Feb 9, 2006

books! hip hop! translation! and depressing movies in the morning...

just some brick a brac...

1. never ever ever ever watch The Hours as the first thing you do in the morning...it's incredibly bleak and depressing albeit beautiful and will confusingly depress and uplift you all afternoon possibly into the night...
2. this afternoon while listening to Boulder 1190 and eating my lunch of smoked oysters in cottonseed oil i noticed an unusual number of shell bits...more than i've ever noticed before...made me feel like i was actually eating little animals rather than something out of a can...yum!
3. and speaking of Boulder 1190, it's sort of the best radio station i've ever had the pleasure of coming across...and it's hard for me to admit but WAY better than ANYTHING in the Bay Area...and yes, that includes KPFA, 90.1 and all the college radio stations...the difference is consistency...1190 is the beat all day...which is really hard to do...their dj's play really eclectic mixes, for example this afternoon i heard Too Short to Cat Power to The Fugs to Zion I to My Morning Jacket to some 60's soul to The Flying Lizards to to to to...i mean for God's sake that's a pretty great listening session (and not rare at all)...another thing, being a self admitted Bay Area snob, is that they seem to play a hell've a lot from the Bay...tons of Hip Hop FROM the Bay not even PLAYED in the Bay get plenty of air time in Boulder...just as an example, over the last two days i've heard songs from such Bay Area hip hoppers as Crown City Rockers, Zion I, Living Legends, Why?, Z-Man, Octavius, Doseone, Andre Nickatina, Heiro, Too Short et al. (!!!), if you're a fan of any of these groups you'd know what a strange pleasure it is to hear them on the radio...i love it...

...just as a side note to all those Bay Area marks who talk about "undergroud this/ underground that"...shhhhh...sorry, there is no underground anymore...at least not in hip hop...total vent...but people keep resurrecting the word to describe what they do without realizing that "underground" refers to a very specific moment in Bay Area hip hop...specifically Too Short's "out the trunk" (poetics? Ed Sanders and Too Short would probably get along), to Bas 1 (Style Elements) and the Mystik Journeymen putting it down at the 4001 warehouse in East Oakland and then on to The Outhouse...roughly the period of 91' to 99'...i was lucky enough to catch a bit of it (97'-99')...and then it ended...the Bay got really expensive (dotcom ad infinitum) and everyone moved away...LL gone, Peanut Butter Wolf gone, Mystik Journeymen gone, Shingo2 gone, M.O.S. gone, Safari gone, everybody moved away and took their labels with them...either downsouth or east for the cheap rents...so basically if you say "underground" you're chauncy...so there...

"we independent...independent as fuck/ we can walk into an A&R and say 'yo what's up'/ grab a pen Mystik Journeymen we wanna sign you/ 400,000 whatcha gonna do?/ i hit that fool in the head with my shoe!/ how do you suppose i sell my life away to you hoe's/ oh no!"
—Sunspot Jonz (imagine this being yelled though)


picked up some books for thesis reading:

1. Trilce- Cesar Vallejo trans. Clayton Eshleman
2. The Complete Posthumous Poetry- Cesar Vallejo trans. Clayton Eshleman
3. Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan- Paul Celan trans. John Felstiner
4. Threadsuns- Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris
5. Poems of Paul Celan- Paul Celan trans. Michael Hamburger
6. Paul Celan A Biography Of His Youth- Israel Chalfen
7. Self-Destruction- Laura Moriarity
8. The Penguin Book Of German Verse- ed. Leanord Forster

wow...that German Verse book...what a stinker...i checked it out because it was the only text not checked out or lost with work by Holderlin...published in 1957, in my own reading experience an absolutly dreadful decade for classics and pre-modern translations...for some reason translators/publishers got it into their collective pea-brain's that taking poetry and translating it into prose was a super idea...so with the Holderlin we end up with this...

Abendphantasie

Von seiner Hutte ruhig im Schattenn sitzt
Der Pfluger, dem Genugsamen raucht sein Herd.
Gastfreundlich tont dem Wanderer im
Friedlichen Dorfe die Abendglocke.


...being turned into this...

Evening Fantasy

The ploughman is sitting quietly in front of his cottage in the shade, the smoke goes up from the frugal man's hearth. In the peaceful village the evening bell is sounding a welcoming note to the traveller.

blegh...and no translator's name to give credit to...

off to the bar for Celan reading...

happy hour is happy...

kisses...

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