After reading Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, I had been waiting patiently for the second installment to drop. The first installment was so darn good and it took Crouch a long time to finish it.

Kansas City Lightning released in 2013, which was a decade already; therefore, I thought he should have released the second installment or he should be finishing it up already. I did a quick Google search and to my dismay Stanley Crouch had passed away in 2020 at 74. I had no clue.

I hope some other jazz writers will pick up where Crouch left off. It would be a great loss if the second part of Charlie Parker’s life and music will never release. RIP, Mr. Stanley Crouch. Thanks for the works you have left behind.

It took me a while to get through Cole’s latest Netflix Special since I only watched a few minutes here and there during my lunch breaks. I was not a fan of raw sexualized materials, but I was glad I stuck to the end. Cole talked about the pain he felt when he lost his mother exactly one year ago when the special was taped. It was an emotional one and I could relate to what he had been going through. RIP, Ms. Charleen Cole. Your son is a hell of a comic.

Âm nhạc Việt Nam vẫn bị trong tình trạng ca sĩ mới hát nhạc xưa. Ca sĩ mới nhiều đến nỗi tôi không thể nhớ tên. Còn nhạc mới thì dường như tôi chưa từng được nghe một bài nào trong vòng 5 năm gần đây. Chắc tôi theo giỏi âm nhạc không đúng chỗ hoặc cách nghe nhạc của tôi bị lỗi thời.

Tôi không nghe nhạc đơn (single) mà chỉ thích chiêm ngưỡng trọn vẹn một album. Thường thì ca sĩ thu âm album chỉ hát nhạc xưa. Chẳng hạn như Nhật Thảo với Những ngày thơ mộng. Giọng của cô cũng rất là già dặn và cô trình bài “Bão tình” (nhạc Hoàng Trọng & lời Duy Viêm) rất thấm cùng với lối hòa âm rất mộc của Đạo Nguyễn. Cô hát “Kiếp nào có yêu nhau” (nhạc Phạm Duy & thơ Minh Đức Hoài Trinh) hơi bị run. Tôi không hiểu vì lý do gì vì phần orchestration của Đạo Nguyễn cũng rất nhẹ nhàng. Nhưng anh đem lại một bất ngờ khi cho tiếng súng nổ vào phần hòa âm của mình.

Nam ca sĩ Tuấn Anh không những được song ca với Nhật Thảo qua ca khúc “Một ngày không có em” (nhạc Y Vân & lời Nguyễn Long) mà còn được hát đơn ca khúc “Bước chân dĩ vãng” (Nguyễn Hiền & Lan Đài). Với giai điệu blues ngà ngà say, Tuấn Anh cướp đi phần trình diễn của ca sĩ chính trong album.

After reading Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major” in The New Yorker, I want to pursue a graduate degree in English just for the humanities of it. I just looked up Mason’s MA in English and the concentration in professional and technical writing appeals to me. Since I love reading and writing and I can get free tuitions, why not? My wife disagreed. The kids are my priority. She’s right.

I want a story to keep me company while my husband
stares into his phone, beside me in bed. Any story.
That a man named Solon planned the whole city of Athens
while in love with his mother’s friend’s son. He broke his hand

trying to catch a turtle on the roof of a temple
is what I want to be told while my husband plays scrabble
against any number of people he hasn’t seen in years.
Exist for forty points links to stop for twenty-five which

he drops into tranq for its q worth at least half the house.
Slang for a person or thing that will act as a sedative.
Tonight after three episodes of a show about Russian spies
with perfect American accents, I ask if he like peanuts

and he says he loves peanuts, and it’s as if we’ve just met
and are fools for each other, still make out on sidewalks at dawn.
Plutarch recounted the life of Solon “at a time when history
was by no means an academic discipline” wrote someone

on Wikipedia, while Solon wrote a law forbidding slaves
from being gymnasts because his mother’s friend’s son
was a gymnast and a slave and because he didn’t
fall in love with Solon back. “It is irrational to renounce

what we want for fear of losing it,” wrote Plutarch.
His eyes in a duel with the screen of his phone, my husband asks
what dentist I’ll see tomorrow, and two minutes later:
Did I remember to turn down the heat. Academic, irrational,

exist for thirty-two, tranq for a house with central heating.
Tell me the one about the peanut that choked Plutarch,
tell me about the backflipping slave. Solon invented the euphemism.
Prisons as chambers, policemen as guards. I love you,

I’ve said, enough times to make history, or join it, and I mean it,
did you turn down the heat. Let’s be civilized, said Solon.
And: No man is allowed to sell his daughter unless she’s not a virgin.
He made a law forbidding unions that defeat the object of marriage,

but the object of marriage was an acrophobic turtle at a time
by no means known for steep temple roofs. Four days from now
I’m brushing my teeth when my husband says, I don’t feel
any love from you at all. Solon would answer this usefully.

He made a law stating that immediately upon marriage,
bride and bridegroom should be locked in a chamber to eat a quince.
Or if not immediately, then four days from now. Count no one happy
until he’s dead, said Solon, to the happiest person alive.

Taije Silverman

Klim released Family, an everyday typeface based on Clearface—originally designed by Morris Fuller and Linn Boyd Benton. Of course, a new font family comes with an in-depth essay by Kris Sowersby. Worth a read for type nerds.

I have nothing but love for my wife
But at times her words cut like a knife.

Dear all,

I concurred with everyone’s feedback. It was like a huge family gathering without the dramas. Mad kudos to all the leaders, the parents, and especially the kids—without them, we would not have been together in one room. I hope no one got sick.

I have a small suggestion to some of the parents, especially the fathers, to talk to your doctor about sleep apnea and sleep test. We had the entire orchestra playing during the night. I have sleep apnea myself and I brought the CPAP machine with me. It really helped with the music playing.

Chị K, anh T, S, and O, welcome to the Hung Vuong Family (not the Thang Long Family) LOL!

Cheers!

I don’t have a clue what I had read. Mlinko’s poems are way beyond my limited comprehension of poetry. I read the entire collection twice and couldn’t pick out one for my blog. It’s definitely not her; it’s me.

The boy at my poetry reading wants to start a reliquary.
He might be twelve, his belly billowing like a safety
net for his body and his thick, curly hair the color
of Tang. His shoulders have the breadth and weight
of a kitchen cupboard but his voice is a child’s,
girlish and mannered. His name is River.

He tells me the bolt he found along the bank of a river
will be the first official piece of his reliquary.
Meaningful objects are hard to come by, he says with a child’s
comic gravity, but I’ve got this bolt. Lifesaver-
shaped erasers line the shop counter behind him beside paperweights
of Paris. In the Q&A his cheeks prick a muddled rum color

each time he asks a question, like What’s your favorite color?
and Do you believe in numerology? His mother scolds, River!
when he asks my deepest fear, but he waits
for my answer. I want to ask how he knows what a reliquary
is. I want to know what the bolt looks like, if it’s right now safe
in his pocket and if the sign it held warned CHILDREN

CROSSING or WIND GUSTS. A child’s
deepest fear is not of danger but of loss, though of loss that doesn’t color
what comes after. Absence without aftermath. He’s so intent on saving
what surrounds him that who he’ll be without it must seem, to River,
as abstract as old age—a minor evil that the simplest of reliquaries
could overcome. I want to hold the bolt’s small, solid weight

in my hand, hold its useless intention, but people are waiting
to buy my book and tell me how when they were children
they also lost their mothers, as if inside reliquaries
we keep grief, and not the rose-scented and colorless
bones of saints. As if grief could carry us like rocks across a river,
embedded in sediment so we might safely

walk above water. But grief is the water. I have saved
messages from answering machines and a nearly weightless
shred of cork, several post-it notes, and a petal from a river
of curbside cherry blossoms that my father scooped like a child
with both hands to let fly in front of my mother. Moth-colored
powerless petal. And then-isn’t a book also a reliquary?

River waits in line to ask what he should put in his reliquary.
Instead of signing my name I list: a used eraser, a child’s watercolor,
and a page from your diary saying you haven’t lost anything,
you’re safe.

Taije Silverman