Occasionally she pauses to add her own drawings to the volume's illustrations. Her space looks somewhat like an East German interrogation chamber and exudes a musty whiff of Cold War-era disinformation and censorship.

"I wanted to convey a sense of the lessons we learn and the lessons we lose," she says. "Miami is like the Tower of Babel. People from all over the world live here, but sometimes we lose our literature, our identity, and even a sense of place."

Garcia Ferraz, whose elderly mother suffers from advanced stages of Alzheimer's, says the exhibit is an homage to her mom.

"My mother loved to read," she sighs. "One of the things Mami still conserves is a photo book with scenes of Cuba we keep next to her bed. Although she never got to return to her homeland, she still loves those pictures. For me, what each of us has done for this show has deep roots and lots of branches touching upon many things."

At the entrance of the capacious three-story building, housing several artists' studios, Angela Valella created a sprawling collage installation out of torn book pages, photographs, postcards, and even notes and thoughts jotted on scraps of paper by her mother, Aracely Dominguez Daniel, who passed away this spring at the age of 83.

"Right before dying, she asked for a piece of paper and wrote her final note with a trembling hand," Valella says with a faltering voice. When she looked at the spidery scrawl, it read, "I'm sorry to tell you all that I've always been different than all of you."

Says the artist: "Mami was considered the weird one in her family. I didn't realize till recently how this project has been a discovery of who she was for me."

Valella says her mother was a writer who had an operatic singing voice she often used to entertain friends. "She lived in a building in Miami Beach where some of her neighbors played the piano, and they would get together and perform. When she died, she left this trove of books in her apartment that included early signed editions by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Benedetti, and many other important writers that left me amazed."

She also left behind reams of her own writings, which have inspired Valella's installation.

For her piece, Valella tore page 47 from some of her mother's books to cover a wall. Nineteen forty-seven was the year her mother married and her lucky number, the artist explains.

She also had one of her mother's neighbors climb a boom crane and shoot bird's-eye-view pictures of her mother's home, which she has integrated into her collage. "I also underlined random passages from the book pages and was surprised to discover a narrative emerging as the piece evolved," Valella notes.

Throughout the rabbit warren of small project rooms and halls in the building, old-fangled overhead projectors beam theoretical mumbo jumbo by French philosophers onto walls. It's an intellectual nod to the deconstruction of text. But it all seems overplayed.

More interesting, though, are photographs by Eugenia Vargas Pereira, who lost her 100-year-old mother earlier this year while rushing home to Chile to be at her side. In images saturated with gorgeous crimson and azure hues, Vargas Pereira swims in a back-yard pool while holding a rare gilded edition of Dante's Inferno. The book came from the collection of Valella's mom.

Equally compelling is an untitled work by Liz Cerejido, who for many years has documented her 77-year-old mother Helida's descent into the ravages of Alzheimer's. For her take on the imperfect archive, Cerejido covered a wall in slate gray and painted phrases in chalk over it, adding a sound element with a recording of her mother's voice.

"I had my mother read words to me from flash cards I gave her before she stopped speaking two years ago. Mom is now in the final stages of her disease," Cerejido informs. "The phrases on the wall are random words I used to describe the experiences of an imaginary Cuban exile family that had very different lives than we did, but sadly that wasn't the case," the artist explains. "Instead, the words you hear in the sound element of the installation refer to how my mother lived more an existence like Penelope waiting faithfully for the return of Ulysses, or in our case, my father, who never made it here from Cuba to join us in the United States."

Although some of the works convey a deep sense of sorrow or nostalgia, none veers to the maudlin or morbid, which enhances the rhythm of the show.

Odalis Valdivieso adds some welcome humor with her sound piece, The Black Bean Audio Archive. The 30-something Venezuelan artist has worked on it for the past 11 years, collecting oral recipes of Miami's favorite legume from people across town.

"So far, I have 126 different recipes from people like my grandmother, maids, workmates, and other folks I have encountered through the years," the youngest participant boasts.

"To me, black beans are a signature dish that links Hispanics, Afro-Americans, and almost every culture in our city," she says. "Just this last week, I ate a totally new version that included malanga with the beans. They were pretty hearty and tasty."

And not unlike the contrasting recipes for frijoles negros, this exhibit, with its many disparate approaches, more than lives up to its name.
*********************************************

Angela's Archive (2009), by Angela Valella
Details:
"Imperfect Archives": Through October 30. 801 Projects, 801 SW Third Ave., Miami; 305-266-6155. Weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. or by appointment. Exhibit closes with a book sale October 30.
Subject(s):
Imperfect Archives, 801 Projects, Miami local art

Michael Flamingo

Black charcoal,
Of the soft quality
Finds its way across the paper
At that instant, a metamorphosis happens
White paper turns to
unlimited canvases.

Pencils of multi-layered nibs;
Penetrations and castrations
Of multiple natures;
100 Dollars for one vasectomy
1500, if the first born is of
womb and feminine genitals.

Camel-skinned tabla-top
almost pealing at its seams;
A drummer drums his mood
For a few whiskies more
He will play on the house
The whole bloodied night.

Two plays and only
half a performance
Disposable masks
for the fluorescent stage lights
This actor has a flair
for the grotesquely satiating.

14 August’09 (02:12 hrs)