Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Brain I am in touch with you.

You are the You-niverse,

A You-knowverse which knows you back:

Back, front, and sideways.

Staring;

Nothing going on ‘upstairs’.

As I become aware of staring

Where there’s nothing’s going on,

Transformation in a second.

Change within, inside the mind.

I bind myself to it: it’s beckoned.

It: the flashing nano-minute.

Standing up and going out,

Picking up a tome I’m

Reading, I resume

The all-plebeian ordinary daytime.

Bending Over The Bathtub 6.19.2012

Circling Round Baths II; To The Child Mystic II;

Revelations Big & Small;

Arlene Corwin

Love relationships transform:

Their own dynamic force;

Their own dynamics:

So do you.

In the bath (as is my wont)

I think about

My mother, dead

Since two-thou…  something, and I think:

She did so much for me, I dread

To think: harp lessons,

Voice, piano…

Someone who had

Only reached the seventh grade,

Then out to work – a teenage maid.

Sewed me clothes,

Gave and goodness knows…

From love’s concern,

Burned for Arlene.

How to measure wounds and hurts,

Faults versus virtue

Against the sacrifice and faith:

On a scale of support,

It’s sudden insight,

One repents.

Love Relationships Change 8.10.20112012

Love Relationships; Circling Round Baths; Mother Book;

Arlene Corwin

Thank you God, for the computer. -

It gives room for privacy

To listen inside/out of me

And get it down,

Not forced to see a soul

(except my own).

Thank you for a bathtub,

Callous softening in peace -

A place

Where I can lift a leg

Behind my head

And not succeed.  (I never do).

But with no hundreds to behold me

I can keep on trying,

Lying there.  Thank you.

Giant, tiny oxymoronic gifts are mine

While barren, impecunious, impoverished

Of every age define their lives and are defined

By piles of garbage – soggy, squelchy;

Luckless, hapless, poor

On other levels too

While I’ve got bath, computer,

Endless water;

Lucky, favored.

Thank you.

Once More From The Bath 5.10.2012

Circling Round Baths; God Book; Circling Round Computers;

Arlene Corwin

Sitting in the bathtub thinking

What a pity

That the memory

Gets in the way of now.

Last night’s success

Completely gone -

Departed,

Spent absolute.

No substitute.

If time is taken

To think ‘then’

(Just hours ago),

A method

To make then a ‘now’

Without

Losing the moment?

Maybe some can.  I can’t.

Yet.

Bath Again 2.8.2012

Bath Book; Vaguely about Music;

Arlene Corwin

My husband showers,

I take baths,

Luxuriating in the tub,

Sitting submarined,

My scrub-a-dub-dub duck around.

My character shows: sybaritic.

Showerer shows his: ascetic,

Doing all his stuff outdoors,

I train on floors.

He takes his walks,

I, talk in my computer talk.

Who’ll live the longer?

I in my enameled bubble,

He in his one day of stubble.

We are happy;

Probably

Both doubly good and bad

In more than one reality.

Access To Another Reality 1.17.2012

Circling Round Baths;

Arlene Corwin

]]> http://arlenecorwin.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/my-drug-of-choice-2011/ Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:02:27 +0000 arlenecorwin http://arlenecorwin.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/my-drug-of-choice-2011/ My Drug of Choice

My whimsy,

No one paying me – I guarantee -

My drug of choice is coffee.

A little bit embarrassed, still

I must admit

That getting up and out of bed,

Productive, calm, ideas in head,

With energy the captivating motivation,

It’s magician caffeine,

Slick with tricks

Transfixing and converting dullness

In the intellect

To masterpiece,

Accomplishment, t

The scent of genius

In the air

- all there -

Charmed caffeine powers

Potential for some hours,

Then like all things that exist,

Transient, evanescent, transitory,

Drawn to Time by time

Evaporates leaving just – me.

Drug Of Choice 10.23.2011

Coffee Book; Circling Round Baths;

Arlene Corwin

Contiguous

The white & black,

The front & back.

 ℘

Sitting in the bath

Awake since four,

Wiped out, inert,

I am the object of a passive flirt,

Eyes seeing skies

On patterned towel.

Letting mind

Determine meaning.

Pushing through, I don’t allow

The view to glue me

To the images I see,

Still not inclined to rise and do,

I soap and soak – amused.

Bent to fuel the symbols squelched,

The bathroom silence snubbed,

And pushing forward and beyond,

I play the mind

And list the attributes designed.

I go to God.

I wash my body.

Strangely filled, no longer tired,

Wired for the day.

Contiguous Walls 6.30.2011

Circling Round Baths;

Arlene Corwin

]]> http://arlenecorwin.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/hot-bath-2011/ Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:43:09 +0000 arlenecorwin http://arlenecorwin.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/hot-bath-2011/ Hot Bath

I’m mean;

I’m super economic;

I’m environmentally aware.

More:

Conscientious,

I save energy wherever…

(It is wrong to waste it).

Yet,

There is a sin,

One luxury, one trap

Straight from the tap,

Filled to the top:

A bath at night

By candlelight;

A cat,

His walking act

Along the edge

Defying laws

Because

He doesn’t care;

The temperature,

The narrow ledge,

His tail dripping.

Dearest reader, don’t begrudge

This one indulgence.

©Hot Bath 2.19.2011

Circling Round Baths;

Arlene Corwin

          The Day The Belly Fat Came Out

I was in the bath and watching

As the water drained.

Watching.

Waiting.

Sitting back and snatching warmth.

Halfway down the tub

I saw the hub:

A roundness

That no diet can remove.

Reproving God and nature,

I sat looking at the fat –

That dominates the muscle,

That has replaced the muscle.

Sit-ups, backbends, cobras, ploughs:

I’ve given in.

No longer thin,

The waist and hip a strain on zipper.

You will have to take me as I am.

I

© The Day The Belly Fat Came Out 9.21.2010  Circling Round Baths;  Arlene Corwin 

Arlene Corwin’s Poetry

Just another WordPress.com weblog

——————————————————————————–

Arlene Corwin’s Open-Ended Biography

Arlene Corwin (born Arlene Faith Nover) is an American jazz singer and pianist, poet, teacher and practitioner of Yoga. Born November 8, 1934 in the Williamsburg Maternity Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. She has two children. Jonathan Eric Corwin (born July 24. 1956 and) Jennifer Nover Council (born February 2, 1964). Mother Margy Lillian (born Brown). Father Albert S. Nover. Both were hairdressers, owning a beauty salon together. Everyone was musical on both sides of the family.Mother sang, could play some piano. Father was a gifted sculptor and wood carver, played a little harmonica and mandolin. The family is Jewish.

As a child she had already sung at weddings, bar mitzvahs and for the USO, raising bonds for the war effort. At 13, having a boyfriend who played the saxophone and who listened to Symphony Sid, jazz disc jockey whose late night show originated from Birdland, she awakened to jazz, listening to the late night show “under my blanket”. “A turning point”, she says. (Well before “Lullaby of Birdland” was put to words Arlene had written a lyric of her own – a lyric she still sings today) At 14,she was playing for a dancing school once a week. Then she got an accidental job (“slipping in on a banana peel when the singer got sick”) in a Brooklyn nightclub singing with a group. “Mom and dad chaperoned, of course”.1950s 

She began to sing regularly when again, out of the blue, an agent rang offering a job for a hundred dollars a week to play at the Mayflower Hotel in Manhattan. It was a restaurant owned by Bob Olin, a former light heavyweight world champion. “I was so naïve I played the whole evening without ever taking a break. Who knew about breaks? Why they kept me I’ve no idea.” But they did and the steady salary of $100.00 a week (which she gave directly to her mother, any other choice never occurring to her) and the experience of having to make a varied program led to her singing to the piano, and eventually to playing to the singing. At this time she was still in high school as attending the prestigious High School of Music & Art as a harpist.She graduated from Music & Art getting a scholarship to Hofstra College as a music major.

Then in 1952, while still at Hofstra College (now university), she was playing on the weekends in a Hempstead, Long Island nightclub-restaurant when Slim Gaillard, who’d come to see Jack Teagarden (also working there) began to take notice of her. He started showing up regularly. There he met Arlene’s mother Margy, and the two eventually opened a jazz nightclub, the first to cater to blacks and whites. It was called The Turf and it, like Birdland had its own radio show, for which Arlene wrote the theme song “The Slim Gaillard Show”. Now she was standing as well as sitting, getting a chance to sit in and sing as often as she chose. The die was cast. It was jazz, cool jazz.

“When you hang around New York all kinds of opportunities show up”. And so, she got a leading role in a B film called “Jukebox Racket’, wrote the score for another B film called, at the time “She Should Have Stayed In Bed”, later to be called ‘1,000 Shapes Of A Female: see IDMB (the company, called Exploit Films was owned by Errol Flynn “tall, big in every way, veins on his face, but exuding old world charm” He was quite, quite overwhelming.”

Then there was a bit part in John Cassavetes “Shadows”, followed by the lead in what has become a cult ‘beat’ musical called “The Nervous Set” by Fran and Jay Landesman where she introduced the now-standards “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most and “Ballad Of The Sad Young Men”, both subsequently recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Bassey and numberless major artists. She studied acting with Joshua Shelley. “It was a time to find out who and what I was. “I was definitely not an actress. I was too introverted and none of those clothes fit” she says.

All the while she returned to the intimacy of New York supper clubs. They were the bottom line, singing and playing.

It was during the supper club period, she met Al Weissman who became her manager. She was signed to the Joe Glazer Agency and began to tour with her own trio. “Wherever I went they’d say, “You know, there’s just been a girl here who sounds like you. Her name was Barbra something. I suppose we had Brooklyn Jewishness in common. ” (She too was signed with Glazer.)

Although published by Frank Publishing (owned by composer Frank Loesser) years later she asked for the songs back because “nothing happened.” “It was a period of promise, a period I was not equipped to fulfill”.

Greece, Lebanon, Greece, Oxford – Yoga & Jazz

In 1966, by way of Paris, Greece (where she and husband Jim Council were neighbors with Leonard Cohen and Marianne) and Lebanon, “where I actually managed to do some television, singing jazz”, she settled in Oxford, England for the next 18 years, teaching yoga,(“lectured and demonstrated in what must have been a hundred Women’s Insitutes, posed for one of the very first health magazines called Health & Fitness, wrote articles on nutrition, had a weekly radio spot on a little radio show for BBB Oxford actually doing Yoga on radio while describing each pose with a microphone up my nose, did a tape on meditation – it was a lot of Yoga”) and singing and playing, being voted Best Jazz Singer in the Midlands 1972, appearing at Ronnie Scott’s three times. She did 3 television shows; a late night BBC jazz show called “In The Cool Of The Evening”, radio for BBC overseas, was invited over to Amsterdam to do Dutch radio, sang at universities around England, (“one night opposite Pink Floyd, “who were just starting out, I suppose”), the American air bases.

She appeared several times at The Stables in Wavendon (run by John Dankworth – now Sir John Dankworth – and Cleo Laine -now Dame Cleo Laine – while at the same time giving weekly yoga lessons to a group there, (which included Dame Cleo – “a wonderful

yogin”). The Wavendon All-Music Plan, later known simply as WAP “was the most stimulating and original enterprise I’ve ever encountered, pairing all kinds of musical genre. I even played on the same bill as Vladimir Ashkenazy.”

Starting in 1969 and all during the 70’s fate gave a push to the yoga side of things and Arlene was teaching yoga classes in doctor’s offices for hyper-tense, cardiac and overweight men. teaching regularly at conferences for IBM. She gave demonstrations, lectured all over for the Women’s Institute, posed and wrote for Health and Fitness Magazine (summer issue 1982) a book called The New Manual Of Yoga by Karen Ross (1973) wrote articles on nutrition, made a cassette called This Is Meditation. It was a full double life with Yoga taking half the time and singing the other half.

2009 finds her favorite project on Google called Arlene Corwin’s Poetry, a project that started in 1949 or about 2,000 poems ago.

2010 landmark:  First published book of poetry, “Circling Round Time” comes out in September “To The Child Mystic” the second due to come out in December.

2010-11  Circling Round Time and To The Child Mystic.  “The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative . Regular poetry submissions  and comments to online magazine ElderwomanSpace.

2012 More books!  Circling Round Woman; Circling Round Our Times, Our Culture; Circling Round Vanity: Vaguely About Music and Circling Round Eros + 2.  Publised by Xlibris.

Music career took and upswing with performances and concerts – an intimate series of composer of the month programs based on the best of American popular composers.

And, of all things, the start of yoga teaching in Härryda, Sweden.  At this stage Ms Corwin is 77 years old.

Tags:arlene corwin’s background, biography, life

Posted in arlene corwin’s biography, autobiography, biography | 1 Comment »

You are currently browsing the archives for the biography category.

I was thinking,

“I have written mean and angry things

About my mother.” I had reasons.

Yet, here in the bath,

Re-working wrath

(One of the seven sins)

I find a word: communication.

Buddha, Jesus, Ramakrishna

Might have found a way. I didn’t.

Is it readiness, mine, hers?

Receptiveness, hers, mine –

And not about a way at all?

When simile has failed,

Would seers, like the ones above,

Not say a word, sit silent, smile

Or walk away?

Communication may not be

The A

And Z

At all.

Circling Round Baths; Mother Book; Love Relationships;

Arlene Corwin

My husband says,
“Throw out the tub –
Take a shower for,
You never know when you might fall.
You’re getting older.”
He’s been saying that since I was fifty.
When I think about the luxury
Of lying in a bathtub,
(As I’m doing now)
Water very, very warm,
Only bellybutton upwards showing,
He’s no way of knowing
How luxurious it feels.
Silly man!
He would replace my space,
My trace of treasure
With a shower where
You stand, save water,
Get your body cleaned and scoot,
You’re out.
I want my space.
Soakings, softenings, examinings;
You well know what I mean.
I’m worth it!

© I Want My Space 4.18.2008
Pure Nakedness; Circling Round Baths;
Arlene Corwin