Xark!

The last sergeant

I woke up with this poem this morning...

The last sergeant wrote in code
dreamed in code
in furtive Post-it codes
that whipped out to sea
or melted on the floors
of jungle ruins.

Plans and diaries and love notes to
the lost emperor, or his heir,
who could not find a place to land
and so floated,
somewhere,
beatific.

The occupiers glimpsed him
in their shadows and imagined
his tattered sergeant's uniform.
decorations in code,
memories in
ribbon.

The legend grew fierce but
he was croaking mad when they found him
so they didn't recognize
his radio to the stars
moldering in the cave-trash leftovers
of a twenty-year mission
to nowhere.

Why we're not blogging here

Today my mother wrote to see if we were OK, because we haven't been blogging much. This, then, is the 21st century: "Now be sure to eat right. And wear clean underwear and a nice hat. And be sure to blog every day."

In fact, the reason we're not blogging much at Xark is because Janet and I are blogging/vlogging and podcasting our collective asses off at SpoletoToday 2008. Janet's in charge this year, which means her dream has finally come true: She gets to tell me what to do, and I have to do it.

Here are the videos I've put up so far...

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

The second (better) Amistad video

Amistad: Race, art, history and opera from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Splimerick No. 1

This year, as in previous festivals, we'll be writing and collecting haikus about the Spoleto festival (Spo-kus) over at Janet's Spoleto Today blog. But we're adding a new challenge the year: Spoleto limericks (or, of course, "Splimericks").

Here's my first, which probably doesn't belong where people of taste, class and discernment might be exposed to such vulgarity:

A singer who hailed from St. Bart
released a bun-flapping loud fart
"Twas not me let that thing!"
the young man he did sing,
"it was placed in the score by Mozart!"

To send us your Splimericks and Spo-kus, e-mail them to Janet and the gang.

Wandering amok

Today's agenda wound up being unstructured. My recent push has gotten me back to a full-week ahead of my work responsibilities, and this morning I was asked to come up with profile subjects. So I did what I used to do: I went out.

"Tornado Child"

Pam posted this over at Tales From The Microbial Laboratory yesterday, but when I saw it just now it just struck me so strong that I wanted to repost it here.

for Rosalie Richardson
By Kwame Dawes

I am a tornado child
I come like a swirl of black
and darken up your day:
I whip it all into my womb,
lift you and your things,
carry you to where you've never been
and maybe, if I feel good,
I might bring you back,
all warm and scared,
heart humming wild like a bird
after early sudden flight.

I am a tornado child.
I tremble at the elements.
When thunder rolls
my mother-womb trembles,
remembering the tweak of contractions
that tightened to a wail
when my mother pushed me out
into the black of tornado night.

I am a tornado child,
you can tell us from far,
by the crazy of our hair;
couldn't tame it if I tried.
Even now I tie a bandanna
to silence the din of anarchy
in these coir-thick plaits

I am a tornado child,
born in the whirl of clouds;
the centre crumbled,
then I came. my lovers
know the blast
of my chaotic giving;
they tremble at the whip
of my supple thighs;
tornado child, you cross me
at your peril, I cling to light
when the warm of anger
lashes me into a spin,
the pine trees bend to me
swept in my gyrations.

I am a tornado child.
When the spirit takes my head,
I hurtle into the vacuum
of white sheets billowing
and paint a swirl of colour,
streaked with my many songs.

Go to Pam's place to learn more about the book where she found this...

Handbill No. 1

Howl at 50

So yesterday I recorded my pilgrammage to City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Street in San Francisco, walking from the Embarcadero BART to North Beach with my Handycam, occasionally pointing it at myself like some not-so-handsome, not-so-Byronic Anderson Cooper. I'd put the video up but I got all the way out here before I realized I'd never installed the Sony software on this laptop.

Anyway, City Lights isn't where the Beats got started, but it is, in a sense, the physical location where the Beats became the Beats. It was their ground, a safe haven carved out on the "other" edge of the continent by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

But if what I expected to find was communion with the spirit of Jack Kerouac, what I found instead was a new rapport with Ginsberg.