9.23.2005
Listening right now to WKCR, Phil Schaap playing the marvelous, pristinely recorded and unlikely quartet recording of Coltrane and Monk live at Carnegie Hall, 1957, due to be released by Blue Note on Tuesday. This recording was discovered buried in the Library of Congress. Great way to spend Coltrane's birthday.
9.15.2005
I waited in line for an hour in the rain to get free tickets to Jordan's Million Poems Show. Finally got in, pushed through the excited crowd, and nabbed a seat right next to Shanna. The crowd warmer, Jim Behrle, did some good preflight audience interviews, which he recorded, apparently, with a pack of Marlborough Lights.
I ran into Jordan just as the wardrobe person was getting his clip-on mic adhered to his tie. Jordan's talk show look/vibe is excellent: formal, friendly, a little nervous, slightly distanced but enthused and aiming to please. The suit says I care about my look, and the wrinkles say I don't care more than I should. He uses a Craig Kilborn-like posture on stage, but with none of the smugness. He's somewhere between Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, leaning toward the Cavett side of the spectrum. The nervous part is in a good way -- he makes the audience and guests feel that they are important enough to get nervous over.
The opening monologue concerned the dangers of engaging in an interesting conversation with Ange Mlinko while trying to navigate in a car in upstate New York. Davis also touched on the surprising gaps in knowledge that can be found among the outlying population of Ithaca, NY as to where Ithaca actually is.
Jordan's house band, JJ Appleton, has a great theme song. If you even need to hear a catchy indie-pop talk show theme that addresses questions of what Jordan Davis dreams about, trust me, you're gonna want to get down there and check this out.
The first guest for the evening was Anselm Berrigan, a poet and Artistic Director of The Poetry Project. While Appleton played Elvis Costello's Less Than Zero, a winking reference to Berrigan's last book, Anselm hit the stage sporting a Macy's-looking button down striped shirt, cargo shorts and grey cross-trainers offset with black socks. The promoters over there at Edge Books are smart to get him out into the media early to start the buzz about his upcoming book, Some Notes on My Programming, which is gonna be big.
Anselm also read from an advance copy of The Ted Berrigan Collected Poems, which is slated for a November release from U. of California. The book is so large that many New Yorkers may have to knock down a wall to make room for it. I was concerned that it might throw Anselm off balance and into an unintended stage-dive. According to Anslem, there are hundreds of pages of work in this book that were never printed in any book. I figure if I can pre-order Halo 2, I can pre-order this.
I'm not usually one to complain, but there were some serious problems with Davis's musical guest, Leslie Mendelson. There is a tradition in singer/song writer performances done at poetry venues that one has to learn: 1) Sing out of tune and off-mic. 2) Have a weak sense of rhythm that feels like it's about to fizzle-out at any moment 3) Forget the song parts or lyrics and start over on at least one number, sheepishly apologizing. Mendelson simply ignored all of these time-honored traditions. She sang catchy 70s AM radio-like pop tunes in-tune and with a confident, appealing tone, crossing Carol King, Norah Jones and Randy Newman. If people just start throwing out the rules of our society like this, then anything goes, it would be total chaos. I guess if you want to break the rules of poetry-music, you could, but you first have to prove that you _know_ the rules. After a few years of paying your dues playing weak, wince-inducingly out of tune songs that just don’t work, then maybe you've earned the right to bend the rules _a little_ and perhaps sing in key. But to sing well in-key and to have the whole thing sound really good? This is just not how it’s done.
I ran into Jordan just as the wardrobe person was getting his clip-on mic adhered to his tie. Jordan's talk show look/vibe is excellent: formal, friendly, a little nervous, slightly distanced but enthused and aiming to please. The suit says I care about my look, and the wrinkles say I don't care more than I should. He uses a Craig Kilborn-like posture on stage, but with none of the smugness. He's somewhere between Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, leaning toward the Cavett side of the spectrum. The nervous part is in a good way -- he makes the audience and guests feel that they are important enough to get nervous over.
The opening monologue concerned the dangers of engaging in an interesting conversation with Ange Mlinko while trying to navigate in a car in upstate New York. Davis also touched on the surprising gaps in knowledge that can be found among the outlying population of Ithaca, NY as to where Ithaca actually is.
Jordan's house band, JJ Appleton, has a great theme song. If you even need to hear a catchy indie-pop talk show theme that addresses questions of what Jordan Davis dreams about, trust me, you're gonna want to get down there and check this out.
The first guest for the evening was Anselm Berrigan, a poet and Artistic Director of The Poetry Project. While Appleton played Elvis Costello's Less Than Zero, a winking reference to Berrigan's last book, Anselm hit the stage sporting a Macy's-looking button down striped shirt, cargo shorts and grey cross-trainers offset with black socks. The promoters over there at Edge Books are smart to get him out into the media early to start the buzz about his upcoming book, Some Notes on My Programming, which is gonna be big.
Anselm also read from an advance copy of The Ted Berrigan Collected Poems, which is slated for a November release from U. of California. The book is so large that many New Yorkers may have to knock down a wall to make room for it. I was concerned that it might throw Anselm off balance and into an unintended stage-dive. According to Anslem, there are hundreds of pages of work in this book that were never printed in any book. I figure if I can pre-order Halo 2, I can pre-order this.
I'm not usually one to complain, but there were some serious problems with Davis's musical guest, Leslie Mendelson. There is a tradition in singer/song writer performances done at poetry venues that one has to learn: 1) Sing out of tune and off-mic. 2) Have a weak sense of rhythm that feels like it's about to fizzle-out at any moment 3) Forget the song parts or lyrics and start over on at least one number, sheepishly apologizing. Mendelson simply ignored all of these time-honored traditions. She sang catchy 70s AM radio-like pop tunes in-tune and with a confident, appealing tone, crossing Carol King, Norah Jones and Randy Newman. If people just start throwing out the rules of our society like this, then anything goes, it would be total chaos. I guess if you want to break the rules of poetry-music, you could, but you first have to prove that you _know_ the rules. After a few years of paying your dues playing weak, wince-inducingly out of tune songs that just don’t work, then maybe you've earned the right to bend the rules _a little_ and perhaps sing in key. But to sing well in-key and to have the whole thing sound really good? This is just not how it’s done.
9.08.2005
9.06.2005
9.03.2005
Can we just drop the facade of even having a federal government anymore? From now on, let's call it the American Oil War Corporation, AOWC. Their job is to take over oil-rich areas around the world to keep their profit margins high.
AOWC has been revising the taxation system to exclude services not related to Oil Wars. This increases productivity for the company. It's a private company, but it's paid for with public funds. The beauty of this system is that you can tax working poor and middle class people to pay for it. Think about it: why should oil millionaires be taxed to run their own Oil Wars? They created this business in the first place.
AOWC owns the National Guard now. There was a buyout. We sold it to them for a dollar. If you've been wondering where the National Guard has been in New Orleans, remember, AOWC's job is to kill people in other countries, not to rescue them in ours. Think about it, if you're too poor to escape a hurricane, it's doubtful that you're contributing much tax money to help fund the Oil Wars in the first place -- more likely you're unemployed, elderly, an infant, sick etc. -- i.e., not productive. So it's not a big deal for AOWC. Best to just let it go.
Needless to say, doing anything to keep entire American cities from being destroyed is not a part of AOWC's business plan, as it might have been with the old-fashioned Federal Government, even when the disaster was predicted as #1 of top ten possible disasters.
Did I mention that AOWC is a company guided by Christian values? Thank goodness those Christians in our country got out to vote for AOWC to prevent gay marriage. The scenes of totally obliterated society you're seeing on TV are the product of Christian values. Normally you only get to see scenes like this in big-budget Hollywood apocalyptic science fiction movies. The people at AOWC can make this shit real. Look at the footage of desperation and chaos in New Orleans and when the CEO of AOWC uses the word "Freedom," you'll now know what he's actually referring to. If you have a problem with any of this, remember: this is no time to talk about politics.
AOWC has been revising the taxation system to exclude services not related to Oil Wars. This increases productivity for the company. It's a private company, but it's paid for with public funds. The beauty of this system is that you can tax working poor and middle class people to pay for it. Think about it: why should oil millionaires be taxed to run their own Oil Wars? They created this business in the first place.
AOWC owns the National Guard now. There was a buyout. We sold it to them for a dollar. If you've been wondering where the National Guard has been in New Orleans, remember, AOWC's job is to kill people in other countries, not to rescue them in ours. Think about it, if you're too poor to escape a hurricane, it's doubtful that you're contributing much tax money to help fund the Oil Wars in the first place -- more likely you're unemployed, elderly, an infant, sick etc. -- i.e., not productive. So it's not a big deal for AOWC. Best to just let it go.
Needless to say, doing anything to keep entire American cities from being destroyed is not a part of AOWC's business plan, as it might have been with the old-fashioned Federal Government, even when the disaster was predicted as #1 of top ten possible disasters.
Did I mention that AOWC is a company guided by Christian values? Thank goodness those Christians in our country got out to vote for AOWC to prevent gay marriage. The scenes of totally obliterated society you're seeing on TV are the product of Christian values. Normally you only get to see scenes like this in big-budget Hollywood apocalyptic science fiction movies. The people at AOWC can make this shit real. Look at the footage of desperation and chaos in New Orleans and when the CEO of AOWC uses the word "Freedom," you'll now know what he's actually referring to. If you have a problem with any of this, remember: this is no time to talk about politics.
8.19.2005
8.18.2005
Elsewhere (Japanese Notebook), Gary Sullivan, 2005
Elsewhere is a poetic comic art essay on the blurry boundaries of subjectivity, individuality, context and the space between cultures. It is composed of remixed snapshot-based visual travel notes and notebook entries of odd, translated phrases rendered into a truly fused form of poetry/comics. The vibe, scale, pacing and continuity of the book is close to avant-garde film. It’s as if the Kuchar brothers were making art composed of comics, flip books, poetry, and Flickr blogs.
Sullivan uses a lot of humor, and embraces the weirdness of an unfamiliar cultural environment, as well as the oddness of seeing another culture’s interpretations of yours. There is a sense of balancing the discomfort of unfamiliarity with it’s charms.
Much of the material at play in Elsewhere is composed of material taken from the public surfaces of Japan, and then remixed: signage and advertising art. In this sense the book is close to a straight-forward travelogue addressing a public space in which one is an outsider. These materials are remixed into a poetic fantasy-space, as if Little Nemo In Slumberland was addressing issues of cultural context rather than the daily, dislocating experience of dreaming and waking.
There is an indirectness of relation between the text and art which is not at all a disconnection. They are like two simultaneous layers moving intriguingly out of phase, but the phase patterns add harmonic depth to the overall effect, as in Steve Reich. There is space allowed between the images and the lines that allows for breath in the overall coherence of the art.
A feeling of balanced elements which might seem to be inherently in conflict is constantly maintained. For instance, there are moments when a cute quality and a disturbing quality are perfectly fused. The book adjusts to accommodate such combinations. Details which can be dizzying, beautiful, funny, nightmarish, infantile, and strange are fused within the space of a few panels.
The panels work individually and in groups, and this creates a feeling of integrity on the micro and macro scales. There is a strong overall sense of rhythm and build-up that rewards multiple readings. Sullivan also allows the material to have a certain diffused or relaxed energy despite considerable wackiness and strangeness.
There are certain challenges and stresses that come along with using multiple art forms, and I can only hope these don't slow Gary down too much. I doubt they will. Considering the amount of talent in evidence in this book, I look forward to seeing a full-length graphic novel-type project.
Elsewhere is a poetic comic art essay on the blurry boundaries of subjectivity, individuality, context and the space between cultures. It is composed of remixed snapshot-based visual travel notes and notebook entries of odd, translated phrases rendered into a truly fused form of poetry/comics. The vibe, scale, pacing and continuity of the book is close to avant-garde film. It’s as if the Kuchar brothers were making art composed of comics, flip books, poetry, and Flickr blogs.
Sullivan uses a lot of humor, and embraces the weirdness of an unfamiliar cultural environment, as well as the oddness of seeing another culture’s interpretations of yours. There is a sense of balancing the discomfort of unfamiliarity with it’s charms.
Much of the material at play in Elsewhere is composed of material taken from the public surfaces of Japan, and then remixed: signage and advertising art. In this sense the book is close to a straight-forward travelogue addressing a public space in which one is an outsider. These materials are remixed into a poetic fantasy-space, as if Little Nemo In Slumberland was addressing issues of cultural context rather than the daily, dislocating experience of dreaming and waking.
There is an indirectness of relation between the text and art which is not at all a disconnection. They are like two simultaneous layers moving intriguingly out of phase, but the phase patterns add harmonic depth to the overall effect, as in Steve Reich. There is space allowed between the images and the lines that allows for breath in the overall coherence of the art.
A feeling of balanced elements which might seem to be inherently in conflict is constantly maintained. For instance, there are moments when a cute quality and a disturbing quality are perfectly fused. The book adjusts to accommodate such combinations. Details which can be dizzying, beautiful, funny, nightmarish, infantile, and strange are fused within the space of a few panels.
The panels work individually and in groups, and this creates a feeling of integrity on the micro and macro scales. There is a strong overall sense of rhythm and build-up that rewards multiple readings. Sullivan also allows the material to have a certain diffused or relaxed energy despite considerable wackiness and strangeness.
There are certain challenges and stresses that come along with using multiple art forms, and I can only hope these don't slow Gary down too much. I doubt they will. Considering the amount of talent in evidence in this book, I look forward to seeing a full-length graphic novel-type project.
8.16.2005
John Godfrey, Private Lemonade, 2003, Adventures in Poetry
“the azure is shatterproof”
Ruminations on time, place, body, memory, and the intersections of these at particular instances.
The lines in the book are like a metal grating through which thought and sense pour. They are mostly paired-down to single word and two-word movements, a condensed economy of vocabulary, like Eigner, but heavier.
"some/ sunset / thing / Cocktail / fill / moves / three / blind / mice"
Crypto-amorous mood-thought assemblages.
These poems have an certain force of generosity, in that one can feel in them the assumption that the reader is capable of intimacy and complexity, as well as the assumption that the reader is capable of being curious, and of understanding. Godfrey is not selling any of this.
At moments, it feels like a memory of lost love overstepping the proprieties of immediate perception.
Rhythms like: mood / environmental detail / thought / atmospherics / object relation / dream / attachment / social observation / proposition / relaxation / visual observation -- a swing pulse of transient consciousness and transitory existence.
"Print of rattan on your calf / Succinct and nearly cruel"
Sparse, staccato, percussive paratactic line groupings, harmonized with thematic scaffolding.
Constant change-ups between sensation and memory.
Complex mediations which are cerebral and tactile.
Concision and the refusal to encapsulate.
A herringbone pattern of hinting/hiding/saying.
Little bits of personality, personal history, and environment fused together into some other substance that isn’t any one of these things.
Commentary on people, and, more so, people’s situations. A nurse’s-eye view? Observing symptoms?
The physical feeling of Godfrey's line produces a certain buzz, “I have always had here with me here.”
The lines always feel like parts of information, never abstract. Though sometimes inscrutable, the poems are never trying to be mysterious.
Particular, bodily instances, “sweat under sweater”
In the midst of a highly disciplined paratactic linguistic space, Godfrey sometimes drops dauntingly perfect-sounding transitive sentences: “Night briefly unwraps / inevitable hallways”
Self-locating images: “Holiday lights reflects you / on windowglass / at bar's end”
Staccato associational fluency.
Overlapping layers of weather, setting, mood and memory are temporarily allowed to eclipse other things in the space of the poem -- they are given a social space via the poem where they would otherwise only exist in a private burst of neuron firings.
An undertow of unrelieved amorous distance.
Sometimes I feel he is withholding too much. But withholding too much is part of his art.
The poems are short and pleasurable, and also demanding.
Complex mixtures of back-story and proposition in particulate form.
"Shorten my shrift / Expunge the retinal soup // Without cunning, with posture / Let alone a fallow lie"
“Time hangs in braids”
Playfulness set against elegy.
“the azure is shatterproof”
Ruminations on time, place, body, memory, and the intersections of these at particular instances.
The lines in the book are like a metal grating through which thought and sense pour. They are mostly paired-down to single word and two-word movements, a condensed economy of vocabulary, like Eigner, but heavier.
"some/ sunset / thing / Cocktail / fill / moves / three / blind / mice"
Crypto-amorous mood-thought assemblages.
These poems have an certain force of generosity, in that one can feel in them the assumption that the reader is capable of intimacy and complexity, as well as the assumption that the reader is capable of being curious, and of understanding. Godfrey is not selling any of this.
At moments, it feels like a memory of lost love overstepping the proprieties of immediate perception.
Rhythms like: mood / environmental detail / thought / atmospherics / object relation / dream / attachment / social observation / proposition / relaxation / visual observation -- a swing pulse of transient consciousness and transitory existence.
"Print of rattan on your calf / Succinct and nearly cruel"
Sparse, staccato, percussive paratactic line groupings, harmonized with thematic scaffolding.
Constant change-ups between sensation and memory.
Complex mediations which are cerebral and tactile.
Concision and the refusal to encapsulate.
A herringbone pattern of hinting/hiding/saying.
Little bits of personality, personal history, and environment fused together into some other substance that isn’t any one of these things.
Commentary on people, and, more so, people’s situations. A nurse’s-eye view? Observing symptoms?
The physical feeling of Godfrey's line produces a certain buzz, “I have always had here with me here.”
The lines always feel like parts of information, never abstract. Though sometimes inscrutable, the poems are never trying to be mysterious.
Particular, bodily instances, “sweat under sweater”
In the midst of a highly disciplined paratactic linguistic space, Godfrey sometimes drops dauntingly perfect-sounding transitive sentences: “Night briefly unwraps / inevitable hallways”
Self-locating images: “Holiday lights reflects you / on windowglass / at bar's end”
Staccato associational fluency.
Overlapping layers of weather, setting, mood and memory are temporarily allowed to eclipse other things in the space of the poem -- they are given a social space via the poem where they would otherwise only exist in a private burst of neuron firings.
An undertow of unrelieved amorous distance.
Sometimes I feel he is withholding too much. But withholding too much is part of his art.
The poems are short and pleasurable, and also demanding.
Complex mixtures of back-story and proposition in particulate form.
"Shorten my shrift / Expunge the retinal soup // Without cunning, with posture / Let alone a fallow lie"
“Time hangs in braids”
Playfulness set against elegy.
8.12.2005
Separation Sunday
The Hold Steady makes a unlikely combination of elements work. The music is composed almost entirely of rock clichés -- though they are played with a lot of life. Not everything is about originality. The songs manage to activate the information in these clichés, releasing a superficial but real quality of feeling. That's one of the main powers of pop music. The band is tight, and all the instrumental timbres work well.
This music is combined with a singer who does not sing, he vocalizes like a guy alone in a car, yelling the lyrics of Born To Run over his cassette player in an earnest, woozy monotone, but landing right on the bar and capturing something essential about the rhythm and vocal timbres. Incredibly -- this also works. There are only a handful of bands that can pull off a yelling/talking approach-- The Fall, Can, Slint, This Heat....
If you removed the music and left the vocal track it would sound like a recording of high-level slam poetry. There are moments where I'm like, "Man- would you just sing already, "but the Dylan-quality lyrics occupy the space where my brain is crying out for vocal melody. There's also a rock-theater, Frank's Wild Years-like unity to the character portraits of fried rockers at various parties and underpasses.
The Hold Steady makes a unlikely combination of elements work. The music is composed almost entirely of rock clichés -- though they are played with a lot of life. Not everything is about originality. The songs manage to activate the information in these clichés, releasing a superficial but real quality of feeling. That's one of the main powers of pop music. The band is tight, and all the instrumental timbres work well.
This music is combined with a singer who does not sing, he vocalizes like a guy alone in a car, yelling the lyrics of Born To Run over his cassette player in an earnest, woozy monotone, but landing right on the bar and capturing something essential about the rhythm and vocal timbres. Incredibly -- this also works. There are only a handful of bands that can pull off a yelling/talking approach-- The Fall, Can, Slint, This Heat....
If you removed the music and left the vocal track it would sound like a recording of high-level slam poetry. There are moments where I'm like, "Man- would you just sing already, "but the Dylan-quality lyrics occupy the space where my brain is crying out for vocal melody. There's also a rock-theater, Frank's Wild Years-like unity to the character portraits of fried rockers at various parties and underpasses.
8.08.2005
I was following Ron Silliman while he was walking around in a suburban area at twilight. He was urgently exploring people's backyards, following odd private and public-seeming paths between houses, pushing through hedges, taking notes about how everything was arranged and what it meant about how people were living. It was hard to keep up with him.
I couldn't help admiring his curiosity about people, that he was so energized about exploring all these mundane, but very real territories of people's lives. At the same time I was unsure if this was the best way I could be spending my time.
Just then he stopped and asked me, "So, Drew, when are you going to become something?" I smiled, nodded and said," Yea, I guess I better get started on that." He suggested I begin working for the Democratic party. This seemed like a good idea.
By that time the setting had changed, and we were sitting in the cab of a moving truck just before it crashed through the wooden garage door of a closed mechanic's shop. After the accident Ron was gone.
I couldn't help admiring his curiosity about people, that he was so energized about exploring all these mundane, but very real territories of people's lives. At the same time I was unsure if this was the best way I could be spending my time.
Just then he stopped and asked me, "So, Drew, when are you going to become something?" I smiled, nodded and said," Yea, I guess I better get started on that." He suggested I begin working for the Democratic party. This seemed like a good idea.
By that time the setting had changed, and we were sitting in the cab of a moving truck just before it crashed through the wooden garage door of a closed mechanic's shop. After the accident Ron was gone.
8.05.2005
John Stewart is one of the only sources of sane political discourse on TV. It's frustrating to see him stumble in the face of a double-speaking Rick Santorum. Brian Lehrer also blew it this week when Santorum was on his show. Both hosts spent way too much time being gracious during the interview and not nearly enough in preparation for interviewing a guy who is a disturbingly well-prepared and reasonable-sounding generator of reactionary disinformation.
Both Stewart and Lehrer have a literary bent, and some of the limitations of this showed in their encounters with Santorum. When an inane conservative essayist is on the Daily Show, Stewart reads the book and tears him to shreds in a hilarious and affable way. Faced with a well-prepared figure with real power, taking the host seriously by appearing on the show, and repeating discourse that a team of people came up with, both interviewers crumble. Stewart similarly crumbled in the face of Colin Powell, for the same reasons.
Despite this one weakness, the show is great. Maybe the success of the Daily Show could signal the beginning of more cultural phenomena where, in the face of the current overwhelming abject inversions and denials of fact from the public sphere, some people turn to truth-telling by using the power of sarcasm for good rather than evil?
Both Stewart and Lehrer have a literary bent, and some of the limitations of this showed in their encounters with Santorum. When an inane conservative essayist is on the Daily Show, Stewart reads the book and tears him to shreds in a hilarious and affable way. Faced with a well-prepared figure with real power, taking the host seriously by appearing on the show, and repeating discourse that a team of people came up with, both interviewers crumble. Stewart similarly crumbled in the face of Colin Powell, for the same reasons.
Despite this one weakness, the show is great. Maybe the success of the Daily Show could signal the beginning of more cultural phenomena where, in the face of the current overwhelming abject inversions and denials of fact from the public sphere, some people turn to truth-telling by using the power of sarcasm for good rather than evil?
8.01.2005
Cape Cod notes
This is very new land -- less than 20,000 years old. It was created when a mile-thick sheet of ice scraped and melted away, dropping tons of glacial drift, which became the materials for the sandy, ever-changing landform we have now. Mastodons hung out here back in the day.
The area around Falmouth, where we were staying, is peppered with kettle ponds, formed when the receding glacier left giant ice blocks that gravel and sand settled around. When the blocks melted, the negative space these reverse-ice molds created left bowl-like forms in the earth that became these present day ponds, which are also exposed parts of the water table. Large, beautiful dragonflies and damselflies kept themselves busy around the edge of the pond near us, and tree swallows swooped down over the open water to grab some insect lunch.
The porous nature of the glacial drift makes it easy for the aquifer to become polluted, since the pollutants move through it as easily as the water does, as with the soil in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. One of the biggest sources of pollution on all of Cape Cod is the MMR -- the Massachusetts Military Reservation, which has been dumping military waste in landfills for years with little accountability. We could hear the menacing roar of military aircraft once or twice a day from the otherwise extremely peaceful cabin in the woods where we were staying.
We got out to the National Seashore for some hiking in an area on the west side of the Wellfleet Harbor. The landform there is gentle and ever-shifting: dunes anchored somewhat by spare pitch pines. The Cape loses about four acres of land per year from water and wind erosion. Millions of tiny hermit crabs live in this area. If you gently pick up on of these crabs, they will fiercely menace you with their claw, though they are only about the size of your thumbnail. That's the spirit! Otherwise the land was notable for it's unassuming, curving dunes and beaches, watched over only by a few cormorants.
This is very new land -- less than 20,000 years old. It was created when a mile-thick sheet of ice scraped and melted away, dropping tons of glacial drift, which became the materials for the sandy, ever-changing landform we have now. Mastodons hung out here back in the day.
The area around Falmouth, where we were staying, is peppered with kettle ponds, formed when the receding glacier left giant ice blocks that gravel and sand settled around. When the blocks melted, the negative space these reverse-ice molds created left bowl-like forms in the earth that became these present day ponds, which are also exposed parts of the water table. Large, beautiful dragonflies and damselflies kept themselves busy around the edge of the pond near us, and tree swallows swooped down over the open water to grab some insect lunch.
The porous nature of the glacial drift makes it easy for the aquifer to become polluted, since the pollutants move through it as easily as the water does, as with the soil in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. One of the biggest sources of pollution on all of Cape Cod is the MMR -- the Massachusetts Military Reservation, which has been dumping military waste in landfills for years with little accountability. We could hear the menacing roar of military aircraft once or twice a day from the otherwise extremely peaceful cabin in the woods where we were staying.
We got out to the National Seashore for some hiking in an area on the west side of the Wellfleet Harbor. The landform there is gentle and ever-shifting: dunes anchored somewhat by spare pitch pines. The Cape loses about four acres of land per year from water and wind erosion. Millions of tiny hermit crabs live in this area. If you gently pick up on of these crabs, they will fiercely menace you with their claw, though they are only about the size of your thumbnail. That's the spirit! Otherwise the land was notable for it's unassuming, curving dunes and beaches, watched over only by a few cormorants.
7.22.2005
Vanitas Magazine pull-quote sequence, ala John Latta / Nick Piombino
Ann Lauterbach
"token analytic muse in the glove compartment"
Fanny Howe
"to remember ourselves / as beings with no-fire costumes on"
"Gordian brain"
Ange Mlinko
"The mythical orgone box is in the woods, pancreas of our passions"
Carol Mirakove
"epiphone at all those brazilian voters. but all this action doesn't / stop me fantasizing make-out sessions"
Judith Malina
"THE SPARKS / SHATTERING THE FORMATIONS"
Nada Gordon
"What, you think you're special because you have / A DIRECT LINE / TO THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE?"
Marianne Shaneen
"this isn't the first time that this has been said for the first time"
"amorous secret encounters between here and there"
"objects are only there to hold the empty spaces together"
Sarah Manguso
"marriage partners invite me to consider the possibility of being a deer"
Elaine Equi
"no god / no countries"
Anne Waldman
"With this you will be ready to star gaze and get your revenge"
Jim Dine
"listening to the years / ooze by / I don't see / the kindness of the left / helping those millions who hate / by the river of tattletales"
Jerome Sala
once I was a hog catcher / now I tattoo fine filigrees on snowboards/ you wouldn't believe how much I love it
Carter Ratcliff
"my darling, my pretext for opening my eyes in the morning"
David Lehman
"The task of painting and installing a door is a charming respite for a soul fatigued from the struggles of life."
Francis Ponge
"the collision of words and verbal analogies being one way to scrutinize the object"
Nick Piombino
"Watching / Those birds / fly south / again // my / sky / miles / are / no // consolation"
Richard Hell
Chocolate / Figures in colored foil / Come to life and speak.
Charles Borkhuis
"don't talk to me about your nightmares"
Daniel Bouchard
"new asphalt fills the street like black snow"
"I bet the president knew how to get seriously / fucked up; I bet he knew how to do some / serious damage."
Michel Bulteau
"Rabbit's ass near the eternal. / To make the wooden sword in silk. / Huge clouds slam on the breaks. / Solitude then traverses / the non-existence of objects. The shadow swallows up the kaleidoscope."
Clayton Eshleman
"centuplicating with the beliefs of Christian reconstructionists / whose 'immortality' is posited on / the extermination of humanistic idolaters"
Alvin Curran
"Thelonious Monk discovers 'frozen' time between keys and challenges Einstein to a duel for violin and piano"
"The voice of the president commands this ragtag ensemble into convulsive action, which leads to a strategy of silence, insubordination and sex"
Martin Brody
"Irregular, analog moves (melismas and timbres) link the various planes of discrete polyphonic events, shunting smoothly between data points rather than jumping from one to another. In the end, a vertiginous, virtuosic, analog move -- a 2 + octave emblematic arabesque descending through an impossible variety of vocal timbres -- leading to, juxtaposed with, a single self-contained data point, the last word -- and now the only remaining implausible mode of address: the "natural" speaking voice, Prince saying "kiss."
Morgan Russell (writing about Lydia Lunch)
"she is more a habitual pied-a-terre full-gamut embodiment of triune goddess for me...while she might be viewed as autochthonously self-regenerating, one could also just say she is easily possessed by some aspect of the goddess & always refreshed...
Vincent Katz
Ellsworth Kelly made a proposal for the World Trade Center -- a big green shape, bright like one of his colors, of uneven sides, not, at least in the collage he made of it, to indicate a planting of grass, or actual space, but a color space, a collage that could exemplify art's ability to take over actual, mismanaged public action.
Ann Lauterbach
"token analytic muse in the glove compartment"
Fanny Howe
"to remember ourselves / as beings with no-fire costumes on"
"Gordian brain"
Ange Mlinko
"The mythical orgone box is in the woods, pancreas of our passions"
Carol Mirakove
"epiphone at all those brazilian voters. but all this action doesn't / stop me fantasizing make-out sessions"
Judith Malina
"THE SPARKS / SHATTERING THE FORMATIONS"
Nada Gordon
"What, you think you're special because you have / A DIRECT LINE / TO THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE?"
Marianne Shaneen
"this isn't the first time that this has been said for the first time"
"amorous secret encounters between here and there"
"objects are only there to hold the empty spaces together"
Sarah Manguso
"marriage partners invite me to consider the possibility of being a deer"
Elaine Equi
"no god / no countries"
Anne Waldman
"With this you will be ready to star gaze and get your revenge"
Jim Dine
"listening to the years / ooze by / I don't see / the kindness of the left / helping those millions who hate / by the river of tattletales"
Jerome Sala
once I was a hog catcher / now I tattoo fine filigrees on snowboards/ you wouldn't believe how much I love it
Carter Ratcliff
"my darling, my pretext for opening my eyes in the morning"
David Lehman
"The task of painting and installing a door is a charming respite for a soul fatigued from the struggles of life."
Francis Ponge
"the collision of words and verbal analogies being one way to scrutinize the object"
Nick Piombino
"Watching / Those birds / fly south / again // my / sky / miles / are / no // consolation"
Richard Hell
Chocolate / Figures in colored foil / Come to life and speak.
Charles Borkhuis
"don't talk to me about your nightmares"
Daniel Bouchard
"new asphalt fills the street like black snow"
"I bet the president knew how to get seriously / fucked up; I bet he knew how to do some / serious damage."
Michel Bulteau
"Rabbit's ass near the eternal. / To make the wooden sword in silk. / Huge clouds slam on the breaks. / Solitude then traverses / the non-existence of objects. The shadow swallows up the kaleidoscope."
Clayton Eshleman
"centuplicating with the beliefs of Christian reconstructionists / whose 'immortality' is posited on / the extermination of humanistic idolaters"
Alvin Curran
"Thelonious Monk discovers 'frozen' time between keys and challenges Einstein to a duel for violin and piano"
"The voice of the president commands this ragtag ensemble into convulsive action, which leads to a strategy of silence, insubordination and sex"
Martin Brody
"Irregular, analog moves (melismas and timbres) link the various planes of discrete polyphonic events, shunting smoothly between data points rather than jumping from one to another. In the end, a vertiginous, virtuosic, analog move -- a 2 + octave emblematic arabesque descending through an impossible variety of vocal timbres -- leading to, juxtaposed with, a single self-contained data point, the last word -- and now the only remaining implausible mode of address: the "natural" speaking voice, Prince saying "kiss."
Morgan Russell (writing about Lydia Lunch)
"she is more a habitual pied-a-terre full-gamut embodiment of triune goddess for me...while she might be viewed as autochthonously self-regenerating, one could also just say she is easily possessed by some aspect of the goddess & always refreshed...
Vincent Katz
Ellsworth Kelly made a proposal for the World Trade Center -- a big green shape, bright like one of his colors, of uneven sides, not, at least in the collage he made of it, to indicate a planting of grass, or actual space, but a color space, a collage that could exemplify art's ability to take over actual, mismanaged public action.
7.18.2005
Dinosaur Jr. Central Park Summer Stage, 7/14/05
Yes it was the original line-up -- Macis: looking like a gen x Gandalf with trademark long greasy hair gone totally grey. Murph: completely bald and looking a lot like Geoffrey Young. Barlow: he aged the best.
Their nonplussed vibe on stage was hard to read at first. As it turned out, nonplussed is how these guys look when they're trying really hard to make music sound really good. It took three or four songs for them to warm up, but then the whole thing just took off: fast, aggressive, tight riff-switching parts that toggled between introverted and expansive. A true power trio, they cram as much music into every bar as possible, with everyone doubling everyone else and filling in the spaces in a way that just makes you feel like you are being given very large helpings of a dish the servers know is completely delicious. The standard talking point is Neil Young, but I couldn't help thinking Dinosaur is more like the Who in some ways, if the Who was riddled with a multidimensional and multitextured self-doubt that is.
This is the sound of socially hopeless guys who could not learn to fake the normal things people learn to fake, so instead they learned to play really well, and just hoped this would be enough to make things okay -- unassuming people unpacking a surprising amount of music from frustration and longing and a certain amount of desperation.
The report form Mascis is a detailed mass of information from a guy who didn't get the girl and will never get the girl. You can hear the songs emerging from raw unrequited love, an inability to communicate, and feebleness. But then also there is this complete awesomeness at the one thing of playing the guitar and putting these songs together. And the guitar sound is unmistakable -- biting and trebly but somehow still pliable and covering a wide spectrum of tones, suddenly uncontrollably erupting from it's own horizon to include beautiful, alienating and welcoming elements at the same time. A second later the tone recedes into a sharp, jangly clarity. What should sound like lazy, whining vocals are dropped into the power of these song parts and alchemically transformed into a melodic sensitively embedded in a block of conflicted awesomeness.
Working against a bad drum mix (maybe it's expecting a little much to have the Summerstage sound system be able to keep up with the four stacks of Marshalls that Barlow and Mascis had between them), Murph's drumming was aggressive, tasteful propulsion blending seamlessly with the other parts. It's hard to play that much and not sound busy. Barlow's picked Rickenbacker lines boomed and swerved and filled out a bed for all the noise. He has a way of emphasizing the perfect part of the chord in the song peak-outs, reinforcing the melody more than the noise.
As with the Pixies reunion, Dinosaur Jr. recreated the best things about the band without a hint of necrophilia. All the songs were from You're Living All Over Me, and Bug, with a few of the worthy tunes from the first album, like Repulsion and Forget the Swan, done with a Bug-like arrangement that made them sound much better than the original recorded versions.
Yes it was the original line-up -- Macis: looking like a gen x Gandalf with trademark long greasy hair gone totally grey. Murph: completely bald and looking a lot like Geoffrey Young. Barlow: he aged the best.
Their nonplussed vibe on stage was hard to read at first. As it turned out, nonplussed is how these guys look when they're trying really hard to make music sound really good. It took three or four songs for them to warm up, but then the whole thing just took off: fast, aggressive, tight riff-switching parts that toggled between introverted and expansive. A true power trio, they cram as much music into every bar as possible, with everyone doubling everyone else and filling in the spaces in a way that just makes you feel like you are being given very large helpings of a dish the servers know is completely delicious. The standard talking point is Neil Young, but I couldn't help thinking Dinosaur is more like the Who in some ways, if the Who was riddled with a multidimensional and multitextured self-doubt that is.
This is the sound of socially hopeless guys who could not learn to fake the normal things people learn to fake, so instead they learned to play really well, and just hoped this would be enough to make things okay -- unassuming people unpacking a surprising amount of music from frustration and longing and a certain amount of desperation.
The report form Mascis is a detailed mass of information from a guy who didn't get the girl and will never get the girl. You can hear the songs emerging from raw unrequited love, an inability to communicate, and feebleness. But then also there is this complete awesomeness at the one thing of playing the guitar and putting these songs together. And the guitar sound is unmistakable -- biting and trebly but somehow still pliable and covering a wide spectrum of tones, suddenly uncontrollably erupting from it's own horizon to include beautiful, alienating and welcoming elements at the same time. A second later the tone recedes into a sharp, jangly clarity. What should sound like lazy, whining vocals are dropped into the power of these song parts and alchemically transformed into a melodic sensitively embedded in a block of conflicted awesomeness.
Working against a bad drum mix (maybe it's expecting a little much to have the Summerstage sound system be able to keep up with the four stacks of Marshalls that Barlow and Mascis had between them), Murph's drumming was aggressive, tasteful propulsion blending seamlessly with the other parts. It's hard to play that much and not sound busy. Barlow's picked Rickenbacker lines boomed and swerved and filled out a bed for all the noise. He has a way of emphasizing the perfect part of the chord in the song peak-outs, reinforcing the melody more than the noise.
As with the Pixies reunion, Dinosaur Jr. recreated the best things about the band without a hint of necrophilia. All the songs were from You're Living All Over Me, and Bug, with a few of the worthy tunes from the first album, like Repulsion and Forget the Swan, done with a Bug-like arrangement that made them sound much better than the original recorded versions.
7.13.2005
I'm going to Miss L Sov@ the knit tonight because I'll be ripping into a three-song power-trio Live Aid recreation with Mr. Daniel Nester (guitar) and Mr. Gene Cawley (vocals, bass) over at the Bowery Poetry Club. What’s on the menu?
Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me," with Gene's brilliant done-as-a-T-Rex-song arrangement.
U2's "Bad" (not the 17-min version!)
Queen's "Hammer to Fall"
Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me," with Gene's brilliant done-as-a-T-Rex-song arrangement.
U2's "Bad" (not the 17-min version!)
Queen's "Hammer to Fall"
7.11.2005
I seem to have overcome my inability to listen to things while they are being hyped:
iPod mini shuffle in love with Lady Sovereign today. From Run the Road.
Cha Ching -- Jessica Hopper via Jordan
iPod mini shuffle in love with Lady Sovereign today. From Run the Road.
Cha Ching -- Jessica Hopper via Jordan
Yo La Tengo at Battery Park:
Listening to music stretched on a blanket on a beautiful day with plenty of snacks sure beats standing for hours in the S and M discomfort routine of a rock club, but alas, speaker cabinets need wood to bounce sounds off of. They do not sound good outdoors. Over-zealous park organizers turned people away when the lawn wasn't even full, so we didn't get to hang out w/ Ange or Jordan.
In this setting, with trees and sunlight, Yo La Tengo did best in their quiet, casual, open song mode -- esp. w/ the breathing room created by brushes on the drums: intimate, relaxed, and operating within a carefully selected spectrum of shyness with anxiety as a back-story to give it some depth.
Listening to music stretched on a blanket on a beautiful day with plenty of snacks sure beats standing for hours in the S and M discomfort routine of a rock club, but alas, speaker cabinets need wood to bounce sounds off of. They do not sound good outdoors. Over-zealous park organizers turned people away when the lawn wasn't even full, so we didn't get to hang out w/ Ange or Jordan.
In this setting, with trees and sunlight, Yo La Tengo did best in their quiet, casual, open song mode -- esp. w/ the breathing room created by brushes on the drums: intimate, relaxed, and operating within a carefully selected spectrum of shyness with anxiety as a back-story to give it some depth.
7.06.2005
Jim Behrle, 6/6/05 Poetry Project
Why I Am Not Post Avant, Pressed Wafer, 2005
Jim Behrle performed this gig reclining on a piano, sporting a shiny blue wig. Three musicians provided scratchy improv accompaniment with processed dulcimer, prepared guitar and sax. Spaces of silence bubbled out from the lines and music, fully interactive. It was fantastic.
Behrle's poetry is funny on the outside, serious on the inside. You don’t have to get too far past the layers of irony and jokey self-deprecation to perceive that the mental and social particle accumulation happening in his work is deftly controlled and directed on the larger scale. The work is gross, beautiful and hilarious by turns. The humor he uses is not just crowd pleasing, it’s also a little window into a potential poetic energy liberation policy. Notice how he can handle fun and dissatisfaction simultaneously? That's difficult. Anyone can do something simplistic, but making something simple work well ain't easy. Behrle handles it with aplomb:
"Everything gets clearer after a kick in the groin"
"We met at the jaws-of-life party"
"Like I'm going to stop walking cuz some red hand tells me to"
He's trying to get the lines to sound like throwaways, but it's obvious he cares desperately about each one. The loosely assembled observations and ironic references operate under the pressure of a massive cultural fact-denial system like a bathysphere with the sea crushing down on it from all sides. You can feel the subtle shifts in scale operating within this pressure of culturally suppressed information. What information is important? Where does it fit? How does it relate to what I have to do and what I need? These shifts between the details are not jump cuts but cognitive glissandos that sound like someone looking for new paths, and not wanting to do it alone: a poetic cry for help. The ironic Lucite dive suit here is not made of the armor of defensive superiority, but of pain in the face of the pervasive cultural denial of fact staring down one's own personal reality-check.
There are audible remixed poetry parts -- Berrigan, Silliman, Padgett etc., certainly, but more importantly they are remixes of all the pathways in the mind that don't connect right when wired with the traditional schematics. These lines, details, jokes, loosened in this way, feel as though they can route the brain's electrons in ten different directions at the same time. There is an openness to searching for new connections. I can't wait to see how Behrle develops this work.
Why I Am Not Post Avant, Pressed Wafer, 2005
Jim Behrle performed this gig reclining on a piano, sporting a shiny blue wig. Three musicians provided scratchy improv accompaniment with processed dulcimer, prepared guitar and sax. Spaces of silence bubbled out from the lines and music, fully interactive. It was fantastic.
Behrle's poetry is funny on the outside, serious on the inside. You don’t have to get too far past the layers of irony and jokey self-deprecation to perceive that the mental and social particle accumulation happening in his work is deftly controlled and directed on the larger scale. The work is gross, beautiful and hilarious by turns. The humor he uses is not just crowd pleasing, it’s also a little window into a potential poetic energy liberation policy. Notice how he can handle fun and dissatisfaction simultaneously? That's difficult. Anyone can do something simplistic, but making something simple work well ain't easy. Behrle handles it with aplomb:
"Everything gets clearer after a kick in the groin"
"We met at the jaws-of-life party"
"Like I'm going to stop walking cuz some red hand tells me to"
He's trying to get the lines to sound like throwaways, but it's obvious he cares desperately about each one. The loosely assembled observations and ironic references operate under the pressure of a massive cultural fact-denial system like a bathysphere with the sea crushing down on it from all sides. You can feel the subtle shifts in scale operating within this pressure of culturally suppressed information. What information is important? Where does it fit? How does it relate to what I have to do and what I need? These shifts between the details are not jump cuts but cognitive glissandos that sound like someone looking for new paths, and not wanting to do it alone: a poetic cry for help. The ironic Lucite dive suit here is not made of the armor of defensive superiority, but of pain in the face of the pervasive cultural denial of fact staring down one's own personal reality-check.
There are audible remixed poetry parts -- Berrigan, Silliman, Padgett etc., certainly, but more importantly they are remixes of all the pathways in the mind that don't connect right when wired with the traditional schematics. These lines, details, jokes, loosened in this way, feel as though they can route the brain's electrons in ten different directions at the same time. There is an openness to searching for new connections. I can't wait to see how Behrle develops this work.
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