Buy these jeans and a naked babe will straddle your thigh.Filed under: Music
Planning a last-minute-summer vacation? I am. I have taken some very good vacation advice and you should too:
Filed under: Adventures
Today, I’m walking through the park, enjoying music from my headphones, when I spot a man looking up at the sky. As I get closer, I realise that he is flying a kite. However, as I glance back in the direction of the string, it quickly disapears against the sky and I see no kite. I keep glancing back and, as I approach him, I start to take my headphones off. Before I get a chance to speak, he volunteers an answer: “It’s up over the third cloud. You see there are three clouds in a row? It’s up over the highest one.” It takes me a while to spot it because it is no more than a little black dot. He says that it is a standard-sized kite – meaning, to look so small, it must be very high up. I thank him and continued through the park.
Filed under: Poetry
I recently read “The Poetry of Petrarch”, translated by David Young. Petrarch was a fourteenth-century, Italian humanist who played a big role in launching the Renaissance and who wrote a three-hundred-plus collection of sonnets about his love for Laura. Laura may or may not have existed. Petrarch develops her as the perfect woman, mind and body. Sadly, she does not return his affection. While some of the poems are quite inventive, by poem 160 I started skimming – Petrarch’s obsessive sighs and cries become repetitive. Anyway, here’s a sonnet that I really liked! My translation follows.
44
The man whose hands were ready to turn Thessaly / crimson with civil blood sat down and wept / to mourn his daughter’s husband’s death; he knew / that severed head by its familiar features;
the shepherd too, who broke Goliath’s brow, / wept for the rebel son from his own family, / and losing all control in grief for Saul, / took out his anger on a wild mountain.
But you who never blanch because of pity, / you’re well defended from Love’s deadly bow, / he draws and shoots his arrows all in vain;
you see me torn to death a thousand times / and no tears issue from your lovely eyes; / instead they flash annoyance and disdain.
Daniel’s translation:
Classical allusion / Biblical allusion / Girl, why don’t you return my texts?
Filed under: Music Video
When I was very young, my dad made two Beta tapes. There was a program on the CBC that would play hit music videos and he taped the ones he found interesting. I watched them repeatedly and, after our Beta machine broke, they floated around in the back of my head. Later, when I was in high school, my dad got the tapes transferred to VHS and he gave copies to me and my sisters as Channuka presents. Here is one of the music videos from the tapes:
My dad says he taped “What Comes Naturally” by Sheena Easton because he was impressed by the exaggerated colors. He thought that the video was a good tribute to sixties style. There’s some sixties in there, but I think that this video reeks of eighties. Note the elements that make the video sublime: costume changes, large hair, pelvic thrusts and erotic shaving. Note too Sheena’s amazing stares. Sometimes, when the camera cuts to a different costume, Sheena is looking offscreen. Then – without warning – she whips her head around and stares down the viewer. The artist’s stares can really make or break a music video.
Is this a description of my summer or an excerpt from a Tom Stoppard play?
“Art consists of constant surprise. Art should never conform. Art should break its promises. Art is nothing to do with expertise: doing something well is no excuse for doing the expected. My God, this is fun. All my life I have wanted to ride through the French countryside in summer, with my two best friends, and make indefensible statements about art.”
