Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who learned English as a teenage immigrant, will be the new U.S. poet laureate, the Library of Congress announced Thursday.
Mr. Simic taught at the University of New Hampshire for 34 years before moving to emeritus status. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems, “The World Doesn’t End.” He also is an essayist, translator, editor and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature.
Mr. Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938, and his childhood was disrupted by World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15 and joined his father in New York a year later, in 1954. He has been a U.S. citizen for 36 years. “I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15,” he said.
Later on Thursday, Simic received another honor, the 14th annual Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 prize from the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”
A good friend caught Great American Taxi in Boulder a few weeks ago. When I talked to him on the phone he kept raving about one of the cats Vince is kickin’ it with—guitar player, songwriter and vocalist Jefferson Hamer. Today I bought Hamer’s record, Left Wing Sweetheart from iTunes. The record was produced by Sally Van Meter. Ben Kaufmann from Yonder Mtn. appears.
As an ad man, I can’t help but be drawn to Hamer’s second track, “Brand Names”.
Brand names, brand names look to the label
I’d be so lost without you
Show me, tell me, what would you like to sell me
Quickly now the rush is nearly through
I love scathing commentary on commerical culture delivered in a song for sale.
I received a notification on MySpace from blues musician, Olga, about this afternoon’s headstone dedication for Jessie Hemphill. Hemphill, who passed away last year, was best known as a blues guitarist, songwriter and vocalist. She toured widely in Europe and won several W.C. Handy Awards for her recordings.
The dedication ceremony will take place beginning at 4:45 pm at the Senatobia Memorial Cemetery, which is located on Highway 51 South in Senatobia, Mississippi. Reverend John Wilkins, the son of early blues and gospel recording artist Robert Wilkins, will lead a prayer service, after which attendees are invited to join in a group performance of Hemphill’s “Lord Help the Poor and Needy.”
“By erecting this tombstone we wanted to publicly memorialize the important contributions to north Mississippi blues traditions made by Jessie Mae,” says Olga Wilhelmine Mathus, who founded the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of north Mississippi music. “Her music was timeless, and we wanted to ensure that people can discover and learn about her music and the musical traditions of her family for generations to come.”
The Foundation has received major support from the Alan Lomax Archive in the form of donated photographic prints and field recordings of Sid Hemphill, Rosa Lee and Sydney Hemphill, (Jessie’s grandfather and aunts), Fred McDowell, Lucius Smith, the Pratcher brothers, and the Youngs.
[UPDATE] Thanks to the instant satisfaction iTunes provides, I’m listening to Jessie Mae’s 2003 release “Get Right Blues”. Assembled by folklorist Dr. David Evans, the album collects 15 unreleased tracks from 1979, 1984 and 1985. According to All Music Guide, this album is part history lesson, part folk-gospel revival, part boogie and doesn’t contain a single lame track.
As a new media intra/entrepreneur, I spend a great deal of time exploring the bleeding edges of communications technology–social networks, mobile platforms, consumer generated content, etc. Yet, I was an English major in college and I maintain a fondness for books and other printed matter — a fact which helps make the following academic discourse meaningful to me.
Sven Birkerts, editor of the journal Agni, defends print and the critical culture that analyzes it for the common good. Here’s a passage from his piece in The Boston Globe:
I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises. My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian “polymorphous perverse,” that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself — what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.
But this “mattering” requires the existence of a common ground, a shared set of traditions — a center which is the collectively known picture of private and public life as set out by artists and thinkers, and discussed and debated not just by everyone with an opinion, but also most effectively by the self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so. Arbiters, critics . . . reviewers.
The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiters aplenty — some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well — but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.
Academics and critics LOVE authority. Their very existence depends upon it. Hence, the trouble they have adopting blogs, believing in Wikipedia and the like. The thing is there’s no going back. The question is therefore, “How best to extract value from new media?” It seems to me the formal set might do well to establish their own corner of the Web where standards matter. The Web is enormous. There’s room for amateurs and pros.
Thanks to a business trip to NYC, I was fortunate to dine at Gotham Bar and Grill last night. I opened with Black Bass Ceviche made with purple Peruvian potatoes, red onion and avocado in a pineapple aji amarillo emulsion. For my main course, I chose organic salmon with jasmine rice and yard beans in an eggplant and cilantro coconut lime broth.
Then today on the plane back to Savannah, I read in the Business section of The New York Times how Singapore Airlines is serving chef Alfred Portale’s food in first class, including the ceviche dish, which I can now attest is out of this world.
Phil Lesh & Friends, which has been laying low of late, has new members and a fall tour planned with three nights in Chicago and nine nights in Manhattan, along with other key dates including Red Rocks, Paolo Soleri in Santa Fe and The Echo Project in Atlanta.
One of the new players is American singer-songwriter and blues musician, Jackie Greene. The 26-year old Californian says, “I feel very honored to have been asked to take part in such a remarkable band. I am truly in awe of each of their talents.”
Steve Molitz, the keyboard player from Particle is also in the band, as is multi-insturmentalist and session player, Larry Campbell. P&F veteran, John Molo, is on drums.
She also loves live music performed in an intimate space, as this eloquent paragraph indicates:
A large part of the reason that I go to live music performances is because I am looking for some element of connection. I can sit at home in front of my stereo, listen to sterile studio recordings made in a far-away state that have been remastered and flawlessly captured. Sure, I hear a lot of good stuff that way . . . but I also feel a need for a visceral connection, an elemental thread of immediacy tying creator to listener in the same physical space. It’s why I prefer smaller venues – not from snobbery, or so I can tell you that I saw them way back when they were still playing the [insert tiny club name here]. It’s so I can see their eyes and feel their words, with flaws and all. I find myself feeling less than satisfied when I see a show at a huge venue on massive Jumbotron screens. The performers are tiny little ants a million miles away, and most of the action comes from the folks dancing around me. That’s fun, and I’ll do it, but that’s not the connection I really want with my music.
Heather goes on to describe Reilly’s show at the Larimer Lounge in Denver, where in a fiery moment he joined Tom Morello on stage (they both grew up in Libertyville, IL) for a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”. Reilly also played an impromtu set in the beer garden post-show, after a fan asked to hear “Heroin,” a song he had not played earlier in the night.
It seems like it might be easy to confuse Libertyville with Belleville, IL? Belleville, near St. Louis, is hometown to Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar.
We think of successful CEOs as people with exceptional technical skills, and while they may in fact embody this type of knowledge, their curious minds can be more closely linked to their capital achievements.
Author Harriet Rubin paid a visit to the personal libraries of some of America’s business titans for her article in The New York Times. Here she is with Michael Moritz in San Francisco:
Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it is the imprint of old media — books by the thousands sprawling through his Bay Area house — that occupies his mind.
“My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,†Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.â€
Rubin notes that Steve Jobs has an “inexhaustible interest†in the books of William Blake — the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. How revealing is that?
“Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,†suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.
The Duhks rule. The band’s live performance from Merlefest last April is currently the most popular download available from FestivaLink, part of the Livedownloads family of sites.
