Street performance or busking is the act of performing in public places for gratuities. In many countries the rewards are generally in the form of money but other gratuities such as food, drink or gifts may be given. Street performance is practiced all over the world and dates back to antiquity. People engaging in this practice are called street performers or buskers.
Performances are anything that people find entertaining. Performers may do acrobatics, animal tricks, balloon twisting, caricatures, clowning, comedy, contortions, escapology, dance, singing, fire skills, flea circus, fortune-telling, juggling, magic, mime, living statue, musical performance, puppeteering, snake charming, storytelling or reciting poetry or prose, street art such as sketching and painting, street theatre, sword swallowing, and ventriloquism.

Street Music by Arnold Adoff

T h i s  c i t y:
the a lw a y s
no i s e grinding up from the subways under
g r o u n d:
slamming from bus tires and taxi horns and engines of cars and trucks in all
v o c ab u l a r i e s
of
clash
flash
screeching
hot metal l a n g u a g e
c o m b i n a t i o n s:
​as  p l a n e s
overhead roar
an orchestra of rolling drums and battle blasts assaulting
my ears with
the always
noise of t h i s ci t y : street music.

Frame of Mind

For now you can stay
Right here we will play
Until somehow you can find
A slightly different frame of mind
Right here in my arms
Away from all harm
You'll be safe from all the flares
Although I know you don't care

You can lift your head up to the sky
Take a deeper breath and give it time
You can walk the path among the lines
With your shattered frame of mind
Withstand, you could always stay
We can wait right here and play
Until somehow you can find
A slightly better frame of mind

When they say you will fall
You can reach nothing at all
Hide your tracks, beneath the line
Of a different frame of mind
Is it that what you've heard?
Broken words in the dirt
Yelling out into the sun
Here we come, here we come

You can lift your head up to the sky
Take a deeper breath and give it time
You can walk the path among the lines
With your shattered frame of mind
Withstand, you could always stay
We can wait right here and play
Until somehow you can find
A slightly better frame of mind

You can lift your head up to the sky
Take a deeper breath and give it time
You can walk the path among the lines
With your shattered frame of mind
Withstand, you could always stay
We can wait right here and play
Until somehow you can find
A slightly better frame of mind

And when daylight comes through
When the day is a new
Then it will be time
For a new frame of mind
When all eyes are on you
You will know what to do
Since you would have found
Your new frame of mind

When you lift your head up to the sky
Take a deeper breath and give it time
You can walk the path among the lines
But always know that you'll be safe
I'll be here throughout your days
Come find me and we will play

Source: Musixmatch
Authors: Leandre Bergeron Berube / GEORGE RAKUSHKIN
Lyrics: Frame of Mind © Monstercat (on behalf of Monstercat); Kobalt Music Publishing, Latin Autor, UMPI, ASCAP, and 14 Music Rights Societies
​

Sport in our own time (it's a truism) has become the opium of the people, particularly in our western nations. Forget Christian and Islamic fundamentalism and all the other devout, pious and dutiful credal varieties of belief: Sport, the new religion, the methamphetamine of the masses, is the controlling factor in the life of this land. And forget Plato's Academy, because the sports academy is the new university of learning.

Witness the recent hosting by the University of Waikato of the Female Athlete Health Symposium at the Avantidrome in Cambridge. Present were doctors, professors, psychologists, exercise scientists and nutritionists to spread the good word of, well, saving the body for the glories of athletic heaven. These new theologians were not discussing how many angels could dance on head of a pin, but how many medals a girl might pin on her virtuous logo-laden tracksuit. 
​
Cups, gold medals and shiny ribbons have become the holy grails to garnish the glorious mantelpieces of the righteous saints of rugby, rowing, cycling, et el. However, before that's achieved, the dark night of body and soul must be endured in the gym, on the water, on the paddock, in the nets, etc. But all neophytes can be of good cheer because a team of worthy priests, pastors and preachers will dutifully hover, omnipresent, to guide and minister with stopwatches, massages, liniments and readings from the sacred text of good headspace and right nutrition to encourage the fearful and the unbelieving.
​
It's an arduous task, as every pilgrim knows, but at the end of days, after purification through struggle, the coach will be there to wipe away all sweat and tears from the eyes. And the blameless ones will gather at the river and become possessed of the promised land, while the losers will be cast into the fiery lake of disappointment and defeat. And the rest of us watching will cry out with a loud voice and pronounce, amen.  ​

The 2012–2013 Slovenian protests were an ongoing series of protests against the Slovenian political elite members, including the mayor Franc Kangler, the leader of right-wing government Janez Janša, and the leader of opposition Zoran Janković, all three of them in 2013 officially accused of corruption by Commission for the Prevention of Corruption. They began on 2nd November 2012 as the 2012–2013 Maribor protests against the mayor Franc Kangler. The protests spread from Maribor to other cities and towns throughout the country, demanding resignations and prosecutions of politicians and other members of the elite, accused of corruption.

The cause for demonstrations has been attributed by some public intellectuals to misunderstanding of post-socialist political elite who rejected "collectivism as socialist pattern" while, according to notable Slovene anthropologist Vesna V. Godina it is in fact a "pre-socialist pattern", originating from the way the traditional Slovene rural community was functioning much longer than in other – mainly Protestant and to much lesser degree in the mainly Catholic – modern nations, who have replaced traditional political culture earlier in history by the modern representative democracy and individualism.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
–Ernest Hemingway

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
–Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
–Marcel Proust

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
–Oscar Wilde
​
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
–Ezra Pound

“MUSIC for me is an art, it produce beauty of forms, harmony and expression of emotion.”
— Jazzy H.

“Music is different to a lot of people. For me, it’s a way of venting negative emotions and calming myself down...”
— Anonymous

“Music helps me escape from the reality I live in.”
— Jacob T.

A lot of people know the quote: “Music is my life; lyrics are my story.”
Well, I have a few more: “Anyone who has a desire to SING, always finds a SONG.”
— Anonymous

“I think music in itself is healing.
It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by.
No matter what culture we’re from, everyone loves music”
— Billy Joel


“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.”
— Anonymous

Backside

Night eats color,
Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments.
Day falls into the leaves like sparkling fish
And struggles, like the lowly mud,
The shapeless dreams and trees
Nurtured outside this shriveled, deridable despair.
And the space that was chopped down
Tickles the weeds there by its feet.
Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes
Caress the writhing darkness.
And then the people move forward.

Chika Sagawa​​

(Translated by Sawako Nakayasu)
​

​Chika Sagawa was born in 1911 on Hokkaido, an island in the north of Japan. At 19 and with the encouragement of her brother, she left home for Tokyo. That transition from the outskirts of the country to its political and social center figures prominently in her poetry. In Tokyo, she was exposed to western artistic movements, like Dada and surrealism, and western writers. Her first published work was not poetry, but translation, of modernist contemporaries working in English (Woolf and Joyce). Only just beginning her writing life, she died at 25 from stomach cancer. Though largely ignored for many years after her death, she is now often cited as the first female Japanese modernist poet.

Her poetry ascribes human descriptors to inhuman things. A sky will stand, or be clutched. Figs sleep. A city opens and closes. The effect is often exquisite; her poetry contains some of the loveliest images I have read. But beauty is often a burden in her writing. The sky does not exist merely to give humans pleasure; it has a life, plagued with wanting. By endowing these things with human activity, she also curses them with human plight. To exist, in the poetry of Chika Sagawa, is to suffer.

It is unclear as to whether suffering—experienced through a common vocabulary by all things—creates any sort of kinship. Man and nature exist together in the same space, a habitat of words that is at once spectacular and awful. We see this occurring in ‘Backside.’ The poem is a small marvel, like a fist of orange and gold leaves on a tree otherwise skeletal. But its smallness belies a biblical scope. In eight lines she renders the world, her trees replete with light and images of the sea. Then, fingers appear, disembodied and blackened. The fingers are stained with tar from cigarettes—what people give off appears before they do—and her image suggests that a stain is more than a blemish, it’s a wound: a scar with coloration. Darkness writhes; night eats. Flowers wilt and are deemed ‘fake.’ The world is in a sort of unmistakable agony; one can hear the wind in the trees as a kind of wheezing, lungs made to strain.

It is when this ‘despair’ is established that the last of God’s creation comes creeping in. It is hard not to read that final line as something horrible, but then, the horror goes both ways. One can see the trees cowering, but one can also see how a world like this could cow a person. That last sentence starts to take over the poem—is it people who are enduring this world, or is it the other way around? Whose fingers are those? That cigarette might just be a sort of ballast, as Salinger once wrote, against a world as callous as branches in autumn.