Talk Talk

Fair Use or Not?

I’ve been listening to Terry Gross interview Shepard Fairey about his image of   Barack Obama—the one that became so famous during the campaign. He’s involved in a lawsuit over his use of the image which is an artistic elaboration on a photo taken by Mannie Garcia of the Associated Press. I post it here so you don’t have to bother to link:

 

(I know that I’m allowed to post it because I’ve read my rights with regard to intellectual property and fair use.)

 

During the campaign there were many grass-roots renditions of Obama photos, and I made one myself for a fundraiser at a local art gallery. I chickened out and didn’t submit it, but I’m posting it here now. For you.

 

Like Shepard Fairey, I used another person’s photo and tinkered around as artists do to add some gray to the black and white, to convey my own impression. I used a photo that was sanctioned by the Obama campaign headquarters; Fairey didn’t.  Still I’m not sure he isn’t within his rights. Was it only wrong because he profited from it?

 

Not that I’m worried about ‘fair use.’ You’ve seen my Pres. Obama leaning out the Govins' limo! (below)

We are the Kearneys, the mighty mighty Kearneys...

We are the Kearneys, the mighty mighty Kearneys...

 

 

Obama-Mania is everywhere and I want a piece of it...so I use this time to announce that I am possibly/quite likely Barak Obama's cousin. Distant cousin.  On the Irish Kearney side. While we don't have any Falmouth Kearneys in the immediate tree, we have Josephs, Thomases, and Patricks. So we may go back a few generations but I'd bet the genetic DNA would prove a match. Hope so anyway:-) Wouldn't that be cool?

 

Carol Kearney Saba

 

 

Read this.  Or this.  Or this.

More Early Voting

Old and young
Standing in the sun--
It's a little bit fun
To vote for 'The One.'

No I did not vote twice...Pat sent me pix from his trip to the polls.

Early Voting

I voted yesterday. After hearing about the long lines and two hour waits I packed my bottle of water and my book and headed over to the Fort Lauderdale Main Library. It was a pleasant surprise to find the voting booths set up outside the auditorium so everyone got a number and a seat. There were about 150 of us. The wait was about an hour but it went by fast.  And it was interesting voting 'outside' my regular precinct--seeing people I would not ordinarily see at the polls. Can't wait to watch the returns.

Billy Collins at the DBF

This is for Peter who nagged me ever so gently for a review.

Reading Billy Collins is fun. You don’t have to keep linking back and forth to the online dictionary, parsing the poetic sentence to determine the complete thought, and wondering what the heck was he saying, anyway? Billy Collins’ poems are accessible and yet they still pay off because they are, like all good poems, about life’s beauty and death’s inevitability. But listening to Billy Collins is even more fun—because he’s funny. Yep, laugh-out-loud funny.

I know this because I saw him speak last Friday outside Atlanta at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. The venue, Agnes Scott College, was packed beyond standing room. The line queued around Presser Hall (of interest to me only in an unpractical way as I accompanied my brother-in-law to our VIP seats right up front—thanks, Sis) a hundred deep an hour before show time.

Mr. Collins, whom I’m dying to call Billy, was relaxed in a friendly open-collared way. His a-little-too-longish hair stuck out in those Bozo tufts which he must know added to the comedic sense surrounding him. He chose poems he knew would get a laugh and his timing was perfect. Also perfect were his set ups; he introduced each poem with just enough information to fully welcome the audience to it. I’d always been amused by Billy Collins’ poems on the page but his reading found the absurdities I’d missed in my own. He was humble—I had forced a pseudo-seriousness on him that didn’t quite fit.

One of the first poems he read was “Fishing On The Susquehanna In July.” I was charmed because its subject sprang from the painting I remembered studying in grammar school. Herman Herzog's Fishing On The Susquehanna

Its first line, “I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna,” opened the poem to its humor. Neither have I ever fished the Susquehanna, but its image is a part of the American landscape just as Collins poetry has become a part of American culture.

Another poem he read was “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey’s Version Of “Three Blind Mice.” This one spoke of the power of music to soften “the cynic who always lounges within.” An interesting aside here from the poet was that "mice" tend to “come to the surface” in his poems.

Collins said his poem "Litany" was a send-up of two lines he had come across by another poet and parodied. His emulation took the poem in a new direction and I'll bet, I enjoyed it so much, to a new height. It begins with a comparison, as love poems often have done, to a woman's beauty: "You are the bread and the knife,/the crystal goblet and the wine./You are the dew on the morning grass/and the burning wheel of the sun"; it segues to an assessment of the speaker/poet himself. The audience got a great kick out of his delivery of the following lines:

 

It might interest you to know

speaking of the plentiful imagery in the world

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

But it is his affection for his subject that makes me fond of Billy Collins. The poem's last line speaks of love's intoxicating properties: "But don't worry...//you will always be.../..somehow--the wine." 

That’s how Billy Collins is in person—like a glass of good wine—he makes you feel good and you want a little more.

A Poem

I think about the brain and how it retrieves information, the alphabetical filing, the color coding, the associations, etc. We say, what's that word? It begins with a ...g?

Sometimes I solve sudokus but lately I think the discipline of formal poetry might be a better exercise (on many levels).

So I am charmed by this birthday poem written by Brad Leithauser [from the NYROB (May 29, 2008)].  The rhyme scheme is some sort of terza rhyma, I guess, and the final tercet of each stanza is an envoy employing the rhymes of lines 2, 5, and 8.

Old Globe

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

*

Her eye fell at random. “Formosa,” she read.
“Now that’s pretty. Is it there today?”
A pause. “It is,” my brother said,

“though now it’s called Taiwan.”
She looked apologetic. “I sometimes forget…”
“Like Sri Lanka,” I added. “Which was Ceylon.”

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay…

*

She was in a middle place—
her fifties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overheard a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today—
the globe she’d so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

*

Finally, there’s cake: nine candles in a ring.
…Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, “Now make a wish before
you blow them out.” She says, “I don’t see—”

stops. Then mildly protests: “But they look so nice.”
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

Last Day of NAPO Poem #30

Poem #30
The Curtsy

Finish
well. Beg the muse
who started you: drop words
on me like petals falling from
a bough.

NaPoWriMo Poem #25

Poem #25
Miro's Blue

Slashes
of paint, like notes
played, and lasting--afloat
in memory, in the ether
of thought

NaPoWriMo Poem #24

Poem#24
O, Muse, Where Art Thou?

I've hit
a wall, and pomes
that come ain't pomes at all;
I look in the well, see only
bottom.

NaPoWriMo Poem #23

Poem #23
Suburbia

A glass
of wine, a loaf
of bread (with tapenade
as spread), and thou--barbecuing
outside.