Saul Bass Star Wars and me

So I just had to create a new category here called "catch-up."  Longtime readers of this blog probably know that I disappear from time to time and then apparate (as HP would say) and have to do some 'splaining (as DA and my mother would say).

I've been busy and sick and busy and writing and doing layout and having computer stuff.  Gawd it's been about a month since I've posted anything of substance.  I'm doing well all things considered.  Here are a few things that have taken my time of late:

• We're gearing up here for the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in a few weeks.  I have a Gay Writers Dupont Circle walking tour that I'm trying to finalize for that weekend as well.
• This next Sunday I'm reading at the DC Busboys & Poets as part of their Split This Rock lead-up programming.  That's at 7pm.
• White Crane Institute has just announced the new White Crane/James White Poetry Prize.  It's a $1000 book manuscript prize.  More info at the prize website.  It honors excellence in Gay Men's Poetry and has as its first year final judge, the remarkable Mark Doty.  Spread the word!
• Sadly, being involved in this effort I can't vie for the prize myself. This of course brings up my ongoing "do less for others and a bit more for yourself"problem -- a dynamic well known to editors and indy publishers.  Add to this my weird ethical belief in not biasing your work by publishing myself in publications I edit (or stringently denying myself again and again) it makes for a weird split of time devotion.  It all means I have to make sure to reserve time to have my own work published, and available for prizes (of course there aren't many other gay poetry prizes out there but that'll make me move for other options).
• In the music front:  I am of late totally smitten with a band out of Seattle named The Fleet Foxes.  They have an EP out that is just fantastic.  They're on SubPop and if you go to their myspace page (link) you can hear how sweet their work is.  Brilliant.
• In the book reading front I just picked up a copy of The Letters of Noel Coward and am finding them as brilliant and funny as my friend Bo told me they would be.  He actually let me read a few pages while I was visiting him in Brooklyn a few weeks back.  The correspondence between Coward and Alexander Woolcott is just brilliant and really hysterically funny.  They had a way of lovingly cutting each other down in their letters and as playwrights they could really turn a phrase.
• I've filled up a small sketch book of semi-daily sketches and should soon fulfill my longtime threat of posting them to this blog.
• And what would a catch-up be without a recently faved little video.  This one a what-if.  What if Saul Bass (famous screen credits artist known for his title sequences for "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World") did the title sequence to Star Wars.  It's a pretty amazing bit of work.  And the song, by Buddy Rich is pretty snazzy too.