Remember When: Vol 11

Can we name our refrigerator Carol?

Remember When: Vol 10

Remember blogs?

Remember When: Vol 9

Do you remember when everyone was watching that movie Traffic & how that year all the first-born males in America were named Traffic?

Remember When: Vol 8

Remember when you were the most beautiful pony in dog years?

Remember When: Vol 7

Remember when People used to say "Suck it ugly; I'm so beautiful I barf butterflies"?

Remember When: Vol 6

Remember when people used to live inside buildings?

Remember When: Vol 5

Remember when people used to use the phrase "hold on a moment"?

Remember When: Vol 4

When when microscopes could talk about sickles?

Remember When: Vol 3

Remember when people were made out of tinfoil & teabags?

Remember When: Vol. 2

Remember when people listened to that Jesus Jones song in convertible Chrysler Sebrings?

Remember When: Vol. 1

Remember when This American Life was kind of exciting?

Blogging in Bed

Just got home from seeing Pocahaunted. They were pretty great. When I thought about moving from Nebraska to New York, I remember thinking that I'd be able to see bands I like who'd never stop in Lincoln, bands like Pocahaunted.

What I love about them is the event-creation of their music. Not only knowing that it's all improvised, but that they are trying to find the entrancing moment in the music, the spot where the experience becomes more than what the music could be

Now I've seen them. They're playing again Friday with Robedoor. Oh, & Nadja & The Grails are playing tomorrow night, but I'll be in NC both nights, so no rock for me.

Here are some videos of readings I haven't posted until now:


Zach at the NYPL




Zach & Emily reading collabs at Pete's (E's face is mostly covered by the paper b/c I wasn't paying attention to the screen--sorry)




Genya Turovskaya reading some incredible new work (with too much background noise from the bar part of Pete's):

The House is Black

This is most of the film The House is Black made by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. It's an extraordinary film that I'd never heard of until a few days ago. The film has the lyric sense to its editing that Chris Marker's San Soleil has (& not coincidentally, there's a brief piece of writing in the booklet to the dvd). Farrokhzad was something of a wild woman by 50s Iranian standards, which apparently meant being publicly unashamed to be a woman.

I don't know much about her beyond what you could find quickly in a google search, but this film really strikes me. Not only in the juxtaposition of the degraded bodies of the lepers with the metaphysical yearning of the poetry & religious action, but the way it looks closely at a subject & through looking closely sees the subject in swerve. Truly beautiful.

There is an extremely adoring & well-meaning website of poetry by Farrokhzad. Some of the translations are a bit tinny, but I'm pretty taken with this poem:


Only the sound will last

Why should I mind, why?
Birds fled to the aquatic side,
Sphere is vertical,
Sphere is vertical
and move: rise and fall.

At the borders of sight, bright stars rotate,
The earth stands steady seen from the heights,
All black holes are altered to confined circuits and links,
And day is an unknown vastness
to the contracted wits of paper-worms.

Why should I mind, why?
The route has to cut
across the veins of life.
Don’t you see?
The cultivation stand of moon doesn’t agree
with the disposition of defective cells.

In the ambiance of sunrise, only sound,
only sound will adhere the active quantum of time.

Why should I mind, why?

Why this inert bog is there, why?
Isn’t it just to amass the mass of vicious bugs?

Don’t you see?
Those decomposed corpses had shaped
all thoughts of this freezing morgue.
In the dark, infirm creatures veil
and insects talk.

Why should I mind, why?

Don’t you see?
Printed sheets will not prolong,
the short life of a pathetic thought.

I am progeny of trees,
I cannot breathe in contaminated air.
And a dying bird reminded me the flight.

Don’t you see?
The feat is to reach the bright gates of sun.
And it is to surge into the consciousness of light,
And it is to watch aged windmills dieing out
in the releasing vacuity of space.

Why should I mind, why?
I milk unripe clusters of wheat with the warmth of my breasts.

Sound, sound, only sound,
Sound of clear calls of ice to flow
Sound of stroke of shines
on the feminine limb of earth
Sound of fertilized sense
Sound of the expanding love
Sound, sound, sound,
Only the sound will last.

In the land of dwarfs, scales are small,
Why should I mind, why?

Don’t you see?
I act upon roots of truth
And the constitution of my soul
overruled the bounded jurisdiction of the blind.

Don’t tell me about lengthy, wild, howls,
and about those pitiful genitals of animals.
Don’t tell me about the sorry twist of worms
in the emptiness of limbs.

Legacy of martyred flowers committed me to life,
Legacy of martyred flowers,
Don’t you see?

Forget Reading

My review of Anthony Hawley's Forget Reading is up at the Cutbank reviews site.

Update

I got the new Lil Wayne.

I know you all were worried.

Don't worry.

I got it.

La Monte Young:The Second Dream of the HighTension Line Step

Two Things That Happened This Wek

Biking downhill beside the cemetery on 5th Ave a pigeon flew up in front of me & hit my head. Not hard, not Fabio-on-a-roller-coaster hard, more of a grazing, but it was still much closer than I want to be to any Brooklyn pigeons.



Walking to meet JP i saw two guys loading drums into a stairwell:

Guy 1: I heard they're on Elijah Wood's record label.
Guy 2: Elijah Wood has a record label?
Guy 1: Yeah.
Guy 2: Huh... but they seemed like cool guys.

I Saw a Documetary Called Mongol Last Night & This is What I Learned

Temüjin was born Yvette Marie Stevens in Great Lakes, Illinois to Charles Stevens and Sandra Coleman around 1162. The Secret History of the Mongols purports that Temüjin was born with a blood clot grasped in his fist, an indication in the traditional Mongolian folklore that he was destined to become a great leader. He was the third-eldest son of his father Yesükhei, a minor tribal chief of the Kiyad and an ally of Ong Khan of the Kerait tribe, and the eldest son of his mother Hoelun. According to the Secret History, Temüjin was named after a Tatar chieftain that his father had just captured. The name also suggests that they may have descended from a family of blacksmiths. After quitting high school in 1969, Temujin joined the group Lyfe, soon exiting that group to join another dance band, The Babysitters; neither enjoyed any success, but fortunes changed when he teamed with ex-American Breed member Kevin Murphy and Andre Fischer to form Rufus.

Debuting in 1973 with a self-titled album on the ABC label, Rufus was among the most successful funk groups of the decade. With the help of Stevie Wonder, Rufus broke into both the pop music and R&B charts in 1974 with the hit "Tell Me Something Good". Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the band had a number of R&B hits, including "Tell Me Something Good", "Masterjam", "Sweet Thing", "Do You Love What You Feel?", and "Once You Get Started". The group earned half a dozen gold or platinum albums and two gold singles with "Tell Me Something Good" and "Sweet Thing" before Khan went solo in 1978.

Harp & Altar: issue 4

Check it.

Then check it again.

Motive

Motive

by Moikom Zeqo
trans by Wayne Miller

Where is the conch
I once blew
with the lips of the seasons?

Inside each olive tree
is the anchor
of an old sea fable.

I’m standing in the surf
with my hair
in the stars.

Please! Don’t read
what I’ve written
on a hundred horizons.

Pick up the shells,
the bones of my music.



from I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

Salvatore Giuliano

About 15 minutes into Salvatore Giuliano the rebels/bandits perform their first political attack. The crew are hanging out in a public square, spaced throughout the field of the frame so that their attentive nonchalance is a threat in itself. One man plays a jew’s harp & its incongruously playful harmonics offset the poised bandits.

It’s the kind of scene that’s been co-opted by Scorsese & his imitators so much that the particular nature of its tension feels cliché by virtue of its influence. But then the target exits the building. Someone whistles. The lights are cut & the screen goes black.

Then something uncanny happens. Something that makes me totally lose it. The rifles fire. One in the foreground & at least one deeper in the square. The square is lit by the rapid shots of the rifles -- one flash is so bright that the square is completely illuminated for a moment. The black screen residually retains the details of the flashed square.

It’s the kind of moment in a piece of art that means more than the entire whole, in which the moment is eternally becoming despite the telos of the entirety. Like Jesus’ limp fingers in the Calling of St Matthew. When Kevin Shields steps on some series of pedals & the gravity drops. Those rifles flashes lurch a momentary understanding. The violence lights the scene. The setting flashes & becomes a burn of detail in fragments & the crackling of lodestones.

It is this way & then the next morning there is nothing but bloodstains on the cobblestones, the alarm clock ringing, the heaviness of morning dew & the inevitable ground up glass beside the highway.

Obama / Kid Rock 08

That's my suggestion for VP

Reading Last Weekend

Elisa Gabbert





Amy King





Mike Young





Leigh Stein





Tao Lin

When Ill

One Way No Exit, by GC Waldrep

You need this.

Lincoln in NYC

Zach Schomburg Reads

Tonight at 6:30 at theNew York Public Library, Jefferson Market Branch
425 Sixth Ave (at 9th St)

Friday at 7 at Pete's Candy Store
with Emily Frey, Genya Turovskaya & Genine Lentine



UUVVWWZ plays

Saturday at The Cake Shop, 8pm
with Hearts of Darkness, The Show is the Rainbow & Professor Murder

New From Kitchen Press

Tentative List (A), by Thomas David Lisk. You can find a selection from the book here www.kitchenpresschapbooks.blogspot.com/ and purchase it here www.kitchen-press-book-store.blogspot.com/

Early Summer Superlatives

Most Likely to Be the Best Records for Packing Up & Cleaning an Apartment

Bach’s St Matthew Passion
Agalloch: Ashes Against The Grain
Wolves in the Throne Room: both
Mind of Asian: Chinmoku No Kiri No Naka
The Pine: Homeless Life
Gypsy: s/t

Most Likely to Be the Best Records for Driving from the Geographic Center of America to Brooklyn

The Roots: Rising Down
Pekos/Yoro Diallo: s/t
Pocahaunted: Island Diamonds
Orthodox: Amanecer en Puerta Oscura
Giuseppe Ielasi: Gesine
Miriam Backhouse: Gypsy Without A Road
Natural Snow Building: The Dance of the Moon and the Sun
Omar Souleyman: Highway To Hassake
Aesop Rock: None Shall Pass
Silverfox: Middle Class Taste Test
Ghostlimb: s/t

Most Likely to Be the Best Records for Reading Anonymous Manuscripts

Orthodox: Amanecer en Puerta Oscura
Nemeth: Film
Taylor Duepree: Northern

Most Likely to Be the Best Record I Didn’t Think I Liked at All in Nebraska but Now I Like a Lot

Howlin Rain: Magnificent Fiend

Most Likely to be No Joke

I want the new Lil Wayne real bad.

Hotels

I've been reading Andrew Mister's chapbook Hotels from Fewer & Further Press. At their best these poems use prosody as a surface tension above some kind of acrid sea. The lines are stately & confident, but undercut by caesuras & enjambment. This reflects the disrupting layers of idea & memory & emotion the poems point toward. Check how this poem jumps wildly from the public to the intimate, while maintaining its cool via the prosody:

Robert Desnos is Dreaming

Open your eyes. The gendarme
fighting along the border
cuts a passageway to the right

ventricle, removing the words
by hand. He continues until
our clothes are warm and damp

at his feet. is the gendarme the light
crawling this crual difference
between us? The heart beats

back. I don't know which
is worse, to wake up or
keep sleeping. At least I know

what my heart is for.
"No, you don't," she says.
And she's right, I don't.

These poems have a kind of James Wright or early Bly feel to them, poems of memory and experience that attempt to move the reader through the experience to a place of tactile emotion. But the allusiveness & smarts in these poems shows a bit of the difference between what those 70s guys were doing & what Mister is up to. Those deep image dudes had a kind of undigested belief in the metaphysical importance of the experience & the image as vehicle of the reading experience. They assumed their own importance. If they wrote a poem about mailing a letter in the snow you were supposed to for some reason believe that their banal experience is important simply because they attended to it. It's partially coming out of the Zen influence, but it's also a matter of self aggrandizement. Mister's poems here, like in the Liner Notes series, may have the music of a deep image poet but they respond to the fractured nature of identity, memory & public performance of emotion through the layering of ripped up pieces of the self & the other. Check how the poem "Poem ending with a line overheard outside El Rio" begins:

Someone walked out into another day's blue

By someone I mean anyone other than me

At the flip of a switch the light bulbs burst

Cocteau Used a car radio on account of

Bathroom light can be so unflattering

Watching veins sink into her chest

As she breathes in the bleach

The first line could be a Wright line, then the second both undercuts that romanticism & also forces the individual "real" voice of the speaker. But then the next two lines seem like a cut & paste to get energy out of the juxtaposition, of course a very Cocteau kind of move. It's both an homage & a clever moment. But then the cleverness becomes a scene of an actual moment, cue the effective bathos with the veins & harsh chemicals. He goes on later in the poem to say "We traded another day's blue for darkness / Meaning I slept all day and when I awoke / Light shook out of the fixtures like water[.]" The jumps in this poem are more disruptive, but they continue to bring the poem back to a speaker who does not believe in the self he could create himself as. The poem layers attempts at stable memory just as "Robert Desnos is Dreaming" layers the attempt to identify through a public model with the private inability to do so.

What keeps me rereading these poems is how they are consistently calm. Rather than writing this layering as a violent disjunction of language or an attempt to use language to perform the epiphanic, he chooses a pared down & quiet prosody. It's this that makes Mister's writing so interesting to me: he meshes the beautiful clarity of Wright with the ideological problems of individual experience in the pluralizing marketplace of the self.

There is nothing more boring than someone blogging about how they haven't blogged in a while

I used to live in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Then I put everything I own into boxes.



Anders & Ande & Elisabeth helped me put these boxes into a train.

Jon helped me get those boxes from Penn Station. Amtrak helped very little. Amtrak are not very helpful people.

Jules & I carried all the boxes into our apartment. Now everything I own is in my new apartment.






Now I live in New York City.