Month: July 2018

everything’s gone orange – Random gum of August 2018 soundtrack

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Everything’s gone orange – Random gum – August 2018
www.comraderadmila.com / Follow me on Spotify

01 Curtis Mayfield – “Pusherman”
Watching old episodes of Soul Train; cheers to Ade & to Ste
02 Wendy James – “Bad Intentions and a Bit of Cruelty”
For Naomi: I am sure I said I would never include any Wendy James thing anywhere. Wrong again
03 Julia Jacklin – “Leadlight” …I love you my darling I do!/But I can’t promise I’ll be here to see this whole love through…
Oh, how I love Julia. “I didn’t know that the ground, is not only harder/Oh but colder when you are not around”
04 Weyes Blood – “Everybody’s Talkin’”
Weyes Blood does Harry Nilsson
05 Cat’s Eyes – “I Knew It Was Over”
We always know it’s over before we’re told
06 Sunni Colón – “God is a Woman”
If God were a woman, would things seriously be the way they are?
07 Three J’s – “Chalito”
A song to escape the wee prick that is Three Js
08 John Denver – “Leaving, on a Jet Plane”
John Denver is like… reliving earliest childhood, and learning over time that nothing and no one you perceived in childhood is anything like what it really is
09 Al Green – “Love and Happiness”
10 Zack Mexico – “Suzuki” …I don’t wanna fall in love…
11 Sparks – “Girl from Germany” …My word, she’s from Germany/Well, it’s the same old country/But the people have changed…
12 Bill Baird – “You’re Someone Else”
13 Juliana Hatfield – “A Little More Love” …I’m trapped, trapped in the spell of your eyes/In the warmth of your arms/In the web of your lies…
Juliana’s take on Olivia
14 Fad Gadget – “Coitus Interruptus”
15 The Cambodian Space Project – “The Passenger”
16 Beastie Boys – “Egg Man”
17 Pongo – “Tambulaya”
From Angola to Lisbon – I dare you not to jump around
18 Marissa Nadler – “Hungry is the Ghost”
19 Nai Palm – “Atoll”
Australia
20 San Mei – “Wonder”
More Australia!
21 Barrie – “Canyons”
22 LCD Soundsystem – “Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up”
23 Spirea X – “Chlorine Dream”
24 Machine Translations – “Made a Friend”
More Australia and Australian translator friends … and machines
25 Eva Pilarová – “Popocatepetl Twist”
For the Czech chicks – Anne, Martina
26 MorMor – “Heaven’s Only Wishful”
27 Jefferson Airplane – “White Rabbit”
For singing loudly in middle-of-night darkness. Hubbubs with Mr Firewall!
28 Emily Jane White – “Nightmares on Repeat”
29 Emma Ruth Rundle – “Fever Dreams”
30 TEKE::TEKE – “Chicchana Toki Kara”
Montreal
31 RÜFÜS DU SOL – ”No Place”
More Australia for an Australia-heavy mix
32 Laura Marling, LUMP, Mike Lindsay – “Shake Your Shelter”
Some things are hard to listen to
33 Whyte Horses – “Empty Words”
34 Caterina Valente – “Popocatepetl Twist”
Another (this time French-Italian) take on this song – and of course a nod to my old friend Mike and our time in Mexico, as Popo erupted
35 Sequoyah Tiger – “Cassius”
Italy… not often I get to include or get fooled by Italy
36 Kaada – “Care”
No-no-no-norway
37 The Walkmen – “Another One Goes By”
38 Natalie Prass – “Your Fool”
39 Erika Wennerstrom – “Extraordinary Love”
40 Boxed In – “All Your Love is Gone”
41 Unloved – “When a Woman is Around”
42 Illy – “Enquanto Você Não Chega”
Brasil
43 Olden Yolk – “Takes One to Know One”
44 Gamine – “Fille du soir”
45 Dirty Three – “Great Waves”
Australia
46 Julio Cesár Oliva, Morgan Szymanski – “Estampas de México: No 16 Los volcanes (Popocatepetl & Ixtaccihuatl)”
47 Rafiq Bhatia – “Before Our Eyes”
48 Mitski – “Geyser”
For the geysers that explode again and again before my eyes
49 Mimicking Birds – “Lumens”
Shining a certain kind of light…
50 Blondie – “Picture This”
“All I want is a photo in my wallet/A small remembrance of something more solid/All I want is a picture of you”

 

“defuse your body’s insurgence”

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Body Bereft
–Antjie Krog

wednesday 18 june
over my terrified
body my hand moves again up to
my breast again hoping
that the lump of clay will not be there
that the hand misconstrued
that it has indeed vanished in the

meantime. the mountain stands
stripped clean and burnt through. I live by the
breath of the mountain alone.
I have no other competence. on
the windward side fringes of light sing, on
the lee side there is nought

from the waist you
blindly suppose yourself
secretly whole, you try to defuse

your body’s insurgence
against your body. let the stone lump
grow cold in the fog, let
the pine trees tilt like umbrellas in
a cortège, let my thoughts
steam to ripeness in sorrow. but I,

I am occupied this
morning: softly I coax my breasts to
unwind in foam, let them
freely drowse in tranquil fragrance, then
I rinse them in honey
to luminous shape and there where the

mammogram reveals its
blackest clot, I lather in light, I
caress with the sweetest
tonality of breath, of light-limbed
tintinnabulous bliss
there the light soaks in so blindingly

that the black membrane feels
itself blessed by blue, diluting its
viscous toxic polyps,
dissolving them to effluence. see
the rust bleed like biestings
from my nipples. Whole like a whiplash

I want to live on this earth.
(late night)
fuck-all. I feel fuck-all
for the life hereafter – it’s now that
I want to live, here that

I want to live. when I
look at you I grow sad, oh yes as
sad as the heart can see

sunday 22 june
my heart
whimpers on her hinges. I want to
touch something, hold something,
revive the wholeness that once was mine.

I want to return with
my previous body. I am not
I, without my body
only through my body can I in-
habit this earth. my soul
is my body entire. my body

embodies what I am.
do not turn against me, oh do not
ever leave me. do not
cave in around me, do not plummet
away from me, do not
die off on me, do not leave me with-
out testimony. I
have a body, therefore I am. step
into the breach for me –
yes, you are my only mandate to
engage the earth in love.

monday 23 june
the last rains of winter fall
faster than yearning or winter trees
with lymphatic systems
against the wintry light. it’s as if
I am young again in
my upper arms suddenly, and smooth

at the back of my head.
my body glows complete, my elbows
hang free with my senses
extended over my skin. I see
the mountain, maintaining
herself on her cliffs, containing her-

self in stone as stone, her-
self complete in herself. she decays
with the earth in the tongue
of eternity. I can do nought
but ascend in her with
roaring immaculate radiance

sunday 3 october
steadily the days curve
more brightly over me. the blossoms
are crushed by the wind. on
some inclines I shall never saunter
again. from the earliest
times you have been identified daily

and appropriated with
eyes and inhalations. only in
some imaginations
are you methodically flaked off.
my heart knows that you have
nothing to do with us, that you are

lost deep in the concept
of mountain, that the word mountain is
an abstract noun, that blue
is a verb, stone a friend, for next to
you I become she and
she he and we irrevocably

become us, because you
remain you. all in-
cantations of yearning
tilt in my chest. my pulse resounds with
poems and axillary
feathers, my blazing gizzard

buzzes with rhyme. I hone
my heart to yours. I shall never let
you leave me. words my mouth
will lose – my seams will be undone – I
speak many tongues but not
one of them any longer my own

Photo by Ari Spada on Unsplash

retracted claws

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Each Happiness Ringed by Lions
–Jane Hirshfield

Sometimes when
I take you into my body
I can almost see them – patient, circling.
Almost glimpse the moving shadow of the tail,
almost hear the hushed pad of retracted claws.
It is the moment – of this I am certain –
when they themselves are least sure.
It is the moment they could almost let us go free.

Photo by Fabrizio Frigeni on Unsplash

swooned birds

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In the season of birds constantly flying directly into my closed windows…

Recollection
–Eila Kivikk’aho
Words couldn’t move mountains
words weren’t even up to opening the door.

But when you’d gone,
I took them in, to shelter in the warmth,
like swooned birds that had hit the window.

And they never tire of singing.
And I keep on listening to them.

Photo by Andrea Reiman on Unsplash

lived instead

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The Museum of Obsolescence
–Tracy K. Smith
So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,

Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescence

Of shed skin. It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts

Ticking through our shirts. We’re here
To titter at gimcracks, the naïve tools,

The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.
There’s green money, and oil in drums.

Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books
Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.

In the south wing, there’s a small room
Where a living man sits on display. Ask,

And he’ll describe the old beliefs. If you
Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his hands

And sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him
With a video looping on ad infinitum.

Special installations come and go. “Love”
Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,”

Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see
(After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?)

Is an image of an old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

your move

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Open House
–Naomi Shihab Nye
I work as hard as I can
to have nothing to do.

Birds climb their rich ladder
of choruses.

They have tasted the top of the tree,
but they are not staying.

The whole sky says,
Your move.

Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

“I do not consent”

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Poem About My Rights
–June Jordan
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a
boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one/a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life

Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash

“civilising love of death”

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Ignorance of Death
–William Empson
Then there is this civilising love of death, by which
Even music and painting tell you what else to love.
Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death

Making death their ideal basis for different ideals.
The Communists however disapprove of death
Except when practical. The people who dig up

Corpses and rape them are I understand not reported.
The Freudians regard the death-wish as fundamental,
Thought “the clamour of life” proceeds from its rival “Eros.”

Whether you are to admire a given case for making less clamour
Is not their story. Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.

Because we have neither hereditary nor direct knowledge of death
It is the trigger of the literary man’s biggest gun
And we are happy to equate it to any conceived calm.

Heaven me, when a man is ready to die about something
Other than himself, and is in fact ready because of that,
Not because of himself, that is something clear about himself.

Otherwise I feel very blank upon this topic,
And think that though important, and proper for anyone to bring up,
It is one that most people should be prepared to be blank upon.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash