The name Air is a ackronym for Amour, Imagination, Rêve which translates to Love, Imagination, Dream…..
So… I discover this band, (AIR) and thinking on it, I don’t even remember the process that it happened. Truthfully, there is such good music out there at this point, I can’t remember when it was this nice, maybe 30 years ago?
They have a nice combination going, muted Electronica, good vocals, and a nice Euro kinda sound. Funny enough I had been aware of their work for awhile, but I never figured out who was doing it. Check out “The Virgin Suicides” soundtrack…. That’s AIR performing it.
So… watch the videos, give me some feedback n what you’re hearing, and what you think of it.
If you like their stuff, you can find it readily on the web….
Cheers….!
Enjoy Yourselves, More Later.
Gwyllm
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On The Menu
Linkage…
AIR – Mer Du Japon
The Great Spirit Names the Animal People: How Coyote Came by his Powers
The Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes
Bio: Lorna Dee Cervantes
AIR – Once Upon A Time
Art: Gil Bruvel
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Linkage:
Wiccan Symbol Won’t Be Placed Next to Nativity
Naked woman discovered in apartment
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AIR – Mer Du Japon
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The Great Spirit Names the Animal People: How Coyote Came by his Powers (Okanogan)
from Mourning Dove, Coyote Tales (1933).
The Great Spirit called all his people together from all over the earth. There was to be a change. He would give names to the people, and the Animal World was to rule. The naming was to begin at the break of day, each one having the right to choose his or her name according to who came first to the Spirit Chief’s lodge. The Spirit Chief would also give each one their duty to perform in the changed conditions.
It was the night before the New World. Excitement was among the people. Each one desired a great name of note. All wished to be awake and first at the lodge of the Great Spirit Chief. Everyone wanted power to rule some tribe, some kingdom of the Animal World.
Coyote was of a degraded nature, a vulgar type of life. He was an imitator of everything that he saw or heard. When he asked a question, when he asked for information and it was given him, he would always say, “I knew that before! I did not have to be told.” That was Coyote’s way. He was hated by all the people for his ways. No one liked him. He boasted too much about his wisdom, about everything. Coyote went among the anxious people, bragging to everyone how early he was going to rise, how he would be the first one at the Spirit Chief’s lodge. He bragged of the great name he would choose. He said, “I will have three big names to select from: there is Grizzly Bear, who will be ruler over all running, four-footed animals; Eagle, who will lead all the flying birds; Salmon, who will be chief over all the fish of every kind.”
Coyote’s twin brother, who took the name of Fox, said to him, “Do not be too sure. Maybe no one will be given his choice of names. Maybe you will have to retain your own name, Coyote. Because it is a degraded name, no one among the tribes will want to take it.
—
Coyote went to his tepee in anger. He determined not to sleep that night. He would remain awake so as to be the first at the Spirit Chief’s lodge for the name he wanted. . . . Coyote’s wife (afterwards Mole), sat on her feet at the side of the doorway. She looked up at Coyote and said in a disappointed tone, “Have you no food for the children? They are starving! I can find no roots to dig.”
“Eh-ha!” grunted Coyote sarcastically. He answered his wife, “I am no common person to be spoken to in that fashion by a mere woman. Do you know that I am going to be a great Chief at daybreak tomorrow? I shall be Grizzly Bear. I will devour my enemies with ease. I will take other men’s wives. I will need you no longer. You are growing too old, too ugly to be the wife of a great warrior, of a big Chief as I will be.”
–
Coyote ordered his wife to gather plenty of wood for the tepee fire where he would sit without sleep all night. Half of the night passed; Coyote grew sleepy. His eyes would close however hard he tried to keep them open. Then he thought what to do. He took two small sticks and braced his eyelids apart. He must not sleep! But before Coyote knew it, he was fast asleep. He was awakened by his wife, Mole, when she returned from the Spirit Chief’s lodge, when the sun was high in the morning sky. . . .
Coyote jumped up from where he lay. He hurried to the lodge of the Chief Spirit. Nobody was there, and Coyote thought that he was first. . . . He went into the lodge and spoke, “I am going to be Grizzly Bear!”
The Chief answered, “Grizzly Bear was taken at daybreak!”
Coyote said, “Then I shall be called Eagle!”
The Chief answered Coyote, “Eagle has chosen his name. He flew away long ago.”
Coyote then said, “I think that I will be called Salmon.”
The Spirit Chief informed Coyote, “Salmon has also been taken. All the names have been used except your own: Coyote. No one wished to steal your name from you.”
Poor Coyote’s knees grew weak. He sank down by the fire in that great tepee. The heart of the Spirit Chief was touched when he saw the lowered head of Coyote, the mischief-maker. After a silence the Chief spoke, “You are Coyote! You are the hated among all the tribes, among all the people. I have chosen you from among all others to make you sleep, to go to the land of the dream visions. I make a purpose for you, a big work for you to do before another change comes to the people. You are to be father for all the tribes, for all the new kind of people who are to come. Because you are so hated, degraded and despised, you will be known as the Trick-person. You will have power to change yourself into anything, any object you wish when in danger or distress. There are man-eating monsters on the earth who are destroying the people. The tribes cannot increase and grow as I wish. These monsters must all be vanquished before the new people come. This is your work to do. I give you powers to kill these monsters. I have given your twin brother, Fox, power to help you, to restore you to life should you be killed. Your bones may be scattered; but if there is one hair left on your body, Fox can bring you back to life. Now go, despised Coyote! Begin the work laid out for your trail. Do good for the benefit of your people.”
Thus, Coyote of the Animal People was sent about the earth to fight and destroy the people-devouring monsters, to prepare the land for the coming of the new people, the Indians. Coyote’ eyes grew slant from the effects of the sticks with which he braced them open that night when waiting for the dawn of the name giving day. From this, the Indians have inherited their slightly slant eyes as descendants from Coyote.
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The Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes
“Love of My Flesh, Living Death”
Once I wasnt always so plain.
I was strewn feathers on a cross
of dune, an expanse of ocean
at my feet, garlands of gulls.
Sirens and gulls. They couldnt tame you.
You know as well as they: to be
a dove is to bear the falcon
at your breast, your nights, your seas.
My fear is simple, heart-faced
above a flare of etchings, a lineage
in letters, my sudden stare. Its you.
Its you! sang the heart upon its mantel
pelvis. Blush of my breath, catch
of my seebeautiful birdIts you.
—
“Poet’s Progress”
for Sandra Cisneros
I haven’t been
much of anywhere,
books my only voyage,
crossed no bodies
of water, seen anything
other than trees change,
birds take shape — like the rare
Bee Hummingbird that once hovered
over the promise of salsa
in my garden: a fur feathered
vision from Cuba in Boulder,
a wetback, stowaway, refugee,
farther from home than me.
Now, snow spatters its foreign
starch across the lawn gone
crisp with freeze. I know
nothing tropical survives
long in this season. I pull
the last leeks from the frozen
earth, smell their slender
tubercular lives, stand
in the sleet whiteout
of December: roots
draw in, threads of relatives
expand while solitude, the core,
that slick-headed fist of self, is
cool as my dog’s nose and pungent
with resistance. Now when
the red-bellied woodpecker
calls his response to a California
owl, now, when the wound
transformer in the womb
slackens, and I wait
for potential: all
the lives I have
yet to name,
all my life
I have willed into being
alive and brittle with the icy
past. And it’s enough now,
listening, counting the unknown
arachnids and hormigas
who share my love of less
sweeping. For this is what
I wanted, come to, left
alone with anything
but the girlhood horrors,
the touching, the hungry
leaden meltdown of the hours.
Or the future — a round negation,
black suction of the heart’s
conception. Save me
from a stupid life! I prayed.
Leave me anything but
a stupid life.
And that’s poetry.
—
“California Plum”
for Nathan Trujillo, discovered frozen to death in a
public restroom in Boulder. Feb. 3, 1992, and
identified only as “a derelict.”
I suppose I was a derelict.
I was a derelict’s kid. I succumbed
to man and minotaurs were
a thing of the past not
in my vocabulary. I knew the trees,
the fruit, the sweet, the fences
in my neighborhood to get me there
where dogs and men can’t reach.
I beat the boys and joined
their clubs. No initiation
could deter me. Oh yeah,
I know where the tracks go,
how to catch it going South,
what to carry, who to talk to,
what size jar of instant coffee
will get you into camp–
how to walk like a child
of a maid, go inside the Inns,
at 10am the leftovers line
the galleys: ham and omelet,
waffle, cutlet, biscuit, gravy….
I filled my skirt with jam and ate
through noon. I judged my troops
by the content of their refrigerator
(only ones with working moms
could pass). And oh, my literate
acquaintances! My bums and
babblers banging in the stacks!
I suppose I’m just like they are,
dry inside at last, pumping
the poems of Pushkin, Poe and
papers by the racks. I sat in there
most every day, whoring working
hours away. I know the open places, graves,
the cemetery gate — the only one we’re allowed
to pass without eviction. Idle tears
will get you anywhere, said Tennyson.
You can read it in our clothes, the rips
we care to camouflage, bunker, in clunky
shoes and hand-me-nots, the stabs, the odds
of ever reaching our normality. I’d say I was
a derelict — I was a derelict’s kid.
—
“Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love”
The writer. Its a cul-de-sac, you wrote that
winter of our nations discontent. That first time
I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked
in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small
apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great
named cats you gassed in the move. I couldnt keep them.
You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved
your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers, firme
from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes
from the nose to the hair to the shaking tip. My favorite
tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup
cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike
and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy
glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed
opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from
Goodwill. What ever becomes of the heart our common
child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter
fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black
felt pen? Who gets what? Who knows what becomes of the
rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning
I sat waiting for the surgeons suction. What ever becomes
of waiting and wanting, when the princess isnt ready and
the queen has missed the boat, again? Do you still write
those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinskys ace
letting go? Like: Lorna meets Oliver North and she
kicks his butt. The dates are immaterial to me as
salvation or a freer light bending through stallions
in an air gone heavy with underground tunnels. Do you
read me? Is there some library where youll find me, smashed
on the page of some paper? Let it go is my morning mantra
gone blind with the saved backing of a clock, now dark
as an empty womb when I wake, now listening for your tick
or the sound of white walls on a sticky street. Engines out
the window remind me of breathing apparatus at the breaking
of new worlds, the crash and perpetual maligning of the sand
bar where sea lions sawed up logs for a winter cabin. I dream
wood smoke in the morning. I dream the rank and file of used
up chimneys, what that night must have smelled like, her mussed
and toweled positioning, my ambulance of heart through stopped
traffic where you picked the right corner to tell me: They think
someone murdered her. You were there, all right, you were
a statue carved from the stone of your birth. You were patient
as a sparrow under leaf and as calm as the bay those light
evenings when I envisioned you with the fishwife you loved.
And yes, I could have done it then, kissed it off, when the scalpel
of single star brightened and my world blazed, a dying bulb
for the finger of a socket, like our sunsets on the Cape, fallen
fish blood in snow, the hearts and diamonds we found and left
alone on a New England grave. Why was the summer so long
then? Even now a golden season stumps me and I stamp
ants on the brilliant iced drifts. I walk a steady mile
to that place where you left it, that solid gold band
thrown away to a riptide in a gesture the theatrical
loveso well. What was my role? Or did I leave it
undelivered when they handed me the gun of my triggered
smiles and taught me to cock it? Did I play it to the hilt
and bleeding, did I plunge in your lap and wake to find you
lonely in a ribbon of breathing tissue? Does this impudent
muscle die? Does love expire? Do eternal nestings mean much
more than a quill gone out or the spit? I spy the bank
of frothed fog fuming with airbrushed pussies on a pink
horizon. I scored my shoes with walking. My skill is losing.
Its what we do best, us ducks, us lessons on what not
to do.
Thanks for the crack,
you wrote
in my O.E.D. that 30th renewal when the summer snapped
and hissed suddenly like a bullet of coal flung from a fire
place or a dumb swallow who dove into the pit for pay. Kiss
her, and its good luck. I palm this lucky trade but the soot
never sells and I never sailed away on a gulf stream that divides
continents from ourselves. But only half of me is cracked, the
other is launched on a wild bob, a buoy, steadfast in storm. I may
sail to Asia or I might waft aimlessly to Spain where my hemp
first dried from the rain. My messages wring from the line,
unanswered, pressed sheets from an old wash or the impression
of a holy thing. But dont pull no science on this shroud, the
date will only lie. Shell tell you its sacred, even sell you
a piece of the fray. She appears on the cracked ravines of this
country like a ghost on the windshield of an oncoming
train. She refuses to die, but just look at her nation
without a spare penny to change. My wear is a glass made
clean through misuse, the mishandling of my age as revealing
as my erased face, Indian head of my stick birth, my battle
buried under an island of snow Ive yet to get to. What could I do
with this neighborhood of avenues scattered with empty shells
of mailboxes, their feet caked with cement like pulled up
pilings? Evidently, they havent a word
for regret
full heart.
Someday, I said, I can write us both from this mess. But the key
stalls out from under me when I spell your name. I have to fake
the O or go over it again in the dark, a tracing of differences
spilled out on a sheet. If I could stick this back
together, would it stay? Its no rope, I know, and no good
for holding clear liquid. I gather a froth on my gums, and grin
the way an old woman grimaces in a morning mirror. I was never
a clear thing, never felt the way a daughter feels, never lost
out like you, never drove. My moon waits at the edge
of an eagles aerie, almost extinct and the eggs are fragile
from poisoned ignitions. Im never coming out from my cup
of tea, never working loose the grease in my hair, the monkey
grease from my dancing elbows that jab at your shoulder.
But I write, and wait for the book to sell, for I know
nothing comes of it but the past with its widening teeth,
with its meat breath baited at my neck, persistent as the smell
of a drunk. Dont tell me. I already know. Its just the rule of
the game for the jack of all hearts, and for the queen of baguettes;
its a cul-de-sac for a joker drawing hearts.
—
Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954 – )
Through her writings, Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes evokes the cultural clash that Americans of Mexican descent frequently face. Born in San Francisco, Cervantes’ “maternal Mexican ancestors intermarried with the Chumash Indians of the Santa Barbara, California, area, and her paternal ancestry is Tarascan Indian from Michoacan, Mexico,” reported Roberta Fernandez in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Cervantes and her mother and brother moved in to her grandmother’s San Jose, California, home around 1959, when her parents divorced. “As a child she discovered the world of books in the houses which her mother cleaned,” noted Fernandez. She became familiar with Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. By the age of fifteen she had compiled her first collection of poetry. In 1974 she traveled to Mexico City with her brother, who played with the Theater of the People of San Jose at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos. At the last moment, Cervantes was asked to participate by reading some of her poetry. She chose to read a portion of “Refugee Ship,” a poem “which renders the Chicano dilemma of not belonging to either the American or the Mexican culture,” remarked Fernandez. This reading received much attentionappearing in a Mexican newspaper, as well as other journals and review. The poem was later included in her award winning poetry collection debut, Emplumada.
“Emplumada is a collection of bilingual free verse in simple dictiona glossary of Spanish terms is includedthat paints strong visual images and diverse moods,” described Lynn MacGregor in Contemporary Women Poets. It includes verses of mourning, acceptance, and renewal and offers poignant commentary on the static roles of class and sex, especially among Hispanics. Characterized by their simplicity of language and boldness of imagery, the “poems in Emplumada form a tightly knit unit which shows readers the environment into which the poet was torn, the social realities against which she must struggle, and the resolutions she finds for these conflicts,” said Fernandez. “Written in a controlled language and with brilliant imagery, Emplumada is the work of a poet who is on her way to becoming a major voice in American literature.” Emplumada has earned considerable critical acclaim; and in 1982 it won the American Book Award.
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AIR – Once Upon A Time
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