Action Patrol

I just saw that the Action Patrol discography is available for free here.

One of the truly great mid-90s Richmond hardcore bands.

Poppy, spazzy, & so much fun. I listened to "EG 45" approximately 100 times a day when I was 21.

Tomorrow Night: State of the Union Anthology Reading

*State of the Union: A Poetry Reading*

*John Ashbery, Dan Chelotti, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Nick Flynn, Caroline Knox, Eileen Myles, Mathias Svalina, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Elizabeth Willis & Rachel Zucker *

October 30, Thursday, 6:30pm
The Amie and Tony James Gallery
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York, NY

~Sponsored by Wave Books and The Center for the Humanities~

William Carlos Williams wrote: "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Join the contributors to the Wave Books anthology State of the Union: 50 Political Poems to get the news in Linda Pollack's Habeas Lounge in the week of the Presidential election!

THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Three Things With Which You Might Assuage the Crushing Pain of Existence

Menace Ruine: The Die is Cast
A nearly orchestral take on dark, bleak metal with a great woman singer. Sounds like it was recorded in the basement of an abandoned cathedral. It has a loping neo-folk feel to it, like Current 93's weirder, louder stuff, but doesn't get monotonous like I think a lot of that stuff does. Some eye-wideningly thrilling moments.



BLKS JKS: Mystery

Amazing South African band, sharing aesthetics with both TV on the Radio & the Allman Brothers, but with a rhythmic background that is unsettlingly awesome while still being essentially pop music.




Blood Ceremony: S/T

70s-style doom metal, in the vein of Witchcraft they keep a retro sound to their production. Unlike Witchcraft, or any metal band really, they prominently feature the flute. The singer sounds a bit like if Stevie Nicks had been in a metal band. Which is a good thing. It's a little campy, but addictive.

I'm Reading Tomorrow with Sommer Browning, Julia Cohen, Patrick Herron, Brian Howe & Ken Rumble

October 24th @ 7 p.m. - Stain Bar - Williamsburg, Brooklyn

stain
766 grand street
brooklyn, ny 11211
(L train to Grand Street,
1 block west)
718/387-7840
open daily @ 5 p.m.

Hosted by Amy King and Ana Bozicevic

READERS: Sommer Browning, Julia Cohen, Patrick Herron, Brian Howe, Ken Rumble, and Mathias Svalina

Snowblink in New York

Snowblink plays in NY tomorrow & next Thursday.

Thursdays in New York are so inviting.

You can slap me for that one.

I'm not sure where the show is tomorrow. But here's the info for next week's show.

Zebulon
258 Wythe Ave
Brooklyn, NY
w/ CHARLIE LOOKER, JULIANNA BARWICK, SAM BUCK ROSEN
NYC ALBUM RELEASE!

Little Dances, Elisabeth Reinkordt

little dances from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

Frank Stanford Literary Festival

During the second panel, Pregeeta Sharma used the phrase “uncanny hybridity” in discussing Frank Stanford’s work & I had one of those little moments where my ideas crystallized around the phrase upon hearing it. I’d been thinking a bit about Stanford’s Battlefield as a social epic, one of clash & foment, a kind of 20th century version of the plantation culture that Glissant discusses in Poetics of Relation. The systems of power in relation to race are fluid in their bases.

One swing of the book might have African American characters at the camp showing awareness of a subjugating social reality, whereas the next swing has Frances functioning as the quasi-masochistic chauffeur of a Black man. Drive on Francois. The identity of Francis is always an act of becoming in relation to the people around him, the epic models & the ambient fervors of race, violence, booze & sperm. It is a becoming that is rarely reflected upon & no more understood at the end of the poem than at the beginning.



The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is the greatest social epic of the 20th century. While other epic poems may have more hermeneutic heft to them, there is no book I'd rather hear read from cover to cover with a group of friends & a bottle of brown liquor.



For some reason I thought we had to take 10 hours to make a 4 1/2 hour drive back to KC on Sunday. Therefore we didn't stay for the entire reading. My bad. So my bad. Sorry Chris, Sam & Julia.



Hearing how people became acquainted with Stanford's poetry is in a way a textbook case for the social movements of poetry. Or at least the poetry that matters. Each person who talked about first reading Stanford talked about the person who handed his work on to them. It's almost a shame that his books are/will be better available. The mystique of the secret packet of photocopies is pretty strong.



The guy behind Chris here has a magnificent rat-tail.



Respect to Matthew & Katy Henriksen for putting the festival on. It was a wonderful event that left me full of ideas for thinking about Stanford's work & inspired by his poetry & the influence of his poetry & his example on contemporary poets. Aside from the fact that I love his work, I think he's an especially interesting poet to look to right now because of the liminal elements of his work. A lot of the poetry I'm most interested in right now seems to work by relating aesthetics or attempting to mash up ideas & styles in surprising ways. It's a kind of forced clash in order to make the sparks & shards. Along with people like Notley, Levis, Mullen, Sze, Armantrout & Palmer, I think Stanford is a very public example of someone who did this in a way that does not have the feel of being premeditated.



I'd never seen a bathroom with so many doors.



I like Fayetteville. It reminded me a bit of Blacksburg, though smaller. I liked how the train tracks passed through the neighborhood, showing the unfinished backs of the houses & the piles of junk. D's Pizzeria, however, is the worst. The service sticks to you as you walk out like a saran wrap made out of college town entitlement/despair.



Irv Broughton's & Stanford's film It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood is phenomenal. I've seen it listed in write-ups of Stanford for years & have always wanted to see it, but I guess I always assumed it would be footage of him reading or interviews. Instead it's an effectively unsettling assemblage of footage of Frank, shots of Fayetteville, familiar southern gothic images & lyrically flowing images. It functions as a kind of mise en scène for Stanford's world-view, alternately haunted & campy.

I want to see a dvd-ready version of it; Irv mentioned repeatedly that there was processing problems with it that fuzzed out version we saw. Though Scott Pierce had a good point in saying that he wanted to watch that exact dirty print. There was something exhilarating in seeing the credit lines congeal into pure white light & the wounded patina of crud. It made the film feel like a lost relic of a burnt church, one in which snake blood flowed in the tarnished chalices.

You

Sometimes in our sleep we touch
The body of another woman
And we wake up
And we know the first nights
With summer visitors
In the three storied house of our childhood.

Whatever we remember,
The darkest hair being brushed
In front of the darkest mirror
In the darkest room.

-Frank Stanford

You (LostRoads 1979, 2008)

Sunn O))) Saved My Soul

Who would have thought that two dudes in cheesy Druid robes would be making the 21st century's most affecting religious music? You've heard their records that unroll themselves like meditation music for the tectonic plates. But seeing them live was something close to a transcendent experience.

The physicality of the noise is one thing. Not only could I feel it in my belly & rattling teeth, there were moments when I could feel it in my elbows & skull. The vibration made me aware of the balance of solids that comprise me.

But the up-to-11-ness of the noise is only part of the experience. Each monolithic riff chased itself into fleetingly exuberant harmonics. The sounds were inside the noise. Fit your own metaphor in here.

The duo played for 90 minutes but it was a not a performance that employed maneuvers & changes. It approximated an event without time.

While Sunn O))) have their moments of guitar-worship ritualism, that is not the religiosity of their music. It's religious music in the way it seeks to reframe the experience of the present into an experience of pure event. It's religious music in the way the sound requires an individual exploration within a collective experience.

Walking out of the Knitting Factory last night I could hear the cars passing with eerie distinctness, the shouts of distant pedestrians sounded like they were emerging from me. The ringing in my ears is some kind of homing device.

Photos from Davebgimp's flickr

Babysnakes in the News

Snakes invade Delaware woman's apartment

MIDDLETOWN, Del., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- A Delaware woman said she vacated her home after discovering at least six baby rat snakes in her bathroom, bedroom and burrowing under her rug.

Gladys Dressner, 72, of Middletown said she first encountered two of the 8-inch snakes when she opened the bathroom door to find them staring at her Sept. 1, The (New Castle/Wilmington, Del.) News Journal reported Monday.

"They just laid there and didn't move," she said.

She said the reptiles slowly became more bold, at one point slithering across her bed sheets after she had retired for the evening.

"I flung it off of me and screamed," she said.

Dressner vacated her Hampstead Court apartment and stayed in a motel while Denton, Md., company Critter Control worked to remove the snakes and apartment complex managers worked to prepare a new unit for her.

Dan Santuchi, the Critter Control employee who removed the snakes, said the woman was not in any real danger from the non-venomous snakes, which do not have fangs.

"They pose no real threat, even to children," Santuchi said. "They just get pretty big when they get to their mature, natural size."

He said all of the snakes were less than one month old.

Thanks for passing that on to me, Jon

Tonight Sunn O))) & Tony Conrad!

Some Hells I'm Afraid of

The Howling Hell
The Whining Hell
The Poorly Researched Whining Hell
The Friendly Hell
The Clanking Hell
The Itchy hell
The Hell of Good Advice
The Hell of Muttered Comments
The Repetitive Phrasing Hell
The Hell of Cheerful Colors
Hiccup Hell
The Prolonged Hug with Near-Strangers Hell
The Pop Quiz Hell
The Hell of Paper Cuts
The Hell of Alarm Clock Snooz Buttons That Go Off too Soon
The Hairy Hell
The Hell of Cheesegraters
The Red-Eye Hell
The Hell of Children Screeching PLEASE
The Hell of Overheard Cell Phone Calls
The Cake Hell
The Milk Hell
The Peter Pan Bus
Pillow Hell
Formica Hell
The Hell of A Thousand Nicknames
The Cheering Hell
The Morose Hell
Passive Aggressive Hell
The Hell of People Who Want to Discuss Some Neitzsche They Read in Undergrad & Kinda Remember Hell
The Hell of Razors
The Hell of Comet Cleanser
The Hell of Aspirations
Scrapbooking Hell
Take-A-Seat Hell
The Hell of Distressed Brick
The Hell of Files
T-Shirt Hell
Pasta Hell
Sight-Seeing Hell
The Hell of Pearl Jam Songs Stuck in the Head
Houseplant Hell
The Photocopied Hell
Waterbottle hell
The Hell of Soul Patches
Introduce All Your Friends to Each Other at a Birthday Party Hell
The Hell of Running Toward
The Nice Dress Hell
The Console Hell
The Hell of The Guy in the Cubicle Near You Talking about All the Chicks He's Gonna Bang Hell
Hell Hell
Heaven Hell
The Personalized Ring Tone Hell
The Start-Up Hell
Nice Skin Hell
The Hell of Being Taken Aback

My Latest Trite Observation about Living in New York

Sometimes I walk around the city with my headphones in, but I feel that I'm missing the sounds of the city. The clatter of cars & buses & construction & breaking stuff coheres if you relax your hearing. It becomes a kind of cavernous room-tone.

The other day I was on Williams Street downtown & some construction workers were pulling huge metal beams off the back of a flatbed. Six guys were on each beam to move it. The metal beam rubbed against the metal of the flatbed & produced the loudest resonant howl I have ever heard. It echoed against the skyscrapers like a gigantic wounded beast gone operatic.

And then I went inside a building & two elevators dinged in almost perfect synchronicity. The squeak of heels on polished floors offset by the jackhammers muffled through the floors. The distant motorcycle tombs the asphalt.

I've always been the type of passenger lulled by the drone of travel. Riding on the subway sometimes I begin to hear the harmonics of the train's rumble, the percussion of the traincars twisting around corners. Then my head nods down & jerks back up again.

Luckily the MTA has discovered a new kind of employee to take care of passengers who fall deeply asleep & do not wake up at the end of the line. They are twelve feet tall & mantis-like in their spindliness. They are humans, but they have huge, pale eyes. They also have humongous pillows for hands.

When the train comes to a stop at its final destination you can see them cantilevering themselves through the traincars. Their huge, pale eyes sweep left & right in search of sleeping humans.

When they find one they quietly click themselves over to him or her & gently slide their pillow-hands beneath the sleeping body. They are very careful. So careful that not even a baby would squint its eyes in its sleep.

They lift the sleeping body up from the seat & slowly carry him or her out of the train car. The sleeping person perhaps dreams of boats or of ballrooms filling with mounds of salt.

The pillow-handed employee carries the sleeping body out of the station into the cool night air. He holds the body at the level of his huge, pale eyes & examines the relaxed countenance of the sleeper's face.

When they reach the rendering plant the pillow-handed employee feels a connection to the sleeping body that has warmed his pillow-hands. He has given the body a name. He never says the name out loud to anyone but the master of the rendering plant, who marks it in his ledger in red ink.

Heather Christle Reading Tonight in Brooklyn

Earshot Reading Series
The Lucky Cat: 245 Grand Street

Featuring:
HEATHER CHRISTLE
& CHRIS HOSEA

Admission: $5, which gets you a free drink.
As always, find us at The Lucky Cat, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn!

Friday, October 10 @ 8 PM

If You're in Lincoln You Pretty Much Need to Be at This Tonight

Oct 9--Peter Gizzi, Julie Carr 7pm!
Clean Part Installment #2--Peter Gizzi, Julie Carr

Thursday October 9 at 7:00pm
Sheldon Museum of Art

PETER GIZZI is the author of The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-1992. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. He is currently the poetry editor for The Nation. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Julie Carr is the author of Mead: An Epithalamion, and Equivocal. She has poems and essays in Volt, Verse, American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Women Studies Quarterly, and English Language Notes. Poems of hers have also appeared in Best American Poetry 2007 and in the anthology, Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books). Carr teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the copublisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press.

Funny Things I Saw People Reading on the Subway Today

A Martial Arts Weapons Catalog.

Only funny because it wasn't like martial arts supplies, it was ONLY weapons.







F.E.D.S Magazine

I went from never having heard of this to wanting a subscription in about 10 seconds. If anyone keeps records for this kind of thing I think I might be a contender.








Of Mice & Men

Always funny, but especially odd because it was a man in his 50s with a precisely gelled hair-do & a power suit. The slim book looked like an awkward toy in his manly two-fisted grip.

They All Seemed Asleep Review

Review of Matthew Rohrer's They All Seemed Asleep from the Barrel House Magazine folks.

The chapbook is still available at Octopus Books.

Jess Mynes' If and When & the Work of a Last Poem

I've been thinking about Jess Mynes' chapbook If and When. It's a lovely collection of spare poems packed with gentle beauty, sharp images & some honest chuckles.

The way I read it (& I'm being a bit broad here) is that it splits into two types of poems: poems that are close acts of attention to nature/agriculture & interacting with it & poems that collect fragmented thoughts & images. Though these two types intertwine in most of the poems, they are the poles I see Mynes working in relation to. "Harmonies" is one that I see as the former type:

harmonies

bee rests on
railing corner rain
drops from treetops
plink rust into
crusted needles
limply lash laurel
flowers clump
parachute where
taller trees were
extracted raise
fronds as fists
of purplish
white swallowtail
pauses bird’s
pitched twittering
spindly necked
stagger of ferns
tips furled
punctuate power
lines slick licorice

"Cast" is the shortest poem in the chapbook & briefly illustrates what I see as the latter type (I've messed up his formatting b/c I still don't know how to indent in blogger. Sorry.):

cast

no quiet in this
kiss
what falls in place
walls

It's a consistently engaging collection, moving between thinking about poetry & the personal to being out in the world beyond all the books & computers & hoax-anthologies. To me the ideology of it is about how the work of both kinds of attention inform each other. The beauty of the book is in the ways the poems do this informing.

But what makes me keep thinking about this collection is the last poem, which uses the aesthetics Mynes has established & then with one electric arc pushes them out of the book, beyond anything he does beforehand. It's not exactly the best poem in the chapbook, but it twists what has come before into a new kind of thinking. Unlike a final poem that looks back at the work of a collection in an attempt at resolution or conclusion, this poem reveals the epiphanic moment of progress that results from this work.

One thing I love is how chapbooks allow for an intimate engagement with a set of poems. They are small enough to reread quickly, often to fit in a pocket or at hand in a bag. But I rarely am affected by the structuring of a chapbook & what Mynes does with the placement of this final poem makes this collection much more than the sum of it parts for me.

I'm not going to post the final poem here; that would spoil too much. You need to read it yourself after stepping through the chapbook.

Buy it at the Katalanche site. After you've read the whole thing email me & we'll talk about it.




So this is not a review, more of an appreciation. But below you can watch a very positive review from a fellow poet:

Anybody Want to Buy a Car?

Friday night I went to the release party for Talking Man by Mike Heppner, which is available from Small Anchor Press. It's a cool project, a great piece of writing & a beautifully constructed chapbook. You should check it out.



Been reading Tisa Bryant's fantastic book Unexplained Presence. It's a wild ride of shifting voices, styles & rhetorical approaches to thinking about history, race, art & the ways these interweave themselves. Buy it at the Leon Works website.



Later car.




In the subway this week I've been reading A Pickpocket's Tale, a story of 19th Century New York underworld as seen through the life of George Appo. More on Street-Rats & Gutter-Snipes.




The Italian poetry section in Aufgabe 7 is impressive. Actually most of the issue is. Jordan Davis' poems in Abraham Lincoln make me laugh a lot. Juliette Lee's poem in the (paginated-by-hand) Minor / American 2 is awesome. John Sakkis drops a hilarious D&D nerdbomb over from Cy Gist Press. Silliman reverts to creepy threatening when his "rep," is threatened.




I saw Caroline Knox & Danielle Pafunda read a few weeks back. They were awesome. Danielle's new sci-fi stuff is hella-killer. Also I went to the Josh Colver reading thursday & he read one of the best poems I've heard in a long, long time.

My New Poem

I don't normally like to talk about my poetry on my blog because people are usually at their most boring when they promote themselves, but I am really proud of my new poem in the debut issue of Issue. I think it represents an important shift in my aesthetic.

Really a phenomenal journal, it has a similar aesthetic to The Yellow Pages. You should check it out at www.forgodot.com.

Tonight

Mike Heppner's Talking Man
from Small Anchor Press

Event: Man Talking Release Party
"because it only comes out once"
What: Night of Mayhem
Host: Freebird Books & Goods
Start Time: Friday, October 3 at 7:30pm
End Time: Friday, October 3 at 9:00pm
Where: Freebird Books & Goods

123 Columbia St.
Brooklyn, New York 11231
Phone 718.643.8484

i miss lincoln