The surface of the world hums and throbs with songs. A stoned neighbor’s 70’s-radio playlist. A restaurant kitchen’s thrashy closing jams. A mother’s lullaby and a father’s lullaby. An opera singer’s audition. Dungeon industrial tracks. The call to prayer. The tipsy empire of karaoke. A nervous adolescent’s talent-show premiere. A crackling crooner from a digitized 78, uploaded. A paved-urban-playground song. A smores-smudged camp sing-along. A sneering, snappy set opener at the club. A busker’s folksified pop cover. Ecstatic humming and wailing in a village ritual. The junior college musical production. Dharma-chanting in the zendo. Ironic anti-songs at the new music […]
Journal
Learning my first rembetika
ΌΣΟ ΜΕ ΜΑΛΏΝΕΙΣ is the song — my first rembetika to learn instrumentally on guitar. The part I’m working on is normally on bouzouki (and other instruments, e.g. accordion and violin). I will learn at least a dozen of these bouzouki melodies on guitar, perhaps many more, by next spring, when I’ll be in Athens and plan to buy a bouzouki of my own. I have read the part from sheet music, but the recording is the real guide. Rembetika is like jazz or bluegrass in this sense — the melodies transcribed in books rarely tell the whole story. Often […]
Poetry
Autumn melody
For hours the rain soaked the cool ferns and cleaned the stones until the gray sky stilled and turned dark. Now our evening lamps are warm around the room and my love plucks strings with her clever fingers and hums a new melody — so light, so melancholy.
Journal
The boy with no ancestors
A boy thought of Ancestors. He thought of an old village he had never seen, a language he had never heard. He thought of fires and hunts and births and gods. He thought of what home would have meant. A boy thought, “I have no Ancestors.” A boy thought, “I have television and plastic toys and shopping centers. I have songs on the radio that are dumb, played over and over, songs I don’t want to hear, songs made by nobody I know. I have a broken family. I have a mother at war with a father. I have parents […]
Journal
What AI can’t replace
AI can’t replace people in a room together reading poetry. AI can’t replace people gathered in a café making music. AI can’t replace the artist’s open studio where you see the mess as well as the work. AI can’t replace the show a local producer puts together with local aerialists and dancers. AI can’t replace the conversation at the pub. AI can’t replace the hours of solitude or the hours of social observation that led to your exquisite short story. AI can’t replace the meal improvised from what’s coming up in the garden. AI can’t replace the flirtation, the encouragement, […]
Journal
Our rich soil
Dead things fall into a million mouths, delicious material to tear apart and recycle, a heap of latent treasures for future shoots, flowers, boughs and antlers. I look at the remnants of art that have fallen, becoming our rich soil, these beautifully disintegrating attempts, brittle soul-leaves dropped from the skeletal limbs of decayed royalty, obsolete aristocracy. Nothing is lost here. The old gods, the great works, the dead dilettantes – their molecules are in your mouth.
Journal - Satire
Announcing McTribute
(Portland, Oregon) A new restaurant project is promising to bring back the gangbuster Portland culinary scene, by going where the local, creative farm-to-table has feared to tread: the comfortable familiarity of the global commercial food industry. A goal of the nascent effort is to bring economic relief to chefs who have lost businesses to the one-two punch of pre-pandemic real estate frenzy and pandemic shutdowns. Setting aside the experimental devolution of Portland’s indie past, the new restaurant will give chefs a nightly opportunity to “cover” successful dishes from America’s most popular restaurants including Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, and Applebees. There […]
Journal
Silent movies on the moon
Light travels through a vacuum; this is good news for art. We could watch a silent movie on the moon, or see a gallery opening on an asteroid, or read a book of poetry on a spacewalk. Assuming we don’t convert sound to electromagnetic transmission, to enjoy a concert we will still need air or some similar gang of molecules, bouncing the waves from the orchestra or loudspeakers into our ears. These materialist signal-transmission mechanisms omit the key element though. The physics of art can happen, theoretically, without the soul, but the medium is not the defining aspect. If we […]
Journal
Dusk-dreaming
The equinox sunrise glows gray behind the curtain. A bird’s shadow flies, close by. I know there will be equal hours of dark and light outside. This will change quickly; parity is not equilibrium. The shadow will spread more, across each day. Here’s a trick our ancestors knew in their smoky villages: in the winter, make things. Fill the cooling evenings with something you can create with your hands, with your voice, with your dusk-dreaming.