Casting Mind back on the day. Back into the deep, dark past of youthful folly, delusion and spontaneous combustion. Back to a time when we just didn’t care, or we cared far too much. When everything was brand spanking new and we drank and drank ourselves into unearned nostalgia or oblivion.
Driving was everything. Driving was our escape and revenge, our home, something we controlled outside the law of adults. Their law wasn’t our law when we drove and partied and listened to Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Bruce Springsteen and the Beach Boys — what today some call Classic Rock. It wasn’t classic back then. It was just the music of our generation.
We had seen “American Graffiti” and we cruised the streets looking for our own version of West Coast Car Culture, knowing we’d never find it. Knowing that our towns, bleeding into other towns, operated under different rules, three thousand miles away from the Valley.…
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Ishizuri Jakucho. 1770
Have decided to take the plunge. Jump in. No longer just an observer. I will practice. I will breathe zazen. I will contain all opposites and not look back. Will do Mu and find emptiness in all forms and form in all emptiness. Will do what is necessary to eliminate I.
The wheel. The great karmic wheel. How to get off it. Why wait? Why wait a thousand lifetimes? Why not now? Total immediacy, total naturalness, complete such-ness. Now. Within this one lifetime, which is all that there is, the nothing and the everything, the nowhere and the everywhere, the center and the circumference, I will get off the wheel. Why wait? Why postpone it? There is only now. There is only here, now.
It’s not just about one. It’s two and three as well. One and none. One and infinity. How to hold the concept of nothing and everything in the mind, chew on it, taste it, and smell it like steaks on the grill.…
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Golden Pavilion, Kyoto, Japan. Photo by Keith Pomakis
Nothing to learn
Sitting still and awesome like a mountain
No-I thought of nothing
Half-way home
Master Hsueng asked No-I
“Why do you think of nothing
With great intent?”
And No-I said
“Through concentration on nothing
I am liberated.”
Thwack came the bamboo stick
Gong gong gong rang the bell
Birds cawed as they fled into the blue sky
Their sky their home
“Master, why did you strike me!“
No-I asked in great pain
No longer still or awesome like a mountain
And Master Hsueng answered:
“When you grasp after nothing
You make it an object
Outside Mind-Body
You break the flow between void
And form
Form and void
You categorize nothing!”
Thwack came the bamboo stick
Back down on No-I’s shoulders
No-I did not Awaken
For two more years
by Douglas Pinson
…
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Posted on: December 13, 2011 | Comments Off
This 21-year-old singer has “it.”
Plain Gold Ring
Explosively controlled jazz. Volcanic scat and soul. She bobs and weaves and falls victim to the depths of her emotional possession, as all great artists do. But she rises from those depths and expresses the journey upward and outward, without losing her courage or her conviction.
Aside from her wonderful voice, running parallel with it, she moves in interesting, idiosyncratic ways to her own song. A refreshing change from all too many pop singers who dance in cookie cutter ways, pushed into narrow corporate forms to look like every other pop singer. Joy Williams of The Civil Wars is similar in her physical originality.
* * * * *
Kimbra Johnson was born in New Zealand, grew up there, but now makes her home in Australia. She has been compared with singers like Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse and Bjork.…
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Bang on the Chasm
by Robert Mueller
I am wondering about new jazz and new art music, and separating them entirely for the convenience of entertaining these thoughts. I am thinking about consorting with a difference even though what I have to say about one has to be true of the other (again assuming for the purpose that they are separate). Specifically as a matter of degree I want to distinguish new jazz as a living production that arrives currently, spontaneously in the club or spontaneously also at a jam session or recording session, from the same scenario for new art music, which comes to us as a product, or object, that, when it arrives, may arrive in a public performance, but not currently. Rather, there is a delay, for reflection to take place, and even if it were to take place in the few moments after the performance has ended (that is, right then and there), it nevertheless arrives in the mode of delay.…
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Review of
Alan Gilbert, Late in the Antenna Fields
by Robert Mueller
The writing in Alan Gilbert’s volume of poetry, Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books, 2011), feasts on sarcasm and dispirited bitterness, not to mention a certain snagging anomie. Putting it better or worse, the reader might think to assimilate it to some kind of art adhesion. One is led, or profited, to hear, and to sense and to pick at, a general vaguely petulant and vaguely disinterested and yet persistent patter of ambient petrified displeasure. There is thus less of a danger than a foregone captation in this approach, inherently. So far so good if it sticks; so far so good so long as it educates even, guides, charts and winnows. But when notes of whining and griping swirl in, as they sometimes do, the reader may well wish to give pause.…
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wanderlust
The sand would scrape itself
I heard it whisper
as i breached the whitewashed torrent
with my chest
emerging forth everclear and green
drench-dripping in the first
positive moment
hungry for the textures
of earth and flesh
the mortal opacity.
I carved a monument, an easel.
Then portrayed a pastoral.
I will try to find you there again
around and behind every root and knoll
into the craters of every erosion and explosion
straining
the furthest inherent peripherals.
The wind separates my limbs, it tousles
the hair of the soldiering trees
I lie on my back and shape cloudshapes
around your name
I lie here barren in your memory.
Spinning under the moon, hand in hand
with the animals
into the torn lace outskirts of evenings
the blue the pale the pagan
suckling an entirely different oxygen
and I saw you there
your arms flung open
the mouth of churches
spilling light.…
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newspaper hats before we could read them
pirate ships were easier to build when
digging our way to China salvaging
larvae for insane hatchlings in our heads
our hair cropped for summer like the thorn hedge
chest-naked Pan-like young demiurgers
craving malteds and double cheeseburgers
we were the ones to win the nymphs of creeks
with slingshots and water-guns we’d lay siege
Spiderman’s webs spun tall tales by midgets
treehouses, tall Coke machines, vacant lots
all the buddies I never had now here
my mind the unlikely phởtographer
on bikes, skateboards, barefoot on hot asphalt
the peachfuzz of Spring in our hubris caught
nudie Mags found in pinestraw pile, my first
full glimpse at a woman’s form a new thirst
and I standing between two pines arms spread
into kudzu vines where skein becomes aged
where peripherals are blurred, birds flurry
a boy’s mind can like a squirrel scurry
the forests of my youth don’t look the same
sentry-like, teeming with too many names
in the creek-beds now there is too much said
between my ears no ships, just dry salvages
– by Joseph Milford
Copyright© 2011 by Joseph Milford.…
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