First cars, now motorcycles

This is a strange group of posts for me. 2 out the last 3 are about cars or motorcycles. An interesting thing about "cool" vehicles is the marriage of aesthetics and function. If these machines of Confederate perform anywhere close to as good as they look, Wow.

http://www.confederate.com/confederate2/c2-links/machines.html

Patricia Thirdday and the Citrus Sorrow

Awhile back I wrote a little thing I call "Patricia Thirdday and the Citrus Sorrow." Didn't get a lot of feedback on it, but Anna loved it. Today she wrote me that she had shared the story with a friend, and that friend now claims citrus sorrow when having a bad day. Totally cool. If you haven't read it, you can find the PDF at http://www.joshgentry.com/scribbling/scribbles.htm.

Here's a teaser.

“What can I help you with, Mr. Royce?”
The trim man across from her stared directly into her eyes.
“Sometimes I turn into a citrus fruit.”
After a short pause, she nodded slowly. “You transform into a spherical, orange or yellow fruit full of pulp and juice.”
“Yes. Well, not literally.”
She looked at him and waited.

Revival of the American sports car?

I'm not a big car guy, but recently I've noticed a return to cool for the venerable American sports cars. They look like muscle cars again.

The Shelby Mustang:
http://www.svt.ford.com/gallery.aspx?img=ShelbyGT500_3

The Dodge Charger:
http://www.reviewcars.com/2006/largepics/pics/dodge_charger_1.jpg

The Camero:
http://www.arkansascamaro.com/2007camaro.html

The Trans-Am
http://images.highperformancepontiac.com/hotnews/hppp_0607_2009_trans_am_concept_z.jpg

The Corvette:
http://www.caranddriver.com/assets/image/2006/Q4/1042006171336.jpg

My dream sports car is a Corvette Stingray of the 1960's, say 1967.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/sets/1271595/

Borrowed words (as seen in spam)

"From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!"


"From limits far remote, where thou dost stay",


Both from Shakespeare

Close Eyes and Spin Slowly

It's a custom Genre on my Ipod, Close Eyes and Spin Slowly. So far its all Mazzy Star. Back when, I read a review of a concert of theirs in Albuquerque, first I ever heard of them. It went something like:

Imagine you are in a small, dark club, candlelit, smokey, you are stoned, there's a beautiful woman on stage crooning beat poetry, close your eyes, spread your arms and spin slowly.

Interpretation

I'm into words. I like the work of those who are good with them. I mess about with them for fun, myself. So much of our literature is focused on the written word. We read silently, to ourselves. We are even into the physicality of the media words are printed on. I usually smell a book before reading it. We like nice binding. Sometimes part of a poems structure is how it looks on the page. This world of words has always been my words focus.

The world of silently reading on the page is like a 2 dimensional world, a fine thing unto itself, but without a whole dimension that some other places have. I'm talking about performance. People speak or sing the words. You can add this dimension to any writing, reading a story aloud, performing a poem in a coffee shop, reciting scripture in church. The most obvious and widespread form that performing words takes place in our culture is singing. What's fascinating about vocalizing words, is that there really is a whole nother dimension, a whole layer that isn't there if it is read silently. The amount of room there is for interpretation is astonishing to me. Particularly because I have no competence for performing.

As I said, we see this most often with music. It is amazing to me when someone takes a song, especially a well known song, and makes it their own, something very different. Many examples come to mind, and I have this whole thread going in my blog about different performances of songs written by Leonard Cohen. Yesterday, Luke sent me a gorgeous example of a song transformed. He has since blogged it, via YouTube. Check it out.

undone

I came back from lunch, and one of my co-workers said to me:

The thing that was done has been undone.

Has a ring to it, I think.

Raise your hands

I'm messing about with a new scribbling project. So far its mostly false starts, but I have a whole line, dammit, that I think is going to stay.

Raise your hands to build a wall of thorn and bone

What I call getting away (Sawtooth Mountains, NM)

I grabbed this picture from World66, a wiki style travel guide. It was taken by R X Garcia. These are the Sawtooth Mountains in New Mexico, as you approach them on Forest Service Road 6a. I know because I was there this weekend. I went backpacking in those mountains. If you have some desert rat in you, and you enjoy isolation, then I shouldn' t tell you about this place because you might go and make it less isolated. There are no population centers of any size near this area.

From the time we turned on to the dirt road, we saw no one. Where we parked the van, in the plains below the mountains, we saw the usual fire rings and occasional beer bottle. Once we entered the mountains we saw none of that. No trails, no campsites, no fire pits, no trash, no sign of human kind. No lights, no human sounds. Even when you got to the top of one of the mountains, the vista is strikingly empty of people.

This is my holy land.