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Category Archives: Reflections from elsewhere
Ain’t No Way To Love Me
Jason Bogdaneris’ moody movie of Hannah Marcus’ shadowy song, Ain’t No Way To Love Me
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Dante’s Virgil
written by Crow Jane
So Virgil and Justin Bieber walk into a bar. Virgil says Give us a couple of lagers. Bartender gives ’em some, there’s a monkey sitting at the end of the bar. Virgil says What’s that damn monkey doing at the end of the bar? Barkeep says Don’t say anything bad about that monkey. He’s my friend. Virge says Oh.
Then the bartender says Wanna see something cool? Virgil looks at Justin Bieber, they say Yes. Bartender walks down to the end of the bar, punches the monkey in the face, monkey jumps off his barstool and gives the barkeeper a blowjob.
Bartender comes back, says to Justin Bieber, You wanna try it? Bieber says Sure! Just don’t hit me so hard.
Crow Jane is an anonymous international all-girl poetry collective. We write and translate all our work together, but keep liaisons with The Secret Boat and Truck Club in New Orleans. Their watchword is “We are not just a boat and truck club, we are a SECRET boat and truck club!” Crow Jane has been published in Aufgabe, Boog City and Shampoo Poetry in the U.S. Adopting the sobriquet Societé Anonyme, proxies appeared for us live on stage at the Bridport Poetry Festival in Dorset, England.
For further Kilometer Zero Running Eye Blog bar jokes, click here.
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Bacteria—Genome—Baby Boy
The image (see image right) shows a colony of Bacillus subtilis. Each of the little grains is one bacterium, with the striae of colour denoting the various lineages present, which express different fluorescent proteins.
Initially the scientists had them all jumbled up in the middle of the petri dish, but as they grew and replicated, the bacteria organised themselves into the pattern you see. The formation is both reproducible and describable mathematically. More provocative however is that Continue reading
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Invisible Hand
Announcement: Invisible Hand is an exhibition and residency by Tim Vincent-Smith featuring harmonographic drawing machines, dismantled pianos, live music and the world premiere of Goat Song, a work in progress by Uma Dragon.
Thursday 12th April 8pm: Live music and movement from Sink and guests. See here.
Saturday 14th April 1pm: Reading of Goat Song.
Gallery 1, arts complex, St. Margaret’s House, 151 London Road, Edinburgh, Scotland.
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Untitled (The effect of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Kant’s 3rd Critique on the human brain: a functional magnetic resonance imaging approach)
from Daniel Margulies & Chris Sharp
The brain really is a piece of work. You pump in a supply of glucose and oxygen, and the craziest stuff comes streaming out. Amongst these streams are the works of Stravinsky, Kant’s Critiques, and more recently, this piece by Daniel Margulies and Chris Sharp. The film is a continuous fMRI scan of a brain listening to the Rite of Spring and pondering Kant — showing the floods and ebbs of cortical activity as the music rushes through it. Very suggestive, very beautiful.
“Untitled” is currently on show at the Wellcome Trust as part of their exhibition Brains: The Mind as Matter. If you are in London and haven’t been: go! It is a fascinating and delightful show, featuring: a brainbow mouse, a time lapse film of a chick’s brain spinning itself into existence, old medical movies of brain surgery, casts of eminent brains, trepanned skulls, anatomical drawings, phrenological tools, and much much more. Entry is free.
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Sonnet for Sylvia
by Martin Lewis
I frame this verse, in somewhat antique style,
For thee, Miranda open-eyed and bright,
The sole lady of thine enchanted isle
Now Prospero hath sailed into the night:
And both to him, and thee, I offer thanks
For that haven of fellowship and art
He conjur’d up on swift Sequana’s banks
By Notre Dame, Lutetia’s very heart.
In thy heart also may there ever dwell
The humane passion that thy father proved,
And strength besides, to live that passion well
And love the calling as he also loved.
Fight, like Sir George, with reason and with rhyme
The dragons of this calibanic time!
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‘The Women’ by Martin Lewis
He’d always been his mammy’s boy,
So when she died he was devastated.
During her last year or so
She became increasingly detached
From dull, sublunary here and now,
Though still always tender to both her men –
Adoring and dependent son and husband –
Until finally, bedridden, she had waited,
No sustenance or medicine accepting,
Just staring at the window: the spring trees
Sprouting in the windy urban hospital yard,
And the tiny crystal crucifix hung there,
Sparkling with sunlight like her sky bright eyes.
Continue reading
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In Remembrance of Simon Green’s Teeth
Quietly turning over a pack of tobacco at my desk, I found myself melting nostalgically as I stared at this image (printed as a health warning). It is I believe the first medical photo I have seen that even begins to approach the awesome horror of Simon Green’s teeth circa 2002, when he was living in the antiquarian section of George Whitman’s celebrated Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.
One version of memory has it that incidents are like jars of air, sealed in time and strung out along the washing lines of our past. Another suggests memories are living, shifting memories of themselves, rescripted every time we visit them. Lingering over the photo, I felt I saw Simon’s teeth in my mind’s eye, and heard the cackles and phrases bubbling up through them. Moments later I was ransacking my archives to find the following description, written that winter, shortly before they were gone forever …
‘Simon is set to have his teeth out on Monday, with titanium implants soon to follow. I am sure they will be quite the hardest thing in his head. Still, I will rather miss the old teeth in his ruined cathedral of a mouth. Continue reading
UNDER THE GAVEL OF JUSTICE
I recently read about a fascinating court case in Kenya relating to a hyena killed by a local family. The deceased beast was awarded legal representation, and indeed his lawyer spoke forcefully and eloquently, winning a ruling that the guilty family pay a number of goats to the hyena’s orphaned young in compensation.
The implications of this are profound and far-reaching, as it suggests a way in which creatures of nature (in this case a hyena) can be given both rights and a voice in a human court of law. Environmentalists have been keen to pick up on this, and to start thinking of it as a model for how other natural world parties suffering harm through human activities may be able to seek redress via existing legal frameworks. If so, activists could not only engage in advocacy, but literally become advocates in a trial of — say — wetland birds vs. an invasive real estate development company. And if legal representation can be extended to hyenas and other wildlife, why not to a river damaged by pollution, or an aggrieved landscape? Would it be possible for the Gulf of Mexico herself, through her lawyers, to sue BP for the oil spill?
I too was immediately interested in the Kenyan hyena case, though from a slightly different angle. It struck me that if nature and her creatures could take the stand as injured parties, and enjoy full protection of the law, a necessary corollary would be that they could also transgress against it, and therefore themselves face trial. This revelation … Continue reading
Posted in Hahaha, Reflections from elsewhere, Thoughts and ideas
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Axes and Burins
At first I did it with an ax – thin, slight but with weight, sharp, and with a solid easy-swing handle oiled and darkened from relentless swinging. This technique worked, but usually with a great deal of extra effort after the blow. After the blow would come the wrestling and the knees on the ground, reluctant reverence. I would be summoned for dangerous yanking, twists, back and forth swinging, and, if this didn’t work, hits and smashes to literally sledge hammer my beloved ax out or through. My little naughty adversary and all of his family tree would take my over-the-head strength with this long, thin axhead, accept it with silence, and hold tight. The dumb silence of this interaction can really get to you. Often enough, I repeatedly made a new, quite useless sledgehammer with a huge 33 cm long wooden mallet head. It is not smart to swing around very insecure, large pieces of wood on the end of a stick in the air and over the head. But this is what you have to do when you are like me, a city fool, and haven’t been made aware of only the most unchanged technology since the Stone Age.
Split wood burns more easily. The water comes out of it and it seasons better in the air. When we received five steres (one cubic meter) of soaking wood in the rain, sometimes in lengths which were really too wide to handle properly next to the glass woodstove door, or simply too big for it, splitting was necessary. I didn’t mind. I liked directly contributing to the warmth of my house, of my family. I can’t burn checks or cash for warmth, but wood is the next best thing. Continue reading
Posted in Interesting, Reflections from elsewhere, Useful
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