THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”― Daniel Keyes
Well, the camping trip got sidelined because of smoke and we left a day later than planned in order to jam through the bad weather towards Aspen. As you read this, we are somewhere (hopefully) in Utah…with the radio on…and the crazy world we live in going quickly by, windows rolled wayyyy up. We cannot really go into restaurants because of this recent Covid-crazed reality, and we can’t hang outside in the ashen air…so all we really can do is drive.
We can change this…can’t we???
This newsletter is dedicated to all the people who have lost their homes and more to the current fires, including my friend Julie Schuchard, owner of Tricycle Records, whose childhood home was lost when the Dixie Fire destroyed the historic gold rush town Greenville, CA.
One of the greatest movies ever…and that is just because of Otis Day and the Knights! Seriously though, at nine-years-old when the movie came out, all you wanted to do was find a way to see it…to see John Belushi be the greatest comedian of all time. And then a few years later, when it started airing on HBO, we were all searching out the houses of parents who weren’t paying attention…
Top 30 Most Expensive Items Sold on Discogs in June 2021
$5,800 for some KISS records anyone?
JIM CARROLL TALKS ABOUT BASKETBALL DIARIES – PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW!
I was a Sophomore in High School when my friend Donna Olpe gave me two huge gifts. The first: an introduction to the world of ushering for Bill Graham Presents and the second, a copy of Jim Carrol’s The Basketball Diaries. The book blew my mind completely out of the water with its gritty look at the life of another kid my age…but with very different kinds of teen/adult problems. But more than that: it just felt so rock n roll to me…so right where I wanted my head to be at the time. I got to interview Jim Carrol on KUSF before high school was over and meeting the man was very much in line to reading his pros: shaky, real, piercing. And then there is his legendary nu-wave number People Who Died…there is that, too.
Much ado about nothing: 2021’s best minimalist photography – in pictures
“A stranded tree trunk, an empty pool, the moon shining through bent railings … these images find a wealth of feeling in the smallest of things”
KIKO KOSTADINOV'S LATEST CAPSULE COLLECTION FEATURES YAMANTAKA EYƎ
The world is a better place with Boredoms providing the fashion sense.
Difference
BY MARK DOTY
The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,
a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks
of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop
of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave's span,
every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends
but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.
This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,
this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera's
all subterfuge and disguise,
its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,
nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,
sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do
but link what we know
to what we don't,
and so form a shape?
Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described
into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?
Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another
also sets them apart
— but what's lovelier
than the shapeshifting
transparence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,
unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,
heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,
so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?