D Note love letter 2/16/12

D Base

Our friend Wendy Woo is playing Friday night with her friend Jeff Brinkman, starting at 7pm. We've been watching Wendy rock out for 15 years now! Cool to see the evolution from girl to woman (with 3 kids), not to mention the musical evolution. $10. After Wendy, at 10pm, is a blues rock reggae band called Thanks To Philo. $5.

Saturday at 4pm Music Train Family Concert Series presents The Heavy Cats for a special Mardi Gras edition. Heavy Cats features Lionel Young, one of our all time favorite people and musicians. Should be wildly entertaining. $7 adults/$3 kids.

Saturday at 7pm we have a benefit for Music International. Here's the scoop from their event page.

"Join us for an evening of friendship, fundraising, great food, and, of course, music! Music International was founded as a 501(c)3 organization in 2009 for the purpose of helping musicians outside the United States who are talented and passionate, but who lack the resources they need to fully pursue their passion. We have been able to provide guitars, strings, and teaching materials for musicians in Albania and India in our short history, and have received requests from musicians in Angola, Haiti, and more requests from Albania and India. This evening will feature the goods and services from various small businesses in the Denver metro area, great live music with the Barry Shapiro Band." $15 (includes one drink)

At 9:30pm on Saturday we have Zzyzzyx Band. Good old rock and roll. $5.

Sunday night we have the 9 year anniversary of our Salsa night! Going strong for 9 years, that's a lot of dancing. To commemorate this occasion there will be a salsa dance contest with a $500 prize! Come check out the amazing dancers. $8 (includes lesson and band).

Yours,

D ploy

Extra Credit: To celebrate 9 years of salsa at the D Note here is one of our favorite poems by one of our favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop. The poem mentions the "dry perfectly off-beat claves" which can be heard in all salsa music.


The Bight




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At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.