out to Mexico for a while...

Report from Amsterdam Ave.

Delicately spinning gyre of pigeons high above the buildings, set off in bright white specks of sun.

Strange, filthy four-foot piles of snow halfway into the street -- better than anything in the museums. No millionaires threatening to own them. Jordan also noticing this.

All art should be meltable art.

Snowbound blizzard weekend. Eight foot plough drifts on Ave A this morning. Difficult snow navigation on unshoveled sidewalks via NewBalance. Everyone walking slowly. The A train standing room only from W 4th all the way to 168th.

Katie’s great mushroom and carrot loaf -- two dinners worth of food. Plenty of milk and espresso. Fighting cabin fever. Metal of Honor: Frontline on the Xbox. Spielbergy soundtrack, intolerable in high drama moments, not bad in ambient stretches. Heavy use of bass/french horn pairings. Undercurrent of tension transmitted via the low and mellow settings on the partial series dial.

The art of video game music requires the composer to be as interesting as possible, while also arranging the material to be able to withstand constant, repeated listening within a single level -- esp. if you’re not doing very well. It must stand up to replay without getting annoying. In replay, pointed musical qualities become a drawback. A similar aesthetic in Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. In Metal of Honor, the musical moments of high drama are redundant -- you’re already actively engaged in the drama -- you’re helping to save the world from Nazis. You don’t need reminding that’s it’s epic and tragic.

Metal of Honor’s graphics are well below what the Xbox can do, being a PSII port, but it doesn’t suffer from the odd blocky green-hue emphasis that seems to inflect older PSII games. Despite this, it’s actually quite good with atmosphere, esp. the night sky against the roof lines and streetlamps of a small town. Pastel quality rather than the CGI movie vibe you get in Halo. Lots of burnt sienna. A beautiful day with burning windmills.

Work alleviates the shut-in feeling from seeing the snow go sideways outside the living room window. Video games, esp. FPS games, are work -- series of tasks that need to be accomplished. You eliminate obstructions and threats, protect yourself and collect resources. Metal of Honor doesn’t try to hide this it -- it emphasizes it. You actually get a to-do list and the game checks tasks off as you finish them.

Headed to SF for a couple days to check out some poet's theater.

New Year’s reading at St. Mark’s. Far too sprawling to ever fully experience, which is part of its appeal. If you stay for five hours it’s still just a window on a much larger event. Friends visiting town, so I couldn’t hang and sell food as I usually do. In and out.

Normally the audio in the main hall would be siphoned off into the parish hall via a single speaker for preparers and sellers to hear everything. It’s a great feeling, like a radio show being broadcast from twenty feet away. Alas no channel could be spared this time around, so I missed much while in the back, readying cymbals and tomtoms for a quick staging. I got there late -- post-Patty Smith. She usually hits at 9:00 with standing room only, and people swarm out of the place after she’s done. That still leaves the house with several hundred people, though, who were still there when I split around 1:00.

The backstage activity is where the real show is. Rapid intersections of people. Poets you haven’t talked to in years, people you see often, people you’ve read but never met, all mingling. Friendly talk and the inevitable prickly exchanges. Strobelike conversation. A lot of flip-flopping between contradictions: excited and exhausted, open and wary. On stage it’s a mass encouragement vibe. Everyone gets a lot of clapping.

Gary and Nada read a duo google thing on the word ululations, and talked about the tidal wave and dedicated the poem to the people killed. Many people talked about and dedicated poems to John Fisk and Jackson MacLow. I thought of my many conversations with John -- how we would get on some parapolitical riff and three hours would go by in a blink. I also thought of an evening walking home with Jackson and Alan Davies after a concert at Riverside Church. Talking about intonation etc. The air crystal-clear. A special feeling. Jackson -- interesting, interested and kind.

Hal Sirowitz cracked me up with his perfectly calibrated stupidity. A lot of it is the delivery, too, and the look. Marcella Durand played drums behind Douglas Rothschild reading Ezra Pound -- really great stuff. It was Joe Elliot’s kid’s drumset actually, which I helped Dug tune before he went on -- I love feeling useful!) Great to see Marcella playing drums. CA Conrad used a portable tape player as part of his performance back and forth dialogue and interruptions -- simple and effective. He has a good stage presence --- balanced hamming and nervous energy very nicely, not so easy to do. Frank Sherlock knocked out a strong, straight-ahead reading, no bell or whistles, which is actually one of the hardest things to make work in this context, but he pulled it off. Eddie Berrigan sang w/ guitar -- much more contour to the vocal melody than last time I heard him. Am I hearing some Devendra Banhart influence?

Wish I could have seen more people but what can you do. The marathon, as tiring as it can be, always leaves me with a good feeling -- like having moved through a briefly uncovered massive ambient poetic social texture.

1/9 train wall - lens crafters ad - model with one front incisor blacked-in with ball point pen. the simplicity of the gesture, crosshatching, traces of the human hand on the surface of the photographic reproduction, so effective at destroying the commercial usurpation of this small public rectangle of space. completely takes it back.

on the train to NJ – sun waning in smeared gray sky – Arthur Dove-style but with more menace. beautiful industrial blight with tall march weeds. the stranger's conversation in the next seat. giant letter "A" filling with neon light atop the huge evil-looking anheuser busch brewery. the graffiti out here, on a tanker train among the trees and rusting warehouses stands out strongly. on an iPod ad in the NYC subway graffiti is almost invisible.

the sky changes again. salmon plum clouds against blue.

---
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Gary Cooper. naive, tuba-playing poet inherits millions, feeds doughnuts to a horse, is exploited by and falls in love w/ gossip columnist and has his social conscience awakened by a destitute, homicidally enraged farmer.

hilarious court scene to prove his insanity for giving away his money - diagnosed manic depressive. "He feels total elation when he plays his tuba and writes his poetry."

"Pixilated" meaning crazy – as in visited by pixies – "He sure is pixilated!"

"everyone in Mandrake Falls is pixilated"

Jordan weights in on clarity, a topic that can make poets nervous. One default assumption among some of our more opaque writers seems to be that all clarity is bad clarity -- unconscious patterns of communication which reinforce power structures through faulty associations. This take on clarity is more about the institutional maintenance of categories of thought, mass psychology and suggestibility. It’s not about clarity per se.

What is bad opacity? Rumsfeld’s poetry embodies opacity as calculated obfuscation. The language he used in the press conference where he told soldiers they should get used to dying because it’s not convenient for him to deal with getting armor for vehicles is in exactly the same register as his poetry and press conferences. When he was caught off guard and out of context, though, the obfuscational power of the language, the suggestive vagueness, broke down. It’s all about the framing.

Is vagueness, a factor so prevalent and yet presently so un-discussed from within avant-garde poetry, parallel in some way to the Rumsfeld thing? Create vague word sequences and frame them in such a way that people accept the whole shbang as social power? Is this acceptable as a mirror-critique, or could this be thought of as a mere symptom?

Is there an element of the anti-social which operates separately from clarity as such? Ashbury or Tina Darragh can be very unclear but neither ever sounds anti-social. Can the genX punk concept of antisocial as a good thing -- a big NO -- be said to apply to obscure poetry? Maybe not, since Punk was simple and antisocial and that’s why it worked. It was extremely clear.

Cecil Taylor is difficult, baroque and anti-social, and covers a wide spectrum from unclear to lucid. Maybe difficulty, or challenge, should also be separated from questions of clarity. Ninja Gaiden is considered very challenging, but it’s also very popular. Some of the more challenging poets I like, Carla Harryman, Alan Davies, etc. rarely strike me as unclear.

I do like some unclear poetry (David Melnick anyone?). I am also very uncomfortable with the idea that challenging writing has to be a collectors’ cult you have be initiated into and have to pay a tithe for – poetry as antisocial in a bad way.

If I look at clear poetry that I dislike, it’s never because of the clarity. It’s because of the cluelessness, awkwardness, and bland pandering.

This week’s essay in The New York Times Book Review features Jim Behrle, who is quoted at length on the question of techniques needed to achieve groupie-worthiness. Hot author photos, ACDC T-shirts, and an aura of availability are some of the trade secrets he imparts based on his years of observation organizing readings in Boston. If there is ever a Sex and the City reunion show Jim is going to be the go-to guy for writerly crushes.

The majority of a piano's range uses notes which are produced by a single hammer hitting not one but three strings simultaneously. We hear it as a single tone.

You would assume that the best quality of sound would be achieved by tuning all three strings to the same exact same frequency -- in unison, but this isn't the case. The three strings are detuned slightly -- this produces a better tone with a longer sustain. The strings are intentionally put out of tune make them sound better.

Poetry with overly meticulous lines falls into a similar pattern -- they need to be more out of whack!

The Pixies, Hammerstein Ballroom

When the Pixies where happening in the late 80s I enjoyed what I heard but didn't get deeply into them. I was foolishly purist--the MTV presence and pop riffs kept me at arms length. The last few years I've been listening to the CDs and asking myself, "What the hell was wrong with me that I didn't like this more at the time?"

We got to the Hammerstein early knowing the show would fill up fast. It did. The crowd was much younger than I would have expected -- mostly mid-twenties, through there were a few people my age. Very excited people. Heavy competition for floor real estate. We stood down front, Kim Deal side.

Opening were Le Tigre -- a band I had read about but never seen: three young women doing peppy retro-disco/punk with feminist/queer framing. The music was almost all laptop tracks. One guitar got traded around occasionally, and the odd keyboard doodle was thrown in here and there, but this was all about singing over the hard drive. They did cute orchestrated disco party moves and wore sparkly outfits -- queer political performance art rock with karaoke party as model?

I have to admit I was struggling to access the music, which seemed shockingly sleepy. Maybe this works better on CD? It was hard to discern much content apart from the framing. "All feminists report to the front desk" is as far as they could take the material? The tone was trying to be fun and serious at the same time(Margaret Cho influence?), but it too often veered into a preachy/awkward/immature zone.

The drum machine and synthbass sounded brittle and one-dimensional, like a storefront façade for a western done in high-contrast black and white halftone. The song writing was all bare minimum retro-formalism, though two or three of the tunes toward the end of the set had better dynamics and actually developed some forward momentum and contrast. Maybe I don’t really get this music, but it's still good to see younger musicians trying to keep some kind of politics upfront without loosing a fun vibe entirely. It could also be there is a generation gap between me and Le Tigre?

I did notice, in the overall performance, something that resonated though -- the unhealed, rejected teenager in me that still needs to bond with others who also don’t fit in to their larger social world for some reason, though my identification to this as a straight male happens on a different scale.

The Pixies came on after the traditional unnecessary rock-concert-torture-waiting-period, which is designed, I suppose, to frame the music with a giant block of tedium and thereby have the featured act come as a kind of relief. From the first few seconds of the opener -- Wave of Mutilation, it was obvious the show was going to be incontrovertibly awesome.

The formula for the songs worked over and over with variations: great verse vocal melodies with odd and inventive lyrics, solid but aggressive pop groove with simple propulsive drumming, bringing the energy up three or four notches on the chorus with the beautifully vivid Frank Black scream (I kept thinking: Glenn Danzig!) and Kim Deal harmonizing. Piercing single-line guitar riffs repeating the vocal melody. Every element of the song added a strong element.

The mix, which started a little muddy, got progressively worse, eventually degenerating into a pulpy, over-processed blob that actually obfuscated the last few songs, including Debaser.

They broke the set in half with a twenty minute guitar feedback solo with some antics involving a drumstick and a bottle of beer while the rest of the band stepped to the side. It was almost like a magic routine -- the drummer's influence at work perhaps, since he has been a professional magician.

There is often a trace of something embarrassing about watching a rock stars, but this was entirely lacking with The Pixies. No chat or commentary between songs. Hardly any stage movement from anyone. The Doolittle-heavy set didn't slow up for a second. They mostly went straight from one song to the next. It actually got faster and more aggressive as the evening went on: One great song after another for an hour and a half.

The band was visibly happy at how much people loved the music, how happy they were to be there. The Pixies play a music that is a fusion of exuberance and unhappiness, maybe trying to purge the unhappiness, but also using it as depth, holding the unhappiness up the light of exuberance to see what it is.

I’m loving Shanna’s Gamers, which is finally out from Soft Skull. The Boston Globe mentions my article in it about vector graphics games and physics. I’ve only had time to read a few of the pieces, but here are some highlights so far:

The book kicks off with this Charles Bernstein quote: “If a typewriter could talk, it probably would have very little to say; our automatic washers are probably not hiding secret dream machines deep inside their drums. But these microchips really blow you away!”

Daniel Nester: a fascinating and slightly frightening portrait of ex-competitive gamer and tarantula rustler Todd Rogers.

Mark Lamoureux: Barthes collides with the Atari 2600. Writing on the primitive bit map graphics of the system, Lamoureux says,"The images are incomplete, standing upright only upon the crutches of context and metonymy. It is through those holes in the extremities of representation that the creatures of myth are allowed to enter."

Katie Degentesh unpacks the internalizations of late capitalism via the Atari800.

Shannon Holman: Finally, a lesbian perspective on Moon Patrol.

Ernest Hilbert: a fellow Jersey-boy gamer on golden age coin ops.

Mark Nesbitt reports from beta-tester hell.

Bill Spratch: The best walkthrough for playing George W. you going to find anywhere.

Nik Kelman walks a few MMOE miles in the shoes of a female, and learns to his irritation that “men call you ‘bossy’ when you make any kind of suggestion as to what might be the best course of action.”

At the release party this Sat at the BPC, I’m going to play some improvised music with my laptop and midi controller using sampled sound effects from the game Gravitar as the only sound sources.

Ave. B: doughnut holes arranged lovingly on the windshield wipers of a vintage MG.

There is a marvelous, crystal-clear savaging of Dana Gioia by A.O. Scott also in the Sunday Times Book Review this week. The Book Review should fire all their poetry and fiction critics and hire movie critics to replace them.

When I noticed the New York Times Book Review did a piece on Lyn Hejinian's Best American Poetry I thought, hmmm... I'm sure this will include an extensive, thrilled quotation from Kasey Silem Mohammad's poem Mars Needs Terrorists. I'm sure they wouldn't just run series of understated, threatened put-downs....

What we get is a picture of Lyn, which is shocking enough to see in the Book Review, with the words What Were You Thinking writ large below it. Then we get complaints that experimental poets are actually established, clearly too established for Orr's comfort. This is followed by complaints that the "traditional" sources BAP is taken from, Poetry, The Paris Review, etc. are missing.

I have to admit that I found Orr's comparison of the relative print runs of Shiny, The Yale Review and Cat Fancy amusing. Then the central complaints: the poetry here is not based on anecdote and "constructing a reliable voice."

Orr uses the second Matrix movie as a metaphor for what he sees as the weakness of experimental poetry. Metaphor can sometimes have a way of magnetically pulling away from uses the writer had intended for it. The closer, related, metaphor here would be the first Matrix film, where Neo, still in the ignorance-is-bliss Fox News/ Yale Review Matrix, is offered the pill and rabbit hole of a less reassuring but more real version of things (less based on anecdote and reliable voice you could say). Maybe Orr will one day go back and decide to take the other pill. You can imagine Lyn offering it to him with a sunglasses and an ankle-length leather trench coat. Lyn is Morpheus. Kasey is the pill itself.

Mlinko on primal self-expression.

Magee on Iraq blowback.

Kimball on Jordan Davis and Stephanie Young.

Latta on Padgett, Culley and Gottlieb,

Stephanie Young and Jordan Davis, BPC, 11/13/04

Came in slightly late to the BPC, where Stephanie had already started, sporting a (new?) rocker-Cat Power-ish look. Almost didn’t recognize her from a distance. I settled in at the bar in the midst of her startling, marzipan-heavy series featuring a haunted talking bracelet and a robot: totally marvelous.

“I lick the plate of macaroni. I have a sincere desire to change.”

“I had gone far to rest among the foxglove.”

Jordan Davis:

Is there a correlation between an appetite for Dub and the relaxed line and welcoming tone modulating themselves to the demands of circumambulation? Am I right in thinking there were more specks of disclosure in Jordan's reading than I'm used to?

“Taco hot dog blooper magnolia.”

“Under interests she listed sex and power, and then crossed one out.”

“It’s got to be overcast to mean business.”

“It repeats it, out to the edge of the pancake.”

Two things from different talks given by Steve Evans and Michael Magee linger together in my mind, though the talks were given months apart. Steve made an off the cuff remark worded with chilling concision about how the world had apparently been reabsorbed into a fundamentalist mind-set -- a perception our recent election confirms and deepens.

Magee's riffing off of the Burke thing about how diversity in America can have an ameliorating effect on the use of negative mass psychological forces for concentrating power - that we can't agree on who to hate, seems like it might be up in the air now that American Republicans/Christians seem to agree to hate Arabs and queers together? Or they agree enough on this that a little voting fraud in the right place does the trick.

The election...

no acceptable reaction...

Notes on Michael Magee's talk
Ralph Ellison: Pragmatism, Jazz, and the American Vernacular
Poetry Project, 10/22/04

Emerson -- "How easily we capitulate to badges and names."

The maintenance of idealism in the face of the myth of democracy.

How to avoid the patterns of getting locked into the traditions that precede you.

Social flexibility vs. stagnant institutional power as a discipline -- that is -- what a process of democratization would actually mean.

Magee paraphrase of Emerson: "part of self reliance is to protect other people from yourself."

History is a text that can be revised.

Symbolic action -- creating new idioms, new dialogue, new ways of speaking -- hence new thoughts reflecting new realities, and: new actions.

"All literary power is social power."

Burke's take on Hitler and his popularity w/ Germans at the time: enforced repetition of thought until it becomes tradition.

Complicity of power and language, which can cut both ways -- the opportunity available to use the social power of language for change.

Burke's take on why America won't ever go fascist -- we can't agree on who to hate.

The polyvocal aspects of jazz -- the including of dissonance -- different needs and voices in the social sense, as enriching and inherently progressive socially.

American culture is "jazz-shaped."

Making players out of audiences: this point made me think of a recent performance of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning I participated in recently (there was no other way to experience it, really) where the entire audience emptied out from the bleachers and joined the musicians on stage -- players and audience were one, voila!)

Ellison on interdependent form and content -- heavy overlap with Creeley.

The Bill of Rights as improvisation.

I added a link (left),for the Poetics Orchestra, including some mp3s from the Free Radicals concert.

Next gig: Bowery Poetry Club: Nov 5th