26:
Jim Carroll by Terry Richardson
Excerpt from The Basketball Diaries:
Summer 65: Fucked up yesterday, lost our last game in the summer 15-and-under league up at George Washington High School, and that deuced us out of the championship game today. We had a good squad, mostly cats from down the block in the projects but they had a rule that no Varsity players could play. That ruined our chances of using big Lewie Alcindor even though he’s from the neighborhood and all. I mean, shit, most of the teams got ringers but it’s a little difficult to sneak in a seven foot All-Everything cat onto a court. He can’t exactly use a fucking pair of sunglasses, dig? So I go up to watch the game today and pick up my trophy for the all-league team and what a hassle is steaming as I bop into the gym. THE SUGAR BOWL ALL-STARS, one of the teams playing, are in a rage bitching about the ringers on the RUTGERS team. So true! those cats didn’t have a dude under eighteen running for them, none of them played school ball, but they were some of the best playground players in Harlem. I walked over and was rapping to a few friends, Vaughn Harper, an All-American from Boys High, and Earl Manigault, a Harlem legend of 5 ft. 10 in. who can take a half dollar off the top of a backboard. He’s invariably on and off his school team because of drug scenes and other shit. These two cats are, with big Lew, the best high school players in the city. Finally the captain of SUGAR BOWL points over to us and tells the other team and the man who runs the gig that if they’re gonna use that team, that their team’s gonna use Harper, “Goat” Manigault, and me. The bossman axes the idea of letting in Harper and “Goat” but says they can use me, which is fine with the other team who don’t even know who the fuck this white boy is. Before I say a fucking word I get a uniform tossed in my mug and since there’re bunches of chicks in the stands, my new team mates are huddling around me and I whip on the shit and start warming up. Big fucking difference I’m gonna make ’cause we need leapers for the boards and no backcourt dude like me. Anyway the slaughter starts and I’m hitting long jumpers like a fucker (I gotta say that I always burn up that gym, something about it that I just can’t miss, crazy) so we’re holding our own by the half and I got twenty-eight points, each move of which I make sticks out like a hardon because I’m the only whiteman on the court and looking around, in the entire fucking place, in fact; my bright blond-red hair making me the whitest whitey this league has ever seen. So in short we made a good show for a team our age, but can’t keep up with the other dudes and lose by ten, but that ain’t bad and I got myself forty-seven points and at least got to play for once with these cats I’ve always had to play against in various tournaments since Biddy League days. Then to bust all kinds of balls, the bossman gets some college scout in the stands to testify the other team got at least three ringers he knows and we are awarded the champ bit. After the gold is handed out and all (I didn’t get a trophy for the game ’cause they were one short and I had to say “fuck it,” but got an outofsight plaque for All-League), we go in a corner and pose a team picture for the Harlem paper, “The Amsterdam News.” We’re waiting for the birdie to click when the photog calls over the SUGAR BOWL coach and whispers something to him who then walks over to me and mumbles, “Dig, my man, don’t know how to say this but for, well, …” I cut him short and told I got the message and stepped out of the pix. I guess I would have messed up the texture of the shot or something. Or maybe they didn’t want to let the readers get to see that the high scorer was a fucking white boy.
-Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
25:
VENICE—Ezra Pound, 1971 Henri Cartier-Bresson © Magnum Photos
Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, accompanied her husband to just one — probably atypical — portrait session, that of the poet Ezra Pound in Venice in 1971, a year before his death at 87.
There was a tremendous, heavy silence,’ recalled Ms. Franck, herself a photographer. ‘Pound didn’t say a word. He just seemed to condemn the world with his eyes. We were there for about 20 minutes. I stayed to one side. I huddled in a corner. Henri took seven pictures.’
- From This Decisive Moment On by Alan Riding in The New York Times, January 26, 2006
24:
Ezra Pound at William Carlos Williams' house in 1958 by Richard Avedon
Either move or be moved.
-Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, 1945 mug shot
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
-Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, Easter 1971, Burano, Italy by Franz Larese
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
-Ezra Pound
21:
I came here a wanderer
thinking of home,
remembering my far away Ch’ang-an.
And then, from deep in Yellow Crane Pavillion,
I heard a beautiful bamboo flute
play “Falling Plum Blossoms.”
It was late spring in a city by the river.
-Li Po
Bongeunsa, Seoul, South Korea, Leica M6 TTL, 35mm Summicron, Agfa APX 400
28:
This past Sunday was that legendary, perfect autumn day, impossibly sublime, crisp air, music in your ears, face full of afternoon light. All of us tried to work our superpowers to slow time, to make the day last but Monday still came, steamrolling that afternoon into memory.
I am back east now after 12 years in Los Angeles. You cannot convey to a creature of Southern California the fleeting magic of a perfect October™ day. The day is a wisp of smoke, soon to be hidden by clouds and rain, eaten by the advancing calendar. You have missed it. You need to wait for the great wheel to keep turning until October™ appears on the horizon again.
Angelenos, it does not matter what day it is, the month, the time of year, if it’s an El Niño season or not. Tomorrow in Southern California is a constant; it will always be in the 70s, no humidity, blazing sun. Put your flip flops on and burrito yourself. No hurry, no rush; it’ll be the same until the end of time.
I will take the cycle of seasons, even with the squalor of February and the thick sweaty terror of August. Only 11½ months until October™.
Central Park, October™ 25, 2009, Nikon D300, 12-24mm Nikon © Doug Kim
October
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if the were all,
Whose elaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost–
For the grapes’ sake along the all.
-Robert Frost
18:
Loafing
I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw—
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.
-Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver in 1984, by Bob Adelman
There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. You have to be alert to them and pay attention to them.
-Raymond Carver, Conversations with Raymond Carver
It’s been a continual series of starting-overs for me.
-Raymond Carver, Conversations with Raymond Carver
06:
St. Maarten's, Nikon D300, 80-200mm © Doug Kim
The One Girl at the Boys Party
When I take my girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she’ll be doing her
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.
-Sharon Olds, (1983)
Sharon Olds by David Bartolomi
19:
Labor Day weekend in The Hamptons.
Tim, Amagansett; Leica M6 TTL, 35mm summicron, Kodak Tri-X © Doug Kim
Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
-Sam Keen
Cullen, Amagansett; Leica M6 TTL, 35mm summicron, Kodak Tri-X © Doug Kim
Till Summer folds her miracle-
As Women-do-their Gown-
Or Priests-adjust the Symbols-
When Sacrament-is done-
-Emily Dickinson
Ella and Aubrey, Amagansett, Leica M6 TTL, 35mm summicron, Kodak Tri-X © Doug Kim
In summer, the song sings itself.
-William Carlos Williams
14:
Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, Circa 1970 Photo by Wren D'Antonio
I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation.
-Patti Smith
You’re growing up. And rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the Earth. And it’s good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies… so we can dance.
-Jim Carroll
Dave Treganna, Dave Parsons, Jim Carroll and Stiv Bators, NYC, 1981, unknown photographer
Do not see that piece of shit movie (Okay, I haven not seen it, but it looks like a piece of shit). Go to a bookstore and buy The Basketball Diaries or the album Catholic Boy. I have bought that book four or five times because it is never returned once it has been lent.
09:
Music
If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.
Frank O’Hara
Frank O'Hara, 1958 by Harry Redl
O’Hara remains my favorites of the Beats. His Collected Poems and Lunch Poems are essential additions to any library.
He was known for writing poems in an instinctive and reactive manner, improvising on the spot, not caring anything for traditional form or structure, and for later disregarding or even discarding the final product. Shoving them into his desk drawer to be forgotten was the best that could be hoped for and Garrison Keillor wrote that “Some of his poems only survive because friends copied them down and sent the copies to each other in letters.”
I don’t believe in rhythm, assonance, [any] of that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star.’
-Frank O’Hara
It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.
-Frank O’Hara
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