Photograph of Katherine with Doves Language arcs away to white Curves with soft fluttering White soft arc And then is arcing Gone Like her soft jawline Gracing down from earlobe and arc-sweeping up to chin Like paralleling Proud bowing arc Of dove-white Soft dove-breast Arcing gone To two soft white dovings
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
(The Photo)
This, the little silver niche.
Draw around yourself curtains of
bleep, 8-bit hymns &
sine wave chorales.
You can shake yourself
til your gears wobble and clink;
wave your Lost-in-Space tube-arms
to the blocky beats.
These are the noises of our lives now;
our children will program robo-robins
to pitch their warbles
to metallic scratches.
These are the murmurs of the great silver expanse.
These are noises of death & of
bustling binary fertility.
Oven Bird
O happy
en-moling
fluff-pot,
Secreting yourself
away in
chewy bole-bubble,
Peep from
branch-crater,
wriggle out & meet
Cooling air like
biscuit newly risen,
and like crab, like snail,
like bee,
Build your cell and
Please
seal well
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
Snail shells are homes — always in-progress, always excrescing, always spiralling & nautilising outwards homes — for the artists, musicians, songs, poems, writers, people, places, planets, plums that I regularly burden with gush.
At least this way all the shameless enshrining can be contained.
Think of them as cockle shells built for endless barnacling.
2-11-08
Banshee Birth
At Town Hall I wished
His cover of Cohen’s “The Guests”
Would never end.
And then he had us all hum –
To feel the ghost behind our heads.
& in our necks.
The massed chest-drones were
Soft yellow fibers
Being braided through everyone.
A year later,
At the Warsaw in Brooklyn
He talked about being rapt
Before old videos of Otis
And when Antony sang
He’d seize moments, notes,
And shake them into endlessness
Just like Otis:
With fearlessness
With tender madness
With grinning pain
So again come ghosts:
He wrings their necks
In exorcising vibrato
Just as he calls them forth:
The banshee birth
Antony & The Johnsons Cds
Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
To me, watching Ivo Pogorelich play Chopin as he does here in the 1980 Chopin competition in Warsaw is not much different to me than watching Otis Redding sing “Shake” or Iggy Pop writhe on stage to something off Funhouse. It’s like seeing Coltrane blow holy hell out of his sax. It’s like hearing Patti Smith sing stairs up into the night on “Birdland.” Or Howlin Wolf throttle his guitar neck and sing the rafters into splinters. It’s pure channeled soul: the kind that’s wracked and hurt & fearful and writhing but swept up and organized in a solid mountain of feeling. The heart’s blood, black and wild, captured & focused in a sealed vial of white glass.
From what I understand, Martha Argerich, a judge at the Chopin competition from which this video’s taken (and a legendary Chopin interpreter in her own right), walked out when Ivo was eliminated. I can see why. If for no other reason that these are two Chopin interpreters who capture what’s hardest to capture in this composer’s works: delivering all the massive shifts in feeling without making it seem fragmented, schizophrenic, and doing so with tremendous technique.
Chopin’s works speak to me in part because they depict extremes of emotion side by side as they really (and uncomfortably, sometimes) exist in the human heart; Ivo speaks to me because he seems to understand this intuitively in how he plays. He switches from the most delicate and aching touches to the most hammering fortissimos without making you think he’s just playing up contrast/shock-value. His rubato, his pacing, it all shows a piano player who feels (rather than has read) that Chopin was a revolutionary of the heart’s mapping as much as he was of the keyboard’s.
This is how he plays the Scherzo no. 3: as the story of one human heart struggling and battling, in tragedy and absurdity, unifying it all by making the emotional vicissitudes (which are so characteristic of Chopin’s Scherzos) seem less like hodgepodge extremes yoked together and more like different portraits of the same human face — like Monet’s haystacks seen in varying shades of light. All of a piece, despite the changes, despite the furious switching.
Anyone else out there a huge Chopin fan? Any other interpreters you can recommend?
Swans - “Sex, God, Sex” (From “Children of God”)
Swans’ “Children of God”– this album’s a musical crucible. These songs of Gira’s and Jarboe’s gather, compress, burn & reduce what we feel and what we experience to pure pale cores.
Flesh of melody flayed away and bone remains: a skinny piano line, a frayed ribbon of flute. Sheaths stripped from the blue glowing nerves.
Life and the complex relationships we form to endure it are boiled to nothing but: fear, power, desire, acquisition, redemption, violation, fury.
And the many rhythms with which we walk, run, breathe, leap are pulverized to one stark, cavernous beat.
And the many sights we see from waking to sleeping — the flashing panoply, the images, the objects, the colors, the faces — these too are stripped to their archetypes: fire, a child, a garden, a mouth, honey, blood.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
It has become evolutionary at this point to admire and worship our man-made, synthetic versions of nature and ourselves — while also denigrating/ignoring the original reality from which they came.
As animals and plants become extinct, our fascination and even preference for artificial representations of them [stuffed animals, cute photoshopped hallmarky dogs and cats, remarkably life-like fake plants] dominate. It’s easy to see why — we can extract from the originals all that makes them safe and easy and forgo the figurative thorns (fake plants that don’t stink, rot, have imperfect petals, aphids; stuffed animals or robo-animals that aren’t temperamental, biting, are perfectly obedient, have no excretory functions, are docile, and are able to receive passively all our fantasies and projections).
We weren’t content to extend absolute mastery over nature. Now, annoyed with captive nature’s occasional recalcitrance, or just plain annoying Otherness, we scrap it and make it in our own image, like Gods.
The most fascinating aspect of all this is how it turns inward, upon ourselves. Unable to accept the beauty of variation and imperfection, we will turn to human simulacra more and more — there are already on the market incredibly expensive and highly-lifelike female sex-dummies. Genetics, cosmetic surgery, these aren’t innocent practices, over time they embed this idea in the collective unconscious: “we will not tolerate our own variation and that of others. we will airbrush ourselves and others to make everyone safer to everyone else’s eyes and sensibilities. there is something ugly and frightening about people who don’t conform to our safe expectations, and it’s our duty to remedy this”. And the more people internalize this script, the more they seek to externalize it and inflict it on others.
This is all born of fear. It is a kind of self-directed fascism, an inability to tolerate nuance and variation, a hunger for the imposition of strict standards for what is appealing and what is not.
Listen I know this is uncomfortable and I am sorry for that but I am very hungry and for right now I strongly feel that I am more important than you.
More of Dave Chung’s art here.
