Sailing Towards Utopia
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.”― Thomas More
It is wild to think that the Thomas More quote atop the masthead of the newsletter today was said by someone born exactly 544 years ago. Over a half a century in time. Moore’s insightful comments rings so very true today: what do you get by not funding a proper national education program? You get where we are now.
But let’s not start the Monday off with that kind of darkness, even though all the news carriers see fit to e-mail early in the morning with a lot of bad news.
Let’s start the day off dreaming about the vision that More famously brought to us in his legendary wring: Utopia. Utopia: the dream of a place where everyone is happy, healthy, well-cared for…a dream that is probably unreachable but always worth aiming towards, with achievable high life moments where it seems almost possible.
Björk has been preaching the Utopian vision since her record of the same name came out in 2017. The artist described the record as her platform to imagine a Utopian world, digging deep into the environmental/political issues that are keeping us in shackles (I am listening to the pastoral, beautiful second song, Blissing Me, as I write this…with such sweet strings by collaborator Arca). In the Gaurdian’s review of the record, Miranda Sawyer wrote:
“Björk thinks of her utopia as an island, perhaps one that was created out of an eco-disaster, an island where plants have mouths or hover like hummingbirds or grow out of your hands. ‘Do you know the fish in The Simpsons, that has three eyes? Like that.’…In her head, women arrive to create a new, better society. They bring kids and music and eco-friendly tech, ‘and then there is the everyday life on the island.’”
More’s idea of welcoming us to dream of Utopia is still inspiring the great artists of today to create dialogues of our present circumstances, and to allow us to dream.
Björk is in San Francisco right now with a live show that is supposedly on of the most incredible productions, as written about in the RIFF this past weekend (with the apt title, “Björk makes a plea for ‘Utopia’ at Chase Center”), with a focus on her Utopia album and message. She is performing it again tomorrow night, and thus the rub: while in this dystopian Covid era, I have still not gone to see a big concert, do I venture into potentially dangerous waters to catch a glimpse of a world that could be.
Because we always need those glimpses.
Top 30 Most Expensive Items Sold on Discogs in November 2021
Always interesting to see what record collectors are willing to pay for, and always interesting to see Dark Side of the Moon, the first Velvet Underground record, and some Led Zeppelin record making the ranks. Most pricey seller: Larry Clinton’s Northen Soul single, She’s Wanted (listen to it here) for $6000. Oh yeah.
MYTHIC BEING: Lucy Ives on the art of Toyen
I am not familiar with the work of Toyen, or the surrealist artist she hid during World War II, Jindřich Heisler, but it seems that both are worth digging into (and I have been doing the mighty internet search checking out their work). The stories behind both of their lives….and their affect on each other…is better than fiction.
‘Be kind’: Rabbi Doug Goldhamer, founder of first synagogue for the deaf, dies at 76
Rabbi Doug Goldhamer was an inspiring soul, whose life story was captured last year by friends and colleagues Noam Dromi and Tiffany Woolf under their Reboot oral history/film project Silver Screen Studios (Noam would want me to make sure I mentioned it was under a series entitled Sign of the Times). The video is embedded in this moving memorial they wrote for him.
Don Cherry :: It Is Not My Music (Swedish TV Documentary, 1978)
Thanks Aquarium Drunkard for pointing us to a link for Don Cherry doc: “Over the course of about an hour, we follow Don, his partner Moki and their kids from the pastoral Swedish countryside to the decidedly un-pastoral urban landscape of late-seventies NYC. No matter where he goes, Cherry’s inquisitive, imaginative spirit is an inspiration (even if he was struggling with a heroin addiction at the time). Lasson’s footage is frequently astonishing, whether it’s Cherry communing with birds in the forest or making beautiful music on a stoop in Harlem.”
Charles Dickens's code cracked by amateur sleuths
Happy Birthday to Charles Dickens..and with that, a current news story about taking Dickens’s notes and trying to make heads or tails of them: “The paper, known as the Tavistock letter, was written in Dickens's own brand of adapted shorthand, which he called The Devil's Handwriting.”
In Response to the Lady at a Reading Who Asked What the Job of a Poet Is
By: Jacek Dehnel (translated from the Polish by Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes)
The job of a poet is to sit in the morning at a desk
and sift through the news that crackles with other peoples’ lives.
The job of a poet is to imagine entering those lives
like putting on someone else’s clothes.
The clothes pinch. The clothes are pinched for food they are pinched for drink they hope.
The job of a poet is to imagine a control line
with deciduous or coniferous trees trampled grass a face behind a burdock leaf
some eyes some chinks on the body of the border a poet must imagine the sound
of wet shoes and the feel of wet socks on both the left and the right ice-cold foot.
The job of a poet is to examine words and phrases distrustfully and poets ask themselves
because who else can they ask what does the body of a woman with non-Slavic features mean
a poet must try out these words and wonder if the poet’s own body was found
near the control line would the handwritten report describe the poet’s features as Slavic
or non-Slavic.
The job of a poet is to try these words like the slipper on the weary Cinderella
on people whom the poet loves and whose features are sometimes completely Slavic
or somewhat non-Slavic or not Slavic at all; a poet must try these words out
on the poet’s own mother who also has certain features a poet must try these words on her hair
eyes nose against that dead body with its dead look try them against her living body and alive look
and this makes the poet go cold at the desk.
The job of a poet is to discern in the words visible traces of a corpse being dragged from Poland
to Belarus not just the contours of a map but also broken twigs torn
blades of grass a silver snail trail next to a sole its entrails smeared
on a brown leaf; a poet must visualize a beetle that momentarily stopped
on its six legs seeing a corpse being dragged from Poland to Belarus and then turned
back swaying slightly; a poet must feel and smell the wet meadow rotting bark
and the touch of metal because
the job of a poet is to read that next to the body were three children between 7
and 15 years of age as well as a man and an older woman and a poet cannot stop
reading but must continue stumbling through these wet and muddy lines
and a poet must try being ages 7 and 15 and all the ages in between
in that place in the woods that place of darkness place of dampness that place
where the corpse was dragged a corpse that is the corpse of the poet’s own mother
about whom it is hard to say if her features are Slavic or non-Slavic a poet must try being seven
years old standing next to the mother’s body as it looked then a poet must try this.
The job of a poet cannot stop here so a poet reads on that
they were forced to walk on foot to the border and then to cross the Polish-
Belarusian border at gunpoint that is the metal; a poet must think about how
a corpse is dragged is it pulled by the armpits or the ankles is it pulled
with gloves or bare hands do the hands lose their grip along with the wet and muddy shoes
in that place of darkness in the woods; a poet must think about whether the shoes the blackberry brambles
the burdock the eyes of the children between 7 and 15 years of age the eyes
of the man and the older woman are in the way whether the holster or the walkie-talkie presses
into the ribs whether any discomfort is felt whether the uniform pinches is soiled or dishonored.
All this is the job of a poet and it goes on all day and then the poet goes to sleep and
dreams about escorting children between 7 and 15 years of age at gunpoint and escorting
a man and an older woman at gunpoint and dreams of trying on contaminated clothes and
dreams of trying on a uniform and trying that cold thing that terrifies one in bed
and dreams of returning home after a night’s work in a car with a bobblehead dog on
the dashboard and taking off his pinching uniform having food and drink and watching the children
who in the dream are his children they are the children of the uniform and they are between 7
and 15 years of age and he watches his wife with her Slavic features and armpits by which
her body could be dragged and ankles by which her body could be dragged shoes sliding off
and the poet never wakes up from that cold that mud those woods.
