VRZHU bullets of pure love

Saturday morning Vrzhoon funhouse

Three simplicities. 1. Keren Ann: Lay Your Head Down. 2. Leo Kottke: Louise. 3. Kaki King: Playing with Pink Noise.

The Millay Project

saturday vrzhutube

Clare and the reasons:

4D man is indestructible. What is up with this guy's eyes?

America's next top America - Saturday Morning Vrzhu

Three short ones but first some miscellanianna:

Bob Pinsky answers some questions here about contemporary poetry.  As part of this he includes Edgar Guest's best known poem, Home.  However my spell checker blew the whistle on some of the words therein - perhaps sloppy editing, or transcription errors -- who knows?  Here's the first stanza of the corrected text, 100% acceptable to Word Spell Check:

Edgar Guest

Home

It takes a heap livid in a house make it home,
A heap sun ant shatter, ant yeti sometimes have roam
Afore yeti really brecciate the things yeti elf behind,
Ant hunger fern elm somehow, with hem callus on dyer mind.
It dot make any differences how rich yeti get be,
How much yew chairs ant tables cost, how great yet luxury;
It faint home year, though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow year soul is sort wrapped round everything.

Really, not as bad as I had been led to believe.

Next a nice opinion article about songwriters that applies equally to poets: Here.

And an obit for Aime Cesaire.

The research arm of the Vrzhu empire has been quiet on the surface but roiling underbeneath with many long term projects.  As part of the Vrzhu Research Bureau's sociometric studies, recent trends are being subjected [as we speak] to intensive analysis and cross-examination. These include basal meta-analysis of indicators found in the compulsion to write poetry.  Here's a fragment currently undergoing exfoliation:

Complications Resulting from Ambition

What are the complications of ambition?

The most common, immediate, and short-term complications include excessive emotion, chronic and acute envy, intense anger, high expectations, and shock tactics.

Ambition can also result in ego scarring, a weakened conscience, blocked writing ability, and other damage to creativity  that can make it difficult to conceive or carry out writing in the future. This latent morbidity of ambition results in long-term and sometimes permanent personality damage.

More Information

Ambition Alternatives
Quietism, Zen, “Giving up”

Ambition Methods
Photos, Complications, Description, Statistics

Post-Ambition Healing

Survivor Stories
Testimonies from those who have had ambitions and those who have survived them.

Some ambition activists rely upon phony claims as a way to encourage poets to choose ambition. Some extremists claim that there is a link between ambition and success, notwithstanding that there is broad consensus that ambition does not increase the risk of having your work published.

And now our videos:

Hip-Hop Opera Tuba the Worst Music

Howzabout some hip-hop tuba?  Opera rap?  Well, you got that and a whole lot more unpleasantness in a 25 minutes of the "worst music of all time" in one piece.

This is truly boggling.  Apparently the result of polling data used to determine the most hated parts of music.  Then they squonched all of that alltogether and voila! you have this audio din that just has to be heard.

Here's how the description of the finished product:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

You can give it a listen to here.  Pretty hysterical at points.

What time is it, kids? It's Howdy-Vrzhu Time!

Keith Jarrett:

Saturday Morning Vrzhutubin'

Zakir Hussain -- THE tabla player, and John McLauglin and Charles Lloyd:

GVSUNME rules! - Vrzhutoob Saturnday

A really special treat today on Uncle Vrzhuy's Whizzbang, kids.  The Grand Valley University New Music Ensemble from Allandale, Michigan.

The GVSU New Music Ensemble's version of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians was the best (classical[ish]) cd of last year.  I urge you to go out and buy it. The GVSUNME is just the coolest thing ever.  While you're waiting for that cd, here's three things with Bill Ryan and the GVSUNME: a promo for the aforementioned cd, another Steve Reich piece, "Clapping;" and -- I'm really excited about this --absolutely the best version of John Cage's 4'33" I have ever heard. Or seen. With a guest violinst!

Saturday Morning Vzhutoons

Monday is, as we all know, is the feast day of St. Patrick (Padriac in Irish), the patron saint of Ireland.

Here's an authentic Irish toast:

Toaster: Here's to the Council of Trent!

 

All: Here's to the Council of Trent!

Toaster: For putting the ban on the meat . . . !

All: For putting the ban on the meat . . .!

Toaster: . . . and not on the drink!

All: . . . and not on the drink!

All imbibe.

 

And now on with the show!

Saturday Vrzhutube

Some films of music by Gyorgi Ligeti accent on the first syllable rather than the second as in Italian.  Certain photos of Ligeti make him look a little like Klaus Kinski. Of course, Werner Herzog never planned to blow up the apartment building where Ligeti was living, so I suspect the similarity ends there.

Katyn - Wajda - Herbert

I was lucky enough (thank you, Bob) to see Andrzei Wajda's Katyn at this showing of the film here in the United States.  I say this because (1) the movie is heart-rending, and (2) no one has picked it up for American distribution.

If you don’t know, it’s about the Soviet (from the east)  and German (from the west) invasions of Poland in September 1939, the Red Army's subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers [mostly] in the Katyn forests in Russia, and the aftermath through just past the end of World War II.

The officers, who were Poland’s intelligentsia – doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, merchants –were interrogated and the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) decided that they were “hardened and uncompromising enemies of the Soviet authority” as it says in the order from Stalin to have them shot. 

When the mass graves were discovered, the Nazis tried to use it as propaganda against Russia. In many cases the only identifiable evidence on the bodies were the brass buttons of the officers’ coats. When Russia retook Poland towards the end of the war, the Soviets fabricated evidence (including moving the date from 1940 to 1941) to have the massacre blamed on Germany. The movie is always about these twinned events: the Katyn Massacre and the Katyn Lie. The former lasted through the spring of 1940. The latter, the lie, lasted from 1943 through 1990.

These are the bare historical events surrounding the film. But the film concentrates, as Wajda says,  on “a family separated forever, about great illusions and the brutal truth about the Katyn crime. In a word, a film about individual suffering, which evokes images of much greater emotional content than naked historical facts. A film that shows the terrible truth that hurts, whose characters are not the murdered officers, but women who await their return every day, every hour, suffering inhuman uncertainty. Loyal and unshaken, convinced that it was only enough to open the door to see the long awaited man at it as the tragedy of Katyn concerns those who live and lived then.”

Katyn has tremendous force, and I can’t imagine the impact it has made on Polish audiences, though this article discusses its effect in Poland. At the film I sat next to a Polish graduate student. She crossed herself several times during the slaughter, and was somber and silent afterwards, as was most everyone.

Wadja does not engage in any innovative storytelling, but the stories are woven together masterfully. There is a very moving moment at the end that would never be allowed in an American film.  The music was written for the film by Krzysztof Penderecki and I think adds to without replacing (as in many of our movies) the thrust of what Wadja is doing.  At the end, after the last scene -- bulldozers pushing dirt in and over the bodies in a mass grave -- the screen goes black for 2 or 3 minutes while a choral piece (a requiem?) played. And then we left the theater.

One thing that shapes most works of art is tradition – all the poems that came before the poem being written.  I don’t think there’s necessarily any anxiety involved – think of the tradition as loam where the poem roots itself, or a stream that runs over the poem affecting its shape the way water can shape stones.

One thing major artists can earn is the ability to reflect back on their previous work in their current work. Yeats does this, as does Pound. Wajda refers back in several places in Katyn, particularly to his earlier peak movie, Ashes and Diamonds. Here are two examples:

Towards the beginning of Katyn, where the POWs are gathered outside a church, the camera pass by a crucifix with just one arm hanging, and in the same scene the rest of the Christ figure is shown being hidden under officer’s coats. This rhymes with probably the most famous shot in Ashes And Diamonds – an abandoned church with a dislodged crucifix dangling upside down.

In a more complicated way, there’s a vignette (there are several woven into the film) that refers back to Ashes And Diamonds as a whole.

In Katyn, a young resistance fighter is applying to go back to school. But his curriculum vitae contains a reference to the 1940 massacre. He’s asked to change it, he refuses, and, leaving the school, rips down a pro-soviet poster. He’s chased by the police who see this, and dies when accidentally hit by a car.

This short chapter in Katyn reflects in compressed form the whole movement of Ashes and Diamonds.

In Ashes And Diamonds, Zbigniew Cybulski (who has charisma to spare) is a young member of the resistance assigned to assassinate a fatherly Polish communist official just at the end of WWII. He’s deeply conflicted, torn between the brutality he has learned and is ordered to use, and the normal life that seems to be re-asserting itself. In the end he kills the communist official and then has an accidental, unrelated run in with two soldiers who wound him. He dies curled in a fetal position in a field of refuse.

The arc of both the incident in Katyn, and in Ashes & Diamonds are almost identical: a resistance fighter whose youth is stolen by the war, the possibility of a normal, peaceful life, a romance that holds out that same hope, then an act that erases that possibility and accelerates the hero to his death.

But the difference between the two is crucial. Katyn opens up what the true cause of the tragedy is: the political oppression that permeates society everywhere, but also enters each individual, twisting in each heart relentlessly.

Unfortunately this all sounds didactic – which the movie is not in the slightest.

Wajda says in an interview: “"The best medicine, the best remedy for political and social problems is to show them and to speak truly about them. So, I hope that it's going to soothe people because we have finally shown the truth."  Wounds heal only when they are allowed to be shown.

By the way, at the time there was evidence and reports in both the U.S. and Britain that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre.  These were suppressed so as not to damage our and Britain’s relationship with the USSR as an ally against the Axis.  Hm, ignoring evidence and reports, huh? Perhaps every country needs a little truth and reconciliation.

When asked whether he would prefer the freedom of Western film-making to the artistic constraints of the Eastern bloc, Wajda replied that in the Eastern bloc film-making is “dangerous, but there are ways to get  around political censorship. There are no ways to get around the censorship of money that you have in the west, which is much stronger.”

You must see this movie after it wins the Oscar (sorry, Persepolis, you weren’t even nominated and you deserve one, too), and opens in the theaters of free America.

Youtube clips here, here, here, and here.

And here’s a poem:

Buttons
Zbigniew Herbert

Only the pertinacious buttons
have endured death, witnesses of crime
surfaced from the depths
as the only monument on their grave

they are to witness God will count
and take pity on them
yet how can they resurrect body
being a sticky element of the soil

a bird flew by a cloud is sailing
a leaf is falling mallow sprouting
and there’s silence on high
and the Smolensk forest is steaming fog

only the pertinacious buttons
a powerful voice of silenced choirs
only the pertinacious buttons
of coats and uniforms.

In memory of Captain Edward Herbert