Ken Jacobs & John Zorn
Nervous Magic Lantern Live Collaborative Performance
Celestial Subway Line 3

Anthology Film Archive, 5/29/04

"AIRY NOTHINGS would be a way of describing the illusion of moving through and about places that aren't there. I can understand not wanting to throw away hard-earned (by somebody) money on such frivolity, like riding a cloud through the heavens solely to gawk in wonder. The Nervous Magic Lantern opens before us an unsuspected cinema, without actors and their fascinating problems (movies are about actors, they allow common people to learn something of the problems of exceptionally beautiful people). While only recently acquiring the Nervous tag, it is a technique that could've been employed before the advent of film, and way before electronics. As soon as light could be concentrated and focused through a lens in a surrounding darkness against a reflective surface, and a shutter could be made to spin, it was at hand. I figure it had to've given evidence of itself during the time of optical toys and experiment but got pushed aside, was skillfully shunned as extraneous to the inventing of cinematic mimesis. Recognition of its potential required a mind primed by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. A mind also willing to turn its attention away from human strife, hi-tech barbarity, stupidity, venality, needless pain and waste in the service of God or The Nation. This dream world is a deception of another order, modernist deception, stating itself as such in the same way Houdini attacked priestly miracle-makers and spiritualist con-artists by performing tricks and saying so. Now if you as viewer wish to join in and lend substance to the work via your own depth projection, well, that's okay. Let us tangle." - Ken Jacobs

Met Brian and Marianne at Anthology.

Zorn doing a laptop score of some kind. Relaxed unnerving tamboural movements.

The Nervous Magic Lantern projection system does seem like it could have just as easily have been done with candles and a hand crank in the 19th century. The operation and design was intentionally obscured by pieces of cardboard (don't pay an attention to the man behind the cardboard?) Different objects/photos of some kind, including slides covered with colored granules and half-deflated balloons, seem to be placed under a moving projection lens /strobe -- or maybe the objects themselves were moved. The system allowed for the improvisation of different effects -- radial blur, a panning effect, maybe even some kind of stereoscopic effect or simulation.

Most of the material looked like a helicopter-eye view of a barren / alien landscape, like opening shot of The Shining or the planet surface sections of Solaris. The point of view was a disembodied watcher floating over nightmare landscapes, looking for something. Endless variations within the sameness of the surface textures. An alienation effect created by the disembodied viewer pespective, as in the monster-eye view in horror movies, not frightening, but unnearving, since the monster is no longer unknown: we are a spectator watching powerlessly from within it. Seeing this flim is like watching someone else play a video game designed by an evil shaman.

Shifting blurred forms and powerful strobing. Made me think of a Butthole Surfers concert I saw in a small building on the campus of Bard College in 1987 where there were two separate epileptic seizures from the strobes.

The Nervous Magic Lantern strobe is relentless and slightly nausea and headache inducting. Add to that the constant panning and blurring and it becomes mild torture. The darkened theater becomes a dungeon. Constant hallucinatory texture of mineral surfaces. Some kind of suggestible state / hypnotic state induced by the strobe? Seeing things in the mineral surface forms -- faces mostly, and skulls, but also a pair of vice grips? What does that say about me? That I project issues of identity, death, and agency onto what I see? Brian and Marianne later reported also seeing faces.

At one point a 19th century family portrait of some kind was the photo source, and the people became a nightmarish shifting landscape. The surface of human historical record or memory rendered into a morphing lava-like fabric...

Maybe if we worked out our nightmares more in virtual realms we would export them less to other countries...

Kimball reviews Friedlander

Elvin Jones, 1927-2004

Peter Gizzi, talk on Jack Spicer. Poet's House 5/6/04

I came in late to this talk as Peter was discussing After Lorca. It occurred to me that having Lorca introduce you is a great deflationary comical rearrangement of Whitman's "stealing" his introduction from a private letter of Emerson's without asking him for permission. Could Spicer be considered a negative or reversed transcendentalist? My mind kept going back to the arena of poetic social manifestation were the poet attempts to associate their work with artistic status figures…. what is this process? What does it reveal?

Gizzi in this talk made a pitch to see Spicer as a traditional poet in the good sense, that is -- keeping basic poetic gestures alive (by morphing them) in one's time and according to the demands one's experiences in the world call for. Great to have Spicer described not as some magically depressed hermeticly private crank, but as a reflection of the larger history happening around him.

Discussion of basic Spicer moves -- puns, degraded sources, etc., leading up to a comparison of Spicer with California funk art and assemblage, and, in particular, Bruce Connor.

Gizzi showed the Connor film Report, which was totally riviting. Repeated (sampled you could say) news images of the Kennedy assassination that never get to the actual moment of violence, but seem to be infinitely approaching it. Against this disorienting permanent deferment of the moment of truth a news voiceover continues uninterrupted, the temporal continuity of public language seeming to flow and change even as historical meaning is frozen. I thought more than once of Sept. 11th, and the nightmarish media repetition than followed.

I felt in the audience a fascinating rift between the older audience members who had lived through the assassination and the younger ones to whom it is all more distanced media and myth. The older man sitting in front of me kept shaking his head and quietly saying, "why…why…" not understanding what this has to do with Spicer or why a filmmaker would do such a thing.

More than once I thought of JG Ballard during the course of this film, and I realized there may be strong connections between Ballard and Spicer… the use of repeated media/myth images and their fetishistic aspects, the deflationary use of this material which also invokes the dynamics of individual fixation that these myth/history/image systems involve.

Talking with Steve Evans afterwards we both agreed that the deflationary power of Spicer's work is one it's most valuable qualities.

The poetic movement not from unknowing to knowing, but from believing to not knowing? Not art that destabilizes myth but art that reveals an unstable reality from beneath a myth, or, one could say, a wish for stability.

It's hard to imagine that the patriotic denial of national guilt is stronger anywhere in the world than in the USA now, esp. relative to the ostensible level freedom of speech we're suppose to have here. And esp. considering that we could just be getting started with this neo-imperialist shit. This is something traditional that happens in all countries with power, because patriotism, along with it's sibling, religion, are the primary ways leaders switch off the critical thought of the population in order to exploit them, and to use them to exploit others. (my thoughts return to the obvious again!) So it's been for 2000 years with empires, but I do think the USA has cornered the market!

Our corporate media broker state apparatus themselves broadcast these picture of war crimes day after day and Bush's approval ratings stay the same. Rumsfeld's defense is basically that war crimes are no big deal, and people should shut up about it -- he should be able to do as he pleases without the interference of "the world" knowing what he's doing. As if we could hide the meaning of our actions from anyone except ourselves!

There must obviously be guilt in the population (of the paralyzing variety not of the "okay now how are we going to make it right" variety), but it goes with an equal helping of denial. Paralyzed /unprocessed guilt and denial, those are two great American tastes that go great together. The current leaders are clearly beyond the reach of guilt feelings -- these people are expressions of narcissistic tendencies so extreme that guilt is no longer a possibility.

Our guilt about the history within the USA, which is about genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the cast system and repression of our underclass, all operate here in a strong but deeply sublimated domestic guilt/denial system. The powers of denial here are ten times stronger than the powers of guilt as conscience. In the USA, morality operates as an opinion you have about others, it's not something you would apply to what you actually do, or to what "your country" does.

Americans, on the surface, are infantile in their understanding of what it's leaders are doing and why. We look for images of fathers in a president, trust our government, and we "get mad" at people in other countries when they "don't like us." That's how many Americans think. We're not stupid. This is a tactical suppression of intelligence.

American guilt is a guilt that makes us more violent. We think -- what if somebody tried to do this shit to US? We'd want to kill them and torture them. So then we have to be more violently repressive towards them because we're afraid they would want to kill us as much as we'd want to kill them in the same circumstances. That's how the real white guilt works.

It seems that only in academia is historical guilt allowed to be a topic of conversation for extended periods. Because it is contained there, like a protest march route set by the NYPD is contained. When Goering has his own show on Fox the topic is not going to be historical guilt. "You're just having white guilt" means shut up. It's a reactionary statement. I have to admit, though, that saying "we are all complicit " and just leaving it at is a drag and rings false. If it's not elaborated on it can come off as saying "please watch me wringing my hands."

The guilt incurred through imperial repression of other countries is not quite on the mental radar of Americans yet , though I think we project our domestic guilt onto foreign others. The Abu Ghraib prison pictures are reminiscent of American lynching photography. Think of the treatment of Aber Louima got in jail after being falsely arrested in New York City.

Will these fragmented country/ gulag zones be allowed to flourish? Will they grow? The pictures show a tiny sliver of what's going on over there. They also show just a tiny lighted corner compared to a lot of the things we know about foreign policy/CIA/MI history and what it was done over the past 50. America has been such a quick learner. We were able to learn so much from the Nazis and their innovative ideas about counter-insurgency, and to make sure that that Nazi culture didn't die out, didn't go to waste after WWII.

When Rumsfeld was questioned on the armed services committee was very angry about digital photography, and how easy it is to distribute. He was complaining about this when he was being questioned about why 60 minutes was asked not to show the pictures. This was his main concern.

Funny, I remember all these newspaper articles about the digitizing of photography when it was just starting years ago, how it would mean that no one will be able to believe media or history anymore. Looks like it (combined with networking of computers) is going to have the opposite effect. Information leakage may be a lot harder to contain than the Bush team thought. You can bet they will now redouble their effort to control it now.

5/1/04 4:30

Deirdre Kovak, Kamau Braithwaite, Bowery Poetry Club


Deirdre Kovak

Strong sound-based orientation. Dense, meticulously controlled phrases and sentences carefully smashed together, operating in a intentionally attenuated spectrum of variation, not unlike Bruce Andrews in these respects.

"love it or leave with it"

Much deadpan humor and riffing off of self-discomfort and social discomfort in a look / look away pattern.

"The lack of siblings has contributed to my lack of emotional growth."

"Smoking is not speech."

It feels as if the negative psychic energies of living on this side of empire are being transformed into something constructive, a persona processing system mowing itself down in a sequence of downwardly curved starts none of which, in and of themselves, are allowed to develop, but which nonetheless build into larger thematic images. Information, energies and structures emanate as this system is pummeled with gobbets of decaying contradictory truths.

"like your hand against the squeamish of history"

"tomorrow is touching itself in public

"heaven is a do-over"


Kamau Braithwaite

The excavation of history from one's present moment is epic poetry is it not?

"it it it is not. It is not enough to be. To be free of the red white and blue."

Drumming lightly on the table. Half sung.

"to be semi-colon, to be semi-colony"

"95% of my people poor. 95% of my people black. 95% of my people dead."

This poetry moves beautifully away from mysticism. The necessary opposite of mystery. The articulation of why we have trouble understanding.

"there is an absence of truth, like the good tooth drawn from the skull"

"out of the Coney Island of our mindless architects"

"this perturbation that does not signal health"

Halfway through this increasingly riveting reading, Braithwaite went into an extemporaneous explanation of the origins of the Limbo dance, that it comes from the torture of the middle passage, the vertical space of the slave ship decks. How during the dances the tourists always bend over forward, the easy way, not understanding. Braithwaite's reading was so patiently developed that his story telling skills snuck up on me at this point in the reading, before I even realized what was happening. The story and improvised explanatory information fused beautifully and powerfully with the overall body of poetry being read. It felt not like an interruption of the poetry, but like the opening of a related dimension.

"to negotiate this passage and rise on the other side,
rise like the sun to the wonderful glow of the drums."

5/1/04, 3:00

Sound Cube, Charles Morrow, The Kitchen.

Short pieces by Olivia Block, Nicola Green, Shelley Hirsch, Martyn Ware/Vincent Clark, Miya Masaoka, Steve McCaffrey, Charles Morrow, Phill Niblock, Michael J. Schumacher, Scanner, Stephen Vitiello, and Pamela Z .

A sound cube is a three-dimensional multi-channel surround sound system, a frame holding eight speakers. There were two separate cubes here, one with enough room for about 15-20 people, another smaller one, with room for 6 or so. With this system, the sounds can be positioned and moved anywhere within the cube, vertically and horizontally. The larger cube made for a more communal listening experience, and the smaller one had sharper sound images, because there was less reflection. The best possible position for clarity of image was for a single listener sitting on the stool in the center of the smaller cube. The tension here between clarity of sound image and space that allowed for social listening was interesting. The social connotations of reverb….

Phil Niblock
Beautiful, thick, undulating drone. Slow microtonal variations in the drone layers. This piece was ending just as I came in, so I didn't get a sense of the how the sound cube and 3-D positioning was interacting with this signature Niblock sound.

Charles Morrow
Not surprisingly, this piece best captured the feeling of object three dimensionality the sound cube is capable of representing. Sawing wood, tapping sounds. Vivid feeling of the substance of wood.

Shelley Hirsch
A kind of sound theater/installation poetry. Back yard sounds, connotations of suburban childhood. Mouth sounds.

Scanner
Also used backyard sounds. Riffing off remembered suburban sound space. Yard/space art/space. containment. Birds / synth tones.

Stephen Vitiello
Mesmerizingly beautiful organ tones mixed with particle movement sounds. Gravel sliding off a metal surface. Tonality and texture mixed, as with many of these pieces. The sound of tarps being pulled over wood. Digital delay.

Miya Masaoka
Sounds recorded from a three-dimensionally mic'd koto, as though the listener were inside a giant koto. Eight microphones on a single instrument. Texture sounds, scrapes and taps. Small-scale timbre sound events and drone.

Steve McCaffrey
A marvelous digital arrangement by Charles Morrow of McCaffrey's poem Cappuccino, in which words are taken from mathematical language and given Italian suffixes. Here his voice has been multi-tracked, spacialized and looped -- a single voice recording made into a percussion orchestra, Varese-like rhythmic structuring and development.

Nicola Green
Layers of laughter panning around. Most interesting when there was a overlapping of several layers of laughter. The decontextualization of laughter from the source of humor created an odd drama. Are we being laughed at? Is the laughter sincere? What made this person laugh? Who are these people? Henry, Katie's parrot, almost always considers laughter as a musical event worthy of a response, even laughter on the television or radio. He can imitate it quite well.

Had to leave before I got a chance to hear all the pieces. Adeena and I bumped into Charles Morrow on the way out, said hi, and jumped in a cab to go hear Deirdre Kovac and Kamau Brathwaite read at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Breeze, John Latta

Themes and thoughts in a connective tissue of images. Closely controlled almost formal feel. Frank O'Hara / Robert Duncan echos.

Latta gives equal importance to following perceptions and to following the shapes of the poem's construction and associative turns, even when these elements come into conflict.

"rhythm, unavoidable, makes a ratio"

A few separate modes at work here, I prefer the lighter poems that juggle particulars, rather than the ones that come to conclusions.

Interestingly uncomfortable and distinctly crafted rapture-textures.

At moments the poems push into an almost mystical over-expansiveness as a way of resolving tensions, just when I'm wanting him to go deeper into the tensions....

"lines of distress and conjecture"

Hank Lazer's The People's Poetry

Lazer talks about some good things here, like Susan Schultz, Walter Lew, internet writing and publishing as possibly constructive reversals of globalizing infrastructure. He makes an attempt at addressing rap and spoken word (though in embarrassing uncle mode, ugh!), and goes out of his way to discuss neglected writers like Taggart, Enslin. He talks about Maria Damon! It's clear he's genuinely interested in asking questions about what the present situation is in poetry.

More importantly, he gropingly sees the idea of _dispersal_ as being possibly constructive. He is not even close to understanding the depth of the paradigm shift he is glimpsing out of the corner of his eye. He nervously reverts to mostly giving shout outs to Language poets who are already very well known and widely influential.

When discussing younger writers, this otherwise interesting essay becomes questionable. There seems to be some defensive gravitational impulse that keeps him from escaping triumphalist generationalism, though I would add that he's hardly the only established writer to have this problem:

_A major hazard for this generation is a bland eclecticism, with technically adroit writing that remains superficial because the cultural and historical tension of the formal gestures has evaporated._

If these gestures now lack historical tension (meaning it is no longer the 70s and early 80s?) then he is complaining that young writers sound too much like language poetry and that this doesn't work any more because those gestures only had a political meaning during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations? Would this mean the Lazer considers himself and his contemporaries to have at some point (in the mid 80s?) to have stopped writing in the present? He would then be advocating completely different gestures (direct contextualizations I assume, and think he's hinting at) that operate in present political context of the 90s and 00s? Gestures that poets of his generation are not making, even though they are working in the same period?

Or does he mean that only work that repeats Language Poetry's formal gestures AND framing propositions is valid? That _their_ work is _pure_ (his word) and that _younger writers_ are adulterated?

This seems like a hasty recycling of statements from Lyn Hejinian's famous Rain Taxi interview. My most cynical read on this is the possibility that this kind of statement is intentionally picking out some Iowa workshop / Jorie Graham imitators (work which actually IS confessional poetry with spray-on coating of Language Poetry) and ingenuously saying _look the kids aren't any good, we're the real deal_ as a generational PR move, ignoring the interesting younger writers. Lazer may actually not know about the existence of much writing by poets 20-40.

Or is this kind of statement just a temporary thing -- a presently incoherent conflicted response to a group artistic mid-life crisis?

Jack adds to his streak of interesting, thoughtful reviews with this take on Mike Scharf's Verite:

The night beacon of the lighthouse pulsating in the darkness. Giant bands of glowing fog-light turning through space every ten seconds.

Pigeon Point. Named for the wreck of the Carrier Pigeon. This was a good spot for shipwrecks and rum-running, for the same reason.

Oil lamps and Fresnel lens -- 1872. 1,008 brass-framed prisms to concentrate the source of light. Joined together to form a six-foot-diameter in a circular frame.

Now a 1,000-watt light bulb.

When the steam whistle first blew, cows from a nearby ranch stampeded to the beach. "The cows must have thought there was a very wonderful bull down there."

1970's, the signal was automated.

The night sky, fog moving under stars.

Butano State Park. Coastal Redwoods. Damp and dark at the stream basin. Areas of thick underbrush and overturned redwood trees. Steep slopes and moist, thin topsoil. Not the tallest redwoods but still big enough to be micro-environments in and of themselves. Ferns growing on branches 100 feet up. Purple Iris'.

An economy of sunlight, with the tallest trees taking the most and the animals and plants who dig moisture and shade thriving at the bottom. Some of the lower areas are only redwoods and ferns. Prehistoric looking. Banana slugs, moss, spiders in rotting, upturned root beds.

Going up the ridge. Small desolate areas of terminal Douglas fir forest. Dead trees that choked off their own light -- renewal cycle sustaining them in the overall balance and long term coherence of the forest's symbiotic mechanisms.

Hot, flat fire road with sunlight enough to sustain poppies. A relief to start back down the trail into the cool, moist air and complexities of the mixed Douglas fur and Redwood areas. Sharp patches of sunlight filtered though branches. Unusually quiet. Recent burn marks around the trees -- everything here evolving around the fires. Improvising to turn destruction into something good.

I love the chaos and order mixed together. Are these state park enclosures preserved areas of nature? Or are they now art?

Pescadero, ala trout fishing spot, classic tiny old west town crossroads but with New England architecture. Used to be a seaside resort on the stage coach route.

We arrive at our resort, Coastnoa, Right up against Butano State Park.
Mix of tent areas, cabins, rooms and common areas. Young couples and families. Lightly streaming tinges of anger beneath the crunchy veneers.

Fire place in the room. Duraflame logs provided. Wax and sawdust. I take an interest in Duraflame as a take on content. Their motto is the secret of fire.

Half Moon Bay. Pleasant small town. Crunchy yuppie stuff and child rearing scenes. Katie's friend Stephanie grew up here, living on a boat.

Picked up, to my surprise, a used copy of Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, in the used book store here. Marked up only in the first chapter.

Excellent, strong coffee available every ten yards. Why did the culture of strong coffee never develop in the East? Must be the French/Italian take on eating, which involves taking time to enjoy one's food, never happened in the East, esp. New York City, where food is quickly shoveled into one's mouth as you earn money or race toward the next marker. That, or eating is an excuse to be seen in a status-generating/reinforcing room, where one waits to enter, and is then rushed out like an item in a factory.

NYC has a dispiriting, corporate-dork Starbucks every two blocks, but does not have anything like the coffee culture of the west coast. The East Village has many small coffee shops that survive, not one of which has coffee one tenth as good as an average place the Bay Area. Not exactly about coffee. It is about whether there is an expectation that one is ever suppose to feel that they are abiding within their own duration, even for a small stretch. In the culture of NYC this feeling would be taken as a sign of weakness.

Space of pacific coast highway 1, the realized dream of Dr. John L. D. Roberts. An incredible artwork, though one build by prisoners etc. 1919-1937. Pacific ocean and lush farmlands right up against each other, flowers and vegetables. Limestone cliffs.

The total lack of commercial signs. No McDonalds. No Billboards. Because of policies. Ecologically unsound road repair methods let in destructive nonnative plants, Pampas Grass. Unbelievable feeling of freedom and space on this road. Curving and extending. And the air so full of information -- compared to the unbreathable stuff we use for oxygen in NYC.

San Gregorio State Beach, south side. Old Ohlone village. Estuary and freshwater marsh. No egrets today. Crumbling cliffs and expanding views. The combinations of types of erosion here, sea water, creek water, wind, create a particular variety in the contours of the limestone and shallow topsoil. I remember seeing humpback whale flukes come out of the water right at the beach here years ago. A little girl pointing and screaming in delight and fear.

The cliff line looks like a turkey on a slicer. The Red-winged Blackbirds doing legato notes with a curious timbre. Bright orange shoulders. The sound a combination of machine and cat. Excellent group riffing.

Sparkling early evening sunlight on ocean waves.

California Notes

Flying into SF at night. Black area of bay water. The negative space of man-made light. Water, not development.

San Bruno extension of airport. Connecting transport structures imposed over older small CA town.

San Bruno Regency Inn motel, the room smelling faintly of melted plastic. The details, a perfect piece of installation art about accommodation and alienation, a space created for people to not actually be there, but to be contained and seen to, a bit like the alien studio suite at the end of Kubric's 2001, A Space Odyssey, but of course without the appropriated poshness. The awkward attempts of the aliens to provide a living space, the subtler connotations of which they wouldn't be concerned with. The class implications of the expensive furniture transplanted onto another planet creating much of the alienating upper-class human-pet-hospital-through-the-eyes-of-other-beings vibe.

Low flying airplane sound at night. Amazing bass and treble layers sliding away from each other in the sustain. The depth of the partials. The implied power of the engines a bit too close. Nervousness charged into the sound, beautiful.

Will Alexander, Bowery Poetry Club, 4.3.04

Missed Harryette Mullen, but arrived in time to see Will Alexander's whole set. He read with an electric guitar player, who improvised with loops and textures.

Alexander read with the same style and pacing as he normally would without the music, so the overall arrangement was in the free jazz tradition of streams of separate things happening at the same time in phenomenological polyphony. The poetry was read blastissimo, without breaks or pauses, and the guitar player essentially took a supportive role. The music added a lot to the overall performance energy, and I thought there could easily have been a whole band here, at least bass and drums in addition to guitar.

Alexander's poetry is thought provoking and extremely vertical, with vocabularies building and massing into color areas. You could think of this performance a duet for two harmonic instruments. I experienced it as a movement through space, with cloud and particle formations of vocabulary spiraling past. The guitar player also implied movement through a sound space that could have been considered very small or very large, esp. in his loop sequencing.

Alexander's syntax is fairly static, with constructions that fall into an elevated surrealist argument / description voicing. This static syntactical element is a stable structure around which the vocabulary structures are built dynamically (though this dynamic quality happens within a fairly controlled set of registers). The word groups tend to fall within several sets of concerns -- environments, animals, minerals, elements, and mental states. The words pile up with only ostensible syntactical exchange. The vocabulary sequences, and their implied subject matter, linger way past anything suggested by the actual sentence structures, like:

levels / vertigo / hummingbird / omniscience / nostalgia.

Almost any of the words from these concern-sets can be and are plugged into the syntax grid, and this comes off almost as a proposition about ranges freedom within agreed-upon formal arraignments.

It is impossible to even scratch a doodle onto a scrap of paper without invoking the question of what identifiable parts of the past still have a claim upon us. Alexander addresses this question by actively joining in dialogue with the works of Aime Cesaire. I guess it could be argued that anything identifiable as a claim from the past that one could pick to attend to on the basis of one's own tropisms is already more of a function of what we think of as the present, and the more crucial aspect of the past are those things which also have some kind of claim on us but which we are incapable of seeing at present.

Alexander's work also operates as a perpetual motion machine whose function it is to reject any external definition or limitation of identity or experience while refusing to posit an alternative except the ambient motion and particle phenomenon that seem to go along with and exist as the very substance of this rejection. It felt like the embodiment of the wish to be completely uncontained, hence the impact of the work feels ambiant and spatial. The rebellious, speculative, and of course, impossible quality of this embodiment are so obviously related to the work of Sun Ra that I won't belabor the obvious here.

Laura Elrick & Barrett Watten, Poetry Project, 3/17/04

Laura Elrick read from a new, longer sequence called Fantasies/Impermeable Structures

32 line, 32 stanza structures. Modeled on 32 bar song structures?

"both the object seen and I that sees"

Started with quiet almost introverted reading style, and gradually warmed up into a more dramatic, declamatory style.

18th/19th century voicings as in recent Jennifer Moxley or Lisa Robertson.

Iambic riffing.

Focus on issues of social justice and subjectivity.

"here's where I commodify my sorrows"

"life with partially-hydrogenated declaration"

Brief portrayals (Reznikov?) and Susan Howeish vocab constructions and blurring

"I wear my sleeve on my heart"

"on the grassy knoll of good PR"

Unique feeling of public/private institutional / internal spaces in which mutually-leaking containers filled with the problems of class warfare and artistic representation mix.

-----

Barrett Watten did a two hour PowerPoint presentation about his own poetry with readings of his poems, and interpretations of and commentary on his own literary history.

I guess it would be possible to dismiss this performance as an outrageous act of self-absorption. Whether this is healthy or not, I'm not sure, but I found the whole thing interesting. One important point of reference was my memory of Bob Grenier's slide presentations in San Francisco, where he discussed his own hand written poems, often talking for extended periods about how a particular letter E was trying to become a letter A and so forth, performances I loved for their craziness and outrageousness. Breton is also, obviously a model here. I tend to like multi-media genre-mixing and almost anything that departs from the standard podium reading.

Watten showed a photo that one of the poems from Bad History is based on, an anonymous Korean shop owner during the '92 LA riots shot from the back as he points his gun to unknown targets outside the frame of the photo-- a photo pushing into Gustony cartoonish abstraction. Watten basically implied that what we're seeing here is actually an image transforming into a module or machine used by power the purpose of which is to destroy information about violence while transmitting representations of it. He didn't come out and say this, but I assumed he was implying that the result of this is to make the conception of violence and it's place in history a kind of digestible abstraction that obviates the more important layers of meaning which would have to be dealt with in a representation that included undeniable particulars, particulars which would inevitably draw the perceiver of the photo into the problematics of the historical scene, into the nets of power and meaning evoked there, and into questions of the viewer's own place in these things. There were several moments like this in the talk where I thought focusing on more basic elements of the issues brought up would have made the performance less daunting and more engaging. As Watten went into increasing nuance and complexity on issues of psychology, representation and power, I kept reasserting basic questions to myself that he was invoking be not addressing -- here esp. the issue of intra-class conflict between the immigrant shopkeeper and the rioters.

Interesting sequence starting with a photo of a car being manufactured, looking exactly like a HR Giger painting. Watten read a description of a car manufacturing area where the identification with these capitalist production means was allowed to come through unrepressed, which was then countered with a quote from the book Rivethead about the destructive triviality of the manufacturing process.

Describes Ford's insight that paying the workers enough to buy the cars is a kind of feedback.

Describes the fantasy that the negativity of profit is loss relative to development and production in the Detroit landscape. This was one of several times I thought of Foucault during this talk….the question what is your relation is to the constructive element of power systems…

Appropriately enough: The morning after the reading, on the C train on the way to work, I picked up a NY Post that someone had left on the seat. On page three was a story about how the CIA had Osama in their sights in 2000. Included was a photo, with a copyright NBC, apparently taken from a unarmed Predator spy plane, of Osama. The picture was nothing but a beautiful smear of abstract green and blue color areas with video pixilation bands.

Poetry has the capacity to deal with the nonevents of life in a way that other art forms couldn't possibly manage.

Wallace Shawn / Richard Foreman talk at CUNY Grad Center, 3/3/04

This moderated talk about theater was itself like a play, with Shawn exactly reprising his My Dinner With Andre character speaking very slowing and trying to work out something reasonable to say, and Foreman playing a perfect brilliant introvert character coming out with funny, provocative statements.

Foreman: "I have always hated theater."

Foreman suggested that working in theater has been appealing for him because it has allowed him to relate to other people in relation to his own fantasy life.

Foreman: "I like theater because it's real people and real stuff in front of you -- like life." He suggested that poetry is a contrast to this. He's thinking of Mallarme here? If I had stayed for the Q&A I would have asked why language isn't stuff or something in front of you. Later Foreman says his is a language based theater and I again wonder why the the presence language isn't like the presence of the actors or sets...

Both Wallace Shawn and Foreman discuss their respective relation to narrative. Shawn talks about having to have something to follow when he's seeing a play -- and that too much abstraction and lack of narrative create a situation where the play is like a sequence of abstract paintings. There problem with this, he says, is that you can take in an abstract painting very quickly. With abstraction in a play the first few "paintings" are interesting, and then his interest drops off steeply as the play goes on. He also talks about not liking narrative that is too obviously going for a verisimilitude that a theatrical performance can never create the way a movie can -- a character kicking the snow off his boots as he comes in the door, for example. Foreman says that in a film, his suspension of disbelief with the narrative is deep and almost automatic, and that in a play it never happens because the physical presence of the actors and sets destroys it for him.

Foreman spoke of a new play he's working on called "Pancake People" about internet culture and the general effects of information disbursal in the present era. This is something I think about a lot and feel is a important force operating on my generation of writers. I continue to wonder if we are in a period where the artistic phenomena are increasingly vertical (chordal) -- or that the vertical and the horizontal, the synchronic and diachronic are in the process of fusing.

The comically uptight moderator (unintentionally providing a great theatrical performance here) asks both of them how they start a play, a question which makes both of them uncomfortable and a little defensive, as though the maintenance of some kind of mystery in regard to the inception of the creative process is important to them. Foreman says he starts with "sentences" and Shawn says "sentences, including grammar."

The Moderator character asks about politics in plays and Foreman said the way he addresses politics is by exploring his own inner fascist in the plays. Shawn more or less concured and said "When I'm here talking to you or at dinner I'm a progressive guy, but putting the play together, I'm a progressive, I'm a conservative, I'm a fascist, etc. the whole spectrum..."

Foreman also relates this to being adopted and said, "I could have just as easily been adopted by the Bush family, and then I be like them!"

Jack Kimball does short takes on Corina Copp, Mark Lamoureux, Allison Cobb, Michael Gottlieb, Tan Lin, Barbara Henning, K. Silem Mohammad, Albert Flynn DeSilver.

Packed house at the Poetry Project for Michael McClure and Ron Silliman, last night.

Katie and I had been at the Richard Foreman / Wallace Shawn theater dialogue at CUNY grad center, where we ran into Cori Copp. We all split before the Q & A and jumped in a cab, getting to St. Mark's just as Larry Fagin was starting his introduction.

McClure, who I had never heard, read first. He went chronologically starting with his first poem published in a magazine (Poetry). Interesting sestina.

(when I hear the door creak of audience members coming in late, I always have to look -- what am I looking for?)

Stories of beat companions and a haiku about the light show at the Fillmore.

Sing song portraits of consciousness.

Read from Fifteen Fleas, which Larry Fagin edited and published as a stapled book for the reading. Startlingly flarfy work. Based to some extent on comic books. Lovely, energized swirls of insignificance.

"An animal is a mind."

"Be in comfort Chet Baker"

Ron Silliman started out by saying he was more interested in poetry than in poems.

Read from Albany

"I used my grant to fix my teeth"

Descriptions of public spaces / observations of homeless people / statements / puns / autobiographical elements pooling together and building as discrete units rather than strung into a story.

"I began to wonder… is Bob Dole… also … a Muppet"

"the essence of dance is fundraising"

I didn't get a chance to talk to Ron after the reading at the Telephone bar, but I found myself coveting his Howard Dean baseball cap.

Caught some rare Orson Wells short films at Film Forum last weekend. A lot of magic act material, including Wells dividing Marlene Dietrich in half.

Thinking of why I have an instinctive dislike of magicians. I realized it hits the button with me where I'm pissed at the degree to which the world is fixed, rigged…. Also wondering how much of any art is a sequence of tricks…?

Jim Behrle ups the ante on the poetics of hot dogs.

After the prestidigitator’s trick, which I inadvertently played into, seeking with too little knowledge to expose it...

I felt for my watch, which wasn't there.

Later I found it on the night table.

my relation with the tricksters

The Frequencies, Noah Eli Gordon, Tougher Disguises Press, 2003

I sometimes think of blogging as cross between writing a journal and hosting a radio show.

Noah Eli Gordon, in his first book The Frequencies, takes the writer-as-radio/DJ metaphor and rearranges it in dozens of combinations in a series of prose poems written from the perspective of a kind of DJ/poet/blogger. The poems veer between essay, dream-poem, and quasi-narritive.

Metaphors of broadcasting, sound and signal phenomenon are applied to many subjects, often personal relationships and questions of creativity.

"Is it charming to destroy silence? To glue the bits back together, to appreciate the possibility of selection, to talk with someone in line at the grocery store who gives the standard objection, says it's like a drop in the bucket, this wanting to be heard."

Many details associated with a radio are used to explore some subject matter -- for instance, a series of riffs on time are invoked with a clock radio.

“part suspect, part seduction”

Gordon does a lot with these elements -- light, fun, aiming to please and delivering. Wooing the reader.

Michael Friedman-like voicings crossed with Frank's Wild Years. Waits-esque vibe throughout:

“The station memos were full of roman numerals & everyone in the coliseum had their thumbs pointed down. The queen bee was drinking oil, thought the ticking in her ears was an engine.... Face it, we're all in love with landing gear.“

The few sections of repeated grammatical arrangement don't add much to the book, but there are very few of them.

He implies a lot more interesting material and thought than he develops, a kind of chord building made of implications and hints.

One sentence construction that he handles well is a run on sentence with an argument building tone that doesn't necessarily build an actual argument. This rhythm is combined with figure of speech and cliché mixing and juggling.

The most of this work has a funny, light touch, though Gordon will sometimes orbit closer to a more serious question:

“What we hear off the air is not the radio lying to us, but what we encode to come to terms with our own enclosure.”

There are moments where the identification reverses and the radio become a imitation of sound or a representation of the commercialization of sound, countered here by attending to live sounds coming through the window:

"The windows were open & I could hear people laughing from the roof. It was good. The bed was full. The radio was stiff & prim & explosively still."

Thoreau's preoccupation with the parallel forms displayed in leaves and in ice crystals led him to suggest a kind of early theory of everything based on leaves. This same observation would be fully articulated, in the 1970s and 80s, in fractals -- self-similarity.

Thoreau is often at his most fascinating at these points where a quasi-mystical theme wrestles itself completely free of its metaphysical connotations and becomes a fusion of empirical observations, speculation about consciousness, and poetic, intuitive leaps. The Journals are full of variations on this pattern.

He is investigating the self-similarity patterning of consciousness and attention interacting with high-detail observation and multiple simultaneous layers of theme and subject matter?

Interesting to get his impressions of New York City when he spent nine months in Staten Island in his mid twenties trying to make it as a writer. The blur of faces. Also the similarities of elements of his bio to many writers I know. The college years, the early affinities and imitaions, the historical forces, the critical alliances, the lack of ways to earn money, the disappointments, developments, growth and decisions. You have to wonder about the patterns of how our live as writers pan out and how much of it might also be described with fractals....

Jack Wright (sax) and
Reuben Radding (bass), COMA series @ ABC No Rio

Beautiful saxaphone/ bass duet with combinations of negative space, forward momentum and focused self-control, often all at the same time.

This was a half hour of music played almost exclusively with extended technique. The dynamics were mostly quiet, and it's great to be able to listen to acoustic music at close range with no brittle PA in the almost shockingly low-noise ceiling environment offered by a frigid winter night on Rivington St.

There's something about the way Radding and Wright play together that foregrounds the shapes of the collective pauses, the negative space, which, in a way, is the most deeply collaborative musical element at play.

Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson, 1970

A prodigal son story about the alienation of an underachieving upper-class trade-down. The film is a sieve though which partially digested information about class identity and dynamics pours.

It’s possible to feel the director’s life coming through the film from the first shot, with careful nuanced character renderings, subtle dialogue, scene arrangement and cinematography. Odd to think of this director as the creator of the Monkeys.

Rafelson is good with text. The scene where Nicholson sleeps with Sally Struthers ends with a shot of him wearing a TRIUMPH motorcycle t-shirt. In the last shot, where Nicholson abandons his pregnant wife, the blocking includes the word MEN from the outside bathroom for the entire shot.

He's also good with machines and cars, which are picked out and shot with as much care as the people. He likes to put objects between people, like a cigarette machine. Nicholson is immediately handed a sewing machine in the sequence where he and Karen Black give a hitchhiking lesbian couple a ride. In this scene, which is intensely comic, Helena Kallianiotes so commands the manic dirt-obsessed character and takes so much joy in the portrayal that the rest of the movie screeches to a hilarious halt for the entire time she is on screen.

Great sound moment when Nicholson plays the horrendously and beautifully out-of-tune truck piano and it mixes with the horns of the traffic jam.

There is an interesting mix of class languages and scenarios, though there are never any overt questions of class conflict. The estrangement information is only rendered in the small details of an impossible individual escape from a pretentious, bogus upper-class elite to a frustrated, unaware working class. This is a movie about rebelling against pointless rules and not fitting into any class identity that has spilled over into a partial rendering of the general American aphasia of class estrangement.

Katie and I put on A Love Supreme this morning in honor of Valentine's day.

Looking at anyone's work from the point of view of how it works relative to touchy subjects.

The audience at poetry readings is comprised almost completely of other poets. Is it that only other poets can digest poetry because we have developed four stomachs or is it simply that there's no money behind it?

The quickest glance at the art world implies the latter. When I remember seeing U2 in a stadium in Philadelphia in the mid-eighties, though, I can't help but think that the entire audience was comprised of rock stars.

Is it possible to draw out frivolous-in-a-good-way and serious-in-a-good-way at the same time?

When getting really into it, in a certain way, is a problem.

the myopic, long-distance lecture from the intellectually tone-deaf bully-in-training

the misapplied energy...

The established artists who hold their ears when they hear something that doesn't conform to their ideas.

"The universe is harmonic, or it wouldn't work"
Guy Davenport

"The habit of the realist is to find things the reverse of their appearance."
--Emerson

heard in rapid succession, walking down Ave. A:

a man saying:
"The more money you have, the more boring you are."
a woman saying:
"I've been unfaithful since a week after I got married."

Wondering last night how much reception and suggestion are factors in what is happening in the audience's mind during a poetry reading.

Is it like a tarot or palm reading, where there is ambiguity, a suggestible state and a subject who is searching for meaning?

Or is it more like a pop song -- a canvas with roughed-out templates for painting your fantasies?

Beautiful unintentional collaboration:

I was listening to Wayne Shorter's Night Dreamer, when, on the last track, the quavering whine from some construction machinery coming in through the window mixed in perfectly with the song.

Shorter's playing always sounds completely inside the chord, but with a unique kind of space and freedom. It's amazing how adding the layer of noise to this equation deepens the consonance.

Jean Vengua quotes Madeline Bruser on The Art of Practicing.

What are the psychological and political implications of muscular motion / relaxation / tension patterns and their relation to the physiological and psychological mechanics of playing musical instruments?

In Wilhelm Reich's thinking, social sexual repression results in and is in turn reinforced by patterns of muscular tension. This dynamic is exploited by institutions and translated into various kinds of patriotism and enforced alienations and this has devastating large-scale results. Why not devise a musical system where sound and muscular motion were equally important -- a system of practicing that addresses political problems from a musical perspective.

Free time being eclipsed by temporary work crunch. The few fissures in this crunch have been occupied by the absorbing Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind, Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Bush's State of the Union speech was an unnerving combination of bone-chilling and laughable.

There was an interesting moment when the speech writers and coaches lapsed and included a pause that was used by the democrats to recontextualize one of Bush's statements with applause -- "key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year" -- was followed by clapping before Bush could add that the act should be extended. The syntactic gap allowed for an instant, inverse meaning to be invoked.

The associations are almost gone, and one can now drink this in and not shutter with the nausea of irreversibility.

Marianne is back!

DC Travel Notes:

Empty Amtrak Christmas day.

Marsh weeds alive in the man made stream.

All these things press up against the borders of that space that cannot be easily exploited. The rest of the space is filled. Living things.

*

National Gallery

Da Vinci -- Ginevra de Benci.
Glowing presence. Defensive haughtiness. Sfumato ala Cate Blanchett in The Two Towers.

Neroccio de Landi
Etched-looking halo draws attention to the paint.

Titian
Openly sucking up to power.

Vermeer
Small!

Isaac van Ostade
Muted colors / everyday life.

Goya
Grotesque horse-on-velvet stuff.

Hieronymus Bosch
Like it was painted yesterday. Netherlands/monsters?

Rubens
Blockbusters.

Richard Serra
Literally becoming part of the museum's structure. Museum's power.

Romare Bearden
Multiple impressions of city/family life. Kaleidoscopes of social energies.

Faces: composites of different faces. Identity a composite of influences.

*

Dream sequence

moving my computer
into the future
no television
"look at me"
if you touch the TV

1.10.2004
Frank Sherlock
Bowery Poetry Club intro
1/10/04

Frank Sherlock's poetry uses a poetic composting system, where thoughts
and noticings which might evaporate or be discarded from the mind are
collected and made into an area of material where perceptions and
insights can grow.

Like Buck Downs, he uses a kind of poetic witness protection program to
relocate micro-social speech rhythms, self-reflective process
descriptions and figures of speech:

...long on place short on sightedness

shadowy sketches of self on the lam from the self

Sherlock uses subtle rhythms like in Paul Blackburn and tracings of
thought based on immediate perception like in Larry Eigner. These two
elements are brought together and served with a side salad of humor and
a dessert of Gaussian-blurred connotations.

Loose parameters lead to 

      Magic results    of course

   It could be voodoo

                Just to say

what's been expected from

     The mouth....

His work moves by turns toward scrutiny, presentness and fun.

Lost and Found, Michael Gottlieb
Roof Books, 2003

The three individual poems of Lost and Found -- Issue of Error, The Dust, and Careering Obloquy -- are honed, gradual, sequenced pieces which are structurally not unlike Oppen’s or Spicer’s serial work. The book takes on the feeling of a destroyed object whose constituent parts are slowly reassembling themselves before the reader's eyes like a backward film reel, except the reassembled object is not the same as the shattered one.

Although it shares the central quality of Objectivism in viewing the poem as an object, Gottlieb's poetry develops the concept further by also identifying identity, personal and group history, and thought as objects.

In circling and recircling his scrutiny around a series of remains and implying questions about various processes of degradation that have led to some lamentable current state, Gottlieb develops a compelling poetic system, one capable of including layers of autobiography, social commentary and thought. The mournful, dark vibe is not without humor, and projects a consistent sense of resignation and desire for clarity.

Gottlieb uses intentionally limited methods and tonalities in combination with two main ingredients in subtle, shifting proportions: parataxis and analogy. One of the many distinctive aspects of this work is its extensive and unabashed use of simile. He moves simile away from the straining decorative function it has assumed in the hands of confessional and workshop poetries and uses it as a means of actually drawing out the powers of analogic thought.

there you are
like nothing so much as an unclaimed lot
bought back by the house,
not having met your minimum

Gotlieb’s work often feels like an enumeration of conditions one has been reduced to by the forces of one’s own history. It often reads like a re-visioning of the elegiac tradition -- looking at what you’ve lost through the negative template of what remains in order to better locate and understand the present moment.

Poetry’s relation to wishful thinking can run across a wide spectrum, from a safe area for the imagination all the way to an all-out delusion enhancement system. If poets across a wide range of styles and literary groupings tend to lean towards the latter tendency, then Gottlieb’s work could be considered a sharp corrective maneuver in the direction of dealing with things that refuse to not be the case in life -- things which generally go unspoken.

Gottlieb's poetry fuses lyrical, meditative, skeptical and investigative poetic impulses. The drama this enacts is that of someone uncovering life informations which are continually sinking into an ambient social aphasia. These unearthed layers of psycho-social information are the raw material of the poetry in Lost and Found, material which is sequenced on a larger scale though a pointed process of accretion.

Gottlieb has a unique take on the understanding of the local in poetry. In this sense his work could be considered an extension of the tradition of emphasizing the local in the works of William Carlos Williams or Charles Olson. For Gottlieb the local is a matter of how one lives in groups -- especially the negative aspects of belonging to a particular in-group -- the underbelly of the social agency of creative manifestation.

The connotations and contexts are richly unstable, though. There are select harmonic groupings of possible contexts that this poetry simultaneously evokes: laments about the details of work-life, the toxic long-term effects of being a poet, and the mental and social environmental degradation of middle-class America.

The other local condition operating in the book is the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, invoked through the Alan Davies cover photo and the middle poem The Dust.

The Dust is a list of items, things destroyed in the attacks, mundane business supplies grouped into classes, and mixed with people’s names.

Myst II: Exile, for Windows 98, CD-ROM, Ubisoft Entertainment, Inc.

Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid Brand Adhesive Bandage, 1/2" by 3’’

Picture Frame By Umbra, Fits Pictures 3 1/2 by 5

Daniel C. Lewin

This systematically based, carefully limited method of construction invites comparison to musical Minimalism, especially with someone like Tom Johnson or early Terry Riley or Steve Reich, where the processed-based construction is transparent, but the artistic effects are not totally dependent on the registration of the conceptual process.

As they build up these items seem to be asking questions. Is this what we have created as a group, as a country? Is this what we will leave behind? Are the other things we have created -- social formations and practices, art, a string of life decisions, the same as these objects? What is going to be left of us once capitalism is done with us? What do we wish to be in the face of our extraordinary temporariness?

The mundane quality of most of the objects ("distressed denim baseball cap") takes on a strange poignancy, not at all cynical, as if these things have been relieved of their duties as prosaic commodities and have almost taken over the role of the poet as a commentary-generating agency.

Gottlieb’s work dramatically enacts a forensic social poetics of object.

(the text of Gottlieb's previous book, Gorgeous Plunge, is available on-line in its entirety here)

The requests are in!

Stephanie on fog

Gary with an appropriated essay

Katie on Willows

Nada with a time travel review of Patti Smith

The reason a Roger Corman movie like The Terror is great is because the director lets go of a certain amount of control, due to budgetary constraints in this case. Because of this, other things, things unrelated to the conventional selling points, are allowed into the movie.

Do you guys take requests?

Steve: More reports from the DVD cosmos and sharp, stinging commentary on iffy thinking and writing in the American essay landscape! What do you think of The Return of the King?

Katie: More brief, odd, engrossing NYC public vignettes! What do you think of the disappearance of urban willow trees?

Stephanie: More reading reports from any living room in the Bay Area! In fact anything about living rooms will do: we don't have them in NYC. How do you think fog changes the poetic imagination?

Nada: More intellectual gyrating among the memoir, poetry, and reportage riffs! What are the connections are between the Farrelly brothers and Hannah Arendt?

Gary: More appropriated reviews, live reports and large slabs of discussion on topics about which I know nothing! What do you think of Philip Guston?

Kasey: More refreshing posts on 19th century poets and deer head art! What do you think about minor 18th Century poets writing about rabbits/pets?

Aaron Kunin on K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation

TV on the Radio
Northsix, Williamsburg, 12/19/03

Imagine what a future version of the band that Parliament, from their first, odd album, Osmium, might have been if they had stuck with that particular bizarrely defiant eclecticism. TV on the Radio, a NY five piece band, fuses eclectic impulses within each song, though, rather than, as on Osmium, genre switching between songs. The impulses are put through a indy-rock/pop/soul/disco juicer, and the anti-oxidants flow.

All the songs at this show were fairly long, and the band had a relaxed, good-humored stage presence and patience for taking their time and building up the vibe of each song gradually. The drum mix was not so hot, the bad-middle-band-mix in a three band show syndrome. The sound person just didn't hear that the drummer had a light touch. The mix -- upfront sludgy guitar and counter-pointing dual vocals, worked nonetheless.

The guitar player did crunchy sweep picking on the chorus of every single song, which sounded great. It added a John Cale drone quality to the pop and soul elements.

I can't help but wonder if there is a parallel here with some recent poetic trends? There seem to be many poets fusing many different elements rather than selecting a single thing to imitate in the present environment with its unprecedented variety of practices and examples available.

There's some very, very expensive flarf for sale in Chelsea.

Giacinto Scelsi
The Piano Works 1, Louise Bessette, piano
mode 92

These Scelsi pieces have an impressive spectrum of tone-landscaping transformations. He is particularly good at drawing out melody sequences at very slow tempos, often separating them with judiciously placed cluster-pylons. He's also great at using folkish, jagged, rapturously self-deconstructing rhythmic events.

Seems accessible and way out there at the same time, a combination of qualities I love.

Here are the results from my request for non-shopping-oriented rap music.
Many thanks to the four poets who contributed:

Brandon Downing:

MF Doom (aka Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah)
Zion-I
The Roots

Noah Eli Gordon:

Dead Prez
Mr. Lif
Mos Def
Jurassic 5

Michael Magee:

Mos Def
Blackstar
Cibo Matto
Common
The Roots
Outkast
Sage Francis
Aesop Rock
Mr. Lif

Rod Smith:

Scratch (Documentary)

Music or Honesty, Rod Smith, Roof, 2003

This book creates a scrambled, humorous impression of life by orbiting around the subject matter, but aiming for the center of implication via lyric and absurd line voicings and by creating an impression of a person's existence as an engager of creative processes. Leaving all that in and leaving a lot out. Creating a feeling of living and handling the words in a very deliberate proportion. The feelings emanating from Smith's work -- sympathy, humor, confusion, frustration, sadness etc., are surprisingly strong considering the degree of constructivist means being used. There is also something else here -- a need to bond with the reader and a strong intuitive principle crosshatching with the more systematic processes.

Confessional poetry ostensible attempts to bond with the reader and create a strong emotional current but can't succeed because it actually operates on a model of exploitation, exploitation of the writer's experience used as a means for exploiting a market of readers. Smith's poetry actually does bond with the reader and creates a strong emotional current, plus a good bit more, and does so on a model of liberation and fun. Confessional poets would do well to study this work.

Even the sections where it is clear that the majority of Smith's attention has gone into getting the vocabulary contour of the line right, with the feeling of a brushstroke of words, there is often a strong feeling that embedded in the word-arraignment what is being addressed is variations on conflict -- often internal states and tendencies coming into conflict with an unpleasant external social and political world.

In any given poem there are at least two or three different modalities which interact, often seamlessly or with deliberate use of the seams. One of these is an epigrammatic statement:

"everything can be blamed on you when you are poor."

or, in quoting Jackie Robinson:

"a life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives"

or

"oblivion is prefigured in any emotional state"

Smith is capable of intense hilariousness without ever breaking down into an overly simplified anti-intellectual infantilism.

"Jesus was a sausage"

or

"no two colossal heads are alike"

or

"poems about seeing a bear
outside your cabin
don't really work for me. "

There are sometimes short funny insider jokes.

"In a debatable tureen, in nodal space, 37 squirrels childishly ignorant of science storm the gates of St. Mark's Place"

Whatever else Smith is doing, and there are almost always interestingly interacting simultaneous layers and processes in this poetry, there always seems to be at least on toe skimming the surface of a quasi-Zen stream of thought.

The realization of thusness
flowing forth
paint is not food

There are many moments of unflinching, generous absurdity meant to crack the reader up. This will be juxtaposed quickly with mournful voicings, creating an emotionally complex and unpredictable poetic affect-space.

The frustrations and contradictions of communication and thought are engaged sideways and the result is an amusing, curious warmth of cognitive dissonance.

In one section, Smith uses the Mary Tyler More show as denotatively clear direct political commentary.

Smith can mix totally unique modes -- Delius meets Space Ghost for instance.

There are Ginsburg-like rapture/visionary voicings.

"the inner fire's grate"

Jerry G: Here the voicing flow increases in forward momentum, and the feeling of an argument being developed resonates from the poem. The exploration of conflicts deepens here -- the conflict between inner states, needs, what we wish for, and actual social facts we live within, the conflicts between smaller social groups and what is happening in larger political systems…

The weak notes in this book are minor, and few. A few collaborations that don't gel and can't quite see past the next line (though one with Jean Donnelly works). Also some repetition of lines that don't do much that the original line didn't already do. Mostly, though, this is strong work edited carefully into energetically and thematically coherent sections.

If you listed the modes Smith is capable of flipping through it might look something like this:

Direct epigrammatic thought, joke, diversion, indirect emotional insight, opporance, absurdity, rearrangement, backwardly cohering association, magnetic movement toward seriousness diverted and repolarized with humor, benevolent lyric mind-fuck, silliness, absurdity, friendly inscrutable word glob, one-line takes on literary and artistic history….

In a work where indeterminacy is so clearly a value, one of the things that is remarkable is that such a variety of modalities are so interestingly interrelated and joined, brought into a kind of coherence in other words. This modal quality leads me to think that Smith could be considered a new kind of jazz poet, one whose processes reflect the processes operating in more adventurously improvised Jazz musics.

The stylistic forward momentum of the prose is strong. It would be fascinating to see a whole book in the mode of these short prose sections.

There is a consistent sense of lyrical protest, which will be followed by protest of one's own mental environment.

"it is a great annoyance to have so many wishes"

Followed by a protest of one's own received literary history or amusing light-hearted mockery of one's own immediate group.

Followed by direct, unironic statement.

as the navigator fell overboard
in the memory of
the roll of flame
the soft regimes
played softly &
even the smallest lie
in its revolutions

mute the bit
circumlocution
agasp & tense
beneath our calm
song of death

This factor of protest and rebellion is also operating over several modalities, and, along with the human warmth of this poetry, is probably a key factor in how it works. One protest is against the control of language, of course, the "brooding mercenary definitions" as well as the deeper problem that this problem is a part of -- the systematic institutional control of categories of thought and hence potentialities of life. The internalizations of this process and the ability of the imagination to respond with alternate possibilities and propositions on both a personal and collective level are at the center of where this poetry is pointing.

One of the things keeping me warm during this early winter is a scarf Juliana Spahr knit for me. It's made of some kind of thick wool and totally blocks the wind from the vulnerable neck area which is exposed by my pea coat. The deep cut of the front of the coast necessitates a good scarf, and Juliana's creation really delivers.

The scarf is two-tone, a copper-brown and a silver-gray. The two colors interface in the middle with a series of variegating bands. Both ends also feature subtle rows of inset lines that lead into the edges. The bands and the lines make the whole thing gesture towards its own edges, a particularly coherent and graceful way to design a such a horizontal construction.

Many thanks to Noah Eli Gordon and Brandon Downing for their rap music suggestions.

Sullivan on Koeneke

Incapacitated for two weeks from the flu followed by a sinus infection. With the fever going on for that long, and the sinusitis messing with my inner ear and making me dizzy, I literally couldn't do anything at all -- except for watch TV, which started to become pretty hellish. Normally, if I feel I'm not being productive for six hours at a stretch, I start to go stir crazy. Here are some scattered memories of my TV nightmare.

Saw Frankenstein for the first time. Two things: A scene where the monster shows himself by backing into the picture frame though a doorway -- totally uncanny. Also, there was a recurrent element in the soundtrack where bells would ring in the background in very odd tonal areas. The best one was some kind of German folk wedding song with crazy out-of-keys bell throughout.

The Wild Bunch -- couldn't get all the way through it. It had the same problem as Kill Bill in the beginning-- long, violent fight scene opening where you don't know any of the characters or scenarios, and I guess you're supposed to just get into the decontextualized fight choreography, but it's just tiring and confusing.

MTV -- I was amazed at how shallow and depressing rap music, as it is presented by MTV, has gotten. 96% of it is about shopping (for expensive cars and " for girls"). Please -- someone who knows email me and let me know about rap music that is about more than shopping. It couldn’t be that rap ceased to be interesting after It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back?

Wildboyz -- Slightly disturbing combination of idiocy and beautiful animals. Two great scenes, though. One where Steve-O, walking on stilts, kisses a giraffe on the mouth. Oddly touching. Another where he and the other guy dress in a zebra costume and are almost eaten by two lions. One of the lions runs off with the stuffed zebra head -- unusual feeling from the mix of silliness and the actual nearness of predation.

I see here that the President of The United States is actually two full steps removed from literally being business partners with Osama Bin Laden.

What a relief.

Robert Creeley and Jennifer Moxley
St. Mark's Church, 11/19

The vastness of the main room at St. Mark's isn't exactly conducive to focusing on poetry. Muffled bassy EQ for both readers. During the second half of Creeley's reading there was a continuously creeping reverb feedback. Maybe the good people over at the Poetry Project could do a sound check for situations like this?

Jennifer Moxley

Jennifer started with a Christmas poem and a memoir about life in San Diego.

"the mind is a ghastly instrument"

During the reading there was one of the all-time most annoying cell phone interruptions I've ever experienced -- impossible to ignore. Jennifer stopped, pointed to the offending party and said "You -- OUT!, for a little comic relief. She followed this up with "No, it's okay, I forgive you."

Dream recounting.

She ends with "The Sense Record." There's something about this poem which allowed me to finally focus in this boomy cavernous space.

"he fends off emptiness with his feet"

"nights I worry about spiders in the vacuum cleaner"

Insight polyphonically mixed with negatively charged romantic autobiographical declaration. She's most like Creeley in this aspect of her work, where there is a will to go over the details of life and formulate some kind of keepable propositions about it.

Something about the voicings -- I kept thinking of Mary Butts…


Robert Creeley

Beautifully crafted thought traces and modest propositions about going through time.

Still struggling to switch on during the reading, what did Pound say, you should be a ball of light when reading poetry? And listening to it, I suppose?

"the truth is in a container"

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

Paul Bremmer's power suit / Timberlands combo sticking in my head in a bad way...

"we're gonna have a t.v. party tonight..."

Flipped between two crude documentaries on the Kennedy assassination followed by a full hour of Chomsky on Charlie Rose. Rose so flummoxed by Chomsky's focus and clarity he was basically unable to get to the next question.

Michael Gottlieb and Michael Scharf
Nov 15, Bowery Poetry Club

Both writers establish a broadband connection though an engagement with life informations that refuse to be otherwise. They both refuse to ignore these situations and predicaments, historic, mental, personal, that cannot be easily be improvised out of, though they can be wished away or repressed -- situations that are, after all, probably ignored at both personal and collective peril.

Gottlieb and Scharf are using a kind of poetic fusion, where information and energy is released through an act of combining intellectual processes and subject matters that would rather stay separate: poetic renewable energy.

Heard Richard Thompson on the radio this morning doing a cover of Britney Spears' "Oop, I Did it Again" with a great Nirvanaish arrangement for acoustic guitar and voice.

Even more intriguing was a few seconds of a troubadour-sounding arrangement of the same song that he has apparently been doing live.

The chord changes of "Oop, I Did it Again" are very medieval -- a structure that must have been unconsciously transmitted via the original Swedish songwriter, Max Martin. The transformation of this material was dramatic. I wish I could have heard a full version.

"Amplified"

Chunks of stuff crumbling in the background.

I can't be the only one who has a growing sense of unease about the gradually acrueing signs of long term disasters in several realms?

The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the 3000 year old Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada has broken off due to global warming, releasing all the water from the lake it contained -- the Disraeli Fiord.

That particular ecosystem has been lost.

Huge free-floating ice islands are now adrift.

"It is accepted that should the global climate start to warm, the effects would be felt first in the polar regions, and they would be amplified," said Martin Jeffries a geophysicist.

The Apartment, Billy Wilder

Jack Lemmon is a young suck-up bullshiter drone getting ahead at the office by letting his managers use his bachelor pad apartment as a place to bring their mistresses. He seems to have no connections to the outside world except for his neighbor and his job. Despite these qualities, he creates a certain amount of affability, mostly with body language and delivery.

Shirley Maclaine is the elevator operator bottom in love with the everything-out-of his-mouth-is-a-lie lothario upper manager who promotes Lemon.

All the relationships are pure form/ and/or power exchanges. No actual affinity is show between anyone. The relationships capitalism likes to create? Bullet-like noirish dialogue but for comic effect.

The real theme is the disconnection between people on the job that happens as they are relating to each other – like when Lemon, with a goofy smile asks Maclaine if she likes his ridiculous hat. She nods and talks about the hat, but the expression on her face tell us she is devastated by what she has just been told by the secretary who also had an affair with the boss she is love with. Later Lemmon will have a whole conversation with Maclaine, unaware that she is unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills.

The vast, disconcerting Manhattan office hive-space is filmed in much the same flat shiny inhuman way the office spaces were early in the first Matrix movie. This is contrasted with the way Lemon's Upper West Side apartment is shot. It is shown with at least three different spatial levels at any given moment, which emphasizes the multiple possibilities of life and thought that never occur to any of the characters.

Peter Culley & George Stanley
Oct 22, Poetry Project

George Stanley

to write without any justification, carelessly

Startling wish-fulfillment poem, Vera Cruz.

Poet as yeast cell.

as simple as a glass of beer

Impressive dramatic monologue --

real shit from a canvas horse

Focused use of image and metaphor -- also, taking or leaving image and metaphor.

Intense, casual dramatic insights.


Peter Culley

masters, if your arms could reach

-- riffing on Marshall Amplifiers -- stacks…

Very small units of coherency, context and perception all with an equal amount of valence recombine and build kaleidoscopically without ever losing a sharp sense of place and commentary.

Culley, like Steve Dickison, is a master of drawing information and thought out of the CD collection. You can feel the music becoming a thing as it is perceived, then as an area from which connotation occurs.

Where Bach wakes you up for a head count, Metallica tucks you in

Controlled and various juxtaposition, not dream-like. More like particle physics...

Diminutive Revolutions, Daniel Bouchard
subpress, 1999

Poetry as salvaging -- recovering a sense of place -- acknowledging the multiple layers of world and perception you find yourself in the midst of.

Wrackline, the information about life contained in garbage -- poet as gleaner

Almost Buddhist (Basho?) evenness of attention and affect across the layers of the world

Mosses and lichens

in the woods of Wellfleet



Recreate prudently, the president advises

and the motors hum far off the coast



A summer to write about 



In the closet of the cottage

a tiny toad hides

under a laundry pile.

We capture

to release it outside.

Scanning the street and the horizon with a attentiveness and a poetic pleasure which makes occasional forays into crankiness on one side, and rapture on the other.

A poetic capacity for listening. Listening to the way the elements of the natural world, which after all, include all of the man-made world, its technology. history and poisons, interact. Listening to the simultaneous emerging patterns of public and private life across time.

A certain affinity with ecosystem, including alarm at the egregious human chemical and political imbalances.

the world is on fire     fire sold separately

A gentle kaleidoscope of perceptions and recognitions used as musical intervals.

life must be at least as well lived as fantasy.

Corina Copp and Nick Piombino
Bowey Poetry Club, October 18

I love the feeling of hearing a strong block of poetry from a young poet whose work I hadn't read or heard before at all.

As my filtration system adapted over the course of Corina Copp's reading, my ear moved from light resistance to the unfamiliar rhythms and details to interest and excitement at the new information being transmitted.


Nick Piombino writes experimental wisdom literature: around here we call that poetry.

Clear, funny haikus.

The story of people as books.

I don't know of any other writer who mines the poetic power of concern for others with as much creativity as Nick does.

"Love keeps us loose, while certainty hardens us for the continual struggle."

John Cage, Music for Carillon

George Steel- Carillon
St Thomas Church 53rd and 6th Ave. 10/26/03
Free outdoor concert.

My favorite moment of this concert was approaching 5th Ave. walking east on 53rd St. in the midtown twilight haze. The sounds seem to come from everywhere. If I hadn't known what was happening, and there wasn't anything besides the sound and the people standing on the street listening to indicate it was a musical performance, I might have thought that something had gone wonderfully wrong with this church.

The piece was in 5 sections, with beautifully scattered, staggered chucks of tonality in dream counterpoint with a hint of Gamelan, though maybe all church bells have a hint of Gamelan because of the slightly detuned nature of the bells. I love the decay of the lower bells. All the street sounds fit in beautifully.

The material sounded a little like some of the earlier piano music, as you might expect, since this is also a chromatic percussion instrument. It's a keyboard instrument, but there are literally boards that are played with the fists. I know this only from reading about it. The performance itself consisted only of a building making a series of sounds.

The tones bounced wildly on the glass surfaces of the surrounding buildings, making it hard to tell it was coming from the church at all. It sounded like it was coming directly out of the sky.

When it was over, the crowd quickly disbursed, exactly as I have heard flash mobs described. The ephemerality of the whole thing was powerful.

Carla recommended going a little north of Bar Harbor, to the Winter Harbor section of Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine. It turned out to be good advice. About an hour drive due East of Bangor the coast opens up. The broadly curving harbors and islands of that area are mind-boggling, a relief from the over-saturation of rectangles in New York City.

We drove to Schoodic point, down the two-lane one-way loop road at about 4 MPH, watching the harbor open and close behind the curtains of pine trees. At the point, which is apparently known for producing dramatic and even dangerous waves breaking on the rocks, we walked down the chunky granite beach. The sense of glacial sculpting is intense.

This area has an igneous formation of black basaltic dikes, dark bands where the magma came up through gaps in the granite like ink in a fountain pen. This is clearly some kind of writing practice. Some of them are six or seven feet wide and run straight down to the water. The places where the water touches these stripes results in empty shafts dropping ten or fifteen feet, because the basalt erodes much faster than the granite. This erasure I suppose.

We walked south around an old fence and took a minute to sit in the shaded part of a cliff and listen to the ocean and breaking waves. The different variations of churning and roaring and bubbling water was endless and beautiful.

We went part way into the low pine forest, which quickly becomes too dense to navigate, and crouched down in the moss to listen to the forest sounds: scurrying, chipmunk rasps, and polymelodic group variations from some red breasted nuthatches as well as a few unknown players.

Afer relocating a bit, we hiked up a hill which opened to an overlook view of the Atlantic, the harbor, the ranges of pine trees, and all of Mount Desert Island.

I fell asleep on the couch the other day after work listening to the radio while it was still light out. Woke up in the dark with some kind of baroque solo acoustic guitar music playing. Versions of some kind of opera? The last bits of muted blue were just leaving the sky.

In the dream I was leaning against a rack in a store that went on forever. The same music played, but it was more medieval sounding, darker. I wanted to just stay in the store and listen without buying anything.

Upon waking alone in a darkened room at twilight, I always feel like a tiny speck of life that is bound to be extinguished.

Beautiful shadows thrown against the wall from the streetlight.

In the dream I thought it was odd that that I like this music so much.

What is the thing that throws me into this slightly amused panic in this situation? That the present moment is some dark thing I'm trying to emerge from, alone and disoriented? That the future is a charming but impossibly distant blue glow?

I had to make an abrupt gear-shift when returning to the city from the beauty and relaxation of Maine when a guy half-heartedly tried to mug me for my keyboard on 4th and D.

Marcella and Rich were kind enough to transport the slightly unwieldy instrument in their car after we did a reading/performance together in Orono. I picked the keyboard and keyboard stand up from them on 4th St. around 9:30pm on Sunday night. Just as they drove away, a SRO-type junkie/and/or/crazy guy who had been hovering around started coming toward me with some kind of metal object and a very unpleasant look on his face.

I gently put the keyboard on the cement behind me, picked up the keyboard stand, held it above my head in a way that made it clear he could be putting himself in harm's way, and asked, "Are you okay?" He seem confused by this, stopped, and threw what turned out to be a square metal plate at me, which completely missed. He grudgingly and slowly went away as I calmly menaced him with the keyboard stand.

I realized later that this use of a musical instrument is in the tradition of the Japanese Shakuhachi flute, which doubles as a weapon if you're in a pinch.

Steve McCaffery read with Lynne Dreyer at the Bowery Poetry Club yesterday. I came in late and, unfortunately, missed Dreyer. McCaffery gave a fully engaged, wild reading.

There was one spectacular tour de force long poem near the end which had some kind of formal constraint involving Shakespearean vocabulary. It used ambiguously shifting speaker-identities ranging across a wild, funny, sci-fi search-and-replaced comedy of truth seeking. It couldn’t be located along any irony vs. sincerity polarizing system. Completely energizing.

Demonlover, Olivier Assayas

An engrossing, beautiful nightmare about global capitalism. The film skips over coherent plot and character development and presents a fantasy of smeared shells -- the surfaces of cars, buildings, office spaces and people representing transnational capitalism. The details of the plot concern, loosely, an office rivalry during a financing negotiation and struggle between pornographic websites. The film creates a hermetically sealed, accountability-free world of treacherous (female) high finance middle managers struggling for domination, all of whom, it turns out, are replaceable by the nearly invisible powers that be. The pointed disregard for getting the details across from what appears to be a worked-out script intensifies the nightmare-like quality, as it does in David Lynch’s Dune. There is a brief, bafflingly ham-handed ending shot. The visuals and atmosphere are continuously engrossing and occasionally repulsive. The action scenes are so blurred and jumbled they are almost completely abstract. Sonic Youth soundtrack.

Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Engine 27, NYC, Sept 13th

Henry Threadgill alto saxophone, flute; triggered hubkaphone recordings: Liberty Ellman guitar; Tarik Benbrahim oud; Dana Leong cello; Jose Davilla tuba; Elliot Kavee drums

This night, Zooid was a small ensemble doing carefully arranged improvisations centered around triggered digital recordings of Threadgill playing his homemade instrument, the hubcaphone, a gamelan-like percussion instrument made of hubcaps.

The triggering system he used for the digital recording was a midi keyboard controller that initially put up a fight. At first Threadgill announced "We’re having a modern problem" I later heard him say "I don’t know what that thing wants from me, but I don’t think I have it…"

This delay cause an odd feeling in the audience, and Mike and Katie I all agreed that the more time went by, the more we felt like the party goers in Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel.

Things eventually did get started though, with a long recording of the hubcaphone, panned in the Engine 27’s multiple speaker system to orbit around the space of the room like the girl caught in the television set in Poltergeist.

The band would than play over and with these recordings in what seemed like melodic / rhythmic cells, each of which would be oriented around a particular soloing voice and within a particular hubcaphone recording section. All of the soloing was highly controlled and deeply enmeshed in both the written arrangements and the shifting material from the hubcaphone recordings. The soloings felt less like showcasings of individuals than activations of particular agencies of change and variation within a group system.

Bob Harrison, Chorrera, Bronze Skull Press, 2003, 35p
2542 N Bremen #2, Milwaukee, WI 53212

This is a poetry that fully embraces lyricism while also openly entangling itself with some of lyricism's more problematic aspects without using irony as a insulating layer.

"i'm not frozen
anymore.
i'm in the years
that untold weapons
heal, i carry

my 9 digit spectrum
to the end.

i've taken off
the road carcasses
that stench up
your workaday dreams,
you will never smell
the warning
that i fired. you release
without knowing

all the countries
that have your name
as emblem, in the sea
that never moves, podrido"

Thoughtful and fluid, with a constantly operative blurred openness operating in the ligatures.

A certain imagery and vibe not unlike Vallejo or Jose Lezama Lima -- a kind of ranging over fantastical landscapes and inner drama. This is fused with an intense filmic effect with tightly cut close-ups on domestic detail. Almost Stan Brakage-like in places.

"a tiny landscape
of softening
palms, room
offering, car port
has most
reeds, on a visit
for past -- rapid
has
my lift, wrong
the street
packed eggs, made
crosses, same
shoes lean
promise, owned
raid, black awe"

The words are also carefully arranged as raw art material.

be the lot of
whistles, and courts
blaze on
some plate -- through
a germ lacking
has, in hats of
Not --
or ON an instant’s
rim

Chorrera creates a darkening effect within an imaginative space -- a space that feels on one hand like a refuge, and on the other like a highly wrought zone of confusion intercut with brief slivers of realization.

“an active report rolling through blood”

A honed and repeated elemental vocabulary: harvest, river, blood, flags, heart…

There is a theme of recuperation and repair, and a slurred, dark expressiveness with an undercurrent of protest.

Harrison uses what sometimes feels like a highly encoded and rearranged private language that maintains a strong energetic connection to perceptions, observations and preoccupations which are no longer fully discernable.

A certain hopefulness in the embrace of creative forces.

"undermine the dust"

Some of these moments of associative rearrangement counter-intuitively arrive at Zen-like destinations:

"Leave the toys
in deep flooded satellites
with no voice."

There’s a building going up across the street from my apartment, and the construction sounds start just before my alarm would normally go off. So I wake to hammering and metal clangs rather than an electronic beep. The feeling of entering consciousness with the construction soundtrack feels dramatically different then entering with the alarm.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sound of distant hammering. Some sense of a creation happening just out of reach, or someone knocking at a door.