It seems clear that we need to hear a detailed take on the Stephen Colbert / Alicia Keys duo version of Empire State of Mind from Brandon Brown and/or Harry Allen. I'm thinking a blog collaboration is in order?

I'll be reading at The Bowery Poetry Club today at 4:00 at the book party for Gerrit Lansing's Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth.

Here's a conduction I did of Nada Gordon, Mel Nichols, and Elizabeth Workman at The Zinc bar.

A review of Brandon Downing's Lake Antiquity on BookForum.

Franklin Bruno's Local Currency featured on Pitchfork.

Two fundamental concepts:

1. People are not wearing enough hats.

2. Matter is energy.

Interesting note over at Stan Apps' blog about image and reification in Lukacs.

"Image" is actually central to Lukacs' literary criticism, in that the issue of realism and artist reflection, a la Hamlet, is described as an "image." He does embrace that visual metaphor. In his Marxist aesthetics, reification in realism is the result of a certain kind of mirroring, specifically realism that doesn’t engage the social and economic processes behind the details, that doesn't have any kind of dialectic behind it. He consistently returns to the visual language when talking about what he thinks the realism of dialectical materialism should be in art: the never ending dialectic of appearance and reality, often approached as confronting contradictions. He actually says that fantastic writing does this quite effectively and that the free play of imagination and unrestrained fantasy are fully compatible with Marxist ideas of "realism". He's totally into E.T.A. Hoffmann and the fantastical writings of Balzac.

Solemnity is a sign of fraud.

ask the audience / / lynch mob

World War IV lasted five days....

Why does the image of Carol Channing fill me with dread?

The idea that poetry is good for a person & should be choked down like a horse pill is ridiculous.

Tried to fry an egg, broke the yoke no joke.

The Ted Williams cryogenic decapitation tuna fish baseball incident is strangely close to the plot of Phillip K. Dick's Ubik... if you could still talk to the frozen head that is.

It also brings to mind the ancient tradition of preserving the severed head of the tribe leader in Jullian Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is closer in some ways to the Phillip K. Dick concept of the continuation of consciousness and communication after death, with the hallucinated voice from the king's head telling you what to do.

The fact that the "bat" was actually a wrench naturally calls to mind Chtcheglov's 1953 Fourmulary for a New Urbanism:

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry.

So it must be that in this incident the potential for an expanded definition -- a potentially revolutionary super-proletariat that would include anyone who is bored -- would find a certain kind of illustration. It certainly demonstrates the lengths one has to go to overcome boredom -- which now necessitates batting practice with the frozen, decapitated heads of major baseball figures.

Turns out that Flarf makes you smarter.

Michael Nicoloff and Mel Nichols at St. Mark's

Nicoloff started with material from Bruised Dick, a collaboration with Alli Warren. Deliberate and focused titles like "People in Berkeley Need to Get Down with General Spatial Awareness" make me think things such as: "That's true!" A lot of demotic contouring done in a very alert and engaging manner. Refreshingly different from, say, the kind of widespread boilerplate avant poetry where the goal is to demonstrate that the poet is of greater intelligence than and possessed of an ethical superiority to some kind of image of average American consciousness. Phew. No stiff arming here. Nicoloff and Warren are in there. Deal with it. Lyrical, flexible, funny, teasing, and maybe only scratching the surface of what they could do -- and from here there's no telling what they could do.

Nioloff then went into Punks. Available in it's entirety here:

Propositional, focused, and oddly passionate.

Mel Nichols was next. She has one of the richest textures in a reading voice I have ever heard. And she's not afraid of fun, or raw materials, or delicacy. She read from Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon.

already slow December drops its paranormal forest difficulties strewn

& then why shouldn't leaves' red masquerade swarm the frequency of

a room caught faint & duplicated in the fluctuations of clocks



of course believe all those hermits going to the desert

fast and pray of course of course of course I scratched my own eyes out

giving you he riddle of my taciturn suspended in the dark.


more Nicols here

It's funny, watching the change come over someone's face when they find that something they thought was going to be meaningless is actually the opposite....

Farrah Field on Katie Degentesh.

Nate Chinen on Avram Fefer in the New York Times.

On New York 1 there's an ad for 1-800-LAWYERS, which features a mustachioed lawyer salesman giving a ridiculous "I'm hypnotizing you with intensity" stare into the camera that is indistinguishable from the affect that can be found on 85% of the author photos gracing the poetry and fiction tomes in this country.

Why?

Stumbling upon Telly Savalas three time in one day: above average?

1. Robert Christgau's review of The Best of Ringo Starr, Vol. 2, "Better than Telly Savalas, but no match for George Harrison, or Joe Walsh."

2. Sid and Nancy: Tender scene involving a Telly Savales doll. The is the closest the movie comes to explaining the relationship, via a discussion of dolls in an approximated domestic scene.

3. The Dirty Dozen: Telly Savales: psychotic, rocking a hat.