Category: music

Painting and poetry and music will show us where

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El Michels Affair – Shimmy Shimmy Ya. Enter The 37th Chamber, 2009.

—after Frank O’Hara

You have been smiling across the table at your date
with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth.

You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s
Digest, and retire in Puyallup.

In your next life you will be a teacher
and no one will ever call you by your first name.

After your next vacation you will come home
and discover that your neighbors have redecorated
in the style of Iowa trailer court.

If you feel like you’re getting old,
secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds.

Avoid people who iron their sheets
or roll their socks & underwear.

Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should
be going, not the senate or tv news.

The next thermos bottle you see will actually
be a listening device made in Korea.

All the people in this restaurant
are glad that they are not you.

New Lines for Fortune Cookies, James Masao Mitsui

lucky to be

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El día de mi suerte – Héctor Lavoe, Orquesta de Willie Colón


Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

Song of Myself, 7 , Walt Whitman

into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here

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via Narcos (Netflix).

Rilke : “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love” via Popova.

Jason Hirata and Park McArthur, Lot C. 11 July?–?8 November 2026.
Incurva, curated by Saim Demircan. There is a checklist and floorplan.

Isabella Marie Garcia on Bakehouse and Wynwood Norte (Prism)

Spain, 2026 World Cup champion.

walk garlanded in wisteria

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The Thicket. 2024. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Ray Suen.

Jack & Lula, 4:42

Franz Schubert, Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, 5:40 (Ray Suen · Thomas Nickell, Piano)

I will get me to the wood
Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria,
By the silver-blue flood move others with ivory cars.
There come forth many maidens
to gather grapes for the leopards, my friend.
For there are leopards drawing the cars.

I will walk in the glade,
I will come out of the new thicket
and accost the procession of maidens.

After Ch’u Yuan, Ezra Pound

how this land really is, of how it has always been

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TRACKS-ARTE on politics and criticality in the recent Puerto Rican music.

there needs to be a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it. There must be a way to create such a document.

To map is to assume power. We can redraw the very land we walk upon, record it how it is, how it was, how it will be. We will not use their names, their estate lines, their plantation boundaries, their barracks: these shall be erased. The very essence of the land, the soil is exactly—”

Land, Maggie O’Farrell

Darling of Fortune

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March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides
into rain. The imperceptible change begins
out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new
craving, spring. May your desire always overcome

your need; your story that you have to tell,
enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world
you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging
from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things

fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because
now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting
the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything
wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I

vigilant.

May You Always be the Darling of Fortune, Jane Miller

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what does he think about, i

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here’s a little mouse) and 
what does he think about, i 
wonder as over this 
floor (quietly with 

bright eyes) drifts (nobody 
can tell because 
Nobody knows, or why 
jerks Here &, here, 
gr(oo)ving the room’s Silence) this like 
a littlest 
poem a 
(with wee ears and see? 

tail frisks) 
                               (gonE) 
“mouse,”
               We are not the same and 

i, since here’s a little he 
or is 
it It 
?  (or was something we saw in the mirror)? 

therefore we’ll kiss; for maybe 
what was Disappeared 
into ourselves 
who          (look).          ,startled 

Here’s a Little Mouse, E. E. Cummings

Lionel Benjamin pote yon mesaj ki fè diferans