Dan Romascanu - Stanley Jordan

Nascut in 1959 Stanley Jordan pare cu vreo 20 de ani mai tanar. Cand incepe sa cante iti dai imediat seama ca ai de a face cu un chitarist de o originalitate si virtuozitate tehnica uluitoare. Cu toata precautia necesara, comparatia cu Jimi Hendrix nu este exagerata.

Originar din Illinois si educat muzical initial ca pianist, Jordan foloseste o tehnica numita touch - care consta in lovirea coardei chitarei la locul potrivit sunetului cu degetul, oarecum asemanator loviturii ciocanelului cantaretului de xilofon. Rezulta un sunet intens si stacat, cu mai putina vibratie dar cu mai multa intensitate. Eliberarea unei maini de sarcina creerii rezonantei duce la posibilitatea interpretarii ambidextre, sau chiar la optiunea de a canta la doua chitare simultan (Jordan nu a folosit acest trick in concertul de astazi, dar l-am vazut intr-un filmulet cu alta ocazie).

Jordan a cantat in aceasta seara in trio, dezavantajul daca se poate spune asa a prezentei pe scena a unui cantaret cu o tehnica si viteza atat de senzationale este ca aproape orice acompaniator pare ca este lasat in urma mai devreme sau mai tarziu. Programul in stil jazz fusion a fost o combinatie de piese pop clasice de la El Condor Pasa si Eleonor Rigby pana la un andante al compozitorului pop austriac la moda acum vreo doua secole si ceva pe nume Mozart cu bucati de pe ultimul sau album State of Nature. Albumul are teme ecologice, este una dintre preocuparile artistului pe langa educatia muzicala si mai multe amanunte pot fi aflate de la site-ul artistului.

Cateva piese pe YouTube:

• Stairway to Heaven
• Eleanor Rigby
• Over the Rainbow
• Montreal Jazz Festival

Dan Romascanu

(Cronici semnate Dan)

Concrete Theatre

Stuart Isett - Theatre in Concrete, WA

(HUB bar's on the right, just in case you wanted to know)

(America viewed by Americans)

Money, Cash Money - by Lord Crom

An amazing two-minute parody of Westerns, authored by The Lord Crom.


(Blogosphere)

Skateboarders

Stuart Isett - Skateboarders

(America viewed by Americans)

Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan
rhymes and thoughts

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

A CAT/A FUTURE

I so didn’t want to be a poet, I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

BLANDEUR

But in the end I couldn’t resist. It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice — as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced —
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

THE NIAGARA RIVER

Finally I can ask the question: Can I be a writer? The answer came back as a question, do you like it?

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

HOME TO ROOST

Kay Ryan has been chosen to be the country's 16th poet laureate by The Librarian of Congress.

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the languor of their
rolling over.

GREEN HILLS

She has been compared to Emily Dickinson.

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.

THINGS SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD

(A Life in Books)

Lincoln Gallery

Lincoln Gallery is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.

The gallery is devoted entirely to the contemporary art. I found there the famous portrait of Phillip Glass, by Chuck Close. Ed Ruscha was also there with a splendid Minimalist painting, all blue. So, Photorealism was there in good terms with Minimalism. It was not only that: all kind of Video Art, New Figuration, Pop Art, and the like.

I tried several shots on the work of Close: a huge video installation was giving reflections on the portrait.

Then I tried to record a video: probably it's too fast, but I think it reflects my enthusiasm as I was walking around.



It was after I went out that I read about the history of the large hall hosting now the gallery: there was the ball for the second inauguration of President Lincoln, in 1865.

(American Art and Portraiture)

Cowboys and Mariners - Hats and T-Shirts

Stuart Isett - Cowboys and Mariners

(America viewed by Americans)

There Was Once a Wild West

Stuart Isett - HUB Bar in Concrete, WA

(America viewed by Americans)

Bergman, Shukshin, Sorbul, Del Toro...

- Fragii salbatici - Smultronstället - Wild Strawberries -

- Calina Rosie - Калина красная - The Red Snowball Tree -

- Patima Rosie -

- Wild Yellow -

- El Laberinto del Fauno - Pan's Labyrinth -

- Pan's Labyrinth (Close Up) -

- Sauvage et beau - Wild is Beautiful -

- Mùi du du xanh - Green Scent of Papaya -

(Filmofilia)

Gogol, Swift, Tolstoy, Solzhenitzyn, and Papillon

If you don't know anything about Matt Taibbi and look for his bio in Wikipedia, you'll get perplexed: a very acid political journalist and author who left at some point America to live in Uzbekistan; he was expelled from there after six months as their president likes much more to criticize than to be criticized; so Mr. Taibbi moved to Mongolia where he started to play professional basketball; he got so sick that he needed to return to America for treatment; he worked then several years in Moscow, and finally washed up on American shores again. Somehow kind'o reversed Borat.

If you read his interview in Mother Jones you'll get more the hack of it: Russia is unspoiled and different from America in such a great way, it’s so different. Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia everywhere you go is completely insane. In Russia, if you wake up in the morning to go do something you’re supposed to do for your job and end up 100 miles away stone drunk with a bunch of strangers it’s totally OK. In America we’re so efficient. When the Americans came into Russia en masse in the mid 90’s they all had this crusading missionary attitude – like we have to change this place and turn it more into America. We have to take all these dingy old buildings and replace them with our gleaming corporate storefronts. We have to replace all these interesting idiosyncratic people and replace them with middle class managers who all want to buy IKEA furniture and go on vacations in Ibiza. They had a real missionary zeal about it.

After that you can start to read his blog and to understand the guy.

Only now I would like to tell you something different about Matt Taibbi: his list of five most important books, that I found in today's Newsweek; Gogol is there, along with Swift, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn... and Papillon. Here you go:

1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (Matt Taibbi has read it probably fifty times: a great novel about how human society is basically an unbroken string of tragic misunderstandings)
2. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (also read about fifty times: a lot of the books that Matt Taibbi likes are sort of about the same thing)
   
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (his way of making you realize that the seemingly dull details of ordinary day-to-day existence can be dramatic and terrible)
4. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (of all the books ever written, this one is probably the least like Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has to count for something)
5. Papillon by Henri Charrière (the greatest true-adventure tale ever, a great story of perseverance and the will to live; and so Matt Taibbi is always amazed by how beautiful the writing is)
   

Do you remember the first lines of Dead Souls?

In the britchka was seated such a gentleman--a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young.

I remember these lines as I read them first time, in Romanian; they sounded somehow different:

Un om despre care nu se putea spune ca era urat, dar nici chipes nu puteai sa zici ca ar fi fost. Nu era gras, dar nici slabanog. Batran nu era, dar, hotarat lucru, nici tanar nu puteai sa zici ca este.

(A Life in Books)