David Zwimer 2024
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
Los Lobos, founded in 1973
Two great music sets we love — one is quite recent, informal, a miniature powerhouse. The longer concert is beautifully shot: exquisite pan shots of the full stage, clear as a bell right up on the stage with the performers, back-shots, side-shots, the instruments are in your hands.
Imagine (you can) this group hasn't been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
They are the Americas (south and north) Songbook
Today is our 50th wedding anniversary — Bob & Susan
We've played these guys throughout all the years, and Susan is from L.A.
Oh, the one-of-kind film Texas Chain Saw Massacre is also
50 years old this year. Here is film director Eli Roth's
smart cookie contemporary eye to the film classic:
"Texas Chain Saw Massacre” unnerved me in ways I didn’t expect. I didn’t know it was going to start with those solar flares, and the strange music that blurs the line between score and sound design. The actors didn’t feel like actors. I wasn’t scared by it. I wanted to live in it. It was a movie just dripping with mood and atmosphere, and it felt like it had been made by serial killers."
The Keeper of Sheep
[ 23 July 1930 ]
56
Now that I feel love
I'm interested in things that have a scent.
I never used to be interested in the fact that a flower had scent.
Now I experience the scent of flowers as if life were utterly new.
I know perfectly well that they always had a scent, just as I knew that I existed.
These are things one knows out of habit.
But now I know this from the deep in-breath that comes from way back in my head.
Today the flowers taste good to me on a palate that can also smell.
Sometimes when I wake now, smell comes before sight.
Every day I wake full of joy and sorrow.
I used to wake feeling nothing at all; I simply woke.
I feel joy and sorrow because I lose what I dream
But can still inhabit the reality where my dreams live.
I don't know what to do with my sensations,
I don't know what to do on my own.
I want her to say something, anything, so that I can wake again.
_________________
Fernando Pessoa
The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
translated from the Portuquese by
Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari
New Directions, 2020
There are three books I've read, and then re-read over the last year — each about the same size (under 300 pages), each with less than attractive book design to its merit — in fact the Prose book, perhaps by accident or intent, appears to have been published in 1974: the book's size, Milton Glasserish design, cheap paper stock, an old Doubleday-feel etc., and all three books are straight-up originals. There is something about being relaxed, even confident, and telling it like it is. With a buoyant style.
If the authors aren't personal friends, they should be.
The Prose is shown above, the other two, not to miss, are below.
Francine Prose, Harper, 2024
November
Where is my dear sixteen-year-old-cat
I wish to carry upstairs in my arms
looking up at me and thinking
be careful, dear human
Sixteen years. How many days since
I found you as if an urchin in a snowstorm
and you moved in assured
learned the territories of the house
and what became your garden
Only now do we see the horizon
where you pushed two or three times
then slipped into
Was it too soon or too late
that last summer of your life
when we watched your walk
down to a river to take a sip
from its ongoing flow
Oh Jack I miss your presence everywhere
in the corners of rooms, in every chair,
or nesting in a cardboard box
Take me back where the past can again enter
those early remembered rooms, our snowbound street,
lift me upside down in your arms, I cannot stand it
I need a journey too. Have I slept my life away,
do I understand anything? Will I wear a bell
like yours into the afterlife where language
no longer exists and we gather only linked sounds
like oars from a passing boat,
those few syllables
to recall tenderness
You no longer wait for us
All day long, Basho wrote,
A lark sings in the air
Yet he seems to have had
Not quite his fill
_________________________
Michael Ondaatje
A Year of Last Things
Knopf, 2024
For all the kitten cat videos you watched
Now read the best one
A sheaf of 3 in wrap band
enclosing 40 new haiku poems
& plenty of art work
by the southwest sojourner
______________________________
$ 20 postpaid in the USA
Overseas please add $5