Daniel A. Rabuzzi's Blog, page 19
August 8, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Lady Gaga; Hannah Hoch: Rebecca Horn; Marina Abramovic
[Lady Gaga on the cover of Rolling Stone, issue 1108/1109, July 8-22, 2010:]
[A montage of works by Hannah Hoch:]
[Hugo Ball, in costume to recite his sound-poem "Karawane", at the Cafe Voltaire, Zurich, 1916:]
[Theatre of Marionettes, Automata and Dolls, at the Bauhaus, c.1925 :]
[Rebecca Horn, "White Body Fan," 1972; photo by A. Thode:]
[Rebecca Horn, still from the film Unicorn, 1970-1972; photo by A. Thode:]
[Marina Abramovic, interview connected to her show "The Artist is Present," at the Museum of...
Sunday Morning Coffee: Lady Gaga; Hannah Hoch: Rebecca Horn
[Lady Gaga on the cover of Rolling Stone, issue 1108/1109, July 8-22, 2010:]
[A montage of works by Hannah Hoch:]
[Hugo Ball, in costume to recite his sound-poem Elefantkarawane, at the Cafe Voltaire, Zurich, c. 1916:]Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009."The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root, goat stew, and...
August 1, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: "Wake Up"; Kate Castelli
"Wake Up," by The Arcade Fire (2007); a theme song for the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.
"Wake up, lobster, wake up!" Translucent chalk edgings on the Hudson's waves, the faintest blue wash above, the gulls are calling out..."Look at all the sailboats! Little ones for exploring the river and the bay...here and there: giant ocean-going ones, all the way from London or the Caribbean."
As we set sail, let us think of Calvin & Hobbes, and the Pevensie...
July 25, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Saltillo; Mau Pilailug; Sunken Ship at WTC; Jonathan Barnes
[Saltillo, "Remember Me," from Ganglion, released 2006:]
Heat inescapable...canary seeks shade in a sycamore...lobster offers coffee infused with a spoonful of cold, cold vanilla ice cream...
One of the world's greatest navigators, Mau Piailug, died last week. A Micronesian, in 1976 he sailed alone-- and without compass, sextant or charts-- the 2,500 miles of open ocean from Hawai'i to Tahiti, demonstrating that the peopling of the Pacific islands was deliberate, not due to chance or accident. ...
July 18, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: "Television Man"; Tony Judt, Matthew Cheney, Jeff Spock
[The Talking Heads, "Television Man," from Little Creatures, 1985:]
Wake up Canary, wake up! Dawn is upon us, words there are to sing...
We enjoyed three good short musings this week on language, its challenges, possibilities and limits:
Tony Judt has a beautiful essay, "Words," in the current New York Review of Books . He defends rhetorical style and worries about the corrosive effects of inarticulacy. "When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express," Judt writes. "If we privil...
July 4, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Recommended Reading, Second Quarter 2010
We adore Alastair Reynolds. Out last month in U.S. paperback from Ace is his House of Suns, another one of his love stories wrapped inside a billion-year epic. Reynolds is a poet of technology: clones are "shatterlings"; "aspic-of-machines" is the term for the nanobots and other medicinal therapies one applies as an unguent to wounds. Reynolds is especially good at the toss-off line that illuminates the deep trend, the broad sweep: "Cloning is a technology like making paper: it is not dif...
June 20, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Natalie Merchant; The Decay of Contemporary Art; Solar Sails
Natalie Merchant puts poems to music on her new album (released in April this year). See the PBS video above. Canary especially likes Merchant's stated emphasis on rediscovering and exploring the spoken, rhythmic elements of poetry.
Lobster likes Ben Lewis's polemic, "The Dustbin of Art History," in the current issue of Prospect. Some delicious quotes from Lewis:
"The paintings in Damien Hirst's exhibition at the Wallace Collection last October were execrable. Most critics fulminated that t...
June 13, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Terje Rypdal; John Brunner.
[Terje Rypdal, from Odyssey, 1975:]
John Brunner's The Traveler in Black (1971) is a quiet, unsung gem. I revisited it recently, having purchased a used copy from one of the dealers at Arisia. Uncorking the bottle, I found the wine as full-bodied and heady as it was when I first savored it...I first met the Traveler c. 1970, in the two Traveler short stories that appeared in the Ted White-edited Fantastic.
Less precious than Dunsany, less mordant and cynical than Vance, not so filigreed as Cla...
June 6, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Jacky Terrasson; Christopher Beha;"Year's Best SF 15"; "Whitechapel Gods"
[Jacky Terrasson and friends:]
* Lobster at the lectern:
Christopher Beha (an editor at Harper's) in the current issue of BookForum (page 39), reviewing Gary Shteyngart's latest novel:
"...Chekhov's genius lay precisely in revealing the complex interiority that energizes the most mundane human moments. [//:] Shteyngart makes a compelling case that we lose that interiority-- the very thing that gives us depth and richness-- when we abandon literary culture. It may be, as so many want to tell...
May 23, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: "Pavane" (Regina Carter); The Singularity on a Sunday
[Regina Carter, "Pavane," from her album Paganini-After a Dream, 2003:]
Across the Hudson, mist like the film attaching to the inside of eggshell...the river's surface (the first time in weeks) nearly as smooth as the shell's exterior...
What promises will the egg bring forth?
With the elegant phrasing of Regina Carter in our heads, the lobster (nutmeg and cloves in his hot chocolate) and the canary (brown sugar, one more spoonful please) contemplate the Singularity.
Someone-- John Scalzi? Cory ...
