Luke & Piano ‘08

Roby ‘08

11 Hope Street, (Self Portrait for L.C.) 2008

Glad to finally get this scanned.

Listening to Scott Walker: Scott 3 (1969)

More soon, enjoy.

Image Copyright © 2009 Levi Ward

Medical Gymnastics, by Agnieszka Polska

Listening to Scott Walker’s Scott (1969)

Friend and muscian Luke Rathborne was just written up in Filter Magazine. If you’re in the city, go see his show at Joe’s Pub tonight. If not, you can listen to one of his songs below. Enjoy.

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all images copyright © 2009 Richard Rothman

I posted a while back about a photography teacher I had while attending SVA, Richard Rothman. Not until now has he had a large collection of his images from the project, Redwood Saw, on his smartly re-designed website. Give them a look & keep an eye out for it to be published in print form. Beautiful work.

Great while listening to Red House Painter’s Ocean Beach (1995).

This is the poem we have been waiting for
n’est-ce pas
Much returns to us when we read it
which we do over and over again
It is not inspired
It took days and days to write
You are a detail in it
then you are the engine of the song
If only your gorilla was dead
we could be lovers
You cannot accuse my poem of helping anyone
You cannot use the tone
for the construction of a new thing
We like to read it slowly
touching ourselves
while falling asleep in the charcoal tower
after the terrible goodbye
We stop here and there
to put up red curtains or change the cats
but we come back
filled with sweet gratitude
O sweet gratitude
to be the ones we are
drivers of cars in the night-time rain
toward the adult restaurants and the toughest of lives
in Nashville and Acapulco

–

Crying, Come back, Hero

Now we’re tough enough again
to speak for love alone,
let politics go hang, we’ve
had our try with twisted form:
what good was it but training
for a summer day, discipline
to keep our manhood hard and warm.

One man free to love his minute
in the realms of flesh and sun
breaks down more pain than ages
of humane law or lawyers can.

Speaking softly one last time
let me say, You’ve made your laws
too strong, good or bad, your laws
have weakened many men, and I
would rather haunt cafes on both
sides of town than break my only
heart for your millennium,
my beloved falling through the numbered
arms of weak and weaker men.

It’s panic in the eyes of girls
that tells me I must speak for love alone,
panic at their empty beds,
at sanitary rows of monsters born.

1965

poems by Leonard Cohen

All Men Delight You, by Leonard Cohen

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
Others seem to think
the past can guide them
My own music
is not merely naked
It is open-legged
It is like a cunt
and like a cunt
must needs be houseproud
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by ones like me

A song to listen to after reading:

Exit Twilight by Ilyas Ahmed (feat. Grouper)

my life my life my very old one
my first badly healed desire
my first crippled love
you had to return
it was necessary to know
what is best in our lives
when two bodies play at happiness
unite reborn without end
entered into complete dependency
i know the trembling of being
the hesitation to disappear
sunlight upon the forests edge
and love where all is easy
where all is given in the instant
there exists in the midst of time
the possibility of an island

Excerpt from The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq.