“The test of whether it’s poetry, is: does it sound beautiful when you say the words over, in your mind or your voice, with no skilled performer, no music, just the sounds and meanings in the words themselves”, Robert Pinsky
Charles Bukowski, born in 1920, began writing at a young age and was first published in the 1940s. Then Bukowksi gave up writing for the world of work and bars, not publishing, not writing, so the myth goes, for nearly twenty years. Ten of those years were spent roaming from odd job to odd roominghouse from the East coast to the West. The other ten years, Bukowski worked for the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles, a job that took no effort except for the strength to show up and the patience to perform mindless operations. During that time, his life bordered on insanity and death, two prevalent themes in his writing. According to his own myth making, Bukowski returned to writing the day that he quit the Postal Service, but his bibliography shows that indeed, he had been publishing several years before that.
Takashi Miike(三池 崇史,Miike Takashi?) (born August 24, 1960) is a highly prolific and controversial Japanesefilmmaker. He has directed over seventy theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. In the years 2001 and 2002 alone, Miike is credited with directing fifteen productions.
Themes of his work
Miike has garnered international notoriety for depicting shocking scenes of extreme violence and bizarre sexual perversions. Many of his films contain graphic and lurid bloodshed, often portrayed in an over-the-top, cartoonish manner. Much of his work depicts the activities of criminals (especially yakuza) or concern themselves with non-Japanese living in Japan. He is known for his black sense of humor and for pushing the boundaries of censorship as far as they will go.
It should be noted that, despite his somewhat notorious reputation, Miike has also proven himself to be capable of directing lighthearted children’s films (Zebraman, The Great Yokai War), touching period pieces (Sabu), and subdued, moving pictures such as the road movieThe Bird People in China. Even in his more violent work, he is given to moments of surprising sentimentality, as in Dead or Alive 2. His dabbling in every sort of genre and emotional range is a testament to his versatility as a director, though a lot of his output is genre-defying. For example, The Happiness of the Katakuris is an unconventional farcical musical-comedy-horror involving a bizarre claymation sequence, zombies and b-movie pastiches.
Other less controversial works include Ley Lines and Agitator, character-driven, serious crime dramas. Graveyard of Honor (2002) is a remake of the 1975 Kinji Fukasaku film by the same name. Andoromedeia, perhaps one of his less renowned films, is a teen drama starring the J-pop girl-band SPEED.
Critics have sometimes noted the puzzling discrepancy of Miike’s artistic development noting that he appears to be simultaneously becoming more radical and more mainstream a director. Films like One Missed Call are his most commercial works to date while films like Izo and the “Box” segment in Three… Extremes are less accessible and target arthouse audiences and fans of extreme cinema.
Despite Miike’s voluminous output, it would be erroneous to consider him a dilettante or a director for hire. Academics have recognized Miike as an auteur, noting much depth as well as stylistic and thematic consistency in his body of work. Reoccurring themes and imagery in his work include reincarnation, birds, family, chaos and order. Films like Visitor Q and Izo are highly philosophical beneath their violent, taboo-laden exterior. This mingled with his imaginative and often idiosyncratic cinematography makes his work instantly recognizable regardless of the genre he works in.
David Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1926. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005); The House of Song (2002); Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (1999); Walt Whitman Bathing (1996); Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems (1987); First Light (1983); Landfall (1981); and In Broken Country (1979).
About Wagoner’s poetry, critic Harold Bloom said, “His study of American nostalgias is as eloquent as that of James Wright, and like Wright’s poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse.”
He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Eunice Tjetjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from Poetry magazine, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. He received his B.A. from Harvard College. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are Girly Man (University of Chicago Press , 2006), With Strings (2001), Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (2000), Dark City (1994), Rough Trades (1991), The Nude Formalism (1989), Stigma (1981), Legend (with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, 1980), and Parsing (1976).
Ceea ce e puţin amuzant şi destul de interesant e faptul ca miniconferinţa lui Bernstein despre “ceea ce face un poem să fie un poem” se transformă de fapt într-un POEM (maraton)…
În mod cert unul dintre cele mai ilustre grupuri muzicale ale momentului. Antony Hegarty o voce incomparabilă prin delicateţea şi în acelaşi timp amprenta bizară pe care le degajă. După cum s-a spus deja, ”o experienţă muzicală inegalabilă prin originalitatea stilului”.
Antony Hegarty is the leader of Antony and the Johnsons. He was born in Chichester, West Sussex, England in 1971 and moved to Amsterdam in 1977 for a period before settling in San Jose, California in 1981. As a teenager he was enthused by the British synth pop of the time — in particular emotive torch singers such as Marc Almond and Boy George. In 1990 he moved to Manhattan to complete a degree in Experimental Theatre at New York University and founded the performance collective Blacklips Performance Cult with creative partner Johanna Constantine.
Their early live shows were often opened by Dr. Julia Yasuda, an intersex person, who performed the welcome in Morse code.
One theme explored in the band’s music is aspects of transgender life. This is expressed in songs such as “For Today I Am A Boy“, in which a young boy dreams of growing up to be a woman.
Britishexperimental musician David Tibet of Current 93 heard a demo and offered to release Antony’s music through his Durtro label. The debut album, Antony and the Johnsons, was released in 2000. In 2001, Antony released a short follow-up EP, I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy, which, in addition to the title track, included a cover of “Mysteries of Love”, a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti song and “Soft Black Stars”, a cover of a Current 93 song…
