Dancing like two becomes three (dimensions)
Painting that SIN(g)s color
Writing:
*—If anyone thinks
that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks
when I'm making the wine
but have to drink water
and wish it were plain
that I make when the wine
becomes water again.
He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running
forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like
fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:
— Goodbye, now, goodbye!
Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Dick and Harry
I rose from the dead.
What's bred in the bone
cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy...
Goodbye, now, goodbye! *
..............................................................
Crazy, crazy great
crazily met and yet wait
everything hovers like heat
shimmers on the hot summer
day (wish I could)
threshold of everything....
new, novel, novelty
Critical genius
old bumping new
on against again
wen|new
Catalogs of good (deemed mediocre)
bumped
up against those that never (review well)
{even now}
ideas from dialogues in cafes
in ateliers, in upstairs rooms
manifest that which
IS
but might never have been
but might never have been
IF
BUT -- bangety bang !
Will anything ever BE that NEW again.
How long had ideas brewed?
Since the dawn of time...
Let's see...........at night
Let's talk......long distance
how, let's use that light thing
What'll work?
For what...a fair, a carnival, a whore house,
or
A CITY .... OF LIGHTS
A CITY .... OF LIGHTS
Exposition.........we need lights...gas, then electric
Ben Franklin could let go of the kite...
Ol' Ben be shocked, ol' Ben be shocked
He'd be knocked, knocked,
knocked offa his feet
knockin' me out! (Wow!)
knocked offa his feet
knockin' me out! (Wow!)
Edison was figuring things on a farm
in Nova Scotia...................................
"can you hear me now"
(Leads to something new)
Oh there were a million things already in place
farm machinery, assembly lines, automobiles,
singer sewing
sewing sewingandthey were... sewing,
in Paris sewing, Coco sewing sewing fashions,
crazy fashions, skin-tight fashions, sexy fashions,
hair's a bobbing, skirts a risin', knees a knockin
"can you hear me now!"
(knockin' on heaven's door)
(knockin' on heaven's door)
Crazy!
Coco Chanel caught that crazy
Chaplin, Chaplin singing silent
trampin' crazy, trampin' crazy
That crazy crazy was PICTURES
moving moving PICTURES
TRAINS a choochooing into your seats...all a-screaming
Screaming and reading and reading not
just what happened, and who said what
and got into someone else's |
well, business but into his ohmygoodness
CRAZY thoughts (now that's a NOVEL)
and it was all novel...what! an AMERICAN girl
in a Paris book shop getting Joyce INto print
Black people moving from the States to Paris
IT was all happening!
Clothes, ragtime - meeting dance,
**Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM........the African rhythms
the Carribean currents
THEN I had religion,
THEN I had a vision.I could not turn
from their revel in derision **
freeing Josephine Baker and Isadora
(Scott Joplin dead but not forgotten)
...Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song **
Graceful melodies in tinkling syncopation
played background to the highest glamour
the world will ever know,
to the extreme inventions,
to the wildest thoughts
to artists with new actions
...in fact it felt like everything was NEW, crazy, COOL, and FOU!
all the rage ...in every sentence crazy fun fun fun.....
crazy fast fast fast
crazy smart smart smart
yet (don't forget it couldn't all be good)
Revolution..
turning...
[revolution in the air in Russia]...
REVOLUTION...(back in the USSR)
Kill the Czar and steal those dazzling Fabergé eggs!
That's so inventive, so crazy, such a way to find
a crazy
revolving
worldwide rocknrollin' high!
* (James Joyce. Ulysses
** (Vachel Lindsay, The Congo)
Exact quotes from both - The Congo rhythms and allusions used as
example of jazz roots.
example of jazz roots.
© Gay Reiser Cannon * All Rights Reserved
