the music swells somehow stronger from adversity

Andreas Gursky, EM Arena II, 2000

*     DC's The Caribbean come out of hibernation to play a show Friday night at Comet Ping-Pong (5037 Connecticut Avenue NW). They are performing in the middle -- flanked by DC acts, Deleted Scenes and Cigarette.

*     Plums "Sigmar Polke," was just named Number 1 Spring Jam by the Minneapolis City Paper. Great video of Plums at the link.


What We Want
  -- by Linda Pastan

What we want
is never simple.

We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache,
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
and the stars are there
even in full sun.


The Banal
-- by Elaine Equi

Even with its shitload of artifacts, the everyday is radiant, while the banal is opaque and often obscure. I  prefer the latter, with its murky agate, mushroom, ochre background music -- its corridor of lurk. One hardly knows where one stands with/in the banal. Walls come together with hardly a seam. Wherever we are, we feel we have always been. Poe, for all his special effects, is rather banal in his approach to the supernatural, i.e. overly familiar. Against the inarticulate velvet of this mood, one grasps at the everyday for relief. Thus any object can bring us back with the fast-acting power of aspirin. Any object shines.