Charlie Smiles! 

hard to believe its almost twenty years since Tom Verlaine's Flash Light came out...

"The Scientist Writes a Letter

Dear Julia,

Unless chance finds us face to face again, this
is the last you'll hear from me. I spent this Sunday,
a long afternoon, freezing at my friend's house by
the sea. We men of science... you know. I've returned
to my research in magnetic fields. It's funny how attractive indifference can be. My sense of failure... it's not so important. Electricity means so much more to me. We men of science... you know...
It's snowing again, seems like it's always snowing.
Sit down to write and it's so cold. Outside my window, there's a tree so white I can hardly look at it. It's quiet here. I look thru my glass at patterns all so well defined. Please send my winter coat soon as you can...I find I have no other lines... we men of science... you know...all the best.. all the best, Julia..."

spin of the day, & some time I promise I really will learn to blog some of these tunes--Kiss Me Again


"Arthur's first "dance" record was "Kiss Me Again" recorded in 1978 for Sire using the monicker Dinosaur. He co-produced it with Nicky Siano, with David Byrne adding some enjoyable guitar licks. Steve D'Aquisto remembers hearing the original version on a tape.

"Arthur would give me tapes, pieces of "Kiss Me Again". I went to Studio 54, and it was like 10.30 in the evening, there were just a few people in the place. I said to the DJ, a friend, "Would you play this, I think it's just fabulous" and they played this 12 minute tape of "Kiss Me Again" and the place flipped and danced for the entire bit."



 

extremely well done Chinese Classics site has English & French versions,with each Chinese character hyptertexted to a translation &c.&c--wished I'd had this as a teenage poet!!--here is Li Bai--

"So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed --
Could there have been a frost already?
Lifting myself to look,
I found that it was moonlight.
Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home..."

guitar-slinger Tom Verlaine interviewed--


"There are so many recordings from the 1920s or '40s or '50s that are still really great and available, so whether a record was made in '77 or '89 doesn't matter to me," he says. "My perspective on [Marquee Moon] is that maybe somebody in 2030 will be able to find it and go, "This is a pretty interesting record," and they won't care about the New York scene or the punk scene, it'll just be a piece of music they listen to and like. I remember finding a Louis Armstrong record made in 1927, and I was just really amazed by it. So to me, it's like when I put out a record, [the hope is] that 30 years from now when I'm dead, someone will listen to it and go, "That's kind of interesting, or that's kind of good--you know?"