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People in Dublin showing off their best dance move

The Last Unicorn (multitrack a cappella)

Up with People 1991

'poems about anything' and 'all the brass awkwards'

a while back i was walking out of a grocery co-op in berkeley, when i saw a young person with a little typewriter in his lap and a cardboard-and-marker sign that read 'poems about anything.'

he was writing a poem for a group of girls, and they looked on smiling as he joked with them and pecked the keys at a tiny, irregularly torn scrap of paper. 

he would adjust the scrap with his fingers when he ran out of space, which happened about every four words. 

after the girls had their poem, he started on one for me. as he typed, he looked around, said hi to scruffy hipster types who he knew ("pacman" and "mouth"), called "poems about anything! would you like a poem today?" to the passing grocery shoppers.

the poem he wrote for me was about trombones, because it came up that i used to play trombone. 

here is the poem:

the most awkward and
forgotten of all the
brass awkwards ska
band and nineteennine
ty something means we
are participating in
culture larger bigger
than we are and back
when instruments were
expensive and strictly
for the upper crust
or those who serve at
their behest and since
then as pleasure has
become less of a what
we make of it and more
of a pervasive state
maybe the non electric
audiblast trombone makes
a comeback for its ability
to slide from sound to
sound like situational
ethics and classical music
needing modern relevance so
rich people give free sound
to willing participants

my housemate jen, who is a new music composer, had been having an existential crisis about the relevance of new music in the modern world, so this was surprisingly apropos. 

i mentioned this, and he brought up "noise music," saying that it drew a solid following of punk kids. he wanted to encourage jen, through me, with the fact there are indeed people out there who are interested in wild new music. 

i agreed with him wholeheartedly, even though i knew the academic and avant-garde classical world that jen was facing was a lot different than the world where punk kids lived.

i gave him a dollar for the poem. then he was off, with his little avocado-colored typewriter, cardigan sweater, and orange beard, to try his luck in rockville. "i'll see you again," he said.

i liked him a lot. i hope he is still writing poems about anything. he brought a lot of joy to me and others that day.

culture and the senses

recent note: i like this giddy post, and the idea of 'fifty ways to walk':

**

I'm excited about a recent tantalizing find at the library. I haven't looked into the book at all yet, but the back-of-the-book description is exciting as it is. Culture and the Senses, by Kathryn Linn Geurts (University of California Press, 2002). I've typed up a sizeable chunk of it below, and I've bolded the bits I'm most interested in:

. . . Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense and balancing (physically and psychologically as well as literally and metaphorically) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally, feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo-American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent.

Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. She demonstrates this through a careful analysis of language, then by focusing on the attention given to balance and the body in childcare and the way child raising instantiates properties of balance as moral code. The body's ways of knowing extend to culturally relative ways of moving and walking, so that the repertoire of more than fifty "ways to walk," for instance, literally embodies socialization and identity, status and well-being. . . .

The phrase "ways to walk" cues in my mind a reference to an Anselm Hollo poem. I'll have to look up the exact lines, but the title is, I think, "Preface," and it goes something like this: "the poet Vallejo discovered new ways of walking / while living in Paris . . . / the following poems are a record of his discoveries"

this is our time

at the library today, i found this:

The next fifty years are a special time. Between now and 2050 we'll see the zenith, or very nearly, of human population. With luck we'll never see any greater production of carbon dioxide or toxic chemicals. We'll never see greater species extinction or soil erosion.

So it's the task of those of us alive right now to deal with this special phase, to squeeze us through these next fifty years. That's not fair—any more than it was fair that earlier generations had to deal with the Second World War or the Civil War or the Revolution or the Depression or slavery. It's just reality.

We need in these fifty years to be working simultaneously . . . on our ways of life, on our technologies, and on our population.

The period in question happens to be our time. That's what makes this moment special, and what makes this moment hard.

—Bill McKibben, from the facing page of The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century, by the Environmental Careers Organization, published by Island Press, Washington D.C., 1999,