Some Old Friends Have New Faces

Not like this:



or this:



or even this:





More like these:





Dave Madden can now be found self-identifying at the less dusty abode ofwww.davemadden.org. I assume the "org" is short for organization. Oh wait, that's not a joke. Is it?


Elisa Gabbert has broken off from the P-Shares blog to form a splinter group of radicals who have holed themselves us at www.thefrenchexit.blogspot.com.

Better Than Bombing a Starbucks

My review of Keith Newton's chapbook Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City is up on Coldfront today.

Friday Night Poetry in Williamsburg

Friday night will be a shuffle between two readings in W-burg

At Stain: 7 p.m.

***C. S. Carrier, Jennifer Firestone, Erica Kaufman, Matthew Klane, Maya Pindyck, Laura Sims***

At Pete's Candy Store: also 7 p.m.

Janaka Stucky, Dorothea Lasky & Michelle Taransky

Somewhere in the weekend I hope to see the Bacon show & that film Anvil.

Today I will blog about those bloggers who have blogged about my blog entries or blogged about another blog that I link to on my blog.

It will look like junior highschool kid drawings of elves.














I'm not sure if this last one is an elf, but perhaps some kind of intelligent pet of elves.

The "Younger Than Jesus" show at The New Museum is pretty awesome. Without even talking about the art I know it was pretty awesome because I saw the following things there:

1. A doofus in his 60s with an eye patch complaining loudly, performatively to his two sextagenarian ladyfriends “Well, I’m disappointed. I thought it’d be much hipper.”

2. An artschool kid trying to hit on another artschool kid by theorizing the political message of a piece & ending his schpiel with “& you know, blah-blah-blah” & the second artschool kid nodding gravely.

3. An old guy wearing his jacket over his shoulders like a cape (& this was on free-night, which I feel has an implicit no-wearing-your-jacket-over-your-shoulders-like-a-cape rule).

4. A couple making out in the elevator.

While there were a lot of pieces & artists there I liked a lot, what impressed me most was the cacophonous variety of the first two floors of the show. Perhaps going on the free night is the best atmosphere for this show, as it fills the space with art kids, tourists & whatever-I-ams, all reacting differently to the demands & pleas of the works. There was a wild range of grotesqueries & ironies & sincerities & such a wide set of modes of engagement that turning from one piece to another required a shift of methods, but the proximity of everything forced the methods to intertwine. Not surprisingly, therefore, the big room at the Museum was the least impressive to me; its airy space lent too much gravitas to a show that thrived on presentation & novelty of aesthetic rather than contemplative attention.



Which is not to say that none of the pieces benefited from close attention. Icaro Zobar’s simple-yet-amazing hack of four turntables was mesmerizing when in action. Keren Cytter’s unsettling video piece depicted a world hilariously trapped in the stilted trappings of Euro art films. LaToya Ruby Frazier's emotionally rich photographs (an image of one above) stood out in a space that privileged bigger, beepier pieces. Ryan Trecartin’s always-amazing glamzophrenic video was, as always, pretty amazing (composite image below). But what made this show more than the sum of it’s narcissisms is the way each of the two lower rooms performed a wily mess of ways of making & participating with art at this point in the digital crust of the public consciousness.



I feel like I've heard nothing but people complaining & whining about this show, so I was a little dubious of it in advance. But I hadn't had so much fun at a museum show in a long time (& it was hands-down the best thing I've seen at the new Museum's new location).

The Home Video Review of Books: 2.3

New Issue!

www.thehomevideoreviewofbooks.blogspot.com

Reviews of

Notes on Conceptualisms, by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman
To Hell With Sleep by Anselm Berrigan
UNION!, by Ish Klein
Lullaby: Speculations on the first active sense, by Christine Hume & music by James Marks
Full Catastrophe Living, by Zach Savich
Survey Says!, by Nathan Austin
Bob, or Man on Boat, by Peter Markus
The Belladonna Elders Series #3, by Chris Kraus & Tisa Bryant
Night-Sea, by Rachel Moritz
from Disclosure, by Dana Teen Lomax
Quarry, by Carolyn Guinzio
Prairie Style, by C. S. Giscombe
Areas of Fog, by Joseph Massey
More Perfect Depictions of Noise, by Justin Taylor
12 X 12: Conversations in 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Christina Mengert & Joshua Marie Wilkinson
speaking off centre, by James Cummins
Tree of No, by Sandy Florian
The Tangled Line, by Tod Marshall

Four Records That Could Fix You

Trembling Bells: Carbeth

Wow, I had no idea that this was the record I was waiting for. Totally Lief & Liege era Fairport Convention style of brit-folk-rock, played with backward-looking sentimentality. But it has the kind of loose performance & joy of experience that the last Palace records had, before the transition into the more focused BPB albums. While there is nothing remotely "original" to this record, it is a joy to hear this music played with life & love, as compared to the pretty but moribund sounds of Espers or some of those other precious neo-brit folkers. This makes me so happy.



Sun O)))): Monoliths & Dimensions

So even the dregs of cultural reportage like New York Magazine are writing adulatory pieces about Sun now, so I assume the backlash must be in effect out there somewhere. Whatever. I'm loving it. The violins, the chorus: love it. The bigger Sun goes the better. I'd like to see them do a full Pink Floyd style orchestral bullshit performance. I want to see them play on the moon.




Haptic: The Medium

Like I think I've mentioned before, it's hard to write a "review" of a drone record. Assessing drone is more like assessing how deeply the music allows you immerse yourself in it. This is the deep end of the pool. And then you discover a tunnel that takes you straight down into the marrow of the earth. And then you realize that you can breath water & then you realize that it's not even water.

Mechanical noise trickles into grey waves while flutish feedback floats over top. Rhythms that could be cymbals or could be looped up clusters of noise layer across the music. There is an ongoing tension of potential explosion, but the art of this record is to keep it escalating & pulsing while never letting it escape.

The Medium is the kind of record to put on while your working on something & then you realize that you're having the most amazing inspirational experience & you're not sure why & then you realize that it's because this record is lifting you out of your self. Or it's the kind of record to listen to on your ipod while walking through the city & watching how everything before you plays out at the pace of the music & suddenly the banal shit that you do to make it through the day is amazing & the look on that stranger's face that you could have mistaken for fear is a look of wonder. FSS Records pretty has a perfect track record so far. Go to their site & get one of each. (OH!!! I just realized that they put out a record by my favorite Richmond noisyheads Cristal. I need to hear that.)




Omar Souleyman: Dabke 2020: Folk & Pop Sounds of Syria

He's back! Not knowing anything about this guy other than the previous record, I'd figured the first one from Sublime Frequencies was going to be it. I'm so excited to get a second batch of his music. If you don't feel good about the world while listening to this then I can only assume that you've been infected by some kind of parasite that saps all the love out of you. This is some of the most vibrant & exciting dance music happening right now. Hyper-driven oud melodies atop a mix of casio beats & trad drums with incantatory vocals spit out like a street-level rapper. Damn. I mean, daaaamn.

The Wages of Fear is a fundamentally flawed but interesting film

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le salaire de la peur (or as it is more strikingly known in Germany, Lohn der Angst) is well known as a film that, along with Hitchcock, invented some of the modern rhetoric of suspense. Perhaps it is just as well known as a film whose portrayal of American oil companies' careless profiteering resulted in 20 minutes of it getting chopped off for US consumption. It seems like every write up of it also has to mention it's unforgivably misogynistic presentation of Véra Clouzot (also the director's wife at the time). And yet the movie has cache, so I guess it is forgivable.

The film is a pretty amazing tension-action film; the editing in particular is extraordinary. But the film is such a romp through varieties of homosocial masculinity that it makes sense that it needs the infantalized/sexualized woman as a baseline. When one of the brave men calls another one a "woman" as an insult, the film draws up back to the images of Véra Clouzot on her hands & knees responding canine-like to the whimsically violent needs of the protagonist.



If I wanted to be generous I could point out that the strike/response organizer in the town square is the other example of femininity in the film & that it implies there is another world of potential female power outside the constraints of the colonialist purgatory of the town & Southern Oil, but that's overly generous. This is a straight-up misogynist film.



Ultimately, what makes me interested in this (aside from the awesome action scenes), is that the film is about the failures of male-love. The Véra Clouzot character is quite literally jealous, seemingly sexually jealous, of the relationship between the protagonist & his new manfriend. However, through the course of the action sequences the rough physicality of the homosocial relationships all fail, either by a lack of masculine courage or the intervention of fate. The male-female love is portrayed as degrading to the woman & insulting to the man. But the male-male love is not held up as a viable option either. This is ultimately a nihilistic world in which no bonding achieves progress & no endeavor results in positive change.



Which makes this an interestingly influential film not only in how the editing of tension & action occur but in how the homosocial desire of all action films achieves or fails to achieve genuine change in the world of the characters. If this were a shittier & less influential film I'd just forget about it, but it's so meticulously crafted & rendered that I can't help but think about the place the film gives to masculine impotence. In a way my reaction reminds me of watching Medium Cool a film of both great power & embarrassing misogyny.

Best Spam Email Subject Lines I've Received Recently

Your girlfriend will kiss your feet if you give her a golden watch.

Bull pushing your baby.

Massacre in school again - calmness in your love bay.

Important ant information.

I Am In Love With A Band Called The Pyramids

I've been listening to this band The Pyramids a lot of the last few days. There are recent reissues of their records on vinyl & if you hunt about the blogosphere for about 45 seconds you can find copies of them online. 45 seconds well spent in my opinion.



In keeping with the totally awesome afrocentric-commune-love album covers, they play a kind of free-jazz or AEoC-style open music, but with heavy African trance drumming & chanting. It's very close to certain parts of Arts Ensemble, actually, but there's an impressively coherent throughline to every Pyramids song. The songs feel contained, despite the fact that they are obviously dependent on a lot of improv.

A blog called El Reza says that "The first album here, King of Kings was released in Ohio in 1974. The Pyramids included Idris Ackamoor, Margo Ackamoor, Hekaptah, Donald Robinson and Kwame Kimathi Asante all playing instruments like talking drum, Bailophone, one-stringed goge, calypso box, conga drums, Ugandan harp, Hagstrom bass and more." Aquarius Records' site says "Originally released in 1976 [Birth/Speed/Merging], we haven't been able to glean too much about The Pyramids, there are no liner notes (if that tells you how obscure this recording was/is) and a Google search turned up almost exclusively Japanese language sites." Apparently Idris Ackamoor is still doing musical & theater projects. Outer Space Gamelan has an involved (but unreadably unparagraphed) response to a Japanese compilation of Ackamoor's music.



All I know is that these three records hit a perfect spot where my love of afro-pop, free jazz skronk & communal bang&bash come together. I'd been listening to Coltrane's Ascension a few times over the last week. It's my favorite record of his, but it's not one you can bust out for just any old occasion. You need to be willing to enter the music, not just have it on. Pyramids, like a lot of the most fun parts of Art Ensemble, have the kind of spirituality-making elements of Ascension & Live in Japan but with a kind of self containment to the songs that make you feel like they cold be pop hits in a slightly alternative & much cooler universe.

Michael Cutlip

Michael Cutlip

King of the layered cake-paintings.

Everything About This Is The Best Thing Possible

goto Awesome Tapes From Africa to get a whole tape's worth of Ata Kak.

Perhaps the Finest Record Cover I've Ever Seen

My Latest Trite Observation about Living in New York

I walked home across the brooklyn bridge today, which I hadn't done since moving to NY. As usual on the bridge, I was dodging tourists left & right. All of them seemed to be handing their cameras to strangers. It was like some weird game of musical chairs.

When I got home I realized I had a pocketful of strangers' cameras. But all of them are full of photos of me from when I was a child. Now there are a bunch of french tourists outside my door. They are just standing there.

I locked the door, which I imagine they could hear. Every once in a while I look out the peephole & the French tourists are just standing there patiently.

I called my parents & asked them if they know these French tourists & asked them how they could have gotten all these photos of me as a child on their digital cameras. My mother told me that there was a tornado last night out on route 1. That it was their anniversary & that I need to call them back once the French tourists leave.

Some Stuff That Helps Me

Harappian Night Recordings: The Glorious Gongs Of Hainuwele

In the vein of Teeth Mountain & Avarus, this record collects a bunch of tribal-leaning, noisey etudes of pure fucking-around-with-music. I love it. I wish I was hanging out them & banging on stuff & clapping & howling along with them.

Similarly to a lot of great drone music, there's really nothing I can actually say about his kind of record. It's a bunch of musical weirdos banging around on stuff, like how Can were at times & how Finnish free-folkers are or how Sunburned Hand of the Man are. It makes me happy & makes me want to have fun & do weird stuff & make life less boring.

Peste Noire: Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor

This is a surprisingly strange record. I was expecting it to be like a big huge avalanche of black metal power, but instead it's a relatively spare (relative to Peste Noire) movement through martial drinking songs, idyllic landscape recordings, snarled renditions of trouvere ballads & then pretty close to straight up rock. All the while with big echoey drums that fill the cavernous space where the buzzsaw guitars would have been. Just as Alcest stepped away from the black metal form toward MBV, some of this steps toward J&MC. Then other songs are just weird. I'm not sure that I like it all, exactly, some of it feels like it's a little brother trying to get his older brother's attention. But I'm very, very interested in it, in a way that I am not interested in Bill Callahan or Fleet Foxes. It creates it's own parameters of what "rock" can accomplish, instead of twiddling the knobs of the familiar.

Mayday Magazine's Poetry Criticism Roundtable

Even though I find few new ideas in these, it's nice to hear this range of opinions laid out succinctly. I side most with Johannes' take. Negative critique (& positive critique, but that isn't the reason for the roundtable) is reification of aesthetic dominance & correctness. I'd go a bit off of what he says to say that it is the attempt to unify the effects of art into the ego of the reviewer, rather than to experience art as a way of understanding something new about the world, which is what I think art does. I like this quote from his piece:

But what comes out of these quarrels? More quarrel. A lot of time is spent getting angry about non-issues. No new ideas, no new frameworks for reading poetry, no new ideas about poetry have come out of these quarrelsome exchanges.

I imagine that all those poets who get all frazzled about the Dickman brothers (or frazzled about the reviews of the Dickman brothers or the reviews of the reviews of the Dickman brothers) will wish they had all that time & energy back. Or perhaps they continue to pick at the scabs of their own self-inflicted wounds.

It's so weird that KJ's initial letter seems to assume that the only reason someone writes positive reviews is to suck up. It's a huge strawman that then allows him to return to the traditional binary of boring reviews: thumbs down or thumbs up. Who gives a hula hoop about whether one person likes a piece of art or not? Taste is boring, or rather it's the assumption that everyone should share the profundities & pleasures that arise out of one's individual reading practices.

Photos of Snowblink from the Octopus & Yardmeter Event

Thanks so much to the wonderful Snowblink for playing. Check out their music at www.myspace.com/snowblink.








photos by shelton

Octopus Books at Yardmeter

Thanks to Cathy Park Hong, Keith Newton, Karla Kelsey & Snowblink for reading & performing Sunday. And super extra-life thanks to Eric Baus for reading & for writing Tuned Droves, which is so darned good.

Here are some pictures from the event:







My camera died just as Snowblink started playing, so I didn't get any pictures of them. Shelton did & when he gets them to me I'll post them.


In the meantime, here are some photos of my favorite greens:

This Sunday: Eric Baus, Cathy Park Hong, Karla Kelsey, Keith Newton & music by Snowblink :: Sunday in Brooklyn: 5:30pm

Book Party to Celebrate the Release of Eric Baus' Tuned Droves




featuring readings from
Eric Baus
Cathy Park Hong
Karla Kelsey
& Keith Newton

music from
Snowblink




location: 267 douglass st, brooklyn, ny

from Union St (R / M trains): walk north three blocks on 4th Ave & turn left on Douglass

from Atlantic / Pacific: walk south on 4th Ave for seven blocks & turn right on Douglass


poets

Eric Baus

Eric Baus was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1975. His publications include Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), The To Sound (Verse Press, 2004; Winner of the 2002 Verse Press, selected by Forrest Gander), and the chapbooks The Space Between Magnets (Diaeresis), A Swarm In The Aperture (Margin to Margin), and Something Else The Music Was (Braincase Press). He edits Minus House chapbooks, and currently lives in Denver.

More information about Eric Baus can be found here.




Cathy Park Hong

Cathy Park Hong's first book, Translating Mo'um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize & was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Hong is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship & a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Paris Review, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, & other journals. She now lives in New York City & is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

For more information about her explore this.




Karla Kelsey

Karla is the author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, which was selected by Carolyn Forche for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Little Dividing Doors in the Mind, a chapbook, was published by Noemi Press in 2005. Her recently completed manuscript, Iteration Nets, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Work from this book can be found in journals such as Denver Quarterly, the New Review of Literature, and Bird Dog. In addition, poems from this manuscript are included in the anthology Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry. Karla was born and raised in Southern California & is now on the creative writing faculty at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.

To learn more about Karla go here.



Keith Newton

Keith Newton edits the online magazine Harp & Altar. His poems & essays have recently appeared in Harvard Review, Cannibal & Octopus, among other journals. His chapbook Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City was published this year from Cannibal Books. He lives in Brooklyn.

To peruse the wonderful Harp & Altar click here



musician

Snowblink

The first incarnation of Snowblink in 2005 included MGMT as boy back-up singers/percussionists/whisperers. Since then, Daniela Gesundheit has trained over a dozen fellas across the US and Canada to join her when circumstances permit.
She spent the last three years living in San Francisco, where she assisted the folks of Ribbons Publications putting on outdoor music gatherings in the Bay Area. Her most recent release is Long Live. Gesundheit currently lives in Toronto.

Learn more about them & order cds here.
Listen to their music here