Radical Transparency

(in case the other blogs need a friend)

Corns Only Make Me Walk Faster

Reading about Sick on Please Happy made me sing...

I was the kindergarten kid with wrinkled clothes
I dreaded school more than the Chicken Pox, and so I'd go...
Hey, Mom, I'm really feeling sick
I've been feverish
And I know
If I go to school today
I'd probably die on the way
From this cold

That's Derision. By Pain.

And this, Pose Ode, track 1 on Midgets With Guns, is one of those rare songs that applies to everything.

(download)

Big Glowy Castle Whispers

Happened to be in a room with some refrigerator magnet poetry pieces today.

As always, I couldn't help it...

the boy fed the girl big glowy castle whispers
of summer dream fun together
and ate
with silent butterfly turtles
or twirled
in light blue peace time
slowly

Does anyone else get the feeling that every new refrigerator magnet poem you write is almost identical to the last?  Words different; images different; story different; end result pretty much exactly the same?

Or does that not make any sense at all?

Lyrics, Karma, and the Hot Hot Heat

How do people feel about loving a song but not loving the message a song's poetry sends?

The track below is a mild example. Sarcastic wishes for vengeful romantic karma.

And, if, with mild, I'm referring to salsa, which I can be if you want me to be, look no further than Tupac for the hot hot heat.

I think Willie Nelson might have written Funny How Time Slips Away. Not sure how this version was originally released, however. Maybe on a CD single that's not available on Amazon anymore? Maybe only on Al Green's More Greatest Hits.

(download)

Dig and Be Dug

I just learned that Langston Hughes had a Motto...

I play it cool
And dig all jive.
That's the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
Is:
Dig and Be Dug
In Return.

Motto.  Great word.  And a totally hilarious thing to have.  And by hilarious I mean awesome.  Usually.  If it's a good, open-minded motto like dig and be dug in return.

Besides Langston Hughes and Calvin, who else has good mottos?  Who else has a motto at all?

Something Quite Unplanned

A little poem for Valentine's Day...

Rives fans listen closely.  If Biff Rose is not a Rives influence, then we have a fascinating coincidence on our hands.

Paradise Almost Lost is track 4 on The Thorn in Mrs. Rose's Side.

(download)

Turn It On

Just heard Elevation on the radio, and it reminded me of the totally ridiculous U2 vs Pink Floyd arguments* I used to have with my friend Will in college. 

He wanted melody.  I wanted poetry. 

But I loved U2 anyway.  A lot.  Until Elevation.  Then I really got into it with Will.  Total bullshit song.  They didn't need to do that.  It's one thing for a struggling, barely relevant band to stoop to glossy pop.  But not U2.  U2 is way too big and important to turn heartless, to shoot for top 40.  Play for the love, goddamnit.

But, while listening again just now, I remembered that it really isn't a bad song.  Just overplayed.  And not as awesome as other U2.

Like In a Little While, for example, which is track 6 on All That You Can't Leave Behind, an album that may or may not be better off without Elevation.

*Not to be confused with U2 vs Radiohead arguments that I never got to have because I was in Beijing when they were raging.

(download)

Blues, Poetry, Temperature, and Guilt

Every Friday, Ta-Nehisi Coates posts a poem and asks his readers for their thoughts.

Today's is Middle Passage by Robert Hayden.  A white man writing about slave ships.  From white perspectives.  Sympathetic, it seems, to everyone involved.

"10 April 1800--
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."

It made me think of Benito Cereno, of course.  But it also made me think of Taj Mahal's blues version of Langston Hughes's Crossing.

Strange the contrast between the fever in the Hayden poem and the chill in Hughes.

It yanks me back into Melville:

Whether this haggardness had aught to do with criminality could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through causal association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal - a hacked one.

Crossing is track 6 on An Evening of Acoustic Music.

(download)

Hippie Poet Geeks

We're thinking about using The Carrot Project to push a small-scale linguistic revolution. 

We don't like the clunkiness of asking our users what they think a company could do to become more socially and environmentally responsible.  Too many words.  Too dry.  Too meaninglessly professional.  Too little metaphor.

So we're wondering if people might take to calling the most responsible, most worldchanging, most sustainable, most humane, most transparent, most innovative, greenest companies crunchy.  And we're wondering if we can facilitate that with constant links to a crunchiness explanation page.

I just took my first stab at an explanation. 

Imagine you see the word crunchy somewhere on the site.  You're confused, but never fear: it's hyperlinked.  And you click.  And you get this...

Carl told me he didn't like "socially and environmentally responsible."  He said it was long or boring or something. 

I mean I don't even believe in boring.

But he's my lead developer, and I love him, and, without him, I might die, so I kept my statistically outlying beliefs to myself and listened.

He said he wanted me to come up with a brilliantly unboring alternative.  A word that communicates all the loveliness of "socially and environmentally responsible" but gives it a little spice.  Spice and flavor and crunch.

And there it was.

Crunchy.  Like a hippie.  Or a carrot.

And I'm pretty sure I wasn't the one that said it.  I think it was Eric, who was on the three way conf call and giggling in the background at the ridiculousness of our earnestness.  Little did he know.

And so what if we wish we were hippie poet geeks.  I think that's a totally reasonable life aspiration.