More from the Eveny

Whoever strives forcefully towards happiness
Can manage to break strong rope.
When you meet suddenly with unexpected misfortune,
Don’t rush: Think! Observe!
Don’t turn back!
Stand firm
And you will win in your unequal struggle!
If you want to be a true man,
Rely only on yourself!
It is very difficult to scramble up the steep slope
to your goal,
Even harder to do good to another.
For happiness is not given to anyone lightly,
It is brittle like the first ice of autumn,
It comes only to those Who are true to mondji!

from an improvised song by Vasily Pavlovich

Help?

Does anybody know anything about a novelist of the Eveny people named (something similar to) Platon Lamutsky. I've read a mention of him, but I think I might not have his name correct, as I can't find anything to track down any more information about him.

Sources say that The Lord’s Resistance Army massacred more than 200 people last week, Isreal has declared war on Hamas & anyone standing withing 50 miles of someone who's in Hamas, the economy continues to limbo. This is a perfect time to look back at the great works of art to provide valuable life lessons. Art is a place of moral exemplar

Case in point, Gremlins.






I didn't remember that there was a vague moralistic lesson tacked onto the end of the movie about how American consumer culture perverts all of nature's gifts. Gifts like the plastic-eyed cutesy known as Mogwai.

Strange that America didn't learn it's lesson from Gremlins.

America, you let me down.

DJ Prince (of the Weirdos): Do It Like You

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 15

Top Ten Numbers Between 1 & 6 of 2008

1. 6
2. 6
3. 3
4. 5
5. 6
6. 2
7. 4
8. 3
9. 5
10. 5

Burkha-like, with a weird Russian hat strapped to her head.

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 14

Top Ten Words that Begin with the Letters P U N of 2008

1. Puncheon
2. Punctilio
3. Punishing
4. Punjabi
5. Punch-Drunk
6. Punpa
7. Punters
8. Punppeteer
9. Punreblood
10. Punitive

Stories About Ladybugs & Monkeys, by Alyssa Svalina

Once upon a time a ladybug went to Antarctica. It was freezing cold there so he tried to find some leaves but there weren’t any. He wanted to make clothes out of the leaves. So he gathered some snow & he formed it into some clothes. He met a seal named Flappy & he met some penguins. One of the penguins’ name was Swimmer. Swimmer was a macaroni penguin. Swimmer’s favorite things were swimming & eating fish. The ladybug’s name was Frisbee.

Swimmer teached Frisbee to swim & eat fish. But Frisbee didn’t like swimming or eating fish because he wanted to eat aphids instead but Swimmer didn’t want to do that. So Frisbee made a Frisbee sandcastle out of snow. Then Swimmer goed over & he said to Frisbee “Do you want to play snowball fight?” And Frisbee said yes.

The End.






Once upon a time there was a little monkey named Bananas. But bananas didn’t like to eat bananas, he liked to eat aphids. And he loved to sit on leaves. But he was too big so he always fell off the leaves. So he sat on branches.

Not being able to sit on leaves made Bananas sad. So he went into the jungle & tried to find some aphids. He ate every single aphid in the jungle. But the aphids were so small that he was still hungry. But he didn’t have any food because he already ate all of the aphids. So he tried a banana but he didn’t like it. He made this noise “uh-lluch.” Then he spit it out.

Then Bananas tried to eat ants. But the ants bit him. So he tried to find a leaf & chew on it. He found them & he ate one & he liked it. Then he ate some more leaves. The leaves looked like orange, red, yellow & green. They tasted like aphids. Then he looked at the leaves & said “Why does this taste like aphids?” On every single leaf there were 500 little aphids on it.

The End.





Once upon a time there was a ladybug named Uncle BJ the Aphid. He looked very old. He lived in the middle of nowhere. He got up one day & said “Where am I? A hurricane must have struck me & moved me up here. I can’t find the top of the roof. Where is everybody?”

Uncle BJ the Aphid was on the top of a mountain & it was very cold. So he tried to find some leaves but the only thing he found was dirt. He tried to eat it. He didn’t like it. There was no food for him to eat.

But then he met a little deer & its name was Donkey. Donkey gave Uncle BJ the Aphid five leaves for some clothes. He builded some clothes & cutted the leaves to make them. He drew polka dots on the clothes with some wet dirt, for his wings. He ate one leaf & he found some aphids on the leaf, that’s why he ate it.

Uncle BJ the Aphid needed to get off the mountain. He used some of his leaves as a ladder. But they kept falling. So Donkey gave Uncle BJ the Aphid some sticks. He stacked all a hundred sticks to try & reach the ground.

And then he got to the ground.

The End

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 13

Top Ten Methods of Anesthesia Delivery to Polar Bears in 2008

1. Blow Dart.
2. Oral.
3. Rifle Dart.
4. Hand Injection.
5. Slip it into his soup.
6. Tap him on his right shoulder & then inject it into his left shoulder when he turns to look in the wrong direction.
7. Really long needle.
8. Pill.
9. Trickery.
10. Ponzi scheme.

Holidays in Blackface

When I was a kid I remember being up well past midnight some time around the holidays & watching the film Holiday Inn. If you haven't seen it, it's basically a skeletal plot to hang a vaudevillian revue show on, along with some silly zingers for Astaire & the famously wife-&-child-beating crooner, Bing Crosby.

While the movie is best known for introducing Irving Berlin's holiday songs, I think any contemporary viewer would would find the blackface scene for Abraham Lincoln's birthday to be the most striking moment in the movie.




I remember seeing this as a kid & being confused but strangely entranced by it as well. The song has some slightly dissonant blue notes in the choral harmonies that must have been appealing to me as a 10-year old in the suburbs. It's a song of beatification for Lincoln, set along a seeming Mississippi river pier & has a cutaway in which a stereotypical African-American mammy-maid is singing the song to her super-cute kids.

While there is obviously plenty to find reprehensible in the minstrelsy racism of blackface & there are interesting revisionist histories of the cultural importance of the same, I'm thinking here about how cultural memes transfer so that some perverted version of African-American culture reaches me as a kid & has some sort of impact on me.





I'd lived in Louisiana & been to, & heard plenty of jazz coming out of my dad's stereo as I was growing up, but somehow this crossover between the blue note harmonics & the cheesy kitsch of Hollywood musicals affected me. Which makes me think of the plantation aesthetics that Glissant discusses in Poetics of Relation, how the clash makes the impact. I'm not saying this film is great art or anything, but these art works persist & transform through their persistence. Watching that movie was my first time seeing blackface or semi-minstrel music & it was weirdly alien & appealing.

I'm always more interested in collapsing the barriers of standards of correctness in favor of finding the connections that create the most interesting energy. Closing off kinds of art or people always seems to be the way to create formulaic art, it is only by the connection between otherwise unconnected ideas that interested contexts for art are created.

Jean Tinguely

The Coin Toss Hit Urlacher in the Head

Somewhere in Germany right now, my brother is freaking out.

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 12

Ten Records That Made The Year Less Annoying of 2008

Wolves in the Throne Room: Two Hunters
This is from 2007 & I loved it in 2007 & I loved it in 2008. I could listen to this record every day. And I generally dislike listening to music repeatedly.

Grouper: Dragging a Dead Deer Up A Hill
At first I was thrown off by the relative tunefulness of this -- I preferred the echoey clouds of sound of her earlier records. But AM convinced me to give it a few more spins & I fell for it. I saw her last weekend at Silent Barn & loved her live performance as well. She had this haze of clipped out treble that had the kinds of staticy effects that Fourcolor has on the ears, but all generated through old cassette players & echoed guitar.

Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir: Tulev: Songs
Like the hopeful ghosts of children trapped in an echo chamber. This made many subway rides bearable.

Dakha Brakha: Na dobranich
Self described "ethnic chaos band" from Ukraine. Passionate, eccentric & entrancing, this made me realize that those free-folkers from Scandinavia do have more reference points than just their bongs.

Iced Earth: Night of the Stormrider
This came out in 1991 but I'd never heard of it until this year. Totally amazing power metal with the perfect balance of passion & cheesiness. I would have hated this in 1991. I was probably a better person then.

Indian Summer: Live at The Blue Universe
This was released on vinyl this year with beautiful packaging by Adagio records as Hidden Arithmetic. It's sold out from them but still available from some distros. Pretty much my favorite emo band that didn't come out of DC or RVA.

Sawako: Bittersweet
Crystalline soundscapes from one of the finest electro-acoustic ambient musicians out there. This solves pretty much all the BS of dealing with all the insecure, egotistical suckers that we inevitably have to deal with at some point every day.

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra & German Sate Opera Chorus: Bach's St. Matthew Passion
This can fuel any cross country road trip. It helped me back & forth between Nebraskus & New York a few times in the last year.

The Walkmen: You & Me
Yep, I mock some overhyped indie darlings & then I love other ones. Moral certitude is for silly, silly people. "In the New Year" is possibly the only good verse-chorus-verse-style song I've had stuck in my head that was released this year.

UUVVWWZ: s/t
It's nice to realize that your friends' band is actually an awesome band. Email them to buy the record. Only available on vinyl, because records are better than just about everything else in the world.

Nadja: Radiance of Shadows
A reminder, via the Kantian sublimity of thunderous noise, that we are simply petty little animals involved in pointless squabbles for a handful of decades until we die & the earth eats up our chemicals again. Beautifully pointless squabbles, of course.

Pocahaunted: Island Diamonds
You might find them cheesy. I like them very much.

None of these links are mine -- I found them via the google.

Marc Mckee, Wordsworth, Byron, etc., whatever

I have to tell you about a little game I play with poets sometimes, which is called Which Romantic Poet is Their Antecedent. This usually is a fun game for anglo poets who are not directly responding to Stein's work. Your choices are Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge or Rilke (who doesn't belong there, but it's my game so suck it).

Marc McKee. I was reading his chapbook What Apocalypse, from New Michigan Press & I thought he was a Wordsworth because of this poem:

You Think You Will Never Ask to be Set on Fire Again

Curiously, I love it when someone dreams
I have been eaten by a shark.
I love it when someone wakes up sad
that I am a diassemblage
obscured by a cloud of silky red
spooling into water,
failing to make a final obscure joke perhaps--
but especially when anyone wakes
and it urns out I have not been eaten by a shark
do I love it: Think of how man people win!
At least two! and the day
with its sharklessness and unrolling picnic blanket
of bright likelihoods and unlikelihoods
rushes toward horizons that appear toothy
but aren't. It's funny what some days is enough
to make us feel like a pet arrowhead
which i mean in the best way possible
and then how swiftly these seems a sharkishness
beneath the steps we try to manage like Astaire-Rogers
over the contemporary temporary rope bridges.
These endless and big mouths circle
so matter-of-factly, everything seems so hungry
even after feeding, so eager to dress like a palace,
to hoof the thoroughfare
sweating expensive evidence.
Another friend says
scratch consumption and you'll find rage
and of course she's right.
I say scratch rage and you'll find sadness.
Maybe it is a marriage of our wonder and terror.
You think you won't dive any more
into the deep, cold buffet,
thinking, I can't believe I get to live this life,
thinking, I hate when it pretends to be something else,
but we are called into the mouth of the night
and we go.

I like this poem a lot. It has the kind of dialectical movement between wacky & wise that Hoagland used to be good at (before he got stuck trying to do that same move too many times & his face never unfroze) & that Koch nailed about one of out of every 30 attempts. I see this as Wordsworthian in the attempting to draw the reader in with the wet stuff & pull them all the way through the dry stuff before they realize they're getting chafed with proclamation & statement of ideas & whatnot.

But then I read the next poem in the chapbook, which is available here.

And then I realized that McKee is a Byron, not a Wordsworth.

Elsewhere & Wise

I spent the morning reading Kristi Maxwell's Elsewhere & Wise, from Dancing Girl press. It's a mesmerizing chapbook-length poem that repays close attention with an uncoiling set of evocative experiences & metaphor-driven ideas about the feeling of being the self-in-the-world. Upon first read it was to me a poem of imagistic accretion, one that grounded it's wild metaphors in the quiet, constant presence of the body:

Mosquitoes pack our skin.
What is slipped like letters. Slips like.

Itching buckets itself to each limb.
Is carried on. Are carried away: our fingers at it.

Each line seems to find some way to both twist my thinking beyond the ordinary possibility but to also maintain a throughline of either an ambiguous I/Thou connection or the individual body. It becomes not a dance of figurative language, but a record of the ways of being present. All of this told with a confidence of writing, even in its moments of imagistic blurriness, there's no clutter in the language.

But it was upon rereading this a few times that the real power of the poem made itself clear to me. The poem works with a lot of repetitions of language, turning back to the same words or to homonyms & discovering new meanings in them. Maxwell writes:

What skin is drunk? Has drunk?
What cup-ish pores--and oil cupolas.
There is a brightness no eye might jerk.
A vision jiggled into a vision proper.
Into the god-face dragging the hull of praise
nearer sure and shore.

The images create a first level of meaning & then the doubled language creates a kind of shadow meaning. Inside the shadow murky things happen, some passive voice agent first drinks the skin, or perhaps the skin itself is intoxicated, but the little change into "Has drunk?" reminds us that the skin is a place where the body & the world intertwine. The skin drinks in the exterior while also rebuffing it. The container of the pore flips into a holy dome with the connectivity of the similar roots in cup & cupola. The difference between a vision & a vision extends this spiritual yearning until the final line of this page brings the sound of "sure" & "shore" to bear on thinking about faith as an aspect of this permeability.

It's a marvelous poem. Like all of Maxwell's work, it teaches the reader a new way of making connections. And this is, ultimately, the the most practical work that art has for the world.

Not for Vegans

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 11

Top Ten Sounds I Heard Outside My Window in Sunset Park in 2008

1. Cars passing.
2. Buses passing.
3. Recycling trucks emptying massive loads of glass bottles into themselves at 5am.
4. Harleys starting up after the bars close at 4am.
5. People talking in languages I do not speak.
6. People talking in languages I do speak.
7. People yelling at each other.
8. People yelling at each other & then fighting & then other people yelling & then running away.
9. The sounds of snow being shoveled.
10. Trucks passing.

Harp & Altar! Harp & Altar!

It's snowing. Very pretty snow.

Therefore the new issue of Harp & Altar is out.

Harp & Altar announces the release of its fifth issue.

"He began this strange behavior at a very early age by going his own way and finding such evident pleasure in being alone. In later years he recalled very clearly that nobody had made him aware of such things. All by itself the strange need to be alone and apart had appeared, and was there . . . . Even though it was winter, he would have no heating. He did not want any comforts. Everything around him had to be rough, inhospitable, and miserable. He wanted to bear and endure some thing, and ordered himself to do so. And that, nobody had told him either. All alone he had the idea that it would be good for him to order himself to bear hardship and malice in a friendly and good-hearted manner. He considered himself to be at a kind of upper-level school. He went to university there, as a weird and wild student."
-Robert Walser, from "Oskar"

Also: poetry by Stephanie Anderson, Jessica Baron, Julia Cohen, Claire Donato, Elizabeth Sanger, Peter Jay Shippy, and G.C. Waldrep; prose by Joshua Cohen, Evelyn Hampton, Lily Hoang, Peter Markus, and Bryson Newhart; Patrick Morrissey on John Taggart and Matthew Henriksen on Anywhere; Michael Newton's gallery reviews; and artwork by A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds.

www.harpandaltar.com

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 10

Top Ten Places at Which I Enjoyed Thinking about the Film Face/Off in 2008

1. The grocery store.
2. While driving.
3. Elisabeth & Ande's house.
4. My old office at NWU.
5. While biking through Wilderness Park.
6. On the subway.
7. At the Met.
8. Bestbuy.
9. Yia-Yias Pizza.
10. Sandra Beasley's apartment.

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 9

Top Ten Tastes of 2008

1. Salty
2. Sweet
3. Bitter
4. Sour
5. Umami
6. n/a
7. n/a
8. n/a
9. n/a
10. n/a

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 8

Top Ten Poorly Written Descriptions of Images of Gophers of 2008

1. Standing gopher.
2. Gopher beside a hole.
3. Standing gopher with the background whited out.
4. Is this gopher pratincolous?
5. Photo of a gopher.
6. Cute gopher.
7. Gophers are expensive.
8. Gopher in the foreground of a badly taken photo.
9. Cartoon image of a gopher.
10. My first gopher.

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 7

Top Ten Words of 2008

1. if
2. so
3. &
4. the
5. a
6. as
7. to
8. with
9. among
10. of

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 6

Top Ten Valuable Life Lessons I Learned From Watching the Movies Into the Wild & Journey to the Center of the Earth in 2008

1. Jules Verne wrote non-fiction.
2. Be a surrogate child for everyone you meet.
3. Steam cannot kill humans.
4. If your father yells "That's right! I'm god!" then he's not a very good father, or a very good god.
5. If your father died, then he was right.
6. You know you're having a profound moment when a bear enters your abandoned bus camp.
7. You can take a glowing bird from the center of the earth to the surface of the earth, but you cannot keep it in your bookbag forever.
8. Eddie Vedder can write one good song per soundtrack, but it is the one without lyrics.
9. Your sister will always forgive you & rationalize your selfish decisions as long as you two grew up in a emotionally troubled household & she looked up to you as the only person she could trust--so feel free to abandon her & never contact her even though she loves you.
10. Dinosaur skulls make effective & attractive boats.
11. 3D movies look weird without the 3D glasses.

Post # 1000

Word from above:

Please join us in celebrating the release of hand held series 1, featuring readings by Timothy Donnelly, Stefania Heim, and Ethan Paquin:

December 13, 7:oo @ A Public Space
323 Dean Street (at 3rd Ave)
Brooklyn
Admission is free.

This is a launch party for Hand Held Editions.

I applaud all efforts to have poetry events on the N line.

If you don't go to this reading the Skate Witches will get you:

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 5

Top Ten Death Cab for Cutie Records I Did Not Hear in 2008

Tied for 1. Something About Airplanes
Tied for 1. We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes
Tied for 1. The Photo Album
Tied for 1. Transatlanticism
Tied for 1. Plans
Tied for 1. Narrow Stairs
Tied for 1. You Can Play These Songs with Chords
Tied for 1. The Forbidden Love EP
Tied for 1. Studio X Sessions EP
Tied for 1. The John Byrd EP

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 4

Top Ten Times I Was Embarrassed That I'd Seen That Movie Juno (& in theaters no less) of 2008

1. Whenever someone asked me if I'd seen it.
2. When I heard two people at The Mill having an in-depth discussion about how the writing was really great (& they were adults, even).
3. When it came out on DVD.
4. When someone told me that they thought it was "your kind of movie." (The "you" being me there, of course.)
5. When I saw the girl who played the main character in something else & recognized her because I'd seen her in the movie Juno.
6. Pretty much all of May 2008.
7. Whenever I saw people listing it in lists of movies they liked.
8. When a co-worker of mine said he thought it was great & asked me what I thought of it & I had to decide whether I should pretend I never saw or it admit that it was a dreadfully conceived, written & acted film.
9. When it came up in conversation.
10. Right now.

This is what they make you take the medication for

Teeth Mountain

Pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear today



I'm a hippy.

I'm four posts away from having 1000 posts on this blog. Are you psyched?

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 3

Top Ten Sandwich Breads That I Can Remember of 2008

1. Whole Foods 12-Grain
2. Katz's Deli Rye
3. White Baguettes from 5th Ave Bodegas
4. Open Harvest Whole Wheat
5. Russ's' Italian White
6. The good Spelt Bread from Whole Foods
7. Whole Wheat Wonder Bread
8. That Whole Wheat bread from that other place.
9. Some other 12-grain bread.
10. Some kind of oatmeal bread, I think. Maybe it was another 12-grain.

The Best Movie Review I've Ever Read

This has made me break down & watch the first Angelina Jolie movie I've ever watched in my life.

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 2

Top Ten Albums That I Was Ready to Enjoy & Then I Heard Them & I Was Like "Really, That's It?" But Then A Week Later or So I Listened to the Record Again, Thinking "Maybe I Missed It the First Time," But Was Again Disappointed & Then Maybe I Repeated This Cycle a Few More Times Before Deciding There Was No There There (& Then I Started to Realize That I Just Can't Stomach Much Indie Rock Anymore) of 2008

1. Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago

What the world needs now is more simpering songs about blase emotions.

2. Los Campesinos: Hold On Now, Youngster…

Like all those bands you used to like, just a bit suckier.

3. The Hold Steady: Stay Positive

Stay Positive? How about Stay Formulaic, huh? Who's with me? Guys? Hello?

4. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes

For those who think it's better to listen to a band that sounds just like watery bands from the 60s rather than listening to watery bands from the 60s.

5. The Cool Kids: The Bake Sale

Years from now suburbanites who used to go to museums when they were in college but now just never find the time to will look back fondly at their youth spent putting this record on at parties & feeling proud of themselves for having put it on.

6. Titus Andronicus: The Airing Of Grievances

For some reason Pitchfork slams everything Connor Oberst does & then gives an undeservedly positive review to this shameless Bright Eyes ripoff. This is a lesson in rock "journalism."

7. Times New Viking: Rip It Off

The most forgettable sounds of the 90s return!

8. Santogold: Santogold

She knows MIA, so if you like MIA you are obliged to like her.

9. The Dodos: Visiter

Like Animal Collective, but without any of the interesting parts.

10. Okkervil River: The Stand Ins

The diminishing returns of glossy professionalism turn a once great band into everyone's eighth or ninth most memorable performance at some bullshit festival.

I Hate Top Ten Lists & Year End Best-Of Lists: Part 1

Top Ten Minutes of 2008

1. June 2nd, 1:00-1:01am
2. Sept 4th, 9:35-9:36pm
3. Sept 4th, 11:11-11:12pm
4. June 14th, 10:31-10:32pm
5. May 15th, 5:15-5:16pm
6. Feb 11, 3:23-3:24am
7. Aug 9th, 8:10-8:11pm
8. June 1st, 12:00-12:01pm
9. Feb 1, 3:39-3:40pm
10. Oct 3, 10:48-10:49am

Detritus & Overdoses

Issue Two of The Home Video Review of Books is up

Reviews of:

Gina Myers' Behind the R
Kim Hyesoon's Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers
Lisa Jarnot's Night Scenes
Dan Machlin's Dear Body
Brett Price's Trouble with Mapping
John Taggart's There are Birds
Ara Shirinyan's Your Country Is Great
Brandon Shimoda's The Alps
Joel Chace's Matter No Matter
Jon Godfrey's City of Corners
Jen Tynes's Heron / Girlfriend
Anne Heide's Wiving
Anne Boyer's Art is War
Darcie Dennigan's Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse
Allison Carter's Shadows are Weather
Mark Cunningham's Body Language





~~~




The new issue of my favorite magazine (tied for first with Chicago Review, Jubilat & Petulant Celebs Do Charity Work for the Camera) Circumference is out. I haven't read it yet because I showed peculiarly strong restraint at St Marks the last time I was there, but luckily there is going to be a launch reading this thursday so I get to pick up a copy there. You should be there as well. The last time I was at the AAWW they handed out free cans of Tsingtao beer, so you never know.

Circumference reading at the Asian American writers' workshop
Thursday, December 11, 2008, 7pm

Jennifer Hayashida reads from her translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg's dark and intimate A Different Practice. Jeffrey Yang reads from his translation of classical Chinese poet Su Shi's East Slope and his own debut collection of poems An Aquarium.

The Asian American Writers' Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)

$5 suggested donation; open to the public




~~~




Then Saturday you can do this:

Please join us for the launch of Hand Held Editions, featuring readings by the authors of our three new chapbooks:

Saturday, December 13, 7:00pm

Timothy Donnelly: The Cloud Corporation
Stefania Heim: Three Poems
Ethan Paquin: Nineains

A Public Space
323 Dean Street (@ 3rd Ave)
Brooklyn
Atlantic/Pacific - 2, 3, 4, 5, N, Q, R, B, D, M

***

All three chapbooks can be purchased at the "recession has been happening for a year, duh" price of $11 at http://handheldeditions.blogspot.com/





~~~

Then here are your plans for Sunday:

Sommer Browning says

I am playing music this Sunday with Sportsman's Paradise!

A seven-man-and-woman-strong army of guitarists will generate a
forty-minute-long blast of psychedelic blissout mash-up with Tibetan
bell interludes.

There will also be four screens of hypnotic and luminescent video
accompaniment.

How does that sound?


It's free (except it's not. You have to buy $10 in food/drink. They
have good burgers.)

It will be loud.

Monkeytown
58 N 3rd St
(btw. Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Sunday, December 14, 8pm

http://monkeytownhq.com/monkeytownhome.html


I'm going to go to that & then head to Silent Barn to see Grouper & Kria Brekken afterward. It's going to be a night of freaky, noisy goods.






~~~


See? No need to have any plans of your own. Just follow me over the cliff. The water is so beautiful & shallow.

Nothing Says I'm Sorry Like a Stuffed Orangutan

I was in the audience for an amazing Heather Christle reading last night. It closed out the KGB reading season for 2008. With that I was able to hear two of my favorite poets read within four days of each other, which is wonderful.



On the other hand, I heard that horrifying Us3 song "Cantaloop" while in line at Wholefoods yesterday, so it's not like I live some kind of blessed existence or anything like that.
When that "funky, funky" sample plays my skin crawls.



Also, last night I had to go on a late-night trip to a 24-hour pharmacy. It was around 11PM & in line was a guy buying about 20 packets of sugar-free candies, me buying drugs & behind me a guy buying a humongous stuffed orangutan with a straw hat. It was about the size of a 10-year-old child.

I assumed that he had gotten in a fight with him wife, headed out of the apartment in a huff, then realized he was being an ass & headed back to his place, stopping at the only open store to buy an apology gift for her. I hope she accepted his apology. I know I have.

you are little & the clouds are so large

Eric Baus Reading at Pete's Candy Store: 12/05/08 from Octopus Books on Vimeo.



Soon...


Very soon.

Paula Cisewski Gives a Shout Out to the Telephone Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska

It's first time in a poem? Certainly not its last

Elisabeth Reinkordt's "Creation Myth" on Ninth Letter

Video by Elisabeth Reinkordt
Poem by Ronald Lilypants
Audio Design by Anderson Reinkordt
Reading by Patrick Wilkins

There's a nice little interview with Elisabeth on there as well.

Check it

Trickhouse 3: The Revenge

The new issue of Trickhouse has been up for a while now, but I kept forgetting to post about it. I usually think it's annoying when people blog about their new poems being up, but in this issue I have an interview with Shelton Walsmith. He's an amazing painter & artist -- one of my favorites.

I was about to start listing out the other work I like in the issue, but i realized I was going to list it all. Like Harp & Altar, Trickhouse is a treat of precise editing.


Trickhouse vol. 3 – Winter 2008



visual artist: Eric Baden
writers: Brenda Iijima, Rebecca Brown, Michelle Naka Pierce
guest curator: Miriam Kathrein
sound: Andrew Klobucar
video: Abigail Child
correspondent: Erik Anderson
interview: Mathias Svalina with Shelton Walsmith
experiment: Denise Uyegara with Natalie Nguyen

Playlist

Opal: Early Recordings
I used to have a tape of this when I was in high school. I can't for the life of me remember why I would have bought it -- I think maybe I liked Dream Syndicate. Opal are probably going to be remembered as little more than David Roback's pre-Mazzy Star band, if they are to be remembered at all (if Mazzy Star is even remembered). These slow, hazy songs fit somewhere between the VU with Nico & the chilly folk rock of early Cowboy Junkies. When I was a teenager they sounded like nothing else I'd ever heard, now they sound like a precursor to Brightblack Morning Light or the free folk stuff I tend to be drawn to. There's a consistently forefronted malleted percussion, even in the most front-porch songs & songs like "Grains of Sand" with its seductively druggy organ is West Coast psychedelia at it's most intoxicating.






Pom Pom: S/T
I don't know much about this record & it seems like the German musician[s?] wants to keep it that way. The CD & case are all black, with absolutely no info & the band name defies easy googling. I admit that it's this mystique that made me first interested in the music. The Other Music website refers to it as a kind of electronic Jandek & I find it fascinating to cultivate anonymity in a music climate in which bands use every excuse possible to push themselves. But of course mystique only gets you so far. This record is beautiful electronic head music -- smoked out fuzz & noise tracks lead into quiet songs of simple playful beats, always stopping itself before it gets into a banger but always hinting that some kind of justice-style track could build out of the echoes & shadows. It's addictive.

Also instead of an image of the all-black cd case, I posted an image from the web of Kasimir Malevich's Black Square, which is equally pointless to see online.




Christian Science Minotaur: Map 2 (of 9)
Terrible band name. Really bad. I know, but a lovely record of patient guitar explorations. At turns creating pedal-enhanced sounds that glide out like giant rays through open ocean & at others pulling back into calm duets that create lovely harmonies. This is music of smiling meditation. Makes me wish I had a sunny morning in the summer coming soon when I could put it on & sit on a porch reading. You can find order the cdr from the Brooklyn label Little Fury Things, but they have an annoying flash entrance into their website. Be careful. Though this record is worth the annoying website & bad-joke band name.

Review of Ana Bozicevic's Document on Jacket

Matthew Thornburn's review of Ana Bozicevic's Document:

I keep returning to that “curvy” key and my imagining of what a lion–particularly an old one–might think.

How many voices subscribe to the unwritten / underpass of light?

Check out the new issue of Shampoo, particularly the great work by Laura M. Nesbit, Laynie Browne, Mike Young & Jordan Davis.