Movies I Talked About the Most in 2006

1. Little Man

I haven't seen this but I refer to it frequently. When people are talking about films they've seen recently I like to say "Have you seen that Little Man movie?"

2. Cache

Best movie I've seen in so long. You've probably already seen it but if you haven't you really need to.

3. Miami Vice

I loved it, while being aware that it is trash. It does have long sequences of impressionistic filmmaking that I am fascinated by. I'm also fascinated by Colin Farrell's "acting."

4. 3-Iron

There should be more movies in which people don't talk. Usually if they're talking they're acting badly.

5. The Science of Sleep

I didn't like this, though I kind of wanted to. It did cement the genre of fabulist films centered on a child-like protagonist. I ended up talking about how mediocre it was a lot, probably because so many people were talking about how wonderful it was & I argued against it. I really dislike having conversations that boil down to "I like X" versus "I don't like X."

6. Art School Confidential

Amazingly bad. So bad you want to talk about it with other people who have seen it to prove to yourself that it was a bad as you thought it was.

7. Sketches of Frank Gehry

Weak but pretty. An interestingly indulgent kind of bad film. A badness worth talking about.

8. American Hardcore

I haven't seen this but I think i had a lot of conversations about how I do want to see it.

9. The Devil and Daniel Johnston

I think I spent about a week telling everyone I know to see this. It was truly affecting & reminded me of the fact that Johnston's music moves me. Go rent it.

10. Descent

Finally a decent horror movie. I was really excited for this to come out & i talked about it a lot & then after I saw it I talked about it more.

11. Marie Antoinette

I mostly talked about how little interest I have in seeing this & how bad Virgin Suicides was. I didn't see it. I have no interest in seeing it, though I imagine I'll probably see it some time.

12. Cave of the Yellow Dog

I've never heard of this movie. Maybe Darryl Hannah is in it.

Seven Stories Written By My Nieces (One in Collaboration with Me)

1. Once upon a time there was a unicorn & a ladybug & they were two best friends. They loved to play together but one time his friend had to go to school so they didn’t get to play. So the unicorn said can I go to school with you because it was sharing day & the ladybug said you can it’s sharing day. Great but you need to have a backpack like me & lunch. My mom can do that. The end, said the unicorn.

2. Once upon a time there was a little girl & a fox. The little girl loved the fox so much. The little girl had to go to school so the fox said, well can I go to school with you. And the little girl said no because no animals are supposed to go to school. The little girl said next year you may go to fox school & the fox said will I make some new friends & the little girl said yes you will. Maybe you will see my friend foxy the fox. She’s a girl fox. I really do like her. I went to school with her last year. And the little girl & her fox had fun at their schools. The end.

3. Once upon a time there was a person & a brain. Nothing. The end.

4. Once upon a time there was a fork that had a backpack full of North Carolina. The fork wanted to ride a bike but all the bikes were made for humans & not for forks. He went to his friend the bandsaw & had himself sawed into little pieces & then he went to his friend the metalsmith & had the little pieces melted down & then he went to the popcorn maker & ate a bunch of popcorn.

Then he went to a scientist & then went in a machine that turned him into a human. Then he got money from the money tree. And he bought five bikes. He sold them but kept one for him. He put all the North Carolina out in an empty place, the forest. The people cut the trees down & put North Carolina there. The End.

5. Once upon a time there was a little little little eyeball. And it laughed in Alyssa’s face. Sometimes Alyssa let him pop out with his friends. The end.

6. Once upon a time there was a giraffe & alligator. The alligator’s name was Harry & the giraffe’s name was Potter. And they were best best best best best best friends. They loved to play with each other but later alligator said I’m going to move on Tuesday. The Giraffe said please don’t we have a play date on Tuesday. And alligator said yes I need to move so I can have new friends & go to a new school. The alligator said if you don’t let me move I’m going to bite you because I have very sharp teeth. And the giraffe said OK I’ll leave you. I’ll make a new friend. Another alligator named Lucy. She’ll be pretty nice. She’ll probably be my friend. I like Lucy said the alligator. Lucy is my best best best best best best best best friend. The end.

7. Once upon a time there was a fingernail & a finger. I said nothing. The end.

Jumping on the Bed

Four Stories Written By My Nieces

1. Once upon a time there was a doctor & when anybody got sick they give them get better shots & if they didn’t get better they got shots in their ears & their mom said lets call the doctor again & they got a shot & then they feel better.

2. Once upon a time there was a girl named Ashley. She loved horses & her favorite horses was a paint & a palomino & their two names were Cutie & Rudy. They loved Ashley. Ashley loved to ride them. Ashley loved them so much she loved to ride them a lot & every day she rides them two days.

On the palomino’s days she gets to ride Tuesday & Wednesday. And the paints’ days are Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday. The paint was very tired so Ashley let the paint have a rest. Then she took a nap. When the palomino woke up she was very better so the palomino said I want you to ride me now only on Fridays now so the paint can have more days. The end.

3. Once upon a time there was a dog named spot. He loved Alyssa. And every day Alyssa fed the dog & took him for walks & every day she gave the dog some tricks & treats. And every day she played with the dog every day. Then the dog said Alyssa I am tired. So Alyssa let him take a nap & when he woke up & he said let’s play Alyssa. The end.

4. Once upon a time there was a worm & an apple. The apple said don’t eat me I’m scared & the worm said I am very hungry I haven’t eaten in two days & I am very hungry. So the apple said why don’t you get some leaves to chew on & the worm said leaves are not my favorite. Apples are tasty & juicy. I love apples they are my favorite. I want to eat you.

No please don’t. I am not some food, I am a tasty apple who wants to be eaten by a human being. Please I do not want to be eaten & the worm said OK I will not eat you. I will eat another apple named woo-woo & the apple said no that’s my friend please don’t eat her & the worm said yes I will. The worm said I am so hungry I would like to eat your friend. The apple said you can eat a regular apple who is not my friend & not my parents, so he found an apple who did not have a name & did not have eyes mouth & words & started munching, munching, munching, munching & munching.

Then he felt like hanging on a branch & then he wrapped up in a tight little house & he stayed in there for 50 hours & twelve days & then crack-crack, waddle-waddle & opened then a beautiful butterfly on a spring morning. The end.

Alex Brown in Esopus

Esopus is one of my favorite magazines. It's something like a cross between Cabinet (without its Victorian accumulative drive--which I do not mean as an insult at all) & a local group art show. In the latest issue they have some drawings by an eight-grader named Alex Brown that are knocking me out. He draws complicated batle scenes in ball-point pen & colored pencils, lots of Romans & WWII battles. They have a huge scale, almost like a Darger kind of other-world quality. But they are not fantastic, instead grippingly realistic in the envisioning of mass slaughter through the lens of artistic technical innocence. Aside from the scale of his battles the genuine individuality he gets out of each simply drawn face is pretty affecting. I keep thinking that the editors might have made this kid up, because these drawings & the back story are so damn compelling.

And speaking of magazines there is an interesting section on Julie Mehretu, one of my favorite artists, in the latest issue of Afterall, which is also a cool magazine.

See more stereograms & other fantastic things at disaster.strikes

There were scorch marks on the inside of skulls found at Pompeii.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy contrasted the documents of literature, taken from narratives & testimonial accounts of the action of innumerable anonymous actors, with the documents of historians, taken from the archives—& from the imagination—of those who believe to have been in charge of battles & to have made history. Scholarly history took over this opposition when it contrasted the history of the lifestyles of the masses & the cycles of material life based on reading & interpreting ‘mute witnesses’ with the former history of princes, battles, & treaties based on courts’ chronicles & diplomatic reports. The appearance of the masses on the scene of history or in ‘new’ images is not to be confused with the link between the age of the masses & the age of science & technology. It is first & foremost rooted in the aesthetic logic of a mode of visibility that , on the one hand, revokes the representative tradition’s scales of grandeur &, on the other hand, revokes the oratorical model of speech in favour of the interpretation of signs on the body of people, things & civilization.

Jacques Ranciere: from “Mechanical Arts & the Promotion of the Anonymous” in The Politics of Aesthetics

Some Things My Mom Doesn'’t Like

The guy in the house behind them cooks whole pigs in his backyard every weekend.
Some people do not control their kids at church.
Local kids speed through the neighborhood & turn corners too recklessly.
My father gets "fussy."
The assistant to her doctor is too scrappy.
The bird throws all its food on the bottom of the cage.
The burgers at Ruby Tuesdays have all this garbage all over them & have their own names.
My father gets ornery after he goes to the doctor.
The bird poops in its water bowl.


(photo by Jon Pack)

Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld

This book is an oral history of the Rwandan participants in the genocide. Haunting, not only because of the shock but because it relates how an individual wakes up & does the unthinkable. It clearly and without projection describes how a farmer becomes a mass killer & how he thinks about it afterwards.

Alphonse: Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on. He can even become a beast without noticing it. Some threatened one another when they had no more Tutsis under the machete. In their faces, you could see the need to kill.

But for others, on the contrary, killing a person drove a share of fear into their hearts. They did not feel it at first, but later it tormented them. They felt frightened or sickened. Some felt cowardly for not killing enough, some felt cowardly for being forced to kill, so some drank overmuch to stop thinking about their cowardice. Later on they got used to the drink and the cowardice.

Me, I was not scared of death. In a way, I forgot I was killing live people. I no longer thought about either life or death. But the blood struck terror into me. It stank and dripped. At night I'd tell myself, After all, I am a man full of blood; all this spurting blood will bring catastrophe, a curse. Death did not alarm me, but that overflow of blood, that--yes, a lot.

find it here

Oh, and happy holidays & stuff.

The Viewmaster Cycle

See the full set here

My Mom Cut My Hair

If you call my phone right now it immediately patches you in to the sound of an Italian Police siren.

rva

rva

North Carolina, Here I Come

Correction

Working with printers who care more about making glossy posters of aerial views of college football stadiums than making beautiful pieces gives me a headache. Luckily today we met with the other kind of printers. While they might also give us headaches they care about making quality work so I think their headaches will be worth withstanding.

The print guy had these amazing hands, cuticles blackened by ink, thick & stubby, more callous than skin. He sat across the table from us, grunting & sighing like a gangly Tom Waits. When I was wiring houses with my brother in North Carolina I had thick callouses across the middle of my index fingers where the wire slipped through. I didn't notice them until I left town & within days they started peeling away. Now I have hands made of lollipops. I am a wonderful baby sitter.

My Life is a Weapon

With the semester finished I've been finishing up books I started & never quite got to the end of. One of them is My Life is a Weapon by Christopher Reuter, a book about the history & reality of suicide bombers. Though the main goal of the book is to dispel some of the western myths about the motivations & status of those who choose to be suicide bombers if you generally read your news rather than pick it up from Leno none of it will come as much of a surprise: for instance, in the Middle East suicide bombers tend to be more educated & slightly wealthier than the average Palestinian.

This subject is so fascinating to me, the pernicious inversion of social norms of interaction. The ordinary becomes dangerous. The more ordinary, the more dangerous. The idea of someone walking onto a bus & detonating collapses a stable use of public space. It requires the kind of control of space that escalates the motivations of the bombers. Reuter's ultiamte assessment is that these attacks will continue as long as Palestinians & Tamils are controlled, made to feel that their lives have less meaning than their deaths & that no intervention will cease them. It's an assessment I agree with, but the heart of Reuters book is not political, but journalistic. He meets people involved in the bombings in various ways & tries to report back about them as people, rather than concepts.

What is also fascinating is that a culture of celebration of these acts solidified so quickly. Reuter's journalistic approach to the families of the bombers helped to show how they negotiate this. The parents of Palestinian bombers in particular seemed to be at the centers of strange vortexes of the celebration of death & individual emotion. While their children are being publicly lauded, the parents naturally grieve & yet also participate in the beatifying justification for their children's actions. To reject the act as pointless would be an ultimate rejection of the child. As one of the fathers states, how else can they act except to glorify his child's act. What other emotional avenues are there?

Printers

Working with printers sure is a headache.

Some Songs That Got Me Through This Past Year

Wilderness: “Gravity Bent Light”


Regina Spektor: “Fidelity”


Haemoth: “Satanik Terrorism”


Joanna Newsom: “Monkey & Bear”


Witchcraft: “Wooden Cross”


David S. Ware: “Dao”


Patrick Phelan: “Ruin”


Anthony Hamilton: “Ain’t Nobody Worryin”


Striborg: “Digging A Ditch To Die In”


Ghostface Killah: “Shakey Dog”


Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: “Bobby Malone Moves Home”


Young Dro: “Shoulder Lean”


Ladyhawk: “Came In Brave”

Kafka's Couriers

Couriers

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be the couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

--Franz Kafka
in Parables and Paradoxes

Glossolalia

The “tongues’ at Corinth were not languages like Aramaic, Greek, or Latin. They were motor phenomena brought on under the excitement of religious experience. They could result from a genuine encounter with God. On the other hand, “tongues” could be an effect highly desired, expected, sought, and displayed for one’s own enhancement. The utterance was unintelligible. It was like the blowing of a trumpet in so garbled a way that soldiers would not know whether to arm for battles or go to bed. It was like listening to a “barbarian” whose speech conveyed no meaning. it left the understanding (nous) unfruitful. “Tongues” belong to the mind (phren) of a baby, not of a mature person. As an emotional, motor reaction, one could engage in “tongues” without use of his mind.

&

The first widespread incidence of glossolalia occurred in southern France. it followed in the wake of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 and a fresh outburst of persecution of the French Hugenots.

…

The Cevenol peasants first reported hearing the singing of psalms in the air. later, after their antagonists had refused to believe their reports, “the poor shepherds” brought forward something more tangible. They claimed prophetic inspiration.

Among the first to make this boast, in 1688, was a young girl named Isabeau Vincent, a wool-carder’s daughter. Though familiar only with the native patois, when seized by ecstatic trance, the young girl was reported to have prophesied for hours in perfectly cultivated French.


--from A Brief History of Glossolalia by Frank Stagg, E. Glenn Hinson, Wayne E. Oates, a book which I picked up for fifty cents & do not in any way recommend to anyone

A small discussion of glossolalia on Ubuweb.

For all the poems that use glossolalia as a metaphor (& the way too many that use it as a title), has there been any serious aesthetic consideration of it as a public speech act? Most references I've seen to glossalalia kind of throw the word around willy-nilly.

Statehood

I wish I could go to this show.

Statehood = Clark, Eric, Joe & Leigh
In past bands these guys have made some of my favorite rock and roll.

See them live here.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson Interview

Cool interview with JMW at Dislocate. Scroll down for interviews with other faves Joshua Poteat & Alex Lemon.

Today I finish one review & start another review. Z & I meet with printers in an hour. After that we get to focus on all the next projects for Octopus, which is exciting.

Top Ten Records of 2006 That I Admit are Quite Good But I Have No Interest In Listening To

One of the results of file sharing, blogs & trading cds with friends is that there is access to pretty much all the bigger records that come out. Anything that gets a little press becomes instantly available for free. Consequently I have a bunch of albums on my computer that I think are quality music but that I have absolutely no interest in listening to. All of these are records I got for free. I probably would have bought a few of them if I hadn't gotten them for free or if I liked them enough & wanted to have the cd. Usually when I don't respond to a record that I get for free i just delete, but these ones are records fawned over by friends & critics, so I keep them around, watching them grow the itunes equivalent of dusty. One day, I keep thinking, I'm going to just fall in love with this record. But weeks pass & then months. Records like these become just a drag on my hard drive; I don't want to erase them as I admit that I think they're good music, but I never actually engage them. So here's my Top Ten Unlistened to While Acknowledged to Be Pretty Good Records of 2006:

1 The Knife, Silent Shout
2 The Decemberists, The Crane Wife
3 Lupe Fiasco, Food & Liquor
4 Midlake, The Trials Of Van Occupanther
5 Love is All, Nine Times, That Same Song
6 Tapes n Tapes, The Loon
7 Vetiver, To Find Me Gone
8 J-Dilla, Donuts
9 Hot Chip, Coming on Strong
10 Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere

& Karl Parker's Harmstorm

Now that I'm done with my philosophy paper I can get back to talking about stuff that I get in the mail, which is really what I like to do most here. I have been thinking recently about how so much of Stevens' meditative work is a kind of reminder of the empirical, a poetry that works to remind things & ideas that they exist. I've been thinking about this because of Simon Critchley's essay "Superficiality" in the lastest Fulcrum,. What I like so much about Fulcrum is that it is a genuine conversation. There is poetry I can't stand & poetry I adore in this issue. There are good poems in styles that I would normally not run into & poets whose work I make an active effort to track down, like Joyelle McSweeney & Michael Palmer. And all these poems are rubbing shoulders with aesthetic essays that are at worst interesting & more often enlightening. To me the only other journal doing this is, & on a similar scale, is Fascicle. In his essay Critchley describes the the anti-metaphysical tendencies of Pessoa and late Stevens. An interesting piece for its ability to translate a rejection of Heidegger's shell-game approach to being into poetic readings.



And then Karl Parker's chapbook Harmstorm, from Lame House Press, shows up at my door. Parker's work speaks back to Stevens' aesthetics in its gently hypnotic use of vowels, such as the first line of the last poem, "Afterword": "We're gone down the dawn wind." This makes the poems lovely reads, engaging on a sound & syntax level, while never pandering. Parker has a gauzy way of attending to the world, for instance referring pronouns don't link up to actual people in the poems to create story, yet he is focused on experience, never letting the prosody be the foundation of a poem. Instead he speaks to the world, especially speaking to the surface. This is not to say that he isn't colloquially "deep," rather that there is no "under" to understanding in these poems. His poem "Reflects" closes:

Literally everything that happened
to bend your vectored view

suffusing red. Make all allowances
you like and need to move through.

Across the way they see things there
we are.

The first poem in the chapbook, "Pax," closes in this similar way: "Someone told us to go stand// behind a large piece of earth/ and we did. It's that simple." It's these kind of closures that reinforce the active moment of personal experience & I think in a poetic culture that presumes to constantly speak beyond the individual experience these reinforcements are important & (better yet) elegantly done. This is not poetry of the individual attempting to recreate the world, but poems that try to make sense of the difference (if there is one) between seeming and being.

Also, Harmstorm would make a killer name for a D&D wizard. He'd be chaotic evil, of course.

My Favorite Typo

Manguage

Jack Spicer Action Figure

Description: Jack Spicer, aka Evil Boy Genius. A rich spoiled super-villain wannabe who has dreamt of world conquest since the 2nd grade.

Anyone Feeling Generous?

I guarantee it'll be cheaper than that VU acetate

I'm not sure.

Can a blog devoted to covers of Wham's "Last Christmas" keep me from working on a philosophy paper? Apparently so.

The Difference Between Black Metal & Post Hardcore is Joni Mitchell

Youtube is one of the things I hate about the internet, or really my own addled attention-span in relation ot the internet. I'm working on a paper, but keep getting distracted by youtube, but, as always, I found some really great stuff.

Malefic from Xasthur with Nachtmystium, you need to look beyond the fashion choices & hear the chiming, droning, My Bloody Valentine-ish quality of this beautiful, beautiful music.








And here is full set by City of Caterpillar a Richmond, VA post hardcore band from early in the decade. They mixed an epic Godspeed sound with the basement immediacy of screaming hardcore & while that might sound pat, they played one of the best rock shows I've ever been witness to.




And Joni Mitchell tearing me apart with a 1970 performance of "Blue."