Pierre Joris on Douglas Oliver.

Alexander Cockburn explores the distant past in Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

Fighting the heat-induced torpor, Katie and I took a Saturday afternoon field trip to the Met. The East Village in full afternoon sunlight felt like Death Valley or Reno. We immediately caught the uptown 21, a polarity of that familiar line I am less intimate with. The bus runs up the frontage road, with its odd no-man's-land configurations of cramped parking areas and besieged/empty feeling slivers of park space that dwell beneath the FDR exactly like the setting of a 1970s J. G. Ballard novel.

The public transportation karma was clearly switched on for the trip, because the 6 train was practically waiting for us at the transfer. Space can render itself as sheer obstruction in New York City, especially when you are in a hurry and confronted with a maddeningly slow wall of people creeping up a subway station's stairs as though they were at a funeral. When the stars align in the right way, though, even the most distant destination can seem to gravitate toward you within a spectacularly short time frame -- in this case about a half an hour.

So we arrived at 5th Ave, walked past the swarms of loitering tourist and headed into the massive hording-behavior spectacle of empire that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, intent on checking out Treasures of the Sacred Maya Kings, a kind of lifestyles of the sacred Mayan rich and famous / Mayan MTV cribs.

There were ceremonial and ritual objects and some status objects and expensive kitchenware, fascinating and beautiful, most of it the accoutrements of a religiously justified system of class warfare only slightly more explicit than the one whereby The President of the United States believes he has been chosen by God to run the country. Beholding the Mayan jade blood letting needle of the king, I couldn't help wondering if any blood spilled on the ground during our president's periodic mountain biking accidents might not result in some kind of spontaneous eruption of petrochemicals from the earth, magically ensuring a profitable financial quarter for Halliburton.

The most interesting objects to me were the ones that incorporated the images of animals into the object design, this cormorant for instance. There was also a lovely caiman /crocodile. Whoever the craftsmen was who earned a living creating this kind thing for king/priest class, that person certainly had a feeling for the animal. The little crock was what you would call cute, foreshortened, rounded and fierce in an adorable way. The power of cuteness is an affirmation that we very much belong to the animal kingdom. Looking at this thing, I momentarily lose the sense of religion as class warfare and feel the natural environment this civilization lived in transmitting information to me through this thing via it's anonymous human creator.

Cool water courtesy of Alex.

Staring at the tunnel doesn't make the train come any faster -- or does it?

That is: what qualifies as a state of poetic concentration,

even if no poem is produced?

Jonathan on a tear.

Possible reasons why I tuned in hopefully to the Henry Rollins talk show on IFC last week:

1) Out of my misguided pattern of continuing to associate Henry Rollins with Sim Cain, and by implication, Regressive Aid. My LP of Effects on Exposed People melted across the seatbelt brick in the back seat of my parents' Ford Fiesta twenty years ago.

2) Out of the thought that the sales of Rollins books may have contributed to the survival of SPD in the 90s

3) Out of a somehow still fond memory of a line from a Black Flag song that I recall as "I want to crucify you to your front door with the nails from your well-stocked garage" (pentameter, with a great use of a hyphen)

What the show turned out to be:
punk rock Andy Rooney.

Why does Neil Young not use a conditioner?

In general I'd agree that the writing at Gamespot is slightly better than at Pitchfork, but they're both quite good. Most poetry reviewers would do well to get their writing up to that level.

Dream House, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela

After years of intending to go to this long standing sound/art installation, I finally did. Jordan has some photos here

The Dream House is basically a loft space on Church St. with magenta gels over the windows and a couple of small hanging mobiles lit to project symmetrical, blurred, letter-like shapes on the walls. Four PA speakers on wooden risers placed in the corners of the room play a constant sine wave drone of, let us say, an extremely particular set of intervals, from low bass to very high. In other words, it's a big, mirror image chord. The name describes the intervals in what may be a bit too much detail for most listeners:

"The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119, a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer."

The title is really the score. This would demystify the installation (something it really needs) except the intervallic explanation is for the most part inscrutable.

Because of the nature of sine waves, and the positioning of the speakers, the quality of the sound changes drastically depending on the position of your body in the room. Even turning your head an inch to the left or right will change the sound dramatically. The carpeted room, which you enter after removing your shoes, is empty except for the speakers, hanging art and a shrine.

The three-dimensional moiré pattern waterfall of sound doesn’t change--it just has different dimensions. Your position in it changes, and the information that the different positions express shifts based on where you are within the space. It's a fascinating, physical experience of sound. It's almost silly to try to describe it too much using words-- check it out.

In almost any context, bring politics into a conversation about poetry - even to tell someone you like what they're doing, and a previously established agenda set in previously established terms barely related to yours will be immediately and ardently projected onto you.

A) People are defensive B) People crave opponents.

Great to see a piece on Kevin Davies in this week's Village Voice.

from Laynie Brown's fantastic reading at Dixon Place, 5.9.06


There is nothing wasted in this poetry, and it's full of subtle and unpredictable turnings.

"fire is the quickest of animals"

"vampire squid are kept in jewel boxes"

"I examine the list of things that lie between our temperaments"

"ceremonial constitutions of behavior"

Mogwai, Webster Hall, 5.12.06

We walked in halfway though the first song, so I missed out on the opening moments where the band arrives and finds their stations, which always tells me a lot about a group. All I could determine was that there were a bunch of guys on the stage all dressed exactly like Brandon Downing.

The first thing I noticed about the sound was that the mix was crystal clear and not too loud. It was, hands down, the most conscientious mixing of any rock band in a venue this size I have ever heard. They had no stage presence, or, I should say, they had a classic shoegazer stage presence. They literarily looked at their shoes for the entire show, and barely moved, though they were intent-seeming and did seem to enjoy themselves. Careful, crystalline production of their signature sound is what they were there for. They actually seemed uncomfortable with themselves on stage physically- which worked fine. The audience seemed to reflect some these characteristics - being mostly polite mid-to-late twenties couples totally engrossed in the music.

There were almost no vocals. The vocals that Mogwai did use were arranged like instrumental parts - vocoder-ized and produced with no particular fanfare by the keyboard player. I was surprised to find that my absorption in the show was delayed my the lack of vocal drama. That expectation of a rock show must run a little deeper than I realized, since 70% of my CD collection is instrumental music in the form of jazz... People do need a character to identify with. Mogwai works a little differently, though -- they produce an environment that the listener is gradually absorbed into, and hopefully, swept up in. At the beginning of songs, audience members were clapping and cheering in recognition after a single bar of a picked guitar pattern was played. This made me think that listeners were spending a lot of time with the albums, perhaps to the point of self-medicating with them.

Much of Mogwai's music is based on petal-point guitar picking patterns contrasted against big, layered, power chord riffs, giving a modal feel but with the excitement of heavy rock music --all with a broad underlying spectrum of texture that ranges from single-note tremolo picking to lush organ to jagged guitar noise. The subdued picking patterns are build into huge, gothic power chord landscapes, creating an undeniable feeling of expanding scale, riff-switching between earthy and celestial effects.

Tom Beckett interviews Gary Sullivan.

Good to see Halliburton finally doing something about the environment. Order your SurvivaBall now.

Shanna Compton, Down Spooky, Winnow Press, 2005

Portraits and landscapes with verbal playfulness chops out the wazoo. Vocab harmonics -- "traffic light" / "light subjectivity," intertwined scenes and wordplay are all executed with a crucial balance of relaxation and density of detail that rewards repeated readings. Complex and casual, the poems in Down Spooky use appealingly jumbled details on the surface, an engaging rhythm and a narrative subtext moving underneath: fun, alert, charming, and animated with a buoyant, light touch.

Pet peeve: the introduction uses my least favorite intro strategy: the introducer is more interested in the introduction as an occasion for his own expression than in saying something to the point about the poems.

Compton uses phrases that balance alluring and puzzling qualities. - "hookymaking convincability" along side carefully crafted dreamy epistolary textures: "My dear and loving head wound"

"my sister and I once spent the day / walking around in Brooklyn / We watched a Capybara do / nothing, for like an hour."

What feel like word replacement effects work right alongside a Creeley sing-song modality and place / mood suspended chords under charged lines of sharp giddiness and beauty. And the wordplay permeates the settings and portraits, it doesn't just sit on the surface of the poems.

High School reminiscences.

In "Last Paragraph" the address of the poem and the address between the characters in it is intentionally blurred. Here, Compton uses a scene -- an account of a moment in a relationship where the vocabulary in the poem seems to be almost taking over the story, and this makes for a layered harmonic effect. I think this quality of her poetry is related to the way certain choice sentences / lines spoken in the midst of a personal conflict between lovers or friends can stick with you for years after the fight is long over - as much or more than a line of poetry can. The words take on a life of their own, and this might have as much to do with language and poetry as it does with memory and emotion. Compton's poetry is especially keyed into these interlocked processes.

"Map of the City" uses appropriation of and/or is written the style of a state tourist pamphlet, except it could apply to any state, and seems to have more to do with how a city is remembered or thought about than how it is sold. So this is a kind of satire where the purpose isn't (just) to make fun of something but to use the satirical mechanism, the taking up of a voicing, to activate another artistic effect.

"all are washed over by the paradox of open space"

Compton will go from a gentle, almost pastoral poem involving birds to "The day of prophesy has come and gone. / It seems our father never did possess / any ecclesiastical spacecraft."

Blurred barhopping accounts.

Some lines are worthy of Rogers and Hammerstein, with an extra comic twist: Let's skip / the argument about who's haircut's / worst in the senior picture/ At least you weren't wearing a boa."

Some of the poems are left underdeveloped. They work better when she's combining more elements. She has a contained swagger and in places I want even more swagger -- with less decorum.

Compton always adds a little wry distance just where it will do the most good -- in the few places where a poem is listing towards sentimentality or cliché. Or she'll deploy a cliché on purpose, but with a intervention: "The river pretends / to be caressed by a breeze."

As in James Schuyler, some poems work well as vivid, pleasurable portraits or scenes but also operate on another level, but with so little fuss that you might not even notice it on first reading: The "the slow desiccation of an espresso drop / on the countertop, it's pep all lost" works as a scene and a joke, but Compton is also thinking with the images -- in this poems (and others) there is a kind of meditation on the passage of time -- the drying of a drop of coffee on a table's surface.

In Down Spooky, literary references are delivered in the style of Ella Fitzgerald: "Marianne would discus the fauna, / but I'm not gonna. It's enough / to sip this drink and await the flutter."

Synesthetic, comic impressionism.

Fact #122

A duck can't walk without bobbing its head.

Jordan's got video from the Flarf Festival last weekend.

"I think it helped that I had my shirt off."