moon traveller herald

Leonard Cohen is out of the stupa, out and about again. Thought about seeing him yknow. BUt the freight was heavy and it wasnt in the cards. So there I was. Yknow. And I saw a DVD at the Video Underground in Jamaica Plain. This DVD was a serious dissappointment. If I had time to rag on it I would. But suffice it to say that I liked Leonard's brief intermediary commentary. And I liked his one number [The Tower of Song] he did at the closing with U2. So go to try and buy it as an iTune. Nope, buddy, no luck, got to buy the whole soundtrack album to get that one. And why not? The parade of muscians in the movie proper are a bunch of turds that. taken together, do not make one shit. I shook hands I suppose with Leonard Cohen once..it was the Mercer Center in NYC, on an intermidable intermission waiting for the New York Dolls to wake up or hop up and go on finally. "I really like your music," I said. He was polite. Ok. So I am listening to the old birdon the wire's records...

Recently looking at some writing by Charles Simic on the poetry of the blues. Simic is a very lyrical, imagistic and accomplished poet, who also writes criticism. His steady stream of work has always impressed me, especially the reimaging work on the life of artist Joseph Cornell that he produced in 1992 [“Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell [NYR Book]. The pieces recently read were selections from Simic’s “The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays And Memoirs” [U of Mich Press, 1994]. As Blues Poetry has at times been focused on my blog, I thought I’d riff a bit on it. The blues belongs to a specific time, place and people but it in turn transcends those limits, writes Simic. He continues: “The secret of its transcendence lies in its minor key and its poetry of solitude.” And yes, it was that odd key that first captured my imagination, I’d agree. It conjured up a world that could address one’s most elemental feeling – loneliness, let’s say. “Lyric poetry has no closer relation ...

Norbert Weiner [1894? -1964?] is definitely the father of cybernetics – and an influential thinker on the phenomenon of feedback. He was a brilliant mathematician, and, just like a movie math genius in his day and others, he was a little batty. A diminutive Belmont, Mass. Jew with a prince nez, Harvard grad and M.I.T. prof - he was absent of social artifice - as he would creatively and readily follow lines of thought and forgo the important social and practical niceties – unlike thus in manner to a lot of his competetive colleagues during the defining experience of World War II. Now, cybernetics - the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems - never became much of a science unto itself, except, for a while, in the Soviet Union. Some of its interests informed AI which never became much of a science either. But regulatory system study continues, and people continue to find out things, and they generally should thank Weiner for in some way setting the stage. My take...