that wobble not finding

Korean poetry collage created here.

As first read about on the music of sound.

proper medication

courtesy RhettandLink

I'm saving some of these great ads to watch after my periodontal appointment. But that's no reason for the rest of you to hold back.

Many thanks to the post-Fabulonian cabal who power The Hair Hall of Fame for sharing this Salt Lake Community College Cosmetology ad. After you've tipped your stylist, you can catch the making-of video here for add'l context/laughter.

And now another word or two or three from our sponsors . . .

For those who watch Glee and/or think of Alyson Hannigan one time at band camp:




Freedomize Explorer:




Bucks First:

out of their damn minds

The folks at PCL LinkDump post two videos that'll work some mighty voodoo: one of sonic DIY buzziness and another of one Bill (Wm. Burroughs) shooting another (Wm. Shakespeare).

An old compat musician/writer Michael W. Dean seeks not the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, but that of the Libertarian Punk out Wyoming way. And one day finds guns, bison and steam (if not in that order).

And he who has brought forth the planet that was FABULON, Chateau Thombeau and Wunderkammer sires within the without. Not crazy, per se. But adhering to the mind of no mind with the beautiful images and such.

Oh, wait--from A Basement of Curiosities, a man, his LP and a story . . .

what's the story, morning glory?

Before you go shooting the Ferdinand or smudging pucker paint, check this out at The Boat Lullabies.

so I shoved it into Race

Much as people shamelessly quote The Simpsons and Monty Python, folks back in my long ago youth and far off corner of the sticks were still quoting lines from early 60s comedy records by Brother Dave Gardner.

Now you can be funny that way too (tragically passé and marginalized), thanks to Schadenfreudian Therapy.

Lapsing now into lazy/lame comparisonspeak: Imagine if Jonathan Winters, Lord Buckley and the wraith of Walt Whitman met in a smoke-filled green room thereby creating a wormhole from which a strange otherworldly dude came through to skat, and otherwise sing & speak in numerous over-the-top voices.

This dude would be Brother Dave.

But I'm overselling it. Go on, kick thy own self . . .

We Had Him

courtesy MohammedDawud

Rest in peace, MJ.

everyone's gone to the movies

I've caught this in bits and pieces on the nuevo UHF subchannels like THIS TV and RTN's Off Beat Cinema.

But here it is for one and all courtesy Google Video and publicdomaintorrents.com, A Bucket of Blood.

Sponsored by FABULON and Ms. Blythe Danner.

solitude & the inverted fedora

I'm Learning To Share speaks volumes on Jughead's hat.

Yes, Jughead of Archie comics fame. It's like a doctoral thesis on American Studies in a tasty Flintstones chewable.

the music of sound posts the coolest article ever on The End of Solitude. Recommended, as in very.

If that sounds like no fun, FABULON will show what your friends really think of you no matter how much you text them.

In any case, whatever your state of popularity, please consider doing this:

Stand up and walk away from your computer and go outside somewhere where the birds vastly outnumber the people. Phones and iPods off, just you alone with whatever's happening.

black and white and read all over

I've pestered the heck out of friends with one emailed URL after another from VietNamNet. (Who knows why, as I'm the same provincial East Coast American who digs Kung Pao FM.)

Here's a story about Vietnam's National Poetry Day festival held this past February.

And another quite fascinating human interest story/fable/poem of sorts about a farmer, his wife and the field they've given over to 10,000 storks. An eco-tourist spot has come of their work.

As one visitor observes: "It’s nice to relax in a hammock in the garden and feel the wind from the river. At sunset the land turns white with all the returning storks."

Meanwhile, one reads in AOL of Ruppy the red fluorescent puppy.

links to Laurie

Pathway To Unknown World has a link to audio of an interview last fall with Laurie Anderson. It gets kind of distorted at times and glitchy toward the end, but is very interesting.

Here's a quote of hers from back in the day posted on The Music of Sound. One of several bits of sound advice.

And she's been spotted during a flyby of FABULON.

black light radiation

The Boat Lullabies serves up a video of a man singing & playing in a new, as yet unfilled 1/2 million gallon water tank. Like a vast piano with the sustain pedal weighed down--every note goes on forever.

Blind Pony Books leads us down to a vein of Merle Travis' buried verse.

And to keep it country while observing the rule of three, we'll stumble into Easter morning with the Man in Black:



(courtesy Carters01)

grid worthy

InfraNet Lab posts about the electrical power grid both as big damn infrastructure and the natural world's marginal respite from humanity.

Also mentioned is the On The Grid photo show ongoing in Providence RI, which seems more than a good case for the latter.

My agoraphobic, Stilgoe-esque reaction is that the world is too much with us sentient bipeds as well.

If you too are ready to switch off/on/out/whatever, you'll see me there. But only if I don't see you first.

weasel urine for the people?

Huh . . .*

Oh, I was just thinking of mentioning the poet James Tate when Poem of the Week obliged by posting one of his poems.

While locked inside a Barnes & Noble earlier this month, I had time to wander and saw two recent books by poets I'd seen read way back in my long ago student days.

One is The Ghost Soldiers by the aforementioned Mr. Tate. Great book full of nutty/spooky/beautiful prose poems. Contemporary fables, if you will, or won't. (*Perhaps not--see page 29).

Two is The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by the poet Tomas Tranströmer. Also worth your glance--here's some online T. to prime the pump.

Much like International Talk Like A Pirate Day (which I leave to Alan Tudyk and other experts, but all the same . . ), I hope there is some worldwide observance/emulation/whatever of these two writers.

These books should help us prepare.

the devil and Richard Hell

. . . are meeting death at not just any crossroad, but Au carrefore étrange.

Oh, yeah, devil, Richard Hell. Richard Hell, the devil.

(Not a commentary, just clever shorthand/idle pointing. Back to napping now . . .)

zzzzzzzzzz

Entering sleep mode, with just a few items 'fore snoozing . . .

I'm Learning To Share! posts a Ferrante and Teicher 78 from their prepared piano days. Yes, prepared piano--"Beezwhacks" is an especial example.

Poem of the Week posts the poem "Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World".

Anyone arriving bored & confused might time trip back a year to unterkayness' first month of posts. Too many to deal with? Maybe try the second one.

No doubt more groovin' stuff out there awaits, but lids grow heavy, torpor sets in, and autopilot takes over as suspended animation slows things down.

Gerald Manley Goldfrapp?

On uberkayness, I was getting all in the misty bits of time with Gerald Manley Hopkins. Much philosophical slogging thru my half-sprung notions of contingency & loss.

Anyway, not so much a fan of Goldfrapp as I am of dancing leaves, the following vid says it all so much better than I. And gotta love the tea whistle coda. Thanks be to planet FABULON and chrisf242.



Short of the poetics of a well-produced video, I trundle forth with ticket stubs, pics of a fave restaurant on its way out, plus on audiokayness I take two different approaches to elegy.

dang ol' Capt. Beefheart on dang ol' Music Thing

The 10 commandments for guitarists as put forth by the good cap'n:

http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2007/06/practice-in-front-of-bush-captain.html

Gotta go look for a bush . . .

the curator

My friend Bob French forwarded me some cool stuff today. One item was the following poem by Miller Williams (Lucinda's dad):


The Curator
by Miller Williams


We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come,
were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,
the youngest assistant curator in the country.
I had some good ideas in those days.


Well, what we did was this. We had boxes
precisely built to every size of canvas.
We put the boxes in the basement and waited.


When word came that the Germans were coming in,
we got each painting put in the proper box
and out of Leningrad in less than a week.
They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.


But what we did, you see, besides the boxes
waiting in the basement, which was fine,
a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—
but what we did was leave the frames hanging,
so after the war it would be a simple thing
to put the paintings back where they belonged.


Nothing will seem surprised or sad again
compared to those imperious, vacant frames.


Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble
after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—
You know it lasted nine hundred days.
Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie
sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,
but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.


Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.
They told us this: in three homes far from here
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.
Now they had been sent to defend the city,
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.


I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.


“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”


And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger
than all of us being here in the first place,
inside such a building, strolling in snow.


We led them around most of the major rooms,
what they could take the time for, wall by wall.
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.
I told them how those colors would come together,
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout
and why this painter got the roses wrong.


The next day a dozen waited for us,
then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes.
Each of us took a group in a different direction:
Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse,
Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,
Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper.
We pointed to more details about the paintings,
I venture to say, than if we had had them there,
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces
the same way we’d done it every morning
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.


But now the guide and the listeners paid attention
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.


Maybe this was a way to forget the war
a little while. Maybe more than that.
Whatever it was, the people continued to come.
It came to be called The Unseen Collection.


Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.


Slowly, blind people began to come.
A few at first then more of them every morning,
some led and some alone, some swaying a little.
They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces,
they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,
to see better what was being said.
And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.


After the siege was lifted and the Germans left
and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places,
the blind never came again. Not like before.
This seems strange, but what I think it was,
they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.
They could still have listened, but the lectures became
a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?
Confluences come when they will and they go away.



CREDITS: Miller Williams, “The Curator” from Adjusting to the Light. Copyright © 1992 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.

[Hopefully, fair use applies here . . . Tho' if I ever sign up for Adsense, all bets are off.]