Category: Various

August’s Top Five Vids

Posted on by Rocco

5. Phil Collins + Gorilla. Could it get any better than this?


 

4. I spoke too soon: Cookie Monster + Tom Waits. Now, this is fantastic.


 

3. For my exo-Toronto friends. KPMG is a huge multinational auditing/consulting/kitchen sink company, our new mayor hired to suggest ways to trim our budget. And surprise surprise, one of their suggestions was privatize some city services. And why not? Why should our tax dollars pay for unionized city workers when they could go towards unionized private workers! We’d save millions of cents! Anyhoo, in the following video, Councillor Vaughan asks about Melbourne, Australia, a city that also privatized some of its services. Listen for the dramatic punchline…


 

2. I mentioned this idea on Facebook a few weeks back. Take heed, vegerians, for the next time you invite over a meat-eater!


 

1. This is a beautiful clip from the movie Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, inspired by John Foster Wallace’s book of the same name. In the clip a man talks about his father working as a washroom attendant in a ritzy hotel. It really gets under your skin.


 

 

Other People’s Poetry

Posted on by Rocco

 
Route

Her voice roosts in my memory.
My body rocks my thoughts to sleep.
The telegraph wires vanish in the distance.

Pebbles collide, sound the stroke of noon.

 
Life-Saving Medal

My nose cuts the air,
my eyes are red from laughing.
At night, I gather milk and moonlight
and run without turning back.
If the trees behind me get frightened,
I don’t give a damn.
It is great to be indifferent
in the middle of the night
where all these people go,
the pride of the cities,
the village musicians.
The crowd is dancing, furiously,
and I am just this anonymous passer-by
or somebody whose name I can’t remember.

 
Phillipe Soupault (1897-1990)
 

As These Words Unravel

Posted on by Rocco

 
they become a trail of evidence
leading forward to you,
leading back
along the breath of a hand,
the rim of a heartbeat
the break of a cut,
the edge of a fingernail
to a warm presence
billowing in your blood
like black curtains,
a heavy reluctance,
rubbing against your bones
like shadow branches
of the moon.

Remember the old woman
on that summer dock?

I am in the glint of broken shells.

Remember the dog
chasing down horses on that dirt road?

I am among the hot stones
spat out like bullets from those tires.

Remember the boy
thin as a birch
driving his mountain bike neck deep, into a swamp river?

I am beneath the green weeds dangling from
his glasses
held by masking tape.

Remember me now?

I am a god standing
somewhere in a rush of leaves
and as you gather them
these words,
know that
I am somewhere
in their fragments.
They are clutched around me
like a handful of shells
held close to you, now,
like the remembering of
of muscles, after a heavy load,
the memory of touch upon skin:
solidifying forever
into an instant
lasting as long
as the heartbeat
the brief hush
when all these pieces freeze
into a single moment,
and you realize
as clearly as the silence
around us,
that everything I am
has already happened
a million times
in a million different ways
and will never happen
this way
again.

 

 

 
2002 (c) Rocco de Giacomo