Five Cool Things Blog

Coffee is for Dark Angels

From the sodden bogs of the great northwest in the near middle of November, I send you my greetings. Exfm is a new way to find, collect and share music on the web. Little tricky to grasp, but worth checking out. Nina Simone — wow, please take a listen to that big sound and those beautiful lyrics. Simon Armitage doesn’t seem to have very fond feelings for poet Ted Hughes so he pulls out his bag of metaphors and shoots Ted down. Onetime abstract painter, sometime cartoonist Philip Guston did have Richard Nixon to kick around and had a hell of a good time doing it. Spike Lee tweets — and FCT does not flinch. Always remember what Radio Raheem says, “TWO SLICES!”

a new way to find, share and listen to music

1. Turn on the Web | EX FM

From the not terribly clear exfm website: Exfm is a social music discovery platform —what the heck is a social music discovery platform?  By the way, dear exfm: contact me if you want some help with the language. Continued: “exfm turns the entire web into your personal music library. As you browse the web, exfm gathers every MP3 file you come across, building a music library for you. Exfm makes it incredibly simple to share your favorite music with all your friends.”

Much better description at TechCrunch: That’s why the geeky team at exfm (formerly Extension Entertainment) built a browser extension for Chrome that turns the Web into your music library by running silently in the background and indexing every MP3 file you stumble across. Exfm continues to check the sites you’ve visited, automatically building a library for you of songs you can throw away or turn into playlists. Full article here>>

Check out Charles Mingus doing Mood Indigo on exfm>>

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2. Whoa | Feeling Good, Nina Simone

Lyrics to Feeling Good ~ Written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse

You Know How I Feel
Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel

It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

Fish in the sea you know how I feel
River running free you know how I feel
Blossom on the tree you know how I feel

Dragonfly out in the sun you know what I mean, don’t you know
Butterflies all havin’ fun you know what I mean
Sleep in peace when day is done
That’s what I mean

And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me

Stars when you shine you know how I feel
Scent of the pine you know how I feel
Oh freedom is mine
And I know how I feel

More on Nina Simone here>>

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3. It’s About Ted | Simon Armitage

Not The Furniture Game

His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney
and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in
and his blink was a cat flap
and his teeth were bluestones or the Easter Island statues
and his bite was a perfect horseshoe.
His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded.
And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt
and his smile was a caesarean section
and his tongue was an iguanodon
and his whistle was a laser beam
and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough.
He coughed, and it was malt whisky.
And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards
and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing line
and his neck was a bandstand
and his Adam’s apple was a ball cock
and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle.
His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.
And his wrists were ankles
and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub
and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits
and the palms of his hands were action paintings
and both thumbs were blue touchpaper.
And his shadow was an opencast mine.
And his dog was a sentry box with no-one in it
and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children
and his nipples were timers for incendary devices
and his shoulder blades were two butchers at the meat cleaving competition
and his belly button was the Falkland Islands
and his private parts were the Bermuda triangle
and his backside was a priest hole
and his stretchmarks were the tide going out.
The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease.
And his legs were depth charges
and his knees were fossils waiting to be tapped open
and his ligaments were rifles wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards
and his calves were the undercarriages of Shackletons.
The balls of his feet were where meteorites had landed
and his toes were a nest of mice under the lawn mower.
And his footprints were Vietnam
and his promises were hot air balloons floating off over the trees
and his one-liners were footballs through other peoples’ windows
and his grin was the Great Wall of China as seen from the moon
and the last time they talked, it was apartheid.

She was a chair, tipped over backwards
with his donkey jacket on her shoulders.

They told him,
and his face was a hole
where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.

Ted Hughes

Sylvia Plath

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4. I am Not a Book | Philip Guston’s Poor Richard 

Intro to Philip Guston’s Poor Richard by Debra Bricker Balken

Mutt and Jeff and the Tartuffisms of a Presiding President

From Poor Richard

From Poor Richard

Sometime during the summer of 1971, Philip Guston (1913-1980) began a visual narrative of Richard Nixon’s life, a series of almost eighty drawings that caught one of America’s most maligned politicians in a depraved, monstrous state. Titled Poor Richard, these caricatures play on the brooding self-pitying character that Nixon exuded throughout his life. While much has been made in the ongoing interpretations of the radical content of Guston’s late work — of his brash betrayal of abstract painting and the New York School and his introduction of quirky, incongruous, cartoon – type figures and shapes around 1968  — nothing quite approximates the mocking and satiric nature of these renderings of an American President.

5. Spike! | Tweet of the Week

spike tweets