Tuesday Links

I must have looked at this photo of Greenburg, Kansas about a half-dozen times yesterday. Simply heart-rending.

Also yesterday, news about the series Lost, which is scheduled to end in 2010. More here. Unspoken as of yet on the mainland is the effect this will have on the Hawaiian economy. OK, so not a big effect, but Hawai'i still regards TV production of a network show as frontpage news. Network money is big money, and everything feeds tourism.

I heard what was likely the studio release of the title track from Guns 'N Roses Chinese Democracy record which, I hope, will be released before my children can vote. You may recall I blogged about it here over a year ago. It wasn't terribly exciting, as I have heard bootleg live performances of the song, but it's still pretty catchy. Check it here, via Idolator. Update: they also leaked another track, here.

Shifting gears, when Eddie Vedder and Boom Gaspar played with Jack Johnson last month at the Kokua Festival, there was a deluge of bloggbuzz about it. Yet last weekend, Eddie played with Flea at a benefit in L.A. called the Hullabaloo Show, which benefits the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

There were rumors that Ed initially cancelled due to illness, but these were later disspelled. Unless I am misinformed, Ed performed four songs, solo, acoustic: "Walking the Cow," which is a Daniel Johnston cover, "Drifting," "I Am Mine" and his new song "No More War". He then played six songs with Flea on bass, and former Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons:



"Throw Your Hatred Down," "Watch Outside," "Corduroy," "Habit," "Better Man," and "The Kids Are All Right".



Steve Jones, best known as the Sex Pistols' guitarist, joined them for "The Kids Are All Right."

Oh No! Lest we forget: Reality imitates Reality:

The Mrs. has kept me up to date on the raging (and I do mean RAGING) controversy over on a Park Slope parents' yahoo! group involving a nursing mother daring to give nourishment to her toddler in the park the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, the celebs are now at it as reported here, giving the La Leche League and the anti-nursing-in-public cabal another platform on which to wage their unholy war. Many astute bloggers have noted that you see more breast on the red carpet at any celebrity-attended event than you do when a nursing mother feeds her child.

Just trying to keep this post as random as possible.

Lost Poem: "Program for the Class of '87"

I was cleaning through some old files and....

Let me start another way. In a recent poetry podcast, a poet was asked what magazines he read. The podcast was authored by the Poetry Foundation, which publishes Poetry magazine, the oldest poetry journal in the U.S. The poet admitted he did like to page through Poetry, because every once in a while, he discovered a brilliant gem.

I related to that. It was in back issues of Poetry magazine that I first discovered my favorite poet, Charles Simic. A lot of the time, the poetry there doesn't knock my socks off, but once in a while, it does.

Regular readers may remember a poem I posted in October, from the magazine's Summer Humor Issue (if you missed it, go here to read it again).

Anyway, I was cleaning through some old files and discovered a poem that I ripped out of an issue of Poetry a while back.

The poet is identified as Max Eberts, and I didn't even know what issue this came from, at first. Googling found the index, and I indentified this as coming from the June 1996 issue. I wanted to know more about the poet, but I cannot find any more poetry by Mr. Eberts. There is a Max Eberts who contributed a piece of prose to an anthology of ghost stories. There is also a Max Eberts who was in the publicity department at a little company in Texas called Enron. And a Max Eberts who was editor of Collegium, a publication at the University of Houston. Hmmm. There could be three or four different Max Eberts, or they could all be one in the same. Either way, this poem is among my favorites. It was nice to find it again.

PROGRAM FOR THE CLASS OF '87

Out of the arbor of shade, into the light,
our black gowns shimmering like the pigeons
lined up on the balustrades, we enter the open
air glaze of suits and hats, of banners floating,
moving in a rhythm not like the arched arcades, we enter,
a pageant of shadows, long brush strokes of black
through a watercolor. Here in this thick tongue
of early summer air, the bass drum beating, already
we begin to dissolve. Through rows of chairs, past
endless names carved on every folding bench, on every
curved back, rows and rows in memory of those before us,
we take our predetermined seats, unmindful of the dark
birds brooding in the tabernacles, unmindful of the grave
countenance of the priesthood plodding by -
black gowns, velvet bars, mortarboards,
tassels, soft caps, the satin flesh of hoods gleaming
with color - blue, crimson, orange, red - flaring
from all the black, like flames from a smoky pyre.

The speaker on the podium quotes Ecclesiastes;
nothing new under the sun about waiting
for his speech to end, so much talk
about our mission in life as we sit propped
like body bags. And on the East Lawn, peaceful
with the prayerful murmurs of mourning doves,
we mingle, guests after the wake, moving
through the maze of kisses and hugs, of handshakes
and flowers, the darting eyes we won't see again,
flushed faces and fleshly desires, the young lovers
in their shrouds. The light diffuses the oak leaves
into green air and holes of dim reflection.
A blue jay shrieks Thief! Thief!
We linger, not ready just yet to leave the cloister,
not ready to shed our dark habits. One more stroll
along the lawn, past the hollow, where the owl, hidden,
waits for night, waits to swoop
like a cleaver thrown in the dark.