“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.” ~ Samuel Beckett

1.
Magnum Photography Agency

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{USA. NYC. 1964.
Samuel BECKETT. Rehearsal of “Waiting for Godot”. © Bruce Davidson-Magnum-Photos}

{Irish playwright Samuel BECKETT. 1964. ©-Henri Cartier Bresson Magnum-Photos}

BECKETT SPEAKS

… Socks. Nightgown. Window. Lamp. Backs away to edge of light and stands facing blank wall. Covered with pictures once. Pictures of…he all but said loved ones. Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing pins. All shapes and sizes. Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. Strewn all over the floor.

… Could once name them all. There was father. That grey void. There mother. That other. There together. Smiling. Wedding day. There all three. That grey blot. There alone. He alone. So on. Not now. Forgotten. All gone so long. Ripped off and torn to shreds. Scattered all over the floor. Swept out of the way and under the bed and left. Thousand shreds under the bed with the dust and spiders. All the…he all but said the loved ones.

~ Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue

~~~

The Magnum site holds many more delights, such as this amazing page on protest photography.

{USA. Washington DC. 1967. An American young girl, Jan Rose KASMIR, confronts the American National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam march. This march helped to turn public opinion against the US war in Vietnam.}

See more here > 

2.
Charles Simic

All These Mirrors
by Charles Simic

And the one that’s got it in for you,
Mister, that keeps taunting you
In an old man’s morning wheeze
Every time you so much as glance at it,
Or blurt something in your defense,
Loudly, sonorously raising your chin high
While it spits and chokes in reply.

The razor is at your throat.
The lines are inscribing themselves
On your forehead as you listen closely
With a poultice of tissue paper
Already reddening under your left eye.

~~~

A bit more on Charles…

3.
Katya Apekima

The 5CT staff cannot stop talking about this astounding book. The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, by Katya Apekima, is one of the most deeply imagined and beautifully crafted novels this reader has ever encountered. This is the story of a family, told mainly through two young sisters, sixteen and fourteen years old. The less said about it the better. Just go read it. Podcast with the great Michael Silverblatt, here >

Excerpt:

Before that spring, I’d never read any of Dad’s books. It had never even occurred to me to track them down at a library or bookstore because until we came to live with him, he hadn’t existed for me. But in New York, I started reading his books ravenously. I devoured Cassandra’s Calling. I read his novels before bed. I wanted to have the rhythms of the sentences inside of me, so that I could dream about them. In my sleep though, all the characters were Mom. Sometimes Mom would turn into a strong wind and pull me somewhere, or sometimes she would jump on my back and try to wrestle me down to the ground. I barely ever saw her face. Sometimes — and these dreams were always the scariest — I myself would turn into Mom, and then I would be on someone else’s back, or turning into a wind.

---

4.
Jacob Collier, Susan Collier

5.
Nancy Liang’s Gifs

See more of Nancy’s work here >

The post 5CT for December 2019 appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

What does it mean for a writer to pay attention?

“…if you love something enough and pay a passionate enough attention to it, the whole world can become present in it.”

~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

by Richard Pelletier

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There was something on the wind in that year of 1955. Those two men, one black, one white, knew. Both were artists, both living in New York City. From the Village, came Baldwin with Notes of a Native Son. “The people who think of themselves as white,” he wrote, “have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. Or, as they are indeed already, in all but actual fact, obsolete.” That same year, Frank, Swiss-born, celebrated here and in Europe, set out on a series of road trips in his 1950 Ford Business Coupe (Detroit, Savannah, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles) to document America in a book. The time was ripe.

The show-stopping cover of Frank’s book, The Americans, might well have flown straight out of James Baldwin’s tightly coiled rage. Five passengers sit perfectly and eternally framed in front-to-back order on a New Orleans streetcar. A white man, a white woman. A little white boy in a little white-boy suit. (Already impressive at white entitlement.) A little white girl, crying. A black man. A black woman. In a single photograph—a supremely complicated one-hundred and seventy-nine-year story. The Americans was a brutally honest chronicle. Look, it said. Open your eyes. Feel. It was the book that changed photography for all time.

Miner, shaman, brother, thief


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There is no evidence that Baldwin and Frank knew or influenced each other. But they were working the same dark alleys—the twisted knot of American identity. “Our dehumanization of the negro then,” wrote Baldwin, “is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves. The loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.” I pause for a quick daydream where I see Banksy, under cover of darkness, spray painting those words on the side of Robert Frank’s New Orleans streetcar.

Frank showed us something we hadn’t seen before. America as a dangerous, nervous, deeply weird, beautiful and lonely place. Everything in conflict with everything else. Not the least of which was the story we were telling ourselves about who and what we were. (This was 1955, remember.) He tunneled down much further than was comfortable. His coda to fellow artists who might be paying attention to his work (and there were legions) was: go deeper. That is the single best piece of advice a writer could ever hope to hear.

I came to Baldwin much later. Born poor, black, and bi-sexual in Harlem, he told Life Magazine:

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.”

~

It’s gray outside this morning—the sun is a half-lit, milky stain as it slides behind a bank of Douglas Fir outside my window. I am back at it, trying to stare down this dastardly task: to say something useful about writing and photography. So it occurs to me to talk about love. To say love is at the heart of all this. First, James Baldwin and Robert Frank both have said they loved America. Their love was complicated, but they were writing and shooting from that place. I loved—and still love—those Robert Frank pictures. They changed me from the inside out. I love them madly. I have never been the same since the moment I saw them. That body of work held me upside down and shook me until finally, I came to understand their code.

It is possible to make something beautiful and lasting and soul-shaking from the place where you—your heart and soul, your voice, your shame, your fear, your oddball ways—meet the world.

That changed everything. When you know something like that, down to the bone, all kinds of wonderful trouble is yours. Because now you believe. You believe in the premise at the root of all art making. Most worrisome of all, you now believe that you—yes, you aspiring writer, painter, musician, sculptor, playwright, might wear the hat, too. To coin a phrase, you are fucked. Which is glorious.

A secret at the bottom of a frozen lake

All this inconveniently dovetailed with my beloved, fiercely believing mother’s favorite Life Lesson: ‘You can be anything you want to be, as long as you want it bad enough.’ I confess that I thought I wanted to be Robert Frank. But underneath it all chained up and locked down like Houdini, buried six feet into the bottom of a frozen lake, was my secret. I only ever wanted to be a writer. Too dangerous, so I spent years taking pictures, and I still do. But it has taken me until this moment, on this gray, overcast November morning, to unlock a mystery. Robert Frank, photographer, was my first writing teacher. His courage gave me mine.

‘I worked myself into a state of grace.’ – Robert Frank

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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion

I was sixteen or seventeen at the time. My grandfather lived across the street from us. I would visit on a fairly regular basis—to bring over meals my mother had cooked, or just to check in. On one particular day, I gave a soft knock on his door, and let myself in. His apartment had that old-world, grandparent charm; a lot of wood and carpeting, built-in glass and wood cabinets. Dark and quiet. He was all alone those days, my grandmother had died some years before. His TV-watching chair was empty, the television was off. But he was there all right, in the room, seated at a card table. The table was crammed—set for six people. Plates, glassware, silverware, everything you’d need if everyone came to dinner. Everyone being himself, his wife, and his four children. But he was alone. Except that he wasn’t, not quite. On each of five plates, he’d placed a framed photograph. I scanned the table. There was my father, my two uncles, my aunt, and my grandmother. Everyone had come to dinner. My grandfather was in conversation with all of them. He turned to me—an actor breaking the fourth wall—and whispered that they’d all come, finally, and wasn’t it wonderful. He turned back to the play. He was wearing two pairs of pants—he’d nap during the day, wake up confused, and get dressed again. I willingly accepted the fiction—and the truth—of all that was in front of me. I may have become a photographer that day. Or, a storyteller. Or, a human being. Joan Didion was right, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

A state of grace

Nothing prepares you for writing quite like being a photographer in the days of film. You’d find yourself out in the world—say, Chinatown in New York, or on the coast of California. Endless possibilities for making pictures. Your camera is loaded with Kodak Tri-X film, thirty-six frames. You’re in a bit of a zone, the light is beautiful, and you’re working. Two weeks later, after you’ve developed your fifteen rolls from that day, you have printed your contact sheets, and you find there is nothing. Five-hundred plus images and not a single image that is more than a humble, pleasing record or a dumb cliché. You will try to convince yourself otherwise. You will lie to yourself, possibly for weeks. Maybe this frame, maybe that one. But it’s all useless, there’s nothing there. There is no better training for the excruciating experience of writing first drafts.

So something happened in the relentless effort. In the absurd amount of failure. In the commitment to trying—and the occasional succeeding—that laid the groundwork for a step into the void. My wife and I spent the first two years of our life together on opposite coasts. We spent hours and hours on the phone. She knew me as a photographer. One night I said, “I’m going to say something to you now, and I ask that you say absolutely nothing after I say it.” “Okay,” she said.
I said, “I want to write.”

~

The sun has returned to its milky, half-hidden ways. It’s cold outside. The wind is up. The stand of fir out past my window is telling its proud, steadfast, multi-generational tale. Later this afternoon, Linda and I will travel to the north end of the island to visit a sawmill. On that hour-long ride—through stands of fir and cedar and small towns, I’ll be thinking about a photograph I saw the other day. It’s Robert Frank, 93 years old, sitting out in front of his home in New York City. The backdrop is gritty. A green metal door, a brick section of wall, a green metal screen. The paint on the door frame is chipped and worn. And there he sits, a little hunched over. Still has his hair. He’s an old man looking straight into the camera, a father who has outlived his two children, who both died tragically. His cane is at hand. I imagine James Baldwin sitting right next to him, the other side of the coin. If he were still here, he’d be 93 too. I imagine the two of them, finally having met, after all these years of crossing paths, comparing notes. If I were there, I’d be at a loss for words. What to say to the two storytellers who saw America, who told us everything. Who spoke of the things that were there, who told us of the doom and the glory of who we are. Who left us their songs to sing.

* From Robert Frank’s Guggenheim Grant application. “I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere—easily found, not easily selected and interpreted.”

Robert Frank died on September 9, 2019. Rest in peace, Robert Frank.

The post ‘I speak of the things that are there’ appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

1.

Saul Leiter, photographer

{ snow, 1960 (c) Saul Leiter }

{ subway car 4435 1950 (c) Saul Leiter }

{ jean 1948 (c) Saul Leiter }

{ boy, 1950 (c) Saul Leiter }

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{ New York 1950 (c) Saul Leiter }

2.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe

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Excerpt from Say Nothing:

Just after lunchtime, at around 2 p.m., a phone rang at the headquarters of The Times of London. A young woman named Elizabeth Curtis, who had just started working on the news desk at the paper, picked up the call. She heard a man’s voice, speaking very quickly, with a thick Irish accent. At first she couldn’t make out what he was saying, then she realized that he was reeling off the descriptions and locations of a series of cars. He spoke for just over a minute, and, though she was still confused, she transcribed as much as she could. Before hanging up, the man said, “The bombs will go off in one hour.

3.

Hard Border: Clare Dwyer Hogg & Stephen Rea

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4.

Dark Angels on Writing

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5.

Timothy Snyder Speaks

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5CT recommends his latest book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

***

That’s it. Thank you.

The post 5CT for June 2019 appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

1. A thin, slender neck road. The ocean stretched forever left. Wooded marshlands, right. A crow dropped in and attacked from the top of a wind bent telephone pole. Scared the shit out of me. 2. “I’m from the UK,” he squawked to the back of my young, foolish head, “that’s a million miles from here. As the crow fl— forget that, cliché.” Black wings flapped around my face as the beast hightailed it back whence he’d come. 3. Chills pinged the length of my spine, as I pushed on, biking into the wind down the cracked asphalt, looking back, watchful and afraid. Finally, something had actually happened to me. Something weird, possibly mysterious. Maybe a portent. A harbinger. An omen. A forewarning. Who could know these things? 4. Night. Inside my unheated knotty pine cottage of overdue rent and flickering courage, I tapped out my stories on my mother’s old typewriter, a Remington. Of black winged memories and of my grandfather, who near his end, stood in a midnight rain, ancient, spotted, bony hands pulling and pulling at the door of a cruel, empty car. As if that old car was the all of it, the whole wide world, leaving him. Through a curtain I spied him begging for more time, more something. “Room for one??!! Room for one??!!” he shouted. I went outside and took him home. In fits and starts I wrote what I didn’t know — the beating heart under my paper thin skin. 5. The stories were always the same — only the chords changed. A man who was young and old. On a road of some sort. A coming from, a going to. Arrival always in doubt. 6. Creatures real and not dashed onto the stage. Beagles and nuns and coaches, wine-glugging, boy-loving priests. A rain stick house. A neighbor kid with the All American story: soldier, husband, civilian, divorcee, murderer, convict, ex-con, ordained Deacon, Harley rider, excessively tanned resident of Florida, and finally dead on a desert highway. Tattooed ex cons. Hundred year old rowhouses, beautiful, hundred-year old crack-smoking Muslims. The lonely dried-flower lady who loved gossip. And Chester, who cold-nosed his way into the center of my being and made me love him. 7. So apropos of nothing – this was just the other day — I looked up crows. They are carriers. Of life magic and the mystery of creation. Of destiny and personal transformation. 8. It seems I’m slow on the uptake, it took me decades, but black crow, I take your meaning. I accept. 10. And so this is a song of gratitude. This is a song of a million miles of thank you’s. A song of trying, of beginnings, of asphalt roads, of black winged words, of unheated shelter, of flickering courage, of sad rememberings of a dying man lost in the rain who gave me so much more than story. 11. This is a song of being. And of being together. 12. That old black crow is gone now, his ghost haunts the causeways and the spits searching for the next kid biking past a briny sea, a wooded marsh, dreaming how maybe one day he could be a writer. 13. How he might find his long and thin slender neck road…meet his dark winged crow, his life magic, his night rooms of sorrows and ardour 14. and shed his tears such as Angels, Dark Angels, weep…

The post Sonnet, with dark wings appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

1.
Maira Kalman|Word & Image

Maira Kalman, My Favorite Things

“How do I combine this writing and this art to say as much as I can with as few words as I can.” Maira Kalman

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Illustrations from the republished edition of Ooh-la-la (Max in Love). Copyright © Maira Kalman; 1991. From Ooh-la-la (Max in Love).

Illustrations from the republished edition of Ooh-la-la (Max in Love). Copyright © Maira Kalman; 1991. From Ooh-la-la (Max in Love).

Excerpt: In her work for adults — My Favorite Things, And the Pursuit of Happiness, The Principles of Uncertainty primarily — Kalman lays bare the movements of her mind, the way doors make her think of Wittgenstein and the impossibility of certainty. But she is reticent on the matter of her private life. A fan might not know that she has children, but to hear her talk about her experience of motherhood illuminates all of her work.

“When Lulu was born, I said, ‘Now I know why I’m alive.’ Everything before that seemed pretty fine, but to have a child seemed … Now I know what this is all about. So when Alex was born, the house was just fantastically imaginative, and we’d turn all the furniture upside down and make forts in the room and things that would last for days. There was a sense of play that was very active and very real for me.”

Here are a couple of selections from one of her ‘adult’ books, Beloved Dog.

If you want more, and how could you not, Maira Kalman’s website is here >

2.
How to write your autobiographical novel | Alexander Chee

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What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. ~ Alexander Chee

3.
Like a moth to light | Emmet Gowin

“You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand,” that’s the only exhilarating place to be.” ~ Emmet Gowin

What is it with Virginia and photographers? Sally Mann ranks as one of the preeminent photographers of the modern era, and Emmet Gowin is right there with her. Both from Virginia, he in Danville, she a couple hours away in Lexington. His early-in-his-career pictures of his family in Danville, Virginia were, as they say, deeply felt, profoundly original and unforgettable. (As were Sally Mann’s) Standing still was never going to be his thing. So now here is Emmet Gowin taking the measure of the moth. The New York Times seems to love Emmet Gowin, and has at least two terrific explorations of his work. Have a look here > and here, too >

From Gowin’s early work.

Emmet Gowin, Nancy, Danville, VA 1969

4.
Charles Bukowski, Monica Umba

{ The Blue Bird, by Charles Bukowski, animation by Monica Umba }

There’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

5.
Carolyn Drake

China. Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Hotan. White Jade River. 2013. A message about the soul of jade written by a Chinese jade carver.

“I brought prints and invited people to draw over them, thinking that maybe we could have a covert conversation through images.” ~Carolyn Drake

China. Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Kashgar Old Town. 2011. “Its the street I was born on. It is a beautiful street. My son drew his dream. A person is running after this thief. My wife wanted to draw a beautiful girl.”

This is quite a fantastic story about a project, Wild Pigeon, by the photographer Carolyn Drake. From the Magnum Photos website:

Between 2007 and 2013, Carolyn Drake traveled in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a remote province of China, 2,000 miles from Beijing, staying in Uyghur villages and cities on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The Uyghurs are a predominantly muslim Turkic people, one of China’s recognised ethnic minorities, with their own distinct language and writing systems. She found that the landscape changed on each visit as historic Uyghur neighborhoods were being torn down and rebuilt as modern Chinese cities, a result of government development policy.

As Drake tried to ask Uyghurs about these changes, the translator she was using quit, saying her questions were “too political”. So instead, she invited people to communicate through drawing. The resultant body of work is titled ‘Wild Pigeon’, so named after a folk tale about a bird that would rather die than be caged by humans, a story banned from publication by the Chinese government but passed on by word of mouth.

CHINA. Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. 2013. Image burned into photo by an artist who sells carved gourds to tourists. His father used to carve elaborate horse saddles, but nobody does that job anymore, he said.

THAT’S IT. THANK YOU.

The post 5CT for June 2018 appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

Ted Leonhardt

Richard Pelletier

March 20th 7 pm. 314 Marion Street Seattle, WA

The post Live appearance! appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

1.
Helge Lien Trio

Helge Lien Trio Live at the A-Trane, Berlin April 20. 2008

From Chris Jones at the BBC in 2009:

The first couple of tracks do, in fact, put you in mind of the kind of fast-paced Jarrettisms that EST were so adept at, yet to call HLT derivative is a huge disservice. Lien’s modal approach owes as much to the original source, Bill Evans, as it does any of his fellow near-countrymen. By track three (Radio) Berg’s bowed bass propels this mysterious number into unknown territory. Like the cover image of a dark forest’s interior, this is interior music made by men who, like most Norwegians, hold a deep respect for the pristine wilderness that surrounds them.

The dancier numbers here: Troozee, Diverted Dance or Snurt, contain enough catchy riffs to make them trusted friends upon repeated listens, while on Halla Troll Lien’s use of dissonance is a fabulous counterpoint to the jagged time signature.

By the gorgeous closing In The Wind Somewhere you’ve forgotten that there ever was an Esbjorn, Brad Meldhau, Tord Gustavsen or whoever. This is a world perfectly created by Lien and his pals. Get over it and just enjoy…

Read the full piece here >

We’d be remiss if we did not include the amazing Last Chance to Dance Trance (Perhaps)

2.
Keith Jarrett, the Köln Concert

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Kind of Weird: How the Köln Concert Made Keith Jarrett a Pop Star, by John Lingan

Jarrett was sleep-deprived and harried that night, and his mood wasn’t helped by the fact that the opera house had supplied a relatively small, poorly tuned piano rather than the Bösendorfer grand that he requested. Even after an emergency tuning, the instrument supposedly sounded like a toy, with shrieking high notes and little projection in the low registers. On the record, having passed through two microphones, the piano has an almost otherworldly sound, like it’s five stories high and made of glass. Jarrett plays it harder than he does on his other solo recordings, bashing the keys and keeping largely to the mid-range notes, perhaps out of frustration. “What happened with this piano was that I was forced to play in what was—at the time—a new way,” he explained years later. “Somehow I felt I had to bring out whatever qualities this instrument had.

This is all backstory and context, but as an album, The Köln Concert melts context, vaporizes it: Purely as music, it exists outside time and space.

Read the whole story here>

3.
Aron Klein’s Bulgarian Demon Chasers

5CT subscriber Gothic Horror, pointed us to these amazing photographs and suggested that your correspondent arrange to make a Whidbey Island version of these Demon Chaser ensembles. For that, please stay tuned. For now, here’s the real story:

“Kukeri is an ancient pagan ritual practiced annually across the Balkan mountain regions where local men wear carved wooden masks of beasts’ faces and hang heavy bells around their waists as they perform arcane dances,” says London-based photographer Aron Klein. The Kukeri Project is Aron’s magical and dreamlike series that consists of hypnotic images of large men in carnivalesque costumes, posing menacingly in the wintry Bulgarian mountains. These figures are intended to dispel evil spirits and protect their community from ill fortune. The project came about after Aron started working as a photographer for Meadows in the Mountains music festival in the Rhodope Mountain range between Bulgaria and Greece. “I’ve fallen madly in love with this forgotten corner of Europe with its tiny villages, steeped in ancient folklore and mysterious traditions,” he tells It’s Nice That.

4.
Marc Monroe Dion

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Marc Monroe Dion is so good we thought you’d want to read this, too.

Welcome to Our Hillbillyhole

by Marc Monroe Dion

America is a “nation of immigrants,” and “diversity is our strength.”

The overused phrases are like pennies with the date worn smooth.

Here in Fall River, we have always been right at the grinding, pushing, moving, intermarrying, confusing, “This customer doesn’t speak English. Get Frank to come out here” end of immigration.

I’ve been in Fall River corner stores when three languages were being spoken simultaneously. I’ve used my half-forgotten French-Canadian dialect to interpret for a Haitian lady who was having a little trouble in the Stop & Shop checkout line.

Immigration isn’t a political theory in Fall River. In Fall River, immigration is your grandmother’s accented English, the way the Pakistani-born corner store owner talks. It’s the Cambodian food your new son-in-law’s family eats. It’s your girlfriend talking to her sisters in Spanish.

People come here running, fleeing a war in Syria, a famine in Ireland, poverty and a fascist government in the Azores, too many kids and too small a farm in French Canada, the pogroms of Russia, the hunger of Poland. Everybody shows up here panting and unprepared, broke and scared, fodder for the lowest-paying employers.

You don’t come here because things are going good at home. How do you think your Irish ancestors looked when they came off the boat, gabbling in Gaelic, ragged, hungry and clannish?

When you get here, the others from your country who are already here welcome you. Everyone else wishes you’d go home because you can’t speak English, your food smells funny and you’re “taking all the jobs.”

On my mother’s side of the family, the first Munroes arrived in North America in the 1600s They showed up in chains, captured by the British after a failed Scottish rebellion. By every law, they were traitors, criminals. One of their descendants is believed by some historians to have fired the first shot in the American Revolution. The Dion side of my family came to Fall River around 1900. They were illiterate, as unpromising a group of people as ever came to America.

When you get to America, most likely one of the people you meet is the old, native born man who doesn’t mind telling you that you’re ruining the country or ruining the city, or “taking over,” or not learning English fast enough. Sometimes he’s the guy who hires you to work in his factory or his warehouse. Sometimes, you landscape his yard, or work in his hotel. He makes fun of the way you talk. He calls you names. He thinks you’re stupid. He never learns to pronounce your last name because he never tries.

We elected that guy president.

And now, in Fall River, where immigration is not an abstraction, we face the fact that we did not come here from “good” places. If they had been good, we would not have left, or our families would not have left. And we hark back to the words of poet Emma Lazarus, who called those who came here, “wretched refuse,” but who knew it was a term of pride. It was what you were because it was how others saw you, but it wasn’t what you would become, what your children and grandchildren would become.

I am the proud descendant of traitors and illiterates, of the unskilled and the uneducated, those who came here from someplace worse or were dragged here in chains. None of us were a good bet. After all, we’d already messed things up at home. What made anyone think we’d do any better in America?

They came from some potatohole in Ireland some snowhole in Quebec, some favashole in Portugal, some bucket of borscht in Russia, some hummushole in Lebanon, and the first thing they learned in America was the insulting name they were called by the people who owned the country.

It’s still happening, and it will probably always happen because the instinct of people to call other people names cannot be bred out of the species. Communications improve, but people do not, and what you used to spray paint on a wall, you now spatter on Twitter. Bigotry will hitch a ride on anything that travels.

Welcome to America. The country is such a hillbillyhole that you can’t quote the president in a family newspaper.

5.
Beth Moon’s Ancient Trees

{ Zalmon Olive Trees (c) Beth Moon }

{ Bowthorpe Oak (c) Beth Moon }

by Beth Moon:

“Portraits of Time” is a series of portraits of ancient trees from around the world that explores time and survival, celebrating the wonders of nature that have endured throughout the centuries. This fourteen-year project has taken me on an exhilarating journey to many parts of the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The criteria I use for choosing particular trees are: immense size, great age, and notable history. Locations are researched by a number of methods: history books, botanical books, tree registers, newspaper articles, and information from friends and fellow travelers.

Few of these trees have signposts or any markings/recognition. Indeed, they often grow in unexpected places, seemingly unaware of their surroundings, as if they exist in another world. Many of the trees I have photographed have survived because they are out of reach of civilization; on mountainsides, private estates, or on protected land. Certain species exist only in a few isolated areas of the world. For example, there are six species of baobabs found only on the island of Madagascar, and the mythical dragon’s blood tree grows only on a tiny island in the Arabian Sea.

Full story here >

{ Wakehurst Yews (c) Beth Moon }

{ Heart of the Dragon (c) Beth Moon }

{ Kings Canyons Sequoias (c) Beth Moon }

THAT’S IT. THANK YOU.

The post 5CT for February 2018 appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

“It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself.” – Nick Hornby, About a Boy

1.

Claudia Pettis

Portrait in Soft Grey, Claudia Pettis (4 x 6′)

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After Midnight, Claudia Pettis

Mid-day Blues Claudia Pettis

“The materials I use are important to me—they have textures and smells and origins and histories. I use Belgium linen and elegant materials—fine ground pigments, Italian earths, ambers, chemically complex glazes. I take great joy in the process of mixing and discovering, of putting on paint and taking it away. I seldom frame and think it is unimportant. Yes, when in a private room and home a painting can be enhanced, but I like the viewer to see a work the way I see it, and in doing so they can take part in the process by discovering the way I got there. There are drips and clues in the exposed piece—the canvas texture, the edges, the wood stretchers. I put together each piece thoughtfully.”

Fragile Connections, Claudia Pettis

Claudia’s subject matter is close at hand because she breeds these sheep. From her Mutiny Bay Farm website: “This breed of sheep was chosen for their hardy self-reliance, superb foraging abilities, beauty of wool and temperament. Bred in the Middle Ages for the deep black wool by Benedictine monks, these sheep were also considered the finest and most succulent of all mutton.” See more of Claudia’s work here >>

2.
Jon Batiste, his truth marches on

Just love this interview with Jon Batiste, (Stephen Colbert’s band leader) talking about how he reinterpreted The Battle Hymn of the Republic for The Atlantic Magazine.

Here’s the full piece, have a listen.

3.
Richard Nixon: The Life
by John A. Farrell

If not now, when? Many people are saying this is blazing good read. None other than Frank Rich, who mentioned it in his fantastic New York Magazine piece, Nixon, Trump, and How a Presidency Ends, said, “G. Gordon Liddy was alt-right before it was cool: “a right-wing zealot, with a fixation for Nazi regalia and a kinky kind of Nietzschean philosophy,” who “organized a White House screening of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.”

Excerpt from Richard Nixon:

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The once upon a time crime boss Raymond Patriarca, from Crimetown.

5.
Franz Wright

The post 5CT for December 2017 appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

1. 
Sir Colin & Mitsuko

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2. 
Mitsuko, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 in G major

3.
Thomas Merton

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Bob Dylan in Newport in 1964

By Lucy Tonic:

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4.
Solitude x 2

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Garland’s trademark block chord technique, a commonly borrowed maneuver in jazz piano today, was unique and differed from the methods of earlier block chord pioneers such as George Shearing and Milt Buckner. Garland’s block chords were constructed of three notes in the right hand and four in the left hand, with the right hand one octave above the left. Garland’s left hand played four-note chords that simultaneously beat out the same exact rhythm as the right-hand melody played. But unlike George Shearing’s block chord method, Garland’s left-hand chords did not change positions or inversions until the next chord change occurred. It is also worth noting that Garland’s four-note left-hand chord voicings frequently left out the roots of the chords, a chord style later associated with pianist Bill Evans.

The post 5CT for June appeared first on 5 Cool Things.

1.
Bear

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2.
Story for Business

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{ Nick Parker, John Yorke }

Story for Business — is online from London and is run by John Yorke, author of Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story (and head of BBC drama) and Nick Parker, one of the very best business writers anywhere. If you want to know more, write me. At the very least, read Into the Woods, and get a delicious, deeply informed sense of how stories, from Macbeth to Jaws to Star Wars to Casablanca, actually work. Fantastically interesting and revealing.

3.
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

{Illustration by Raymond Briggs – The giant abandons his vicious-looking club for a game of chess. For a story by Barbara Leonie Picard, ‘How Loki Outwitted a Giant.’ – from The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales}

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The literary fairy tale allowed for new possibilities of subversion in the written word and in print, and therefore it was always looked upon with misgivings by the governing authorities in the civilization process. 

The literary fairy tale is a relatively young and modern genre. Though there is a great deal of evidence that oral wonder tales were written down in India and Egypt thousands of years ago, and all kinds of folk motifs of magical transformation became part and parcel of national epics and myths throughout the world, the literary fairy tale did not really establish itself as genre in Europe and later in North America until some new material and socio-cultural conditions provided fruitful ground for its formation. 
{Arthur Hughes, The evil witch seeks revenge in George MacDonald’s ‘Day Boy and Night Girl’ published in The Light Princess and Other Stories (1874) and illustrated by Hughes.}

4.
Kait Dunton & Albrecht Gundel-Vom Hofe

Kait Dunton in Berlin. In a shop window. With Albrecht. Who leans back at one point so he can meet, intimately, his fellow musician in the music, in the moment. Of course they are playing Hymn to Life, of course they are. From a 2016 album, Piano Conversations.

5.
Workers, poets

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I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young

I swallowed labor, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life

I can’t swallow any more
everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat

I spread across my country
a poem of shame

From Megan Walsh at Literary Hub ->

Today the most famous migrant worker poet is 24-year-old Xu Lizhi who committed suicide in 2014.

He worked at Foxconn city, the electronics mega-factory in Shenzhen famed not only for manufacturing all our Apple products, but for a spate of suicides in 2010 that exposed the sinister myth of opportunity and social mobility on the assembly line: “To die is the only way to testify that we ever lived,” wrote one blogger at the factory. (Foxconn subsequently erected netting to prevent not the despair but the death toll.) But when Xu threw himself from the 17th floor of a building four years later, having published much of his work online, it was not his death that made headlines, but his skill as a poet.

Xu highlighted our own automated disconnect from the people who manufacture the clothes we wear and the electronics we consume, as conveyed in the final lines of his poem,
“Terracotta Army on the Assembly Line”:

(. . .)  these workers who can’t tell night from day
wearing
electrostatic clothes
electrostatic hats
electrostatic shoes
electrostatic gloves
electrostatic bracelets
all at the ready
silently awaiting their orders
when the bell rings
they’re sent back to the Qin

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THAT’S IT, THANK YOU.

The post 5CT for May 2017 appeared first on 5 Cool Things.