Tag: Bridge Records

remembering college – Academia Nuts by William Bland

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a man and his dog

by debora Ewing
buy the book: Academia Nuts by William Bland

William Bland is a polymath.

Cribbing from the back of Academia Nuts: “in 1998 he began a series of 24 piano sonatas each in a different key, which was completed in 2014. In 2002, a visit from a former student, Alexander Seward, inspired him to begin writing a series of poems to accompany the writing of the sonatas. From 2002-2007 approximately five hundred eighty poems were written under the comprehensive title “Poems Accompanying Sonatas.” Several series of poems developed within the larger structure, including the series entitled “Academia Nuts”, written cautionarily for Alexander as he entered his university studies.”

I’m curious to see the entire collection of 580, but I feel Academia Nuts is perfectly curated. I sense a love of academia running like rails alongside a warning to Youth from a tired generation. Ardor is as much a character in the narrative as are clowns, connoisseurs, and head-jars. Words lead naturally into each other, creating melody. If you want, you can sink dreamily into the page, close your eyes, and feel the music. I’ve found myself immediately reading excerpts twice: once for rhythm and once for content.

The piece I chose to read for you, Academia Nuts–Series 2, No. 10, captures the sarcasm of an English Department’s cream-of-the-crop…oops, did I mean me?? I did mean me. We were terrible, with all the crushes on John and his turtleneck sweaters, sitting on desks, criticizing Rob’s spoken English while he talked to his current students (where are your prepositional phrases?); calling our professors by their first names. Making fun of the other students who were making fun of the professors, or us, or each other, or taking themselves way too seriously. Riffing on each other’s poems, not always complimentarily. I wonder how often Andrew caught a whiff of what he’d been given in this gift of poetry from William Bland.

I chose the piece I did because it was pretty straightforward in reading – I could make the jokes-in-type audible for you. The poet takes care to play games with punctuation and syllable. Visual elements make printed page indispensable. And his vocabulary is leaking into my fingers. You’re welcome.

…and this is a perfect segue into telling you what William Bland is doing these days. As C. Damon Carter, and with the same profound mind that wrote 580 poems, Bland has painted over 137 visual poems since December 2020. He has several themes: lovers, dragons, landscapes, religion, conversations.

I especially like this because THERE ARE WORDS in there.

No. 17 “Portrait of Pontius Pilate, inverted” Acrylic on Canvas 36″ x 24″

Carter writes that “for years, I have admired the words of Pontius Pilate, especially his response to a request to change the inscription over the cross of Jesus: ‘What I have written, I have written.’ Carter’s powerful portrait includes the inscription of that statement in Latin.

Contact: Becky Starobin
becky@bridgerecords.com

I love the viscerality, the rawness of passion, the mirroring – is it another entity, or a reflection of self?

No. 70 “My Dragon’s Lust” 24×30 Acrylic on Canvas

The second of the dragon trilogy is an erotic and complex painting with two dragons, two large anthropomorphic forms in the foreground, and numerous flowers, arches and curves.

Contact: Becky Starobin
becky@bridgerecords.com

No. 137 Centre Street, near Eastern Blvd, Baltimore, 1971 “for an LSD instant, I felt I understood the structure of everything” 20×30

“This painting is an evocation of a scene set in Baltimore in 1971. One night, having taken LSD, I looked out from the balcony of my apartment, and for the briefest of instants felt as if I understood the structure, the dynamics, the geometrics of everything. The moment passed as quickly as I had felt it, but I never forgot the feeling.”

–C. Damon Carter, March 2022

In art, as in words, William Bland & his alter-ego/true self C. Damon Carter seem to draw the line which doesn’t quite separate the natural world from the surreal. Please go to the website and see the whole collection – it’s still growing.

You see the madness?
Then, get out of the reach
of dictators who have lured your
body
by appealing to your
mind.
Vibrations and hallucinations aside,

…
be
free.

– William Bland, academia nuts

Further Reading:

buy the book: Academia Nuts by William Bland

William Bland recordings and sheet music are available at Bridge Records, here.

See all the paintings of C. Damon Carter Here. For more information, or to purchase, contact: Becky Starobin.

Bridge Records is an indefatigable resource for the deeper aspects of classical music. David Starobin directed the biopic String Trio, Los Angeles 1946, chronicling the birth of Schönberg’s String Trio, Op. 45.

Arnold Schönberg himself was a painter/composer. An interesting perspective on the parallels of his art and music is published here by College Music Symposium in 1995. A JStor .pdf is available.

Watch a lite version of the biography here: String Trio, Los Angeles 1946

Arnold Schönberg Center: From the Archive – Database Relaunch is a collection of correspondence to and from the composer, including plans for compositions, details peripheral to printing processes, non-musical activities, and family life.


Meeting the Cosmos – Peter Kidd, face to face

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Guest post from #…uncoffeed

By débora Ewing  2018

Meeting The Cosmos

I’ve lived in Texas twice: once in San Antonio, and once in what we call Deep East Texas. That’s part one of this story.

Part two started in 1997 on AOL. There I met my poet-guru, Peter Kidd, who gives away guy-secrets for free, and also Linda,who made magic out of my attempts at poetry. She squeezed my hand through the ether when life got weird, and reminded me how we’ll survive it.

The story of Pete and Linda in Canyon,TX, has been trickling out of me for weeks now. I’m struggling with these frays, looking for a common thread that runs from beginning to end. The problem is that I can only tell my story, not theirs.  There are so many solar systems in the cosmos tha…

…there isn’t enough space in this margin, but I have seen the proof.

They’ve always been a part of me – I call Linda my Poetry Coach because she could work magic with my words when she saw something in them. Peter is my Guru. He is thousands of years older than I am and gives away all the secrets for free. Somewhere during my travels, when I was away from the ether, they found they couldn’t exist apart from each other. When Pete leans in to hear what his girl just said to him, he grabs her ass.

Texas women are matriarchal by necessity, he says. I get that. Linda’s been in the role of coach, friend, sister, mother to me over the years, giving out biscuits of wisdom the way my great-grandmother used to do. My Gon-Gon was my introduction to poetry: those buttery Southern phrases had to be translated in my mind fast enough to respond appropriately. And there isn’t anything more poetic than chow-chow, deep-south relish of the gods. My mom harbors irritation over Gon-Gon’s claim to some sort of Texas aristocracy; aristocracy might have meant something different in those days after the war and west of the Mississippi.

I think Linda comes from Texas aristocracy, too. She is regal at her kitchen table while she tells Mazzy tall tales of living under a rock.

Over roast chicken we discussed Bill Bland‘s poetry while his music emanated from the neighbor room. We moved on to David Starobin‘s recordings – these are snippets of Pete’s New England history. For a time, Pete and Linda lived in both worlds; if I am remembering, she was sequestered upstairs in New Hampshire while she worked on her book Where Angels Long to Look. She reminisced over trees she could see through the window while she wrote.

I took notes in my sketchbook during dinner conversation. Pete’s given me homework: Black Mountain College, the side-stone in a Japanese garden, so many other things. Linda plays the Oracle for him, or maybe the gardener’s gardener, placing the Sancho seki or the Sawatobi ishi precisely where it’s needed in the conversation. I’ll bet she’s pretty good with a Sekimori ishi, too.

Maz and I came back the next day and toured the grounds in daylight. I met the desert willow – resilient delicate princess. Here’s the locust tree, bare now, chosen by the landscaper to obscure power lines with its foliage in the spring and summer. Here’s the fattest trumpet vine I’ve ever seen; I wonder how old it is. The stone foundation of a decrepit outbuilding is now a garden for agave and other indigenous plants. I pinched a bit of sage from the wizard’s garden and put it in my medicine bag.

Pete took us into the bowels of what currently serves as Igneus Press. Like a T.A.R.D.I.S., the simple shed opened into a magical world for me. Several lifetimes are stacked one against the next, and my storyteller’s mind was overwhelmed with juxtapositions. I took pictures of light and shadows while Maz typed notes on Pete’s monologue into her phone.

“Kemmett used to say for twenty years he always kept a noose in the trunk of his car.” Pete reached out and tugged on a rope hanging from the shed’s ceiling. “Here’s mine.”  A poet’s warning, Sekimori ishi. Maz and I were both gifted with copies of William Kemmett’s Hole in the Heart along with other books from the Igneus catalog.

Pete’s bear-hugs are legendary, he says. They are profound, loving, exploratory, hugs with the mind as well as the arms and heart. As we were leaving for the canyon, I requested another with a caveat:

“I need a real one – because the first two were measurements, like in measuring the depth of the soul!” Pete  chuckled and made a woo-woo motion with his hand toward Maz, but I thought his eyes acknowledged that I’d hit on something.

“I used to think I didn’t want to be with a writer,” he’d mused after dinner as he focused on something invisible just off the table, maybe a scene from a past life. We’ve all lived so many.

“Writers are terrible people,” I quipped, something Dostoevsky wrote in a book I can’t place.

“Now I realize I can only be with a writer; because…” and the rest of his wisdom no longer forms words for me, but remains a bolus of parental advice I’ve swallowed and continue to digest.

It relates to a question unasked for me, or sort of asked: what are the partner-qualifiers for my polymath soul? My daughter’s father thought we could be “like John and Yoko,” but it turned out he meant he’d feign the rock star and I could hold down the fort. Tim was a good match physically, mentally, emotionally, and in life experience; he was also a polymath with a set of interests different from mine. In a way, we were both writers. We settled into separate roles of artist and musician, but we didn’t try to cordon them off. Fences were low and easy to jump over if needs musted.

The one I married had a good camera eye but no creative inclination; I thought mistakenly that this might be a good arrangment, giving my creativity extra space in the household. The thing missing had been respect – for my creativity and my identity as a whole human.

So maybe enlisting another writer-demon is a good idea, or at least one to not categorically avoid. This is interesting.

~ See Photos of our Igneus Press Tour Here ~
Further Reading:

Robert Ketchell’s Blog – Stone Setting in the Japanese Garden
After my thanksgiving dinners, I’ll probably lie around bloated and apply the concepts of various stone settings to in-depth psychology and society. We are patten-extractors, right, Richard?

Black Mountain College – History
I’m sorry I never knew about this sooner, or if someone told me I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention. It’s time again, I think.  Let the poets take charge.

Bridge Records
If you are serious about classical music, please meet these people who are serious about recording classical music. David and Becky Starobin have devoted their lives to protecting and creating the legacy of humanity’s better selves in the form of neo-classical composition.

Igneus Press
Start here – feel history as you get ready for the new revolution. Sophie Kidd will be taking the reins on this family tradition. Let the poets take charge.

Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden (Tuttle Classics)
Because I think I’m moving so I don’t want to add more volume to my life, I’m buying this book later. The Sakuteiki, or “Records of Garden Making” was written originally in Japan without illustrations, I believe to preserve the oral history (I may be wrong about this.)  Have some thousand-year-old gardening wisdom.