Courtney Pine, Edana Minghella play Isle of Wight

14th May, 2010








Edana Minghella






“If you haven’t seen Edana Minghella play live before, now is your chance to catch the sultry and smoky jazz classics from this huge Island talent.


Expect exceptional jazz violin from Cuban maestro Omar Puente before the legendary Courtney Pine takes to the stage.”



via Courtney Pine, Omar Puente and More at Jazz On The Meadow | Isle of Wight News:Ventnor Blog.





Jazz on the Meadow

22 May  2.00pm

Ventnor Botanical Gardens

Undercliff Drive

Ventnor

Courtney Pine – Omar Puente – Edana Minghella – The Ric Harris Trio – Keri Highland – Benedict Branca


For the up-to-date information on Jazz on the Meadow, including information on a park and ride scheme operating from Ventnor Town, general concert information and more about the artists set to perform, visit our website.

Tickets for this incredible event are available now from See Tickets, IW Tourist Information Centres, Ventnor Botanic Garden, Red Funnel or by calling 08448449988, and Wightlink ticket offices or by phone on 08713761000 priced at just £30 plus a small booking fee.

Demand is expected to be high, and numbers are strictly limited so buy early to avoid disappointment.


Events on the Isle of Wight : Jazz on the Meadow at Ventnor Botanical Gardens, 22 May 2010.


And today is Edana’s birthday!  Happy birthday, love.





Notes to AM – Resignation

12th May, 2010


Labour’s Love Lost


I would not trivialise your demise dear bro

with half-baked bons mots about that day or this

but I will say


What stunned me

– in the back of the car

crossing town for that brutal farewell –

what slapped me in the face

(and does today)

was the way

the world despite calamity carries on

oblivious.


There was your name

in bold blunt prison

behind Ham & High wire mesh


searing


and yet

the impudent business of living

– bastards standing at bus-stops –

went ridiculously on

as if any meaningful bus could ever –


a girl on her mobile

laughing

laughing?

another, taking leave, hand on hip, of a guy,

skirt stretched, one heel braking her wheeled suitcase

going somewhere


as if going somewhere

still meant anything

when we now know it’s just

going ridiculously on.


And later, when Downing Street called

it’s not that I wasn’t grateful

it’s that it was too late for prime ministerial tea

and sympathy to sugar the shock of earth’s outrageous turning

(he’s gone, by the way, I meant to say, your decent friend,

just yesterday, with two bonny lads and some dignity).


Of the numbing fractured kaleidoscope of that day’s images

one alone spoke sense:

Closing Down Sale

acknowledging as it did

resignation

acknowledging as we must

passing

heydays’ ebb and heydays’ flow

and look, here’s one again, on Oxford Street,

Everything Must Go.









Poem

12th May, 2010

 

 How Beastly the Bourgeois Is

 

 D. H. Lawrence  


How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–


Presentable, eminently presentable–
shall I make you a present of him?


Isn’t he handsome?  Isn’t he healthy?  Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
   thing


Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
   man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
  face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
   demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.


How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–


Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable–
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
   than his own.


And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.


Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty–
How beastly the bourgeois is!


Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
   England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.




(With thanks to Guy Hibbert, who is himself a poet, for reminding me of this.)