The tape of my appearance on that TV show the other week arrived today and I’m watching it now. Seeing myself on the tube is kind of strange. I don’t look like I think I do!
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I’m now working on a comparison of Blogger and Radio Userland for my Radio Free Blogistan site. One thing I like about doing this is that it’s forcing me to look up and learn how to do some things that I’ve meant to do for a long time but haven’t gotten off my ass to do yet.
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Saw Television last night at the Great American Musical Hall in S.F. Fantastic show! Notably better than the previous shows (10 years ago). Almost as if they’d been playing together the whole time inbetween. They seemed looser, really inhabiting the songs and finding new ways of expressing the essence of the arrangements. Richard Lloyd was blowing everybody away with his guitar heroics, and of course Tom Verlaine brought the space-alien noise at at time was almost crooning in his weird way. When he sang
Broadway, looked so medieval
It seemed to flap like many pages
And I fell, sideways laughing
With a friend from many stages
it reminded me of a reading at the Bitter End in New York back in the summer of 1999 that featured some web writers alongside luminaries from the Beat, hippie, and punk eras. I read one of the little spontaneous short stories—slightly edited—from my old Breathing Room online journal, and Richard Hell read some poems by a favorite poet of his and then read the entire 12-poem contents of a book, Weather, that he wrote with Tom Verlaine. The poems are all variations on a single text:
The weather was still exciting. The whole city seemed to optically snap with the cool brightness of the just-moist light and air ricocheting in pings and flapping planes from surface of stone to surface of stone around and through the teeming traffic flesh and pumped out metal fumes and fresh water widely below and entering the underlooked and overseeing sky.
I’m sure it was the memory of the flapping planes optically snapping that made the connection in my synapses.
If you’ve got a high bandwidth connection and you’re patient, you can hear Hell’s reading or even mine.