'Cherokee' is Creek for 'people with another language'. (It's really amazing how white settlers always managed to learn some other tribe's name for any group of Indians. They learned the Creek word for Cherokee, but not the Creek word for themselves.) Anyway, our original name for ourselves was Aniyunwiya, but Cherokee is fine too (though we say it Tsalagi--there's no R in our language). There are about 350,000 Cherokee people today, primarily in Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Missouri.

Native Languages of the Americas: Cherokee (Tsalagi)
link path thru plep Archive

...only her vine in the front garden
which spread over the trellis on the porch.
She used to sing for the grapes to ripen,
sew cotton bags to protect them from the bees...

Choman Hardi
at openDemocracy 19 - 6 - 2003

135200236619
{these are my favorite online games, though I like the Set Puzzle, and Hexxagon. Harmony on the early 90's Gameboy was another favorite, of course Tetris, and Solstice(not the RPG, the puzzle one) back in 89, 90. Mortal Kombat and all that twitchy shit makes me puke.

there. a little insight into my real nature.}

Francis Bruguiere
Rosalinde Fuller with cello
George Eastman House
Still Photography

Mundi Design Studios, esp. Web Color Theory
link thru G3RM

french car with embedded Wi-Fi

How did I construct Hasina? From books, articles, academic researches? From that fastidious disclaimer, Imagination? The first-timer's bosom buddy, Experience? I can point to this and that. But the only thing that interests me in this analysis is the impulse to create her - and that brings me back to the Dhaka balcony: my inherited memory, my internalised folklore that tells me that life hangs by a thread.

The process of becoming a published author for the first time holds only a few mysteries. These are the chief ones. Why is selling the Catalan language rights the most exciting thing that ever happened to you in your life? And, why do you not keep a photocopy of the changes you marked all the way through the copy-edited manuscript so that when it goes missing for days in the post there is no need to start foaming at the mouth? The writing process is not like this. It nurses its mysteries like grievances against casual inquiry.

Monica Ali in the Guardian UK June 17, 2003

This type of musical necrophilia - the technique of overdubbing on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers, was weird when Natalie Cole did it with her dad on "Unforgettable" a few years ago, but it was her dad. When Tony Bennett did it with Billie Holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same level of artistic accomplishment. When Larry Coryell presumed to overdub himself on top of a Wes Montgomery track, I lost a lot of the respect that I ever had for him - and I have to seriously question the fact that I did have respect for someone who could turn out to have such unbelievably bad taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes. But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and callused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. We ignore this, "let it slide," at our own peril. His callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he {could} possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it would bring. Since that record came out - in protest, as insignificant as it may be, I encourage everyone to boycott Kenny G recordings, concerts and anything he is associated with. If asked about Kenny G, I will diss him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this little essay.

Pat Metheny
at Robert Garfias' Kiosk of Information Related to Ethnomusicology

Poetry 180
"a poem a day for American high school students"
from the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center
watermelonincludes this Brautigan poem from '68

Carol Lay has a book out

...He knew how it could rot,
Be warped or broken, but revered it
For what it might become. He had seen it turn
Under his hands from its raw nature
To something longer lasting and man-made,
Made beautiful by chisel and adze and plane,
By surrender under the iron teeth
Of the saw and the slamming down
Of the hammer, again and again
Driving the nails home. He knew enough
To rest at the end of days against a tree...

The Son of a Carpenter

David Waggoner
Verse Daily

The bird heads, now bent out of plane, may have been fashioned entirely out of gold. Other areas, such as the kilt and wings of the central figures and the body and wings of the dragon, were gilt with foil brushed down over the silver. In addition to gilding, the bodies of the figures were articulated by extensive chasing. Although the materials used indicate that this axe head served a ceremonial function, the remains of wood preserved inside the shaft hole indicate that it was mounted on a haft when buried. The griffin-demons, combining human and bird features, were apparently heroic and beneficent; they dominate a contorted boar, forming the edge of the blade by grabbing its snout while grasping the neck of an aggressive Bactrian dragon.

Western Central Asia

Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Are you such a dreamer?
To put the world to rights?
I'll stay home forever
Where two & two always
makes up five
I'll lay down the tracks
Sandbag & hide
January has April's showers
And two & two always
makes up five
IT'S THE DEVIL'S WAY NOW
THERE IS NO WAY OUT
YOU CAN SCREAM
& YOU CAN SHOUT
IT IS TOO LATE NOW
BECAUSE
YOU HAVE NOT BEEN
PAYING ATTENTION

I try to sing along
I get it all wrong
Eezeepeezeeeezeepeeezee
NOT
I swat em like flies but
Like flies the buggers
Keep coming back
NOT
Maybe not
All hail to the thief
But I'm not!
Don't question my
Authority or put me
In the dock
Cozimnot!
Go & tell the king that
The sky is falling in
When it's not
Maybe not.

(ahh diddums.)

Radiohead
Hail To The Thief

shoecabbage

strange but true

that poet fella has a new movie coming out

Occasionally,in the broad curent of contemporary poetry and of writing about it,it seems as though an essential element of the condition of poetry-overflowing in its origin,I believe,and crucial to its survival-is in danger of being overlooked. It is the fact that poetry begins with pleasure(with "delight," Sir Philip Sidney says),
and if it continues as poetry in our time,our memories,our minds,it does so as pleasure. The uneasy certainty that
this is so has led the recurring waves of puritanism which our species has evolved in one repressive ideology after another(including the bottom-line puritanism of the modern world,with its gross devotion) to disparage or outlaw poetry as an undesirable and potentially hazardous substance,unprofitable and likely to encourage the notion that truth and pleasure might somewhere be related...

W.S. Merwin
Foreword to "Shells" by
Craig Arnold