coffee or tea?

"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.... There is laughter because their is nothing to laugh about."
Horkheimer & Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

(thanks, joni and bourbaki!)

the scurvy tunes of alonzo riley (2)

    A kiss
    from Rrose
    Sélavy:

Eros wishes
to remind
all striding
mortals:

    Capital
    Is Not
    Superlative.

    Take Time
    To Tend
    The Roses.

    Else You
    Will Be
    Spanked.

    When I Get
    Around
    To it.

    *     *     *

Dear prisoners,
we’ve come here today
bringing music up
to your prison walls.
By our little
concert we want
to show you
you haven’t
been forgotten.

We aren’t enough
today to throw
these walls
and give you back
your freedom.
So we’ll come again
another day
with our angry bags
and pipes.
Back we’ll be
repeatedly
till we bring the day
we’re strong enough

to break you out.

    *     *     *

First revolutionary
tasks: 1) Take out
all surveillance cameras.
2) Learn the local
flowers & birdsongs.
3) “Read, read, read!”
4) Sleep naked.

Romeo Clandestino
suggests Aikido.
Yoga for the masses
is also sage.
Comrades and lovers
need bodies they
can bring to bear,
respendent,
lithe as cats
and ropewalkers.
Romeo says: parcours
for the young
and quick-healing,
simple bouldering
for the oldsters.

Artistry.
Mind and body
finely balanced,
glad-making.
All the arts
in their slow-
unfolding secrets
are potencies,
personal and
collective.
The struggle is
demanding.
Ergo,
one does not live
by one century
alone.

on scurvy music

from On Stupidity in Music, an Imaginary Dialogue (1958)
by Hanns Eisler

If I think of the stupidity in music I am of the opinion that the desperate do find consolation.

But isn't consolation the real aim of art, especially of music?

Concerning consolation, I can tell you something from the secret documents of the Austro-Hungarian state police in the year 1805 in Vienna, which says: "In times like the present, when manifold sufferings affect the character of the people, the police must pay more regard than ever to popular distractions. The most dangerous hours are in the evening. How can these hours be better and more harmlessly spent than by listening to music?"

But Eisler, 1805 was the year Beethoven composed his Third Symphony, the Eroica. Did the police chiefs want the Viennese to listen to this revolutionary music?

You overestimate the intelligence of the state police in 1805.

Is bad music always stupid?

No. Dangerous things are unfortunately mostly not stupid. But now I'll contradict myself and give you something "in praise of bad music." Here's what Proust wrote in Les plaisirs et les jours: "Pour out your curses on bad music, but not your contempt!"

"Few, the moonlit nights I care for." (G. Seferis)

"Look out for yourself when you pass through X, with the truth under your coat."
B. Brecht

the scurvy tunes of alonzo riley (1)

Here lies Lon Riley.
He hath not lute nor lyre
and mourns it
hardly.

    *     *     *


4:33am.
Song eats
its own tail
and looses
its cookies
thereby.

Moon hangs low
like a wounded scrotum
and seeds hit
the asphalt swimming.

Café con leche?
OK, let’s go!

    *     *     *

Full fathom five
big daddy lies,
who never told
the truth.

To have or not
having have pistol
held to head,
police don’t ask
that question.
“We don’t have
classes here.”

First lie,
that labor forced
macht frei.

“As I would not
be a slave,”
so I will not be
a wage-slave either,
Uncle Abe, old slim
high fiver.

    [Quoth same:
    Preachers at pulpit
    should address
    the congregation
    as if “chasing bees.”
    Me, I prefer
    my preachers
            gone.]

You own the clock
and the time,
for now.
Soon enough,
maybe,
we’ll reckon
otherwise.
Baron Pluto,
meet Kidd Sabot!

    *     *     *

Had they ever
freely shared
with us their booty,
we might believe
they do not treat us
meanly.
As is, we think
we learned to see
slinkingly,
back of the class
room they built for us.
Wethinks that be
obscenely!

From the crier
in the hood,
to the leisured
lords, engated:
You will hear
the acts
of our petition
in words
of flaming cars.
If he fall
into our hands,
Ceasar will go down
tonight,
Rome and her rats
will jump
and all this bitch
will burn.

What is the city
but the people?
“Let them cry tears,
not havoc.”
This for that,
hand to hand,
war of all
against all.

Streets of gold,
walls of tears.
City thrown up
on a stolen rock.

the intrinsic critical lever

“The critical yardstick that allows reason, and indeed compels and obliges reason, to oppose the superior strength of the course of the world is always the fact that in every situation there is a concrete possibility of doing things differently.” T.W. Adorno

on exile and expats

“Sit with us, stranger, and after you have shared our meal, tell us, if you will, who you are and how you come here.”

Travelers, wherever they are, always aim for home. Return will always already have defined them. Not that, then.

Exiles are banished, expatriates live abroad by choice.

Banishment: decreed, or self-imposed, the state of non-reconciliation.

Expats may be reconciled, or not. Their distance does not exclude the identifications of patriots.

Exiles have lost, or cut, this umbilical cord.

Formed by, but severed from, motherplace.

A traumatic second birth, perhaps. But also a potential. Of critical production, of empowerment in dispossession.

As in: “silence, exile and cunning” of a Stephen Daedalus.

But what a gap of disaster between Stephen and us...

Too much to make a home of art, like that.

Still, the exile eye, then, for what it can see. And despairing cannot prevent.

The protest of words, artful or not, responding, dribbling out under flawed direction or ranting wildly, refracted through the estranged and alien optic of exile.

Bad singing, lector caveat.