Every time they come out with a new video, I wonder how they’re going to top the old one.  Same feeling with this one.

As it happens, the audio poem of the day at poetryfoundation.org is by Tony Hoagland.

Romantic

NY Times Article

Here’s one I clipped from the New Yorker and tacked to the studio wall a while ago.

Violent Oils?  Midnight Femmes?  No, it’s the Break.

Listen to Cylinders.

What do those who are fans of the Oils and/or the Femmes think? 

Me, I wish I lived in Australia this February.

Bulwer-Lytton Contest Winners

For all lovers of good writing, here are this year’s winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, (aka “It Was a dark and Stormy Night” Contest) run by the English Department of San Jose State University, wherein one writes only the first line of a bad novel.

10. As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.

9. Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens.

8. With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

7. Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: “Andre creep… Andre creep…Andre creep.”

6. Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved.

5. Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eking out a living at a local pet store.

4. Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do.

3. Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor.

2. Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn’t know the meaning of the word “fear;” a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death — in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies.

AND THE WINNER IS…

1. The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog’s deception, screaming madly, “You lied!”

and these: The new 2009 crop of Bulwar-Lytton winners are pretty good, too. Here’s the winners in the Detective category:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

Eric Rice
Sun Prairie, WI

Runner-Up

The dame sauntered silently into Rocco’s office, but she didn’t need to speak; the blood-soaked gown hugging her ample curves said it all: “I am a shipping heiress whose second husband was just murdered by Albanian assassins trying to blackmail me for my rare opal collection,” or maybe, “Do you know a good dry cleaner?”

Tony Alfieri
Los Angeles, CA

Dishonorable Mentions

The appearance of a thin red beam of light under my office door and the sound of one, then two pair of feet meant my demise was near, that my journey from gum-shoe detective to international agent had gone horribly wrong, until I realized it was my secretary teasing her cat with a laser pointer.

Here are some of my favorites from In This Light & on This Evening.

01 In This Light And On This Evening
02 Papillon
03 Like Treasure
04 Walk the Fleet Road

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

For some reason, I can easily imagine J.E.’s art interposed on this, and him cranking and flinging the trebuchet with glee.  I can imagine all of us doing this, but especially J.E. (I hope I don’t misrepresent).

I hope you guys enjoy this web game as much as I did.  I finished it all in one sitting, due to my addiction to it.

Click on the image above to play.

 This was the result of some accidents playing with ink recently.

The Temper Trap | Conditions
01 | Love Lost
02 | Rest
03 | Sweet Disposition
04 | Fader

I suppose this could category could designate different things for different people. It could mean art or shows that you’ve seen in the past decade, art that’s been created in the last decade, performing arts, movements in art, news about the arts, etc.

I used a photo of Kara Walker’s artwork, because I think I remember Shotts talking about seeing her show at the Walker in 2007-2008.

Let’s talk about your favorites over the past decade….

I heard the following interview and performance with Patrick Watson and the Wooden Arms on NPR in early December.  It was a fantastic piece, but for some reason I thought it would totally be up Ned’s Alley.  Not that I’m all that interested in Ned’s Alley…if he enjoys this I’ll be happy. 

I’ve been listening to their album Wooden Arms and been liking it quite a bit.  If it would have come out sooner in the year, it might have made my Decade’s Top Ten or So.

This one’s for you, Ned.

Here’s an NPR page with links to other Patrick Watson videos and audio.

This should be a lively discussion…the quantity of books published in the last decade, and amount of time invested in reading them means there will be far less “shared” time with the same books as our fellow Hollow Men.

The title says it all.  What are your favorites from the 2000’s?

Peter and the Wolf

"Overman would be proud," I mumbled to myself after hearing the second Elvis song in a row at 8:05 yesterday morning.

Yup, he would be ecstatic that if there was one thing carried over from my high school education, that I could recall Elvis Presley’s birthday with minimal prompting would be it. So I thought about Elvis, quite a bit, in fact. He was hard to escape yesterday, his music on the agency’s sound system all day. I think I may have been growing a bouffant hairdo during this barrage on my sanity.

I also found myself considering Michael Jackson and the similarities between the two. The wealth, the development of alternative realities, the loss of their essence, before dying, in unforeseen, unrespectable drug-induced manners. Ah, the drugs, a symptom I think of the whole loss of reality bit. A way to be in outer space, isolated, and not have to come back down.

I saw a really great PBS program this week- 6 hours of "This Emotional Life", with the net result being: Human Relationships Are THE Most Important variable in mental health and well-being. Elvis and MJ lost this. Their wealth and fame separated themselves out. They became obsessed with themselves, building their realities, suspicious of the intentions of others, partially out of real concerns. Other people want what wealthy people have.

Then a chilling thought occurred to me. Elvis and MJ are a pair of the most recognizable symbols of America to the world. Nay, it is worse, they are icons because they represent America to the world. America is the wealthy, build our own reality rock star whose fame keeps us from being truly aware of the rest of the worlds problems. this has partially been fed by the world’s grandiose view of us.

But now, I really hope at some point soon we develop a grounding, a reconnection, before we end up dried up and deceased of our own over-consumption. The analogy really goes deeper, because there are so many countries/companies willing to continue to to give us our prescription and illicit drugs as long as they can be hangers-on. These were my thoughts on Elvis Presley’s Birthday.

I heard someone say he would have been seventy-five this week.

Alright, let’s hear of your choices for the best music of the decade. 

Serious contenders?  Personal favorites?  Guilty pleasures?

Years, that is.  It’s the anniversary of Galileo discovering Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto orbiting Jupiter.

Read more about it here and here.

I’ve been listening to this song by Imogen Heap like crazy for the past couple of weeks.  I thought I’d share.  On the deluxe version of the album, I really like the instrumental version.  It doesn’t have the emotional tenor of the vocal version, but it really converys a mood to me.  For some reason this song really makes me think of being in England and living in the 80’s.  At the same time.  It’s kind of a strange sensation — this song causes two deeply nostalgic periods of my life to overlap that I never would have thought compatible.

I’ll let you listen now….

01 | First Train Home
02 | First Train Home (Instrumental)

Good 2010 to all of my fellow Hollow Souls.

I’ve been in a particularly reflective mood in this New Year, and I want to explore some of those reflective moments with the rest of you, if possible.  It’s been a decade since the calendar flipped over to the year 2000, a lot of fears never materialized in flipping over and a lot of fears we never realized we should have materialized in the haze of the past ten years.  The more I ponder it, the more I realize we’ve seen a lot.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’d like to post some conversation starters in the articles and have people contribute to the main idea with thoughts of their own.

For this one…I’d like to hear from you all about the things that have happened in the last ten years that have been memorable.  They can be significant or trivial, just something worth noting. 

Ten years ago, I felt like I had been in Kansas City for ages.  Nursing a broken heart made things go unbearably slow, even though I had only been here about ten months.  I actually remember wondering on New Year’s Day of 2000 where I would be in 2010, if I’d even be alive to be cognizant of it.  Happy to say, I am.

What happened for you in this decade in the making?

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: