Luminous Robin, The Moon and Mercury the new post at The Polymath site is a poetic invocation for Luminous Robin.
A vow of clear seeing and sacred listening between the Taurus Moon and Mercury’s retrograde turning.
My radio show Amazing Songs & Other Delights #5 – The Poetry edition repeats tomorrow, Monday 21st, 3-4pm (gmt+1) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com (or on the app).
You can read about the show here.
Tracklist:
01 – Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis – Ode to a Nightingale (Keats poem)
02 – Suede – Heroine (Byron She Walks in beauty 1st lines)
03 – The Cranberries – Yeats Grave
04 – Amália Rodrigues – Barco Negro (David Mourão-Ferreira poem)
05 – Secos Molhados – Não não digas nada (Fernando Pessoa poem)
06 – Annie Lennox – Live With Me And Be My Love (Christopher Marlowe poem)
07 – The Waterboys – Stolen Child (Yeats poem)
08 – Bob Dylan – On the Road Again (Bob Dylan poem)
09 – Radio Bukowski – The Genius of The Crowd (Charles Bukowski poem)
10 – Carla Bruni – If You Were Coming In The Fall (Emily Dickinson poem)
11 – Rufus Wainwright – When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29th)
12 – Fagner – Fanatismo (Florbela Espanca poem)
13 – Ralph Schuckett and Richard Butler – Alabama song (Bertolt Brecht poem, Kurt Weill music)
14 – Patti Smith – Changing of the Guards (Bob Dylan cover and poem)
15 – Phil Ochs – The Bell (Edgar Allan Poe poem)
16 – Quilapayun – Complainte de Pablo Neruda
17 – The Smiths – Cemetery Gates (Keats, Yeats, Wilde came to play)
All shows on mixcloud: www.mixcloud.com/infoyeye/ | www.mixcloud.com/MondoBizarreMagazine
Today is World Poetry Day. Here is my favourite poem:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
My radio show, Amazing Songs & Other Delights has a poetry edition: https://www.mixcloud.com/infoyeye/amazing-songs-other-delights-5-the-poetry-edition-por-raquel-pinheiro/
There’s a repeat of my 5th Amazing Songs & Other Delights #5 – The Poetry edition tomorrow, Monday 2nd, 3-4pm (gmt) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com (or on the app).
Tracklist:
01 – Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis – Ode to a Nightingale (Keats poem)
02 – Suede – Heroine (Byron She Walks in beauty 1st lines)
03 – The Cranberries – Yeats Grave
04 – Amália Rodrigues – Barco Negro (David Mourão-Ferreira poem)
05 – Secos Molhados – Não não digas nada (Fernando Pessoa poem)
06 – Annie Lennox – Live With Me And Be My Love (Christopher Marlowe poem)
07 – The Waterboys – Stolen Child (Yeats poem)
08 – Bob Dylan – On the Road Again (Bob Dylan poem)
09 – Radio Bukowski – The Genius of The Crowd (Charles Bukowski poem)
10 – Carla Bruni – If You Were Coming In The Fall (Emily Dickinson poem)
11 – Rufus Wainwright – When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29th)
12 – Fagner – Fanatismo (Florbela Espanca poem)
13 – Ralph Schuckett and Richard Butler – Alabama song (Bertolt Brecht poem, Kurt Weill music)
14 – Patti Smith – Changing of the Guards (Bob Dylan cover and poem)
15 – Phil Ochs – The Bell (Edgar Allan Poe poem)
16 – Quilapayun – Complainte de Pablo Neruda
17 – The Smiths – Cemetery Gates (Keats, Yeats, Wilde came to play)
All shows on mixcloud: Yé Yé Radio mixcloud | Mondo Bizarre Magazine mixcloud
by Raquel Pinheiro
A little over one year ago my friend Dana suggested me Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I have now been writing The Morning Pages, an integral part of the book that is meant to be carried on.
Dana recommending me The Artist’s Way wasn’t so much because I was artistically blocked. I was composing, playing, painting, writing poems and more at the time. More because I wasn’t going to physical places I wanted to go. My feet, my body, seemed glued. In early 2022 I was invited by a friend to go and spend time with him. I truly wanted to, but couldn’t move.
Maybe summer (2022) would be it. It wasn’t. Summer 2022 brought a big musical piece, appeared literally when I woke up, name, concept, the names of several tracks all there. I turned my laptop on, opened Audacity and start cresting the sounds that, for me, translated the names of the tracks.
Out of the blue, as a coincidence, that Julia Cameron just like my friend Ed call synchronicity, Francisco (Silva – The June Carriers/Velho Homem/Old Jerusalem) start sending small guitar lines for me to hear the sound of his new guitar, an electric one (in Old Jerusalem life, Francisco was known for playing acoustic). He didn’t knew I was composing, I didn’t knew he had the Mustang. “What if I put some of those guitar lines on my tracks?” And so I did and what was electronic start become, and end up, electro-acoustic.
That same summer another friend turned 50. Until the eve of his birthday I didn’t knew he played (guitar), he didn’t knew I played (bass). There was going to be a band in which he was playing covers. I said I would go and play bass. And I did. I had played with them before, had never played on stage, hadn’t played bass in about 18.5 years until a few months before, no rehearsal. Just get there, they were already playing when I arrived, pick the house bass and go for it. It was great.
A few days later I was at the jams that were held at the place of the birthday party. This time, it was tricky to get the house bass. A woman playing electric? Seems not (it turned out is wasn’t just a woman playing electric, but not being from the proper musical background. I stayed there, observing, until I spotted an approachable musician, a saxophonist. We both played together, by the end of the jam. Total improv. He would wonderfully fit the saxophone wherever it was required. The next week he brough a jazz guitarist that gave me four 7th arpeggios to practice to play with them one week later. And so it was.And then it stopped. But I got a fabulous saxophonist for my music I didn’t even knew I needed. That summer I also started painting on canvas.
I didn’t went to stay with my friend. Autumn, Winter came. I didn’t went to go see my friend. It’s 2023. I want to go see someone play abroad. My feet remain glued. Dana, aware of what has been written so far and more, told me about The Artist’s Way. I read it, did all the exercises – some may, at first glance seem silly and childish, but aren’t – begin writing The Morning Pages.
I start venturing into short distance travels by train. Stayed overnight with a recent acquaintance. And with a different friend for a few weeks, carrying a ton of notebooks, my guitar, the digital copy of The Artists Way. It was the first time I spend a number of weeks with an electric guitar as my only instrument. It was a thrill.
Over two years since he invited me, I still haven’t went to see the friend that asked over in early 2022 – there is a little more to the story than my feet being glued the floor. As in, my feet were glued to the floor, but something else, my heart, was glued too. Under his shyness, my friend is adventurous, passionate, intense, larger than life, has deep emotions, loves love, passion and life. I share some of those things, but don’t deal well with deep, bubbling emotions. Open my heart again? Run the risk of heartbreak? Probably not. One day it will (re)happen.
But The Morning Pages have been there for me, so has he who keeps telling me to write for others to read. I write a lot on my journal(s), notebooks, The Morning Pages, to him.
I’ve recommended The Artist’s Way to a few people. Some already read it, did the exercises and wrote The Morning Pages for a while. Others bought the book and are still to read it, do the exercises and immerse themselves in The Morning Pages. My Morning Pages aren’t always in the morning, but I’ve been writing the three pages everyday. Matt, another friend, thinks it is quite the commitment to be writing The Morning Pages for a year.
Did the Morning Pages, The Artist’s Way made me more creative? More creative, not exactly. What they did, along with the friend I’m still to visit, is made me write more about myself in public. Such debut may had been with Bernard Butler’s Camber Sands https://mondobizarremagazine.com/2024/03/27/midlle-of-the-week-song/ The follow up is also with a new song by Bernard Butler, Deep Emotions, that can be read here: https://mondobizarremagazine.com/2024/04/30/bernard-butler-deep-emotions-an-essay/
Early this year I went to a vero circuit/guitar pedal building wokshop. A nice distortion/fuzz pedal both for guitar and bass was build. The last time I had soldered I was 13 or 14. Afterwards, home, I painted and customized the pedal box. Some of the materials, like the sparkling dust and the stars were part of a number of things from The Artist’s Way exercises. The rest is acrylic paint and glossy nail varnish and coat.
I’ve recently become a member of Grupo Operário do Ruído (Workers Noise Group) an ensemble of noise(s) and rhythm from Sonoscopia that will have its public presentation December 8th at Conservatório de Música do Porto. We have a staggering amount of rehearsals and a few workshops. Grupo Operário do Ruído is far less leftfield for me than what can be called life narration writing. To an extent I do that with my poems, but it is very different. I’ve also taken a short trip by metro to the seaside north of Porto that included seeing a small intimate concert friends had put up.
In fairness, I move across very different social groups. So much so that now Beatriz, one of my fellow members of Grupo Operário do Ruído (GOR) asked if her fellow GOR members would be interested in being part of her group of guests in a performance she is part of called Sonópolis. Sonópolis is to be presented at Sala Suggia, the orchestra room, at Casa da Música, July 7th. I’m in!
Today is World Book Day 2004. Here is a list of a few of my favourite books:
Eça de Queirós – A Cidade e as Serras
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Herodotus – Histories
James Gavin – Deep In A Dream – The Long Night Of Chet Baker
Jean Cocteau – Les enfants terrible
Sam Shepard – Crónicas Americanas (Motel Chronicles)
Simon Garfield – Mauve
T.E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.S. Elliot – Complete Poems
Oscar Wilde – Dorian Gray
recent favourites:
Charles Spencer – A Very Private School
Mat Osman – The Ghost Theatre
My Amazing Songs & Other Delights #63 – The Say Hello, Wave Goodbye edition is tomorrow Monday, 8th, 3-4pm (gmt+1) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com (or on the app).
The title comes from the Soft Cell song of the same name, here on a cover by David Gray. The meaning refers to saying hello to something new, goodbye to an old, beloved one. In this case, the old beloved one is Old Jerusalem that Francisco Silva is retiring with a last concert on the 20th, at Socorro here in Porto. Old Jerusalem’s farewell includes Breeding angels, a demos album that contains Red sun over the interstate – that is also on this week’s programme – a song I have the previledge of known, and often sing on my own home, for a couple of years.
If Francisco is retiring Old Jerusalem, he is bringing, given birth, to The June Carriers that release their debut album Equanimity on the 10th.
And now, beginnings and endings, and metting, and journeys, and the same thing, that yet is, but isn’t, become even more interesting.
My track Big Bang, that opens the show, has the exact same guitar line as The June Carriers’s Pastoral Epigraph, that closes the show. It is a travel from the The Big Bang, from the ends, or beginnings, of The Universe to Earth. The guitar, of course, is played be Francisco on both instrumentals. As for the why and how Francisco’s guitar line ended up on my track, on both tracks, that is for another day.
What my Big Bang and Then June Carriers’ Pastoral Epigraph shows is how the exact same guitar line, although easily recognisable, can feel so different depending of its surrounding, of the musical ambience and creation. Of how two people compose differently with the same guitar line (or any other same musical bit). Other than knowing I was going to use his guitar line, Francisco had no say, nor knew, what I was going to do with it. I didn’t have a clue how he was going to use it on what become The June Carriers’ first album.
My 16 choices for this The Say Hello, Wave Goodbye edition are all about travel, journeys, inner and outer, out in space, on our planet, far from home, standing still. The Modern Lovers’
Dodge Veg o-matic is probably the best going nowhere song ever. Bartleby, the immovable, “I prefer not to” scrivener of Henry Melville’s tale as his very fixed ideais regarding is life, his views, doing, moving, changing in ways others find normal is not for him.
Some journeys don’t end well. Like in the Erlkönig a Schubert lieder, with lyrics by Goethe, in which a father rides madly through the night, on horseback, with his son, whistle the Erlking is enticing the child, that tries to draw dad’s attention. The lieder ends with the blunt “In seinen Armen das Kind war tod” (roughly “in your arms the child is dead”.
Others have twist and turns. Diferentes in perspective, depending where we find ourselves. My photos of the maze from my favourite local park are taken from inside it and I know my way around it because I know from where the whole maze can be seen. However, on a foggy day, I may, and still get lost in it. The colour and black and photo illustrate the same thing seen in two different ways.
Tracklist:
01 – Raquel Pinheiro – Big Bang (radio edit)
02 – Old Jerusalem – Red sun over the interstate
03 – Franz Schubert – Erlkönig (Op. 1, D. 328 – Wer reitet so spät sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau)
04 – The Modern Lovers – Dodge Veg o-matic
05 – Bernard Butler – Camber Sands
06 – The Fugs – Bartleby The Scrivener
07 – Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
08 – David Gray – Say Hello, Wave Goodbye (Soft Cell cover)
09 – The Beatles – Drive My Car
10 – The Clash – Lost In The Supermarket
11 – Kings of Leon – Going Nowhere (live in Nashville)
12 – Siouxie & The Banshees – The Passenger (Iggy Pop cover)
13 – The Proclaimers – I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) (2011 remaster)
14 – Aaron Copland – Going to Heaven! (Emily Dickinson poem, sung by Sanford Sylvan)
15 – Little Eve – The Loco-Motion (remaster)
16 – The June Carriers – Pastoral Epigraph
All previous shows on mixcloud: www.mixcloud.com/infoyeye/ | www.mixcloud.com/MondoBizarreMagazine
For tomorrow, Monday, January 1st,, Amazing Songs & Other Delighs is a repeat. Issue #5 The Poetry edition, 9ne of my favourite editions that fits beautifully on New Year’s Day. You can hear it on Yé Yé Radio: /yeyeradio.com/ (or on the app), 3-4pm (gmt).
The poetry edition starts with Marianne Faithfull reading Ode to a Nightingale by Keats with music by Warren Ellis and ends with The Smiths’ Cemetry Gates. Between those there are other 15 songs ranging from Suede’s Heroine to Amália Rodrigues singing Barco Negro, a fado with a David Mourão Ferreira poem, through The Cranberries, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Carla Bruni or Rufus Wainwright.
Tracklist:
01 – Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis – Ode to a Nightingale (Keats poem)
02 – Suede – Heroine (Byron She Walks in beauty 1st lines)
03 – The Cranberries – Yeats Grave
04 – Amália Rodrigues – Barco Negro (David Mourão-Ferreira poem)
05 – Secos & Molhados – Não não digas nada (Fernando Pessoa poem)
06 – Annie Lennox – Live With Me And Be My Love (Christopher Marlowe poem)
07 – The Waterboys – Stolen Child (Yeats poem)
08 – Bob Dylan – On the Road Again (Bob Dylan poem)
09 – Radio Bukowski – The Genius of The Crowd (Charles Bukowski poem)
10 – Carla Bruni – If You Were Coming In The Fall (Emily Dickinson poem)
11 – Rufus Wainwright – When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29th)
12 – Fagner – Fanatismo (Florbela Espanca poem)
13 – Ralph Schuckett and Richard Butler – Alabama song (Bertolt Brecht poem, Kurt Weill music)
14 – Patti Smith – Changing of the Guards (Bob Dylan cover and poem)
15 – Phil Ochs – The Bell (Edgar Allan Poe poem)
16 – Quilapayun – Complainte de Pablo Neruda
17 – The Smiths – Cemetry Gates (Keats, Yeats, Wilde came to play)
Mondo Bizarre Magazine 