The Renaissance Sheet by Lily Brown

Hand-bound chapbooks. Dynamite poems. These will be for sale in Atlanta at AWP, so stop by our table & pick one up.

Ben McQuillan designed these beauties. They might be a bit hard to see in the image above because they are dry-embossed by letter press on some nice, luscious paper. You have to see & touch them to get the full effect.

Lily Brown wrote the poems. You've seen them in Typo, Fence, 42 Opus & Octopus. They are so very, very good. I can't wait for you to read them. And then reread them. And then be all "damn that was good!" And then call your best friend & read them all the poems over the phone.

I ate some chocolates today.

Good ones.

Now you are the jealous one, Ms. Jealousy.

Black Ocean, No Tell Books, Octopus Books & Pilot Books: Apache Cafe in Atlanta, Sat March 3, 7pm

%100% DYNAMITE BLOW UP! %100%







Saturday night of the AWP conference in Atlanta: last chance for a slow dance.

Octopus will be part of an incredible reading/party, which will be again at Apache Cafe.

Julie Doxsee & Lily Brown will be batting for Octopus.

No Tell Books will attempt to dominate by numbers.

Pilot Books have been blood-doping for months in preparation.

I hear Black Ocean are sneaking in a ringer, rumour is that it's Rod Carew!

Saturday, March 3rd at 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Party to follow.
Apache Cafe,
64 3rd Street. NW,
Atlanta, GA (404-876-5436)

Black Ocean (www.blackocean.org) brings together a spectrum of
influences—from silent films to punk rock—and manifests that
aesthetic in the books we print, the shows we produce, and the work
we promote. In conjunction with our book releases, we stage parties,
concerts, exhibitions and other celebrations around the country. Our
readers will include Zachary Schomburg and Paula Cisewski.

No Tell Books (www.notellbooks.org) is an independent press
specializing in poetry founded in 2006 by Reb Livingston, publisher
and editor of No Tell Motel (www.notellmotel.org). Their readers will
include: Bruce Covey, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Shafer Hall, Reb
Livingston, Karl Parker, Ravi Shankar, Laurel Snyder.

Octopus Books (www.octopusbooks.net) is a small press launched by the
editors of Octopus Magazine. It publishes two full-length books of
poems each year, in addition to solicited chapbooks, broadsides from
poems published in Octopus Magazine, and other projects. Octopus #8,
a set of 8 chapbooks, is currently available. Also, chapbooks from
Lily Brown and Jonah Winter, and a full-length book of poems from
Julie Doxsee are forthcoming. Reading for Octopus tonight are: Julie
Doxsee and Lily Brown.

Pilot Books (www.pilotpoetry.com) is the paper cousin of the online
poetry magazine Pilot. We strive to publish innovative work, and
believe that innovative work demands innovative design. All of our
limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides are designed and printed in
ways unique and luminous to the manuscript itself. We use fine papers
and construct all books by hand. Authors who will read: Lori Shine,
Friedrich Kerksieck and Anthony Robinson.

Mark Lawrence Stafford

I was tickled by the latest issue of New American Painting; I thought the last one was pretty weak, but this one had about ten artists whose work I dug. I found the work of Mark Lawrence Stafford, an artist from Brooklyn, especially interesting. His pieces in the issue were like the one above, landscapes employing typed repetitions of the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” In an immediate way I liked the composition of the pieces but the use of the typing allowed me to care about a landscape composition in a way that I don’t tend to. I have nothing against landscape painting; I just don’t tend to find it interesting. The use of language makes it cross over into concrete poetry for me, things like NH Pritchard’s Matrix & such. And the use of that particular sentence as the elements of landscape kind of blows my mind. In his artist’s statement Stafford points out the tension between the playful narrative of the sentence & the testing of human ability for the purpose of efficient commoditization. That’s part of it, but also the repetition of typing, of the common sentence becomes a way of envisioning an environment. The repetetion depletes semantics of sense, instead reforming the words into a representation of space. These are some of the tings that come to mind when I see this. I want to see more of his work.

Jake Gillespie Animations at Concordia University Brommer Art Hall: Tonight at 8 PM in Sewrd, Nebraska

See Jake's video pieces on the big screen. Bring popcorn & Nutter Butters. Bring a pail full of Crystal Light to bribe the guards. Bring a shiv. Hide a razor below your tongue.

Jake has a dvd available at Gomez & Spindle. If you live in Lincoln you should buy it there. If you live outside of Lincoln (loser!) you should contact Jake through his website & get yourself a copy.

I'm sorry I called you a loser.

I meant to call you a lobster.

But you are a lobsterman.

Top Ten No-Fancy-Pantsin' Movies Meme

Top 10 Movies Meme
I got tagged by Logan Ryan Smith

Top ten movies without attempting attempting to flaunt one's high level of aesthetic engagement. Or, as I interperet it, top ten movies you might pop in the dvd player when things are all screwed up in your life & you want to watch something you know every word to. The kind of film you can start at any part of it & be fine with watching it from that point on.

No particular order, of course:

1. Royal Tennenbaums
2. Jaws
3. Wet Hot American Summer
4. Instrument--the Fugazi documentary
5. 8 1/2
6. Big Night
7. Conan the Barbarian
8. The Shining
9. Ronin
10. Surviving Desire

Runners Up: Cache, Usual Suspects, 2001, The Weather Underground documentary, Strangers on a Train, Bridges of Madison County, La Dolce Vita, Going My Way, Friday Night Lights, Basquiat, Rushmore, Sid & Nancy, Predator, Seven Samurai, Solaris (the original), The Third Man, Holiday Inn, LA Confidential, Chinatown, The Hulk

I notice that a lot of these films are highly masculine in nature, I wonder if this kind of comfort-watching of films is for me a process of reifying my manliness. Not Holiday Inn, maybe, but even there it's the Binger that I like, who is a icon of a particular form of American masculinity. I am extremely masculine.

I tag Earth, Air, Fire & Water

The So & So South

Along with many of your favorite poets, I am going to be reading at this event in Atlanta. It's an off-campus reading at Apache Cafe. I am the guest of the lovely & talented Kitchen Press.

Josip Novakovich Reading Canceled and Rescheduled

Hey Lincolnites, you need new plans for tonight. Michael says this:

Josip Novakovich's plane was unable to take off from State College, PA this morning. As a result we have to reschedule his Q+A and reading at Nebraska Wesleyan. Novakovich's reading and Q+A, scheduled for today, have been canceled.

Instead, Josip Novakovich will talk about the craft of fiction and answer questions about his work and the literature of the former Yugoslavia at 1pm, Thursday, March 8th, in Alabaster Lounge, 203 Old Main, on the Nebraska Wesleyan Campus. He will read from his novel April Fool's Day and his most recent collection Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust on 7pm, March 8th in Callen Conference Center, Smith-Curtis Building.

Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere

I'm in no way intimately familiar with the comic world, but this kind of purely lyric comic is strange & wonderfully new to me.

Order it for cheap from Sullivan's blog

I Am A Fan of New Age Music

I'm sick. I have been cycling back & forth on a fever. My head is stuffed full of pink insulation material. Being in this state makes me want to listen to new age music, like the latest Lisa Gerard album, The Silver Tree & Michael Hoppé's Requiem. Soothing music for aching heads. I remember when my mother would listen to Vangelis records around the house when I was a kid & I really dug it, then she took a path that one cannot return from, the path of Manheim Steamroller. I love those old Tangerine Dream records & the ambient Eno stuff & I love a lot of musicians who have follwoed in that path. And obviously new age music is a direct descendent of that world, but once something gets categorized as "New Age" I tend to reject it, even if it is working with the same palatte as some Kranky Records band that Stylus Magazine adores. No more! From here on out, or at least until my fever breaks for good, I vow to never shy away from my affection for the swirling positivity of new age music.

Apparently This Is My Super Power

Anyone whom I link to on my blog will have a pie graph show up in Google-image searches of them. I don't know why this happens. I believe it is because I was bitten by a radioactive .gif of a pie graph. I believe that when my mother was pregnant with me she had a bad case of pie graph fever. I believe it is genetic but also contagious.


In other news the Rhys Chatham record A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars) is as good as you have heard. I'm glad there has been such a big response to this latest round of reissues & new issues of his stuff. I don't know much about him, but when I first heard An Angel Moves Too Fast To See I felt like I had the transcendent response that people talked about having with Branca's music, which I always found a bit calculated (though I've never heard any of it live).

Also, Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Word Blues" might be the best song ever.

David Heatley & Diane Wakoski

I just found this poetry/comic collaboration, part of a series of them that I guess the Poetry Foundation is doing. Looks pretty great. Heatley was the same guy who did the cover of The New Yorker last week.

Nebraska Wesleyan Spring Fiction Series

Michael Dumanis has set up a great series of writers for the Wesleyan Spring Fiction Series. Here's his message about them:

The series will kickoff this Thursday, February 22 with author Josip Novakovich. The Croatian-born Pennsylvania State University professor is the author of three short story collections (Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, and Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust); two collections of narrative essays (Plum Brandy: Croatian Journeys and Apricots from Chernobyl) the textbook Fiction Writer's Workshop (which was a National Book of the Month Club selection), and the novel, April Fool's Day. Novakovich has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. A question and answer session will be held at 3:30 p.m. in Alabaster Lounge, located on the second floor of Old Main. His reading will begin at 7 p.m. in Callen Conference Center, located in the lower level of the Smith-Curtis Administration Building, one block east of 50th & St. Paul Ave.

The following writers are scheduled for March and April:

Thursday, March 29: Bapsi Sidhwa, author of six books including Cracking India, which was made into the 1999 film, Earth, by Indian director Deepa Mehta. Sidhwa has been lauded as Pakistan's finest novelist and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe. Sidhwa will give a public lecture at 1 p.m. in O?Donnell Auditorium, 50th and Huntington Ave. and a reading at 7 p.m. in Callen Conference Center. A screening of the film, Earth, will be held on Wednesday, March 28 at 7 p.m. in Olin B Lecture Hall, located in the Olin Hall of Science.

Thursday, April 5: Cary Holladay, professor at the University of Memphis, is the author of a novel, Mercury, and three collections of short stories, The People Down South, The Palace of Wasted Footsteps, and The Quick Change Artist. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and an O. Henry Prize. A question and answer session will be held at 3:30 p.m. in Alabaster Lounge. Her reading will begin at 7 p.m. in Callen Conference Center.

Thursday, April 19: Julie Orringer, the Helen Hertzog Zell Profesor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, is the author of the short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Northern California Book Award. Her Q+A will be at 3:30 pm in Alabaster Lounge, 203 Old Main, and her reading will be held at 7 p.m. in Callen Conference Center.

Moebius Poetry, Elisa Gabbert, Sommer Browning

This is what I like more & more lately about poetry: its ability to step through itself. To turn itself inside out, allowing for multiple solid foundations on which one can build meaning & understanding. I’m using these metaphors rather than the creation of a field or matrix, as I think it is something inherently in the text that allows for these things, rather than the public engagement of the text, language & image. It is in the prosodic craft that these moments of stepping & turning happen. This function for poetry is why I believe it to warrant a greater level of theoretical attention in regards to this kind of multiplicity. It is the text itself that is in play in poetry. And by poetry I mean, of course, poetry that I like. Not that other crap.

I was talking about this last week, off & on in conversation & in class. I kept being knocked out by poems & then when I tried to figure out what was knocking me out it was this action of turning itself inside out. Then I had a brief chat with my friend mark about a poem of mine & it made me realize that I was attempting to do this myself. So I thought I'd try to express what I'm thinking about--though that always leaves open the possibility that what I was thinking was interesting is in fact somewhat commonplace, which is possible here.

Certainly the poetry of Armantrout, Howe & other such poets who are actively working toward a new aesthetic of multiplicity is an example of this in action but it is a move that is not limited to willfully avant-garde writers. I think it is my love, my childlike & childish love of Larry Levis that also makes me look for this kind of move. And that’s what it is, not a mindset or an approach or an ideological approach. It’s like a dance move you see someone doing at the club & then you notice that everyone is doing it & then you notice that you’re doing it. And it is this is the part of poetry that I think can be usefully taught, though the writing of good poetry can not be taught & only reasoned. You know, when you’re at the club.

Elisa Gabbert is doing it via the epistolary in her poem “Blogpoem for April” that originally appeared on The Steinach Operation, then was further extended through realpoetik & is now the first poem in her very cool chapbook Thanks for Sending the Engine from Kitchen Press

You can’t invent a color, only name it,
like how I just named those contrails Benjamin
and then the sky behind them Benjamin II.
Now, retronymically, I refer to Ben as Ben I.
If he becomes famous, they’ll stop calling
clouds “clouds” and call them “nonlinear
clouds” or “pre-Benjamin” for clarity.
I can think about fame all day, and
compose apologies for my friends’ friends
who I’ve variously snubbed, write them
into emails with personalized P.S.’s:
P.S. My love for you extends forever
in all directions, or sometimes seems to.
P.S. I include a swatch of Yves Klein blue.
P.S. If the sky is a piano store and clouds
are baby grands, we just hang out in the back
and listen to a Casiotone’s preprogrammeds.
P.S. This P.S. is my email’s last will
and testament. It’s leaving everything
to you. P.S. Like my love for you,
like the infinite crystalline watchface of
God of the sky, my email will never die.

The epistle form seems to set up the idea & then the extension of the idea, but it is the second PS where I start having to renegotiate my whole relationship with this poem. The line “P.S. I include a swatch of Yves Klein blue.” makes the form of the poem collapse, pulling the self-aware meta-move of the poem’s first half into a thing, a concrete object. Free, floating, objectively correlate, it somehow becomes a moment of complete honesty in the otherwise rangy poem. After that there are multiple tones working at the same time, each one of which I have to negotiate with individually.

Sommer Browing does the dance move through metaphor in her poem “Mechanics of Deformable Bodies” that is in the latest issue of Free Verse:

There is a rest in our conversation. So I breathe
loudly, roll down the window to hear what it's like
outside. It's like
noisy. A kind of noise accompanied by leaving. A kind
of leaving noise. A door slam. A coffin. Imagine

a man signing a check, his pen stabs a decimal point, the number 34,
scribbled small above

black spider waiting in the corner.

The poem steps through itself at the moment when the metaphors for leaving sounds extends into the narrative of the man writing the check. Prior to that we have a somewhat standard emotionally grounded narrative. The “like” turn is clever, but works to disrupt the tone for me, though it returns quickly to the more melodramatic examples of the slamming door, the coffin. Familiar & if the poem ended with those I would not have thought about it much. But the parallel structure has us expecting the third example of the noise (and the familiarity of lists of threes in things, which is a different discussion). It provides a noise, the scratching of pen on paper, but then the poem enters this world. It is no longer a metaphor, instead the poem has moved into the metaphor. That delights me, but what I think makes this poem really special is that it leaves away from even this action. The stanza breaks, the syntax fails & we are left with a spider. Metaphor for the decimal? Sure. But also an innocuous detail in the room where the man is sitting paying his bills. And then the final period closes the sentence. That same dot.

I think that part of the game in this Moebius move is in the establishment of a stable form & then the forcible renegotiation of it. So it has to be a move that shakes the whole work of the poem but also creates more connectivity through the shaking. When I think of the rhetorical situation of a poem it seems to me that there is a point at which the reader & text interact that is fluid. Some poems ask you to look at a scene with them, some ask you to look at language with them, etc. These poems ask you to look at something that transforms in front of you. And ultimately, this is something I want out of poetry, a space that can accurately reflect the churning set of lines of flight in my lived experience.

Octopus T-Shirts

T-Shirts!

Designed & printed by the wonderful Joey Lynch

Contemporary poetry as a sullen child who won't do what it's told

They were stuck in the back room waiting for a shelf tag.

As I think I've already mentioned here about a thousand times I heart Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse. I wanted to use the chapbook in my po-po class, but it has been a two-month-long saga to get those chapbooks. First I had to explain the fact that they did not have isbns to three different people on three different occasions. Then they did not order the chapbooks because they did not have isbns. Then when I hounded them I had to explain to a new set of people about the lack of isbns. I had to give them Scott Pierce's email address multiple times. Then last week the books finally came in. I got a phone call & two emails from people announcing their arrival. I was stopped in the halls by the absolutely wonderful woman who works in the English department office handling book orders & other things, she told me with a wide, joyful smile, that the books were in. So today, preparing to prep my students for reading it, i though I'd go check on the chapbooks. They were not on my shelf at the bookstore. The extremely patient woman who handles orders & I wandered around the bookstore to see if they'd been mis-shelved, while the speakers played Bon Jovi's "Shot Through the Heart." Three people there attested to having seen them arrive, had seen the actual books with their actual eyes, but the chapbooks had mysteriously disappeared. I went to my class & switched our schedule around so that we're reading Laura Sims next instead. After class I got two emails & a phone call saying that the chapbooks are on the shelf. I have not yet verified this. I write this out of joy that they are supposedly here & available. I write this out of fear that they might have again disappeared. I write this because I wonder how often people's books get caught up in this kind of adventure.

Lost Hyacinths, Blank Domino Tiles

Matthew Henriksen has a interesting discussion of the toxicity of Greenpoint & two of the Octopus Chapbooks here.

Chris Higgs has a pic of the eight hanging with his kittie.
Chris Tonelli has a pic of them watching some Sportscenter.
It's true what you've heard, Chrises love the Octopus Chapbooks.

Chapbooks are like cat burglars. They sneak into your penthouse & steal your most valuable jewels, leaving behind only a faint scent of musk & a lip print on a champagne glass.

New Lifetime

I have a thing against reunion bands. An irrational thing. A thing that feels annoyed when a band I love gets back together & suddenly I have to revise the version of them I have in my head. There was a point in the late 90s when my entire head was a place for holding Lifetime melodies. I made a tape of the two records for my friend Forrest (or maybe Robert made the tape), both records on one side of the tape. He was a paralegal for Ken Starr, that Ken Starr, during that part of the late 90s & he told me that he was on a steady diet of burnt coffee & headphones full of Lifetime. We laughed. He worked about 90 hours a week. I worked less than that but wore suits to work. By day I dreamed of the nights when I could be drunk & in love, by day I had Lifetime playing on my company computer, a bulky IBM that always smelled like burning plastic. I have a thing against reunion bands. In a decade memories grow solid. They become the furniture on which we sit, the plates off which we eat. Sometimes at cheap restaurants I see glasses fresh from the dishwasher with corroded sets of lipstick kissing the rim.

Update:

After a couple of listens this record is no Hello Bastards or Jersey's Best Dancers. It is, however, a comfortable third-best record rather than a total stinker. It's a rehash but not an embarassing rehash. The production has been compressed to all hell, which makes it much tamer. Ari's voice has less of that thing I couldn't get enough of, that sound like he might turn into a skink at any moment. The drums don't seem to be racing the band as much. It could be a hundred bands who've ripped off Lifetime but it isn't. If it wasn't Lifetime & this record came out right now I doubt I'd be interested. But it is & I am.

Denver Quarterly, Ekphrasticalism, Essayism & Sandy Florian

I got the new Denver Quarterly in the mail yesterday. I feel tremendously honored to be in such good company. Great poems by Hadara Bar-Nadav, Tony Tost & many others. My po-po students were really dead today in class. It's snowy here & many of them were absent but I was all psyched about the class & the more they failed to engage the more frustrated I got. That's a bad teacher for you. We were discussing the work of ekphrastic poetry & I was thinking about the space that is created by the outside text. It is, I think more fundamentally or overtly than other objects of attention, the opening into a matrix of meaning. One cannot present a reading of or response to a piece of art without the assumption that there are multiple potential reactions to the same piece. Ekphrasis assumes its own inability to comprehensively assert.

And yet criticism doesn't necessarily do this--much of criticism is about the attempt to create a stable interpretation (even when the stable interpretation is one that invites a multiplicity, which is a whole different dark closet). To me this is what ekphrastic poetry does that criticism oftentimes fails to do--which is yet another reason that Cole Swensen's The Glass Age is so delightful to me lately. It is essayistic, without being assertive in a manner that excludes more potential.

I think Sandy Florian's Telescope works in a similar manner with respect to the dictionary. I said in my intro to her reading on Saturday that her work crosses between poetry, fiction & essay. I know that this hybridity is somewhat de rigeur today, or at the very least not shocking. However I think Florian's hybridity does something more fascinating than the typical crossover between essay & poetry, which tends to wed an essayistic approach to ideas with a lyric approach to attention. It rescues the idea of a word from from the dictionary stability, similarly though fundamentally differently than Harryette Mullen & Marisol Limon Martinez. Florian does not move to the absurd or inventive (in the sense of a new creation) but mines the mulitple definitions of a thing as it is commonly used in the world while pushing the definitions outside of their categorization.

You might think I put this a bit heroically to say she "rescues" but do think it is heroic, because she remakes the words through their own established definitions. And it's thrilling to read & hear these poems. I've read those poems quite a few times & each time the syntax puts me to work (check these out if you haven't read them). But hearing her read them on Saturday was an entirely new way of understanding how she connects the sets of information. I had previously heard them as full of challenging halts, but she read them fluidly & passionately & it made me fall for those poems all over again. But then again I totally fell for Sommer's poems as well. And Julie's. It's a good think one doesn't need to maintain any sense of monogamy in poetry.

The Clean Part

Thanks to Sommer Browning, Sandy Florian & Julie Doxsee for coming to Lincoln to give an absolutely incredible poetry reading. My recommendation is that you cancel all your plans for about a month, hide in the basement with a set of votive candles, reading their poems & subsisting on a diet of ritz crackers & powerade. After that you will finally be able to call your self a real American.

Here are some pictures from The Clean Part & The Clean Part-y


Sommer reading from her fabulous series revolving around UFC & malls.


Sommer, Me, Sandy & Zach discussing the ideology of serial poetry.


Sandy & Zach find out that they both adore Lorine Niedecker—what a coincidence!


Julie reading from The Knife-Grasses


Sandy reading from Telescope


Zach saying goodbye to the audience while holding a pail of scissors.


Anthony, Zach, Carlin, Julie, Sommer, Sandy, Jeff, Jessica, Tim, Cody & Another Person at the Hawley residence.

Thanks to A & B for hosting a lovely get-together afterwards & their beautiful new place.

Old Schoolchildren & Old Schoolmarms

Sommer B.

Sommer Browning has a poem in the new Free Verse that is going to snooker you.

The Clean Part: Sat. Feb. 10, 2007. 7pm:

Just when you thought that Lincoln wouldn't have another poetry reading featuring three innovative & exciting poets, The Clean Part returns, featuring three innovative & exciting poets.

Next Saturday: Sandy Florian, Sommer Browning & Julie Doxsee

At the Sheldon Gallery.

Read more about these three & link to samples of their work at The Clean Part site.

Thanks to Ben for the poster. What says innovative & exciting poetry more than a snake with rubies for eyes shooting laser beams out of its ruby-eyes?

(That was not a rhetorical question.)

Elisa Gabbert's Thanks for Sending the Engine is now available from Kitchen Press.

Alisa

Alisa is the best intern in the world. In other worlds there are interns that are of comparable quality. But in ours she is the best. If you disagree with me you will be wrong. Unless you live in another world. In which case you might be correct. Though I doubt you are correct.

If you are an intern & you are not Alisa & you do not live in another world I am sorry but you are not as good as Alisa is. I imagine you are pretty good. Alisa is better.

Remember how you had a great day last Wednesday & you went for a nice walk & went to the library & just kind of poked around & then you had a really productive evening? Do you remember that?

Alisa not only had a better, more enjoyable & more productive day, she also made homemade boysenberry-rum sorbet in a hand-cranked ice cream maker. And her arm wasn't even tired.

I Have Five Things in My Knapsack

1.


Kerri Sonnenberg


Brandon Shimoda

I finally got a chance to read Dusie 5, which has been up & at 'em for about a week now. So much rockin' poetry. I've been in heaven these past two weeks, a heaven that involves a lot of looking at great poems in new issues of journals.

2.

The latest issue of Pleiades (who need to update their webpage) has a killer opening poem that you should check out: “Landscape with Suicides” by John Gallaher.

3.



The new Caetano Veloso record, Ce, is scrumptious. For more on Veloso, visit the houseboat-sitter. Also, Labyrinth Books has very affordable copies of his lovely memoir of the tropicalia movement.

4.


The Exploding Star Orchestra record is a very nice record but will neither bedevil nor bedazzle you. And yet it is good for the ears & other such items.

5.


The Candian black metal band Wold's new album Screech Owl is a disturbing & somewhat disgusting delight.