One of my favorite (Soma)tic poetry rituals is to lay out food next to a speaker, then cover everything with a basket. After this, I pile the basket with blankets and pillows. I then blast this Ono track, so that her transformative words penetrate and vibrate inside the food: “Yes, I’m a witch, I’m a bitch / I don’t care what you say . . . each time we don’t say what we want to say, we’re dying.” Once the song has filled my meal, I slowly chew and digest the music while writing, remembering her beautiful threat: “I’m not gonna die for you / You might as well face the truth / I’m gonna stick around / For quite a while!”
During the Covid-19 lockdown, I was in Seattle, the empire of the crows. I fed them fruit, nuts, and crackers from a plastic hummus container I nailed to a window ledge. The birds came all day, different tribes moving over their city, terrorizing cats and humans who wronged them. One began to bring me gifts and would stay on the ledge to eat lunch with me, allowing me to stroke its beak. The biologist Lynn Margulis flew in the face of the neo-Darwinists because she believed evolution’s most significant steps forward have been through interspecies cooperation. I feel her theory in my body, and I wonder if you do, too.
The next time you find a listing for a Jason Dodge exhibition, please see it! The title of this site-specific installation for MACRO was especially fitting, considering the tale of Remus and Romulus, the mythical founders of Italy’s capital, who suckled at the teats of a wolf mother. Dodge created multiple dimensions of sensory experience with a wide assortment of materials—including herbs, flowers, plastic debris, and old lottery cards—which littered the floor of the space, producing a crunching sound as you walked over them (elsewhere in the show were stacks of soap and desiccated palm fronds, accentuating the work’s overall strangeness). I left this presentation, which pressed itself deep inside me, with remarkably changed footsteps.
I challenged myself to listen to one of Laraaji’s songs for 8 consecutive nights with the lights turned off. I made myself comfortable but very alert to the artist’s footsteps up the road to the gods. You should do the same with a friend! Each song is about 18 to 24 minutes—just long enough to allow for a trip into unexpected realms, which your party can return to later for a much broader conversation. Doing this will make your friendship even weirder and more beautiful. Laraaji offers a sweet and lasting joy.
Each of the 9 songs on this album is titled “Invention.” The energy entering the tail of the number 9 flows up and circulates within the crown chakra, producing an epiphany. The album is a little under 27 minutes and loops beautifully. I’ve listened to it while driving across Montana; the music practically carves itself onto the land. Nikola Tesla said, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration”—Davies’s astonishing soundscape feeds and is fed by all three of these elements.
“Poetry is life distilled,” said Gwendolyn Brooks. When driving across the United States, stop in Topeka to read the work of this great poet in her park. As she once wrote, “Because the world is at the window / we cannot wonder very long.” Read her poems with those you love or for those who cannot be with you.
The Flint Hills are the last patch of original tallgrass prairie that used to cover much of America. In a very short time, European colonizers chewed up the land for corn and wheat, littering it with barbed wire, shopping malls, condos, and endless highways and destroying much of the terrain and many of the creatures that once thrived here. Watching the sun rise over the Flint Hills is one of my favorite things to do—I listen to the sparrows, buntings, and bobwhite quail call to the new day. Your imagination will always remember this place once you have visited it.
The cofounder of this unique space in New York’s Hudson Valley—which is dedicated to the presentation of innovative music, film, and performance—is the rock legend Melissa Auf der Maur, who is also the venue’s director. I was fortunate to hear her perform there one night, playing her haunting song “22 Below” (2010). Throughout the gorgeous weave of electric guitar and percussion, she chanted, “I’m your healer, and you’re mine.”
Some numbers hold us so continuously that we can live a lifetime without noticing them. The moon takes about 27 days to circle around Earth, and the average menstruation cycle is roughly as long. There are 27 channels to God in the Kabballah. A little over 27 percent of our planet’s surface is covered by land, while male ejaculate can travel up to 27 miles per hour. In Sanskrit, 27 is a Harshad number, and Harshad means “joy giver.” There are 27 bones in my hand, making the letters and words in my notebook.
She is one of my favorite poets, and almost no one has heard of her, because she refused to publish a book in her lifetime. Her husband, Ken Sequin, beautifully edited her very first volume, Collected Complete Poems, which was put out by Grey Suit Editions in 2021. “Would you confound—in dual languor / another artifice of sapped inventions, interred smiles // as if the moon miscarried / her inanimate yellow,” reads one of her mysterious and beautiful verses. If you love poetry, let Sequin into your life!