public heart health message: pick up the phone!
What age is your heart? Be honest and ask yourself the following questions:
do you have high cholesterol?
what you eat can add 5-10 years to your heart’s age
extra weight there adds 5-10 years
do you smoke?
smoking is one of the biggest risk factors and adds 20 years to your age
drinking a glass or two of red wine a day can be good, but more than that is a poison to your body and can add 10-20 years to your hearts age
Jeff, I know you’re laughing hysterically somewhere about all this–when you weren’t drinking, you were smoking–and when you weren’t smoking, you were drinking–or planning on it! The last time I saw you I think was when you advised me on which one of the Wild Planet flasks would be best for me!! I mean, my goodness, 3 bars in town are donating food and booze to your memorial!!
Delicious
sailing salutation corvette driven
champagne gutter punk
divine delicious memories
goddamnit motherfucker
you know how people are always curious about how people will react when they die?
I hope this is one of those pranks.”
That’s when it actually sank in. Up to that point it was more abstract, I guess I was still processing that it wasn’t a joke. But then when I went looking for him, for the Jeff I’d known and joked around with since 7th grade…and couldn’t find him–that’s when it sunk in. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Jeff.
I guess none of us did.
Art Predator performs poetry on Blog Talk Radio
On Monday night, nila northSun interviewed me and I read poetry on Blog Talk Radio. If you want to check it out here’s the link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/2008/04/29/Talking-The-Line-hosted-by-Nila-Northsun
It was a lot a fun; nila and I have been friends for 10 years and the interview sounds like two good friends shooting the breeze, talking about poetry, writing, sharing stories, and poems. You will learn more than you probably wanted to know about the Art Predator in the process! it runs about an hour.
In the interview, I read several of the poems I have posted on this blog including:
In 2000, I convinced nila to go to Burning Man and I think she’s been every year since (I skipped 03, 04, 06). We’re looking for a jpg of us and I hope to post it soon (if the new dashboard at wordpress allows…still having problems…me and a number of other people–at least I’m not alone!)
Thanks, Rafael Alvarado, for inviting us on!
celebrate: a poem for Earth & Poetry Month
Here in the US, we’re closing in on the end of Earth Month and Poetry Month, April 2008, a time when we celebrate and pay more attention to both what it is to live and well on this earth.
celebrate
In honor of Earth Month and Poetry Month, I offer to you and riders on the poetry train and for readwritepoem (aren’t local names/places a form of jargon?) this poem which celebrates my watershed and bio-region. I’d also like to dedicate this my friend Jeff, burner, classmate since 7th grade, who died of a massive heart attack last Friday. His family plans a gathering on Thursday; his friends have something a little more wild with bagpipes playing Aerosmith’s “Dream On” set for Friday (contact me for more info).
dolphin play, steelhead run, pelican peer
Channel Island sail, Anacapa arch
salt lips, rock rolls, finch dawns, fog noons, moon climbs
sea, sycamore, sage, lupine, jeffrey scents
Topa Topa pink light, Pine Mountain star night
life, work, growth amidst our sacred landscape
I made the broadside by painting my body like the coastal hillsides in the spring and the sea, then pressed by body onto fabric in he shape you see here. I photographed the resulting image, ran it in blue then in green colored toner, signed and numbered them, and it was published in the 200th issue of ARTLIFE Limited Edtions March 1999:
Top 5 Posts of All Time
According to Word Press Stats, as of Saturday, April 26, these are the most read posts and pages on my blog of
All Time (from Nov. 2007 to April 26, 2008)
with the number of readers following the link…
| Title | Views | |
|---|---|---|
| Inspirational: Next Lunar Eclipse 2/20/0 | 4,484 | |
| Lunar Eclipse Poem | 196 | |
| spring poem | 188 | |
| >> whew! plus the best chocolate f | 175 | |
| Gamesh 315 Poem Aug 6, 2007 | 168 |
Al Young in Ventucky
Al Young on NPR 4/24 Morning Edition
yesiree-bob, Al’s on tomorrow, find your NPR morning edition and listen…it will be worth your while…I’ll be listening to it on KCRW 89.1 in Ventucky
if you missed it, you can listen at npr.org or read below; the links aren’t live so to hear his lovely, rich, melodious voice, Al Young
California Poet Laureate Al Young’s ‘Blues’
Listen Now [7 min 17 sec] add to playlist
EnlargeAl Young was born on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. He grew up in the rural South and in Detroit before moving to the San Francisco Bay area in 1960. Courtesy Al Young
Young Reads Young
Al Young reads two poems from his new collection, Something About the Blues.
Book Excerpts
Morning Edition, April 24, 2008 · Al Young took to writing poetry, as he describes it in one poem, “to make out the sound of my own background music.”
He’s now the poet laureate of California, celebrating National Poetry Month with a collection called Something About the Blues.
Though he’s lived in California for decades, the 68-year-old poet was born in rural Mississippi and had the good luck to find himself in one very special classroom in the second grade.
In the segregated South of the 1940s, Young attend a black-only school. “At the Kingston School for Colored, we put a lot of emphasis on things that would be now called African American, on Negro literature and Negro culture,” he tells Renee Montagne. “So we memorized poems by people like Langston Hughes, of course, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.”
Young moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1960, “under the sway, all of the hullabaloo. The Beat Generation was sounding its horns … and there was just a lot of romance about it.” He had $15 and a guitar.
Young’s poems touch on not only blues and jazz music but also, not surprisingly, life in California. In “Watsonville After the Quake,” he writes about the Mexican immigrants forgotten in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In “Blues My Naughty Poetry Taught Me,” Young observes the state through the window of an Amtrak train:
Sea-fences, industrial wash-ups, slushy tracks
and rickety light: skies so soulfully watercolored
you’d have to be an arts commissioner not to see it.
Seen across the Bay through trees and the undersides
of freeways San Francisco looks lonely at the end
of one bridge and the beginning of another…
Poems: ‘Something About the Blues’
NPR.org, April 23, 2008 ·
‘Watsonville After the Quake’
On Central Coast radio KTOM blasts
Eddie Rabbitt thru waves of air the sea
surrounds, & all the other country stars
come out (Claude King, Tammy Wynette, Shelley
West) & spread themselves in droplets.
The sacred moisture of their song is skin
to seal a pain that quavers in this ash blue night
coming on just now like a downcast motel date,
who’s warned you from in front that she’ll be coming
’round the mountain when she comes.
Whose tents are these? What’s with these shot
parking lot & alleyway families peeping around
the raggedy backs of undemolished fronts?
That brownskin kid on a grassy patch along Main,
catching a football & falling with joy
on the run, is his family up from Mazatlán,
up from Baja or Celaya—or edges of eternity?
Network TV didn’t do this news up right.
For all their huff & puff & blow your house down,
the mediators of disaster and distress
didn’t find this sickly devastation sexy.
Besides, who’s going to cry or lose sleep
over a spaced out, tar papered, toppled down town
by the sea, brown now with alien debris?
‘Los Angeles, Los Angeles:
One Long-Shot, One Cutaway’
1/
Inside your belly, a new beast ripens.
While all your twilit litters guard the door,
the ghost of Ho Chi Minh pours out a toast:
Here’s to old Saigon, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing;
Iran before the Shah; to Port-au-Prince,
and Port of Spain, Tijuana, Kingston Town;
to Tokyo, Bombay, Tel-Aviv, Nairobi and Accra.
Not Ghana but the oldest Gold Coast drums
her thoughts out loud in not so cooling colors,
The darkest nights of Seoul turn into tunnels,
where rays of hope, spaghetti thin, break skin
and ream the veins of dreams so long deferred
that laser-lined Thought Police 100 years from now
still can’t decrypt the meaning of their blood;
their blues.
2/
A Stoly on the rocks, some rock cocaine,
a spoon of smack can crack the sound of barriers
and barrios alike. But light is hard.
‘The James Cotton Band at Keystone’
And the blues, I tell you, they blew up
on target; blew the roof right off
& went whistling skyward, starward,
stilling every zooming one of us
mojo’d in the room that night, that
instant, that whenever it was. Torn
inside at first, we all got turned out,
twisting in a blooming space where
afternoon & evening fused like Adam
with Eve. The joyful urge to cry
mushroomed into a blinding cloudburst
of spirit wired for sound, then atomized
into one long, thunderous, cooling downpour.
What ceased to be was now & now & now.
Time somehow was what the blues froze
tight like an underground pipe before
busting it loose in glad explosions; a
blast that shattered us—ice, flow & all.
The drift of what we’d been began to
shift, dragging us neither upstream nor
down but lifting us, safe & high, above
the very storm that, only flashing moments
ago, we’d been huddling in for warmth.
Melted at last, liquefied, we became
losers to the blues & victors, both.
Now that he’d blown us away with his shout,
this reigning brownskinned wizard, wise
to the ways of alchemy, squeezed new life
back into us by breathing through cracks
in our broken hearts; coaxing & choking
while speaking in tongues that fork & bend
like the watery peripheries of time; a
crime no more punishable than what the
dreaming volcano does waking from what it was.
Believe me, the blues can be volatile too,
but the blues don’t bruise; they only renew.
© 2008 by Al Young, from Something About the Blues. Published by Sourcebooks.
“Up Jumped Spring” a spring poem by Al Young
Al Young, CA Poet Laureate visits Ventucky College
12-12:45pm Poetry & discussion of poetics for change
1:30-2:30pm Poetry & Prose plus writing tips
both the above events take place in the Garden Patio
7pm Guthrie Hall with live music, art and living history performance by Suzanne Lawrence
From “Up Jumped Spring” by Al Young
California poet laureate, Al Young, was born in Mississippi and was reading by the age of three. He began publishing poems, stories, and articles in his early teens, and has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been a poet, writer, teacher and lecturer throughout his literary career and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California , Berkeley in Spanish. He has taught poetry and fiction writing at a number of universities nationwide, including the Universities of California at Berkeley , Santa Cruz and Davis ; and Stanford University . Versatile and prolific, his works have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Rolling Stone, and the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. As a screenwriter, Young has worked with Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.
Here we are, California State Poet Laureate Al Young and the Art Predator at the Santa Barbara Book Festival Sept. 2007–that’s Glenna Luschei, poet and publisher in the background.
On Monday, April 21, Al Young will do a live interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, then he will drive up to read at the college where I teach and share his work with my students and the community. While here he will participate in three events:
7-9pm–“A Celebration of the Earth:
Poetry & Performance featuring AL YOUNG “
in Guthrie Hall on the West side of campus; park near the gym; $1 to park
The evening begins with live music and a living history performance by Suzanne Lawrence as Anna Paquette on “One Hundred Years of Growth: 1815-1915–from remote agricultural Mission Town to car accessible county seat” followed by Theater Arts student KM Hageman and Friends who will sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
At sunset, Al Young will perform backed by jazz musicians and with an accompanying slide show of eco-art images contributed by Debra McKillop, Steve Schafer, Dan Holmes, students, and others. The slide show is organized by student Art major Tanya Orozco. The evening will close with another song by KM and Friends.
For more about Al Young, author of over 20 books of poetry, prose, and fiction including the National Book Award winner in 2002, The Sound of Dreams Remembered go to alyoung.org.
A reception, funded by the Ventura College Foundation, will follow. Al Young’s performance in funded by Associated Students.
Al will give two readings during the day: a lunch time brown bag poetry reading in the Garden Patio between the new library (LRC) and the old library (SSC) from 12-1245p, and a prose and poetry reading with writing tips and techniques from 130-230 in the same location.
All events are free and open to the public.
The Art Predator is very excited!
LA’s Dengue Fever in Ventucky 4/17–CANCELLED!
you could have checked em out at Salzer’s 6pm 4/17–except the promoter canceled…too bad!!
they will be playing at Soho in Santa Barbara tonight at 8pm however
art predator 