Disruptive Juxtaposition

Speak Yugoslavian?

2007-08-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

If you speak Yugoslavian and have any desire to help me out on a translation project, please let me know. I realize the small audience of this site might make the odds of your speaking Yugoslavian relatively small, but maybe your dad's friend's uncle's old roommate's lawyer's estranged son summered in I dunno Corfu or somewhere like.

What a musical return!

2007-06-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

Who knew it would be Dan Deacon who would tempt me out of my blogging hiatus? I have to tell as many people as possible about this guy.

Also these chaps:

Enough.

2007-01-28T10:02:00.000-08:00

Mortar Strike Hits Girls' School in Baghdad.

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How (not) to Drive a Humvee in Baghdad.

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Vlogger Jimmy Burns in a very possible Baghdad.

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Baghdad goes global.

Results, jazz, results

2007-01-28T09:40:00.000-08:00

No dice on the Washington Square Summer 2007 Poetry Prize (although it's nice to be a finalist). Likewise on a Colorado Review submission. Cue up that Charlie Brown Christmas "Christmastime Is Here" jazz track used to such uproarious "woe-is-me" effect in Arrested Development. Just joking.

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Wynton Marsalis Septet, Blue Interlude. It's a concept disc about an extended love affair. Here's Wynton himself explaining it: "It's about two people becoming one - very delicious - slice of spirit."

*

Wrote a poem this AM about a kid in college who, while brushing his teeth, leaned too hard on the sink fixture such that it, the sink fixture, broke away from the wall entirely, thereby unleashing this torrent of water into the bathroom. The rooms below the bathroom, unfortunately, belonged to two freshmen, and their material goods did not fare well in the deluge.

All-Cousin Holiday Soiree, 2007

2007-01-27T17:18:00.000-08:00

Mary and Elizabeth, sisters extraordinaire, neither one of whom has ever dropped me on my head, here reminisce about their SNES Super Ghouls'N'Ghosts skills circa 1992. Wait, no: that's me doing the reminiscing.

A veritable Who's Who of family. A shiny dime to the first one who finds Winston Churchill. Photo by Kristin (love you).

George listens skeptically to an explanation about the rudeness of pointing, indifferent to the courtesy I'm showing him by making my point without pointing. Plus, I seem to be boring even myself.

Jodi: "Oh, Edward."
Edward: "Oh, me."

This snapshot either preceded or followed a fantastic story involving a potential intruder, a set of footprints in the snow, a teenage peeping tom, a house full of lesbians hot-tubbing it in the moonlight, and Edward's unimpeachable morality. But I forget the details.

Up way too late, Max announces his intentions to rule the world Mussolini-style.

The next morning had a flurry of snow on it and on my car. Kris snapped this from the inside as Alec and I struggle to stay upright and clear the windshield in the gale-force 2 mph winds.

Max and Alec enjoy getting the obligatory manual-labor phase of life out of the way early.

No matter what his grin might imply, Max does not plan on running after the car as he unleashes a fusillade of snowballs.

Name that phrase

2006-12-06T19:53:00.000-08:00

Man does not live by bread alone.

*

Bing Crosby, Merry Christmas.

Van Morrison, Into the Music.

Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days.

Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll.

Through a pinhole

2006-12-03T17:32:00.000-08:00

Death Cab For Cutie, Transatlanticism.

Sigur Ros, Takk...

Debussy, Preludes Book I, Images Book I, Estampes.

Animal Collective, Feels.

Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat.

Death Cab For Cutie, We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes.

Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings "It Could Happen To You".

Death Cab For Cutie, Plans.

*

Why all the Death Cab? Oh, just going to see them tonight at the Joint. Why the Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins? Oh, they'll be opening for Death Cab. Why the Animal Collective? Because it's awesome. Why the Chet Baker? Because I like to falsetto-sing along with him as I'm reading student papers. Obviously.

Columnated ruins domino

2006-11-29T20:28:00.000-08:00

Debussy, Melodies.

Debussy, Preludes Book I / Images Book I.

Lambchop, Is a Woman.

Brian Wilson, Smile.

*

Happening this Saturday.

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Certain shirts I'd purloined from him show up in the tectonic bottom levels of my dresser drawers - stuff I don't often wear but which I "borrowed" and never returned. It's possible to do this sort of theft during the college years, when you're home on break and your sibling's not around to cry foul or sucker-punch you for taking what's theirs.

*

"You'll grow old if you know too much." - Yevgeny Vassilovitch Bazarov

Wherever fortune flings it, it strikes root

2006-11-28T22:53:00.000-08:00

Neutral Milk Hotel, On Avery Island.

Danielson, Ships.

Joe Henry, Tiny Voices.

Sonny Rollins, The Bridge.

*

"Like the rest, we shall go for our husks on Judgment Day,
but not that we may wear them, for it is not just
that a man be given what he has thrown away.

Here shall we drag them and in this mournful glade
our bodies will dangle to the end of time,
each on the thorns of its tormented shade."

~ Inferno, Canto XIII.

Get through your Sunday with these

2006-11-26T17:06:00.000-08:00

Stars, Set Yourself on Fire.

Fruit Bats, Spelled in Bones.

Wilco, Summerteeth.

Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.

M. Ward, Transistor Radio.

Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard.

It's comin' out!! It's comin' atchaaaaa!!

2006-11-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

Food Bed Gospel is, that is.

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Beethoven, String Quartets Ops 59 and 74 (perf. the Takacs Quartet).

Big Star, #1 Record.

Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together.

Phoenix, It's Never Been Like That.

Dr. Octagon, Dr. Octagonecologyst.

*

Carved apart a turkey yesterday, yesterday being our actual Thanksgiving. The turkey I roasted turned out to be extra, and so I was able to practice carving it in edifying privacy. The experience turned out to be memorable, and put me in this frame of mind:

"A technique is a procedure that may be mastered, but the skill of the sage goes beyond this. One might say that it has become an 'art,' a dao. With Zhuangzi's conception, any physical activity, whether butchering a carcass, making wooden wheels, or carving beautiful ceremonial bell stands, becomes a dao when it is performed in a spiritual state of heightened awareness."

Presidential reading habits, maybe

2006-11-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

Camera Obscura, Let's Get Out of This Country

Luna, Rendezvous

Wayne Newton, Mr. Las Vegas

The Notorious Bettie Page, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

*

In the line at the bank yesterday, I was complimented for having the foresight to bring a book with me: Turgenev's Fathers & Sons. The complimenter was a Vegas-looking fellow, with brilliantined Lancelottish hair, black clothes, a light amt. of girth around his middle, black specs, and a reedy-but-big voice. I relayed to him the Matt Fitsko-derived fact - not since confirmed or denied - that Abraham Lincoln always carried a book with him, wherever he went. He enjoyed this possible fact. Then a young fellow with a British accent and a laddish mien interrupted him to ask what the date was. "It's November 22nd," Vegas Lancelot said, "tomorrow is the November 23rd, which is Thanksgiving." Which I took to be a surprising five seconds of harsh school and condescension for poor British Guy. American Hegemony at work within America itself, perhaps?

*

Weird: the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade on the tube over my shoulder right now happens to feature the fellows from Spamalot. Everything's connected today.

The core thaw

2006-11-21T21:06:00.000-08:00

Puccini, Tosca.

Animal Collective, Feels.

Ryan Adams, Demolition.

The Decemberists, Picaresque.

Rufus Wainwright, Want One.

*

Inconspicuous Consumption.

*

Lines, at last. Ahem:

Kids don't pick each other up
too frequently, I know you're after
all boys will be boys & it's something
to heft a person who's lived as long as you,
I would swim with Drew Marong
on my back & felt like Atlas: he'd
pretend to drown & so would become
the world to me.

*

A turkey's in the sink, thawing. Will it be alright by Thanksgiving? Say I began the thaw this afternoon? I'm thinking about the innermost thaw. Also: thaw begins to look fascinating with enough consideration (and Scotch). I'd play this game with various words when I was younger. I would say Cheerio - as in the cereal O - until the word lost all associative meaning.

*

Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

The charm offensive

2006-11-20T23:11:00.000-08:00

Otis Rush, All My Loving.

Shout Out Louds, Howl Howl Gaff Gaff.

Andrew Bird, Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs.

Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender.

*

Sadly, there's been no time to read poems, write them, or run.

*

This town darkens quickly. Valley life. I also suspect that the absence of material in the atmosphere means that light doesn't catch on anything. Ambient light levels stay low.

*

I'm bringing back the use of "presently" for "right away" or "as soon as I can." Who's with me?

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Tonight's post title is brought to you by Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which deserves your patronage.

Current listening & more

2006-11-19T20:00:00.000-08:00

Beethoven, String Quartets Ops. 59 and 74.

Fiery Furnaces, Bitter Tea.

Portishead, Dummy.

Radiohead, Amnesiac.

Duncan Sheik, Phantom Moon.

*

Now entering a thirteenth straight hour of work. Occasional stops for food don't count.

*

Someone tell me how The Simpsons were tonight.

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"The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to television, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of 'the lonely crowd.' The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions - and each time in a more concrete manner." ~ Guy Debord

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"They are THE OPPORTUNISTS, those souls who in life were neither for good nor evil but who took no sides in the Rebellion of the Angels. They are neither in Hell nor out of it. Eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air..." ~ John Ciardi

*

Two contests to ready Food Bed Gospel for. Currently taking bets on how the MS will fare. The odds that it'll win the day are not in your favor - let's call them at 800 to 1 - but brother will they pay.

Happy birthday, Jon.

2006-11-09T19:07:00.000-08:00

Current listening

2006-10-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

The Decemberists, The Crane Wife.

Thievery Corporation, Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi.

Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Summer in the Southeast.

Talking Heads, Talking Heads '77.

British Sea Power, Open Season.

Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans), self-titled.

Tortoise, self-titled.

The Thrills, So Much For the City.

Vashti Bunyan, Just Another Diamond Day.

Vashti Bunyan, Lookaftering.

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs, Under the Covers.

Neko Case, Blacklisted.

Tortoise and Bonnie "Prince" Billy, The Brave and the Bold.

First stanza of "Mark Twain's Burglars"

2006-10-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

bumbled & played an unplanned song of candleabra maraca,

arias of stubbed toes, comic opera sobbing when they were caught

in the lines of the broadsheet the Hannibal news drew up when

its best son & curmudgeon managed a laugh at his thieves' expense,

the notice to any subsequent burglar a helpful how-to - "The china's beside

that thing by the entryway, chiffonier I think they call it,

pergola or something like that" - as though he had affably

dealt with the theft of his mind, he gave crooks green lights

& couldn't find the right words - "Please don't make noise as you leave,

& help yourself to a kitten -

Yours sincerely,

M. Twain",

On rain in Vegas

2006-10-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

The land's so unaccustomed to rain that the jagged hills which hem in Vegas itself and its infinite suburbs are washed clean of months of dust. When a shower passes, the mountains hold forth with profound brick reds and deep purples everyone had forgotten were there. The smell of galoshes and puddles, which tended to be fleeting in my younger days (as though the darker the weather was back then, the more it tends to glow today), is everywhere: there's nowhere for the water to drain off to, and because the earth is always warm the rain, once it touches down, spreads that damp metallic scent all over the valley.

Yesterday: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, a cinnamon candle, and missing someone (you know who you are) all afternoon. The plan for today: the wonderful same.

Marketing isn't all bad

2006-10-01T20:47:00.000-07:00

The Hold Steady's new album Boys and Girls in America. The press this release is winning is legitimately won. Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen are apt. Piano sales floors are filling up with scruffy kids wearing thick-rimmed glasses and Chuck Taylors, all of them equal parts cynic and idealist.

Good Ground - Excerpt #2

2006-09-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

SGT. SAUSAGE-CASING TO THE RESCUE

by M. Darski
July 17th, 20__

Sgt. Eric Luchessi got his arms, head and torso through the window without much difficulty, but it took some maneuvering for the 5’ 7”, 400-pound Suffolk police sergeant to hoist his considerable midsection into the den of a Sag Harbor home burglarized last year.

A Suffolk jury watched Luchessi’s entry on a videotape played in court Friday. Police invited Sgt. Luchessi to perform the demonstration entry because of his size. According to prosecutors, his relative and eventual success proved that defendant David Flaim, who is an inch shorter and 100 pounds lighter, could have made the same type of entry with ease.

Flaim, 38, is charged with burglarizing the Sag Harbor home of next-door neighbors Sal and Bonnie Orzelak by hefting himself up through the Andersen casement window and leaving through the side door with assorted high-end electronic devices including a Hi-Def plasma-screen TV, five of seven surround-sound Bose speakers (w/ subwoofer), and approximately 700 DVDs.

Defense attorney Crisp O’Hara has suggested that the 305-lb Flaim would not have fit through the window opening. O’Hara said Friday that the video of Luchessi climbing into the house proved “precisely nada”, in part because Luchessi needed a ladder to reach the window 69 inches off the ground, and used it for leverage as he thrust his way into the house. O’Hara called the action “as unlikely as it was unsightly.”

During cross-examination by O’Hara, Luchessi conceded that he could not have gotten in through the window without the help of something “to get myself off the ground,” but added that some patio furniture in the Orzelaks’ backyard “could have done the trick easy” when it came to Flaim’s intrusion.

Sgt. Luchessi, one of the arresting officers in the case, took part in the experiment as a favor to an investigator on the case. Luchessi said he was happy to help, even if it cost him some ribbing by officers who dubbed him “Sgt. Sausage Casing.” “If this will keep one more cocky good-looking klepto off my Main Streets, I don’t care what they call me,” said Luchessi.

Open house

2006-09-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

Here come the parents!

Every time you close your eyes

2006-09-26T22:59:00.000-07:00

So many student papers. Like, so.

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RJ: from "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

*

What kind of love? It doesn't matter at this point - the poem's first line - because I'm hooked. Whatever kind of love I'm inclined to read this love as - fraternal, sexual, paternal, pantheistic - I now have this ticking instrument in mind. & the reader's got to know what kind of love we're really discussing here. Also, how about the triple stress of "fat gold watch"? Love it.

*

Currently Arcade Firing. Aren't they due for another album? They've got to be sitting on a trunk full of songs by now. If my band's first album happened to be Funeral, I'd be nervous about my follow-up too. But hey guys, it's all good. Let us have what you've got.

White eager Cessnas

2006-09-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

RJ: from "Midsummer" by Derek Walcott

Certain things here are quietly American -
that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars
of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes
muttering the word umpire instead of empire;
the gray, metal light where an early pelican
coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire
of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine's.

*

Perhaps I've been reading too much of The Odyssey - as rendered into gorgeous iambic pentameter by Robert Fagles - but these lines of Walcott's strike me first & foremost as highly metrical. Each line, five beats. But in the absence of a common metrical foot, Walcott constantly keeps his reader's ear imbalanced. Extra beats abound. Spondees - stress / stress - pile up ("the WORD UMPire" / "PINK FIRE"). I enjoy these effects more and more these days.

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True confession time: when I was in high school I thought Emerson's poetry was top-notch.

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Say Walt Whitman and his long rambling "breath unit" settled down with a metrical fellow such as, oh, say, off the top of my head James Merrill or even for an older & weirder case Emily Dickinson. What would their children's cries sound like?

Grist for the mill

2006-09-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

These things come up in recent poems:

~ The 80s kids' show Pee-Wee's Playhouse

~ Iggy Pop's Lust For Life

~ The "rule of thirds", a photographic principle which states that objects of importance should be on or near the points of intersection on a hypothesized 3x3 grid

~ Solar calculators

~ Big Lots discount superstores

~ Automatic sensor-based faucets in public restrooms

~ Faceoffs of substantial duration in Japanese manga

~ Zeno's Arrow

~ Childish impressions of Benito Mussolini

Escort!

2006-09-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

from "Benediction for the Savior of Orlando"

Signs and wonders: Jesus Is Lord Over Greater Orlando
snake-tagged in cadmium on a vine-grouwn cyclone
fence along I-4 southbound north of downtown
is a credo that subverts the conventional wisdom
that Walt Disney is the messiah and his minions the christened
stewards of this place, that the Kingdom to Come shall be Mickey's,
that the bread of our communion will be proffered by A.T.M.
and the wine quaffed without taint of sulfites
or trademark infringement, all of which is certainly true
and yet too pat, too much like shooting mice in a barrel
when there are far nastier vermin to contest
and purgatories far worse than Disney's realm of immortal
simulacra suckled at the breast of Lake Buena Vista.

*

See also.

*

These opening lines - this opening sentence - reminds me of the way I taught some canny upperclassmen to read McGrath and Goldbarth and their ilk: disservice though it may have been, I advised that they simply underline their best guess as to the poem's main and sub-ideas. "Purgatories far worse" is a good candidate, and "far nastier vermin to contest" slightly less so. And sure enough the poem's a rollicking good timey dirge for strip-mall America - "Chuck E. Cheese is the monstrous embodiment of a nightmare, / the bewhiskered Mephistopheles of ring toss." The best of McGrath's poems provide these kinds of keys, and there are enough keys in McGrath to keep the poem jingling, as it were. The poem "talks," but isn't conversational. As speech, is remains elevated in a way that the speech of other poets using this so-called "ultra-talk" technique (I'm glad that phrase has died before its birth) just isn't. "Benediction"'s language might be talkier than most poems, but it's not talky; it's as high a speech as the plastic chintz materials that is its muse can afford.

*

If the above paragraph reads murkily to you, it's not you: I gave blood today on one of the longer days so far. But hey, you, give blood. There are more car crashes and shootings in your town than you may know. When you go, talk to the attending nurse. Bring a book of poems. You will find that a veil over your workaday goings-on will fall away. Spoken and written words bear new weight. Angles of commonplace objects pique your curiosity. And if you're lucky, you'll get an unexpected compliment: "Done in four minutes! Wow, those are some juicy veins." Pizza, Cheese Nips, and Oreos to the left.

I miss him too, John.

2006-09-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

RJ: "Dream Song 111", John Berryman.

Fact, confusion. "I miss him." Fact. "Then I shot him dead. / I don't remember why." Confusion. If you can say that a Berryman poem is actually about something - and we must, or else why read & try to interpret anything - then this would seem to involve a Wild Bill Hickok-style card game, with tempers running high and guns in the room. Neat idea about the cards: all of them are implied to be red. With all of the violence implied on this ship, it would seem that the sudden profusion of red points us to an act of violence the speaker catches up with only after the end dash. It's as though he's been shot or, more reasonably, realizes he's been hurt.

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PoemHunter, take note: no one, but NO ONE, wants the "Fun Cursors" your site so tirelessly peddles along the left margin of your Web page. Especially if they're animated. Criminy.

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The Great Pyramids of Giza, as monuments to the lost, are beginning to make tremendous sense to me. Not in terms of the slavery and loss and cost in their construction. More in terms of this totemic statement of permanence - or as close to permanence as we can come. This impulse to memorialize hugely.

RJ: "The Dumka" by B.H. Fairchild

2006-09-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

The Dumka

His parents would sit alone together
on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvorak's piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense

and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
by smearing the sky green with doom
but afterwards drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and table tops. But it was
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise
or bow their heads as they spoke about

the farm in twilight with piano music
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main street like mannequins,
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, the homecoming,
the homecoming, and afterwards, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,

the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.

~ B.H. Fairchild

*

Huh. Hmm. The first stanza's so... so... dull. Ten lines and one real image? I like my poetry to be made of thicker stuff. I forgive this poem that initial slackness, however, in that the subject matter requests and makes good upon that quiet outset: it is the peace from which the poem spirals out, says its peace about the sobriety nostalgia and gratitude can (should?) impose, and eventually returns to. The poem begins in Kansas, in other words, and returns to Kansas by stanza four: "together in the room in the house in Kansas", as an ending, is way more powerful than the words themselves have any right to be. This is what's meant when we say a line or an ending must be earned: "the sky green with doom" and "the homecoming, the homecoming, / the homecoming" transfigure the ending line into more than the sum of its parts. It's a final line rife with the weight of lived experience.

DJ's RJ

2006-09-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

It's in my unshakable spirit of needless acronymization that I christen this latest project of mine my RJ - it's a Reading Journal. I don't read enough poetry to earn the poet / rogue status I so often quietly claim. Therefore:

Elizabeth Bishop, "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress".

Seems appropriate and timely. A march is a march - as in Sherman's to the sea. As in the Bataan Death. Bishop's poet's-poet subtlety is as finely tuned here as it is anywhere. She plays... coy. Coy and sad all at once: she knows what lies under the march, but disguises her recognition of the martial basis of the march via this museful tone - much of which depends upon those crucial two words "I think" in "I think the trees must intervene." Anybody else read "The gathered brasses want to go / boom -- boom" with a substantial pause between the two booms? Idea: the poem itself occupies the space between booms (wars). I feel like such a literalist.

*

What happened to McNabb and the Philly Eagles? What happened to the dependability of a good ol' death from above passing-game-only drubbing?

*

Indie rock kids and record store clerks take note: the new Yo La Tengo album, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, is a return to form. Naysayers naysayed Summer Sun for being too samey; I was not among them. But here Yo La goes back to the scattershot eclecticism of I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One; this album, like that album, juxtaposes Sonic Youth-style noise rock numbers with the sort of ambient midnight dream-pop Mazzy Star managed to imitate well that one time. There are some new textures too: "Mr. Tough" sashays with some unexpected but spot-on Motown horn flourishes.

*

Now playing: Yo La Tengo, Electr-O-Pura. Perhaps their best in a catalog of bests.

Weird town

2006-09-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

7:45ish A.M. I'm on the return home stretch from a jog to the Stratosphere. Few cars are out. Heading west, my long shadow keeps one step ahead of me. It's great, it's what runs are all about. When enter stage left, crossing Alta diagonally toward me, here comes this on-the-portly-side couple. Let's call them 50-somethings. Their dress is a combination of jeans, flannel, and terrycloth. The woman's ahead of the man. In the absence of traffic they're free to move at their own pace and regard me as I jog on on the right side of the road. I'm well past them when I hear the woman mutter loudly the following word, I'm 3/4 sure at me: "Pervert." Huh? methinks. But then I suppose she's right: who joneses for some old-fashioned Sunday morning exercise, good ol' Teddy Roosevelt style, after moving to the very hive of dollar-based sin and fabulous fakery? It is perverse, hysterically so.

Post-postmodernism Sighting #19

2006-09-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

Cribbed from an archived review of David Foster Wallace's "Oblivion". The review's from n+1, which is now required reading:

"To judge by “Octet” and “Good Old Neon,” two of the best Wallace stories of recent years, he seems increasingly eager to tear down the fourth wall—or, as the narrator of “Octet” calls it, to “palpate” the reader directly—by introducing an authorial presence into the midst of his fiction: David Foster Wallace is speaking to you, and here is why. Fourth-wall-breaking constitutes a central technique for the metafictionists with whom Wallace has so often been grouped. But while the means are similar, Wallace pursues them to different ends. He has no interest in highlighting the artificiality of his art, which is and should be self-evident, but rather in communicating thought and feeling as directly as possible without shirking their complexity. The metafictionist’s tools have become part of his standard arsenal, to be used to supplement his talent for self-effacing storytelling and otherwise set aside. Wallace’s goal, finally, is to grant us complete access to his characters’ inner lives, while reminding us that such access must always be incomplete. It’s a brave and paradoxical task worthy of his full attention, and ours" (bold text mine).

Current listening

2006-09-06T20:31:00.000-07:00

Aloha, Here Comes Everyone.

The Band, The Band.

Crystal Method, Legion of Boom.

Kate Earl, Fate Is the Hunter.

The Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music.

Kill Bill, Vol 1. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.

Lost Legends of Surf Guitar, Various Artists.

Massive Attack, Blue Lines.

Joni Mitchell, Court & Spark.

Liz Phair, Exile In Guyville.

The Rat Pack, Boys Night Out.

Rolling Stones, Exile on Main St.

Sun Kil Moon, Ghosts of the Great Highway.

Thivery Corporation, The Cosmic Game.

The Internets are improving

2006-09-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

Check out the high-level intellectual wankery over on Barbelith. When the essay "E Unibus Pluram" is dropped in the first 30 seconds of my perusing the site, I know I'm a fan for life. For your Sunday consideration, try this on for size: "Is Paris Hilton a simulacrum?"

Weekend recap / forecast

2006-09-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Friday: First Friday tour of downtown galleries. Record store. Sidebar, near the Fremont St. Experience. As we were leaving, shots fired? Between five & twenty? Accounts differ. Downtown Steve's new super-70s pad with a banner view of the Stratosphere. Audible: The screams of folks riding the freefall ride on the Stratosphere's top.

Saturday: Boat drinks in the pool of a local well-to-do dandy. Minor-league baseball with the 51s, named for the nearby and deadly Area 51. Come hell or high water, Artbar.

Sunday: Work, 'course. Poetry submissions. Letters to friends, handwritten at that. A paper perhaps, with a side of eggs. "Steaks the size of your head" cooked out by me, me baby, on a local well-to-do dandy's grill. Red wine counts as a boat drink.

Monday: Solemn reflection, twiddling of thumbs. Moderate labor despite things, knowing me.

First day of school

2006-08-27T22:58:00.000-07:00

Brrring!

Kick-drum Friday night

2006-08-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

Afternoon mix-tape:

Cornelius, Fantasma.
J Dilla, Donuts.
The Back Room, Vol. 1.

Where are all my houseguests? Now taking requests.

Today's disruptive juxtaposition is

2006-08-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

I saw this on rising around 6 A.M. and thought the following: "Funky Soul Medina!" You tell me why.

"We all need someone to look at us"

2006-08-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

That's Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As notions go, it seems like a key connector between Martin Buber's I & Thou and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and here's why: the unnamed narrator in the latter seems so uncertain of herself as an agent in the I-Thou relationship she has with precocious tots Flora and Miles that she begins to invest the "sights" she has of former employees (and lovers) Mr. Quint and Miss Jessup with way more apprehension than would a person with a more developed sense of self. In other words, the narrator has a larger inclination to invent or embellish the ghost-sights of Quint and Jessup because she needs an It to supplement her imperfectly established relationship with the kids; she substitutes a fanciful I-It for the I-Thou she has with her young student charges. Or alternatively, the narrator sets up an Us-Them to compensate for the flawed I-Thou she has with Flora & Miles. (Reminds me of an ongoing conversation two college pals would have about chicks and dudes, but that's neither here nor there.) Buber scholars are more than welcome to chime in: I'm new to the guy.

Weather haiku

2006-08-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

These triple digits!
Air ducts, shoddily designed,
Bring in the desert.

*

But then again, even mentioning the weather in this town's like mentioning the traffic on L.I.: since it's so par for the course, it marks one as new.

*

Donne & Hopkins on the mind. Batter my heart, three-personed God, sprung rhythm and the like. Which might stem, also, from the heat.

Don't think Commie thoughts, don't think Commie thoughts

2006-08-20T21:10:00.000-07:00

Visible from the new digs in central Las Vegas, the terrifying black-and-gray edifice of the World Market Center resembles nothing so much as the Ministry of Love in George Orwell's 1984, in which enemies of the state are sequestered from the proles and right-thinking members of the Party for years at a time, and all manner of psychological puppetry goes on in windowless rooms until the unlucky resister recants and begins to love Big Brother. I like to think that the thing you must begin to love within these walls is Capitalism itself. Not the dollar, not selling or buying, but the whole system in toto. A sort of affection factory for the notion of doubling and tripling one's money.

Two book reviews in two paragraphs

2006-08-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Tom Wolfe jumps the shark with this one. Don't read it, especially if you have been to college: Wolfe's ear has gone all to tin when it comes to capturing the way people actually speak. The book is a complete mismatch between Wolfe's eye for social hierarchies and powerplays (which remains pretty good at times) and the subject matter, which is an overlong heard-it-all-before tale of lost innocence for one Charlotte Simmons, who goes to Dupont University and finds that it's not all laurels and academic robes. That students drink and have sex. Gasp, gasp, triple gasp. The book could be shortened by a good thirty pages if Wolfe were to excise the needless ellipses. The book depends upon stock characters, and even says as much: "Denny, whose actual first name was Demetrio, was like a caricature of a pizza parlor proprietor..." and Wolfe's right.

*

Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy.

This is good. Ruth Stone's eighty-three and conscious of the fact. I've spoken with poet friends about how one might engage the domestic while avoiding inanity. How do you address the ins and outs of living a by-all-rights standard life at home and render that life not with stock romantic regard - i.e. "Ahhh, home." In the first stanza of "At Eighty-three She Lives Alone," Stone clearly finds one answer:

Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket.
You are here; your name on a postal box;
entrance into another place like vapor.
No one knows you. No one speaks to you.
All of their cocks stare down their pant legs
at teh ground. Their cunts are blind. They
barely let you through the check-out line.
Have a nice day. Plastic or paper.

We're all going to die, in short, and the presence of the domestic forces Stone to break out with all the strength she has. The whole book is marked with this kind of desperate energy (although it's not always so... crass, some might say). I recommend it.

Roadside America

2006-08-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas is so prevalent in the American mythos that it's hardly a strange thing to see a billboard advocating its saucy charms. Nevertheless, the appearance of this billboard seemed, back near the outset, auspicious.

Eastern Kansas. Above me, and too big for any normal camera to capture, there is a humongous ground-to-ground double rainbow. The picture I had the toll attendant take for me took in only half of the phenomenon.

Liberal, KS. Dorothy's house is to the right, and indeed looked light enough to fly.

New Mexico, I think. Northern New Mexico's very mountainous - almost Pacific Northwestish in its numbers of pine and S curves.

Clearly, it was pretty awe-inspiring. I couldn't remember upon reviewing these pictures if I was incredibly impressed or incredibly bored. Let's go with impressed. Impressed with the American Sublime.

Rain in Arizona? What are the odds? Low?

Taken on 93 North on the approach to Vegas. Apparently you can't capture Vegas with any known photographic equipment; the city moves too fast and will evade your attempts to comprehend it. One big light show blur you're on the inside of.

Dear Jon,

2006-08-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

The family's back from its trip. And here I am on my last night in town before leaving (again) for the West.

You left for Colorado a year and a week ago. You packed up your black truck with your girlfriend and your bunny Rocky Balboa and struck out for the mountains. At the time, I was in New York City looking for work and bumming apartment space; I may have started working at the bookshop, but I can't remember. In fact, I don't remember when I saw you that summer; once I'd left for New York City at the beginning of the summer, our opportunities for seeing each other were scarce.

Right now I'm listening to the mix album I made for you back in December. This is the White Stripes' "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)".

I was running errands today that included getting some Master locks for the pod that will carry all of my worldly possessions (and some of yours) to Vegas. It occurred to me that your departure, one year ago, was a sort of forging forward into oblivion. That's a viewpoint that's heavily informed by what's happened in the interim, but nevertheless the fact that I can't pinpoint when I saw you last furthers the notion that your rolling out of town was tantamount to rolling down a very long ski slope that would eventually launch you off the planet. This was a very afflicting thought to have while driving.

Now it's "Two-Headed Boy" by Neutral Milk Hotel.

By the way, I'm taking your steel bracelet and two of your CDs: DJ Mea's "Shaken Not Stirred" and Rammstein's "Sehnsucht".

Do you remember sitting in the car twelve or thirteen years ago at the Dunk & Bright furniture store after Dad & Mom wrapped up a purchase, and Dad was playing the Beatles' "Live at the BBC" on tape to purposely torture us, but Melissa and I and yourself all elected to turn the torture back on its bearer by singing along, mangling the versions of "(Too Much) Monkey Business" and "Kansas City / Hey Hey Hey Hey!"

Sigur Ros's "Glosoli".

I also have a pair of your New Balance cross-training shoes, a DeLonghi coffee bar / espresso machine that was meant for you but was never used, and a picture of you in your Navy blues. It's a Christmas photo, taken when we brought Christmas to you in Chicago from Syracuse; in a hotel suite (with a kitchen and a minibar, of course, which fact pleased you), you had to stand against the mauve drape and stare into the middle distance as the flash flashed. On the back of this photo, I wrote with a cheap black Bic a poem of Sir Thomas Wyatt's, the fifth of his "Ten Sonnets". This photo went through the wash, or perhaps I had it in my wallet when I, drunk, jumped into the jacuzzi at Jayne's birthday party with my clothes on (long story, but you would enjoy it). The point is that the rear part of the photo has been bleached a rabbit-eye red, and your silhouette is a distinct, stronger pink. The front of you, however, is of course holding up well.

In Aruba, where all five of us were supposed to go, I will have you know that you missed many such photo shoots: up against those sideways-growing divi divi trees, against the cool cauldronish effects of Rodgers Beach, at the dinner table every night - photo ops abounded, and you are not in any of them. You were, however, given the honor of having a dinner dedicated to you. Perhaps you know about it. It was the dinner we had on the beach behind the resort. There were shrimp you would have loved; Mom compared them to being the size of snowballs, and she is right.

Aimee Mann's "Just Like Anyone". "If there was something else I should have done." The question this clause implies remains an unresolved one, for me.

There's a lot of reconstruction that I don't do. Reconstruction of the flavor of your life from August 1st to December 17th, mainly, and of the days and months prior to that. I don't really do the work of imagining how things felt for you during these periods. I reached out to you inadequately, however, and I am very sorry for that. Please forgive me.

You are not reading this. Other people are. I justify this fact with the notion that the best and most accurate way of addressing you, these days, seems to be through the weird astral simultaneous space the Internet has become for us, with all of its manifold connections and disconnections happening at indeterminate but ongoing intervals.

Today, the idea of leaving felt like a fearful and portentous obstacle. You left and never came back. Some people never saw you again. I never saw you again. Friends and relatives and grandparents and significant others will tell you that I place an inordinate and sometimes unreasonable premium on the expectation of another meeting soon. But I feel that we're all doing this all the time. But today, this optimism flagged. All departures now seem to echo, or have their fractal root, in your departure last August, and your greater departure last December.

Luckily, the Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" helps place these uncertainties in a brighter light. The song reduces them to minor and passing thoughts that can't occupy the same mindspace the song does. The song is too big in the brain to brook these doubts. It has been, and it will be, important to try and live like the way the song feels to me.

I am also taking with me to Las Vegas a slip of paper on which I wrote down what a heavyset, foul-mouthed, and hilarious trucker said to me at the bookshop one night. He was just passing through. Earlier in the night, he'd picked up some pulp smut and some Playboys. Now he was getting ready to hit the road again for who knew where. Someone passing him said, "Hi, how are you tonight?" He said, and this struck everyone in earshot as uproarious, "I'm gon' live through it." Uproarious and true.

So, Jon, my brother, as I Keroauc again across the better parts of this country, the Plains and the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, as I gnaw on chicken bones and swig burned joe from gas stops, as I McGrath and Hummer above the asphalt again, as I Whitmanize the women and men I meet (these are my poets, my guides), I will be thinking about you. I will add to the differences between us. We had always had so little in common. You were violent and coarse and brash and a better shot than me, more practically minded, you worked in your youth with chemicals and balance sheets, you used the old briefcase Dad gave you, and there has been unearthed from the piles of stuff in the house a business card you made yourself, "Jonathan Ryan Lobko / Loan Specialist / Maximum 10$ / Unless you give me a good reason / why I should give you more", while I read books, built models, sketched, walked, ran as you lifted your weights. We were practically nothing alike except in that we liked the taste of travel, once we'd gotten a taste. The best thing I can do for you right now, Jon, is to not let what you did, what happened to you, prevent me from following you out there, Westering again (there's so much to the West) and in this way to be like you, and to then be different than you again, to be myself again, to speed and snapshoot canyons and steer and scribble down poems and nap on the side of the road, make for the towns with the strangest names, roll at last into town, and be there, and be well.

Wilco and Billy Bragg, "Airline to Heaven". This song storms barns and closes your album out.

This is a road trip I want you to take with me. It's something we've never done. Just let's go.

Impossible vacation

2006-08-01T02:55:00.000-07:00

This cannot be happening.

Atta Boyd!

2006-07-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

This is great. I've been rereading the Constitution recently - a handy pocket version published, ironically enough, by the Boy Scouts of America. Also ironic is that the crucial inch of breathing room between church & state is here being kept wedged open by a pastor. An evangelical pastor. I'd send his church some money if I had any to spare.

My library is growing

2006-07-24T17:48:00.000-07:00

Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot
John Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & Other Poems
Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Prose
Martin Buber, I and Thou
George Eliot, Middlemarch
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Spaulding Gray, Impossible Vacation
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (a nice hardcover version)
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
James Joyce, Ulysses
Maxine Kumin, Nurture
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
Bernard Malamud, Magic Barrel
Bernard Malamud, A New Life
Guy de Maupassant, The Great Short Stories
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Ian McEwan, Saturday
Thomas Merton, Complete Poems
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Peter Pereira, Saying the World
Alexander Pope, Complete Poems
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus
Aleksandr Solsyneitzen, The Gulag Archipelago
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a New York Post Family Edition hardcover)
Mark Twain, Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

*

So, ahem, yes. These books account for a large part of my absence from the internets. I picked these up at either 1) the Skaneateles Memorial Library sale, where, at the stroke of the church's 6'o'clock, the gathered bibliophiles darted under the pink tape barrier and had at the beautiful, organized, and extensive collection; 2) the Hamilton Grange branch of the New York Public Library, where I found six books including the new Tom Wolfe in hardcover for $3.50; 3) the Book Cellar in Solvay, New York, which proffers vast rooms full of massmarket books with pink covers and bodices rent in twain, and smaller rooms toward the back with Malamud and Philip Roth; 4) Westsider Books in Manhattan, Broadway & 80th St., where the proprietor knows his Tom Waits.

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

2006-07-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

To get things started, this is Jon at a Labor Day party in 2003. He always did clean up nice. We suspect that he's looking at a standing offer from one of his relatives, the standing offer being to trade in his innocent, tepid Coke for something with a bit more kick.

Here, again, is the shot of the pool area, taken from the treehouse in the northeast quadrant of the backyard. It's about 9 AM. Notice Bailey, the tawny dot in the center of the shot. Beethoven's 6th Symphony ("Pastoral") plays in the background (not really). All is soft light and calm. It is the quietest it will be all day.

Once the party began, J. got right to "work"...

...and so did I.

Sheri Heald, an aunt of mine, favors designer club-ready sunglasses and bawdy stories. She does not dance on top of Escalades in the wee hours, no, not ever.

Kristin Taylor, a former Playboy bunny, married Mikhael Lobko, the famous Texas oil baron, in 1993. She is still after his boundless fortunes - but their love is real.

Throughout my stint as default bartender, cousin Brandon my invaluable assistant and aide-de-camp. We took our jobs pretty seriously. Here we're engaged with the task of eyeing the spirit level for yet another guest and reveler, all of whom were patient and good tippers.

J., clearly, is having incredible amts. of fun in the course of playing Godzilla for some of the younger partygoers.

Kaitlin, Kristin, and Kelly Farmer (aka Farmgirl).

Nadia Lobko, matriarch, and Wladimir ("Bill") Lobko, host.

Newest Filonovich (and member of the family) Ava and mother Zenaida.

Every summer, Alex Klimchuk takes the I-90 east toward the Camillus backyard of his Uncle Bill, which has usually been set upon by children, picnickers, swimmers, and eaters of barbecue - all of them potentially usurpers of his Favorite Chair. With extreme prejudice and with a variety of lethal implements - maces, truncheons, halberds and sai - Alex reclaims his seat. In this shot, the battle has only just ended, and the victor enjoys what's his.

Tanya LeBeau and Aiden Deuschle. You might remember Aiden from his christening back in April. He still has flashbacks.

J. and Nadia.

Peter Filonovich knows what's in your heart of hearts, and it amuses him.

Zachary, Dan, Mike, Nate, Chris, Justin, Tyler (kneeling). These were Jon's compadres when it came to weightlifting, drinking, and various petty crimes I've been enjoined to never reveal. And look at these fine young fellows: how could I snitch on them?

This cannonball garnered 10s across the board.

Stephanie and Melissa.

The Soul Vodka toast didn't happen all at once, but rather made the rounds between the various groups. Here we've got Jon's inner circle, doing their own toast. For my part, being in this circle with Jon's best friends was the highlight of the entire day. By far the best moment.

Peter and Melissa.

The good qualities of Jon's friends are here explicated, with some eloquence, by Maureen.

Stories about Jon. Some feat of Jon's strength or general hubris has just been detailed.

You can't see them in this shot - and possibly they did this after this photograph was taken - but Jon was very much present when the fellows marked the day by searing cigar marks into each others' biceps. It should be noted that this act wasn't exactly condoned by anyone burdened with a legal responsibility for guests' safety or anything such, but it was one of the moments in which Jon could be most felt. He was that throaty theatrical voice you heard in your head, demanding that you do it!

J. not only saves lives; he is also a good listener.

Kristin, Farmgirl, Kaitlin, and Shannon. Kristin doesn't like this picture of her. The other three ladies disagree. Democracy's great, except when you lose, Kristin!

There are now about 2 minutes of Dave's shoulder on the digital video Bill's filming here.

Peter and Max.

Phil Mathis, Jon's best friend. Now he designs missiles (or something) for a defense contractor in Jersey. I hope your missiles drop warheads of crayons and Hershey Kisses, there, Phil. No, really, good work.

You must not be wearing enough Corona-approved apparel. Fair disclosure: Bill is turning this video over to the Thought Police as you read this.

And as evening begins to fall, the faces grow shinier and the smiles wider.

An impromptu recitation of Albert Goldbarth's Combinations of the Universe has nothing on the fount of memorized Robert Frost and Shakespeare's sonnets that is Dave Geary.

Brian Pitt, Tasha's husband, felled the tinder for this flawless fire with the strength of his will alone, and supplied the spark with his own Paul Bunyanish confidence.

Sometimes all you can do is nosh and stare at the flames.

Rich Turner, Abbi Turner, and myself. Jon had an abundance of cigars in a variety of humidors. We dug into these at around 12 or 1. Let's submit this photograph as proof that all of the evening's activities were as respectable and cultured. Although they were not.

And we hope you approved, Jon. We missed you.

Joie de vivre

2006-07-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Celebration of Life party that we're holding for Jon is today. Here's where it'll all go down. We're expecting around 100-120 people... and that's including you, of course. Be sure to hit:

~ The white tent (unpictured) in the yard to the right of the gazebo, for that is where the catered Dinosaur BBQ will be.

~ The pool, which as of last night was 86 degrees F.

~ The white lifeguard chair the dad built in a day's time, where you can apply some zinc oxide to the nose and have your lifeguarding dreams temporarily realized.

~ The cabana on the left, where there'll be 2 kegs, hard liquors and mixers, various too-sweet Schnapps, and one of those "What I Really Learned in College" posters with pictures of various shots. Okay, maybe not that last one. But as for the rest, hey. What are we if not a bunch of Russkies and Irishmen?

*

Stories to come soon.

Brief hiatus explained

2006-06-28T09:35:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought you could count on more regular and even daily DJ updates, off I go to Connecticut today to meet with de facto novel editor and crew-at-dawn enthusiast Jayne . It's been too long since my last road trip. I'll be back on Friday - cheers, excelsior, et cetera!

Flying Tide

2006-06-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a draft of a long poem for most of the day. This feels like a good & proper use of time.

*

The poem (why not tell you) involves a series of (bear with me) paranormal events that've been happening in the house.

*

About two weeks ago my mother awoke at 3 A.M. to the sound of the dog barking. Dog owners will tell you that the barks of a dog have different tones and messages: there's a Hey-you're-home bark, there's a Give-me-that-back-it's-mine bark. This bark, however, was the relatively rare bark of alarm. Now, in fair disclosure, the sister had left the house at 1 A.M. to meet some friends. But she didn't return until 5 A.M., and we're dealing with 3 A.M. here.

Another fact: usually, the dad's the one who wakes at the slightest sound; it's the dad who heads off to investigate possible intruders or transgressors. This evening, however, neither he or myself heard anything.

Another fact: the family'd been in distress that night because we were concerned that we might not be able to take a spur-of-the-moment island trip in early August. This trip quickly became a central goal for us, not so much for the luxury of it but rather in the hopes that the (remaining members of the) family would be able to be together at a happy time and, perhaps, survey this island for potential final resting places for Jon's ashes. (Jon's ashes: what a strange phrase.) The idea's to find a secluded length of beach or rocky outcropping that Jon might've posed upon, and make that his home. Prices for this trip were pretty high, and on the night in question no one was sure that the trip would actually be possible. This was on our minds.

So the mother, and only the mother, gulps a few times and tries to quiet her heart in the dark, and decides to come downstairs to tend to the dog. Downstairs, she sees that the laundry room where the dog keeps house has been altered in one crucial way: a 20-lb container of Tide, normally stored on a shelf above the washing machine, has been taken down and placed neatly on the floor by the laundry room door.

Theories, with rebuttals in italics, follow:

Did someone place it there? No; why would anyone do that?

Well, what's so special about that part of the house? Good question. That's the part of the house where us family members come in and leave through. Plus it's the dog's "apartment", and given her boisterious welcome-homes, it can be difficult to arrive home unnoticed. Basically it's the main entrance and exit for us.

OK, about the Tide. Maybe someone was sleepwalking and placed it there. If any of us sleepwalked, we'd know it; our family members and significant others would be able to attest to the fact.

Perhaps someone placed it there as a doorstop and forgot about it. Perhaps. But there remains the issue of the dog's strange and alarming bark.

Maybe it was your sister coming home for a bit. That would explain the dog's barking... but a) it was a strange and frightened bark, and b) you still have to riddle me the relocation of the laundry detergent.

What does a relocated container of Tide have to do with anything, anyway? Well, since we'd gone to bed thinking of this island trip, one could draw a connection that Jon wanted to signal approved of the idea of making an island, a beach, and the "tide" his eventual home. Dude loved the ocean.

Isn't that placing a little too much emphasis on a coincidental product name? Doesn't that imply that none of this would've happened if there's been a container of Fab or All on the shelf? Sure. But these are the methods of finding - and yes, making - meaning. Under the circumstances, these are the modes of theorization and understanding to which we're necessarily reduced. For want of a better explanation and sounder connections, this one will have to do, won't it?

Got anything better than that? Kristin Kate does. Say we forget the island <----> Tide theory. (That's a two-way arrow, btw.) Maybe Jon just wanted to lift something noticeable and heavy. "You might be able to bench your body weight, W, but I can lift this big honking tub of Tide and I don't even have a body! Ha!"

*

And that's not all.

One recent dinner hour, a few days after the nighttime tale described above, I was outside grilling up some hot dogs. The dad had been outside working. The mother and sister were around the kitchen counter, chatting about that and this.
You need to know that I'd spent a pretty emotional afternoon going through Jon's effects in the basement: his boxes of utility knives, his toiletries. (What does one do with a dead brother's Right Guard? I can't say I want to use it, and can't throw it out. It seems as though one does nothing with it except occasionally take it out, think halfheartedly of doing something with it, and replacing it in its shoebox with the toothpaste and the Mach3 razor.) I had taken one of Jon's bracelets and put it on: two thin leather straps that strung together a series of small fingernail-sized metal squares. It has sort of a weathered but modern, ancient but of the future look to it: the sort of bracelet Mad Max might tug from the wrist of a vanquished desert pirate and try on for himself.

I'm outside tending the hot dogs. The dad's outside. Inside, the sister and mother hear four or five raps or knocks coming from the laundry room area. It sounded, according to them, as though either the dad or myself was pounding the flat of a hand against the siding, or nailing nails into the wall for some reason. Which we weren't. So this draws their attention to the laundry room.

The same huge 20-lb container of Tide flies from the shelf and hits the open door, and falls to the ground.

Both the mother and sister saw it.

The dad heard the knocking.

I didn't hear the knocking, but I can chalk that up to my being on the opposite side of the house.

Once again, let's hear from Scully in her boring doubting normal print and Mulder in his distinctive italics of belief.

Was the washing machine running this time? Yes it was, but the washing machine doesn't generate anywhere near enough shudder or vibration to knock down the Tide - which, again, is on a white wire shelf about two feet above the washing machine.

How can you say for sure? The inability of the running washing machine to knock down the Tide was proven with a series of direct and repeated blows to the white wire shelf, which jiggled a good deal with these administered blows, to be sure, but a) these blows were way more force than the vibration of the machine, and b) even if vibration did cause the Tide to shift forward (which, again, is clearly very unlikely), the Tide would have free-fallen onto the machine and tumbled onto the floor - in accordance with basic physics. It would not have flown with some force from its place of rest against the opposite wall.

But, Mulder, I don't know. Well hell, Dana, I don't know either, but the only explanation that makes any sort of sense is that something or -one outside the range of what we consider normal threw that bottle around. And I think you know who that someone is.

Do you think your going through his effects had an effect? As a matter of fact, I do. "He hated it when you went through his stuff [when he was alive]," opined my family.

Do you think he's angry for your wearing his bracelet? Maybe - but it's not like I'm wearing it without thinking of him. It's not as though it's plunder or booty, filched from the stores of the dead for some personal gain. You know Scully I think you must think less of me every day we work together.

Mulder you know I don't think that. Do I Scully? Do I?

*

And finally (getting to be a little much? Tell me about it), I've been startled awake twice in recent nights by the sound of my water glass striking or being struck by something. The first time it happened I chalked it up to the nightstand being a little bit rickety. But last night I made sure the glass touched nothing before I went to sleep - made sure, in fact, that the glass was separated from anything else by at least a few inches. When the clink woke me up - I'd been only about 30 or 40 percent asleep, I'd say - I nearly said his name. Next time I will.

*

So yeah - these are some of the things in the poem.

Cue up your Kool & the Gang,

2006-06-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

because it's the last day at the bookshop for me. If you have three cheers to spare, let's have 'em in that there Comment Box.

Running notes selected from an in-process poetry review

2006-06-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

One of the most intriguing things about O’Brien’s work in The Guns & Flags Project is its tendency to maintain an intact, technically-correct syntax, even as it adds up to something that is both less and more than a syntactically exact sentence:

And as it spoke of dawn the messenger became
less true or more sound filled the air
and ran along the ground like hair under water…

The “it” here undergoes so many changes and assumes so many disparate characters that a reader suspects the nature or identity of “it” is supposed to be lost, even though this sentence and others like it do make sense as sentences, which is to say that a schoolmarm could parse it out according to her habit. But they don’t necessarily make sense as an idea or a logically-connected series of ideas. Its logic is kept from us on purpose.

And as it spoke of dawn the messenger became
less true or more sound filled the air
and ran along the ground like hair under water,
in the nervously rehearsing patterns of traffic,
and as it went on clearing speech with the bishop
it became less of a messenger and more of
a rose drying out of sight, a fragrance,
until there were no parts at all in the view,
only a laborious frankness bigger than ever
hung everywhere in the quillcolored sky.

While these lines aren’t totally bereft of logic and direction, they pull toward nonsense, or an obscure sense. Taken at the speed of this average reader, the fact that the poem’s syntactically surefooted pulls one in, but the addled, all-over references and changing subjects frustrate a surefooted reading. One’s reminded of Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which demonstrated that grammatical and syntactic correctness is no guarantee of intelligibility.

This is one of the stronger aspects of O’Brien’s work: one’s pulled along by the apparent clarity of the sentence level, but the content of those sentences blurs by. What stands out are certain key lines that function, er, as keys: “looking for all the violence was”, “a thing so young even its hopes are bitter”, “and the clouds come out like workers from a mine”. These are the points of access: they stand out from the technically-right, possibly-wrong-sense-wise sentence. One gets the sense that one is reading a poem of striking individual lines rather than striking sentence cast into lines; one suspects she is looking at a handful of pearls, rather than a necklace of pearls connected with a string, even though the string—the sentence—is right there to see.

Recently acquired

2006-06-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

Anathallo, Floating World.

Aphex Twin, I Care Because You Do.

Devendra Banhart, Nino Rojo.

Devendra Banhart, Cripple Crow.

Coco Rosie, Le Maison de Mon Reve..

Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat.

Serge Gainsbourg, Comic Strip.

Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together.

El Perro Del Mar, El Perro Del Mar.

Russian Divine Liturgy, performed by the Novospassky Monastery Choir.

Post-postmodernism Sighting #77

2006-06-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

Let's welcome Sincerity, Inc. to the DJ blogroll. It was on this site that the sighting was made.

Ah, belief. Something rather than nothing. We can all go in on that, right?

The opened box

2006-06-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

One of the neater sites I've come across recently, Pandora allows you to discover plenty of new music cost-free. You input a song or an artist you know you enjoy, and by associating this artist or song with similar songs via comparions drawn from the Music Genome Project, Pandora finds you other music you're likely to enjoy. For instance, I just formulated a "Sufjan Stevens Radio Station", and "Sister Ice" by Archer Prewitt began to play. What's neat is that I can give "Sister Ice" a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, which affects the songs that Pandora will play for you in the future. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure through music. The sound quality isn't bad at all. If you don't mind the occasional ad, it's free.

Give this one a Pulitzer

2006-06-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

Deadwood, HBO's laureled old West drama about a Dakota town's schemings and general moral lassitude, is known for its extravagant and stunning profanity. Salon's Heather Havrilesky provides a context for the show's just-begun third season, weighs in on the prospect of a fourth (currently not in the works), and fulminates against some of TV's other current offerings:

"The most foul and inexcusable of the lot is "The Hills" (MTV, check listings) populated as it is by the whoring sea donkeys of "Laguna Beach" fame. Whatever limited charms "Laguna Beach" may have held for those easily distracted by the wiles and worries of winsome whippersnappers up to their collarbones in gold, the sorts with soft hands and weak minds who've never worked a day in their lives and likely never will, suffice it to say that "The Hills" has none of those charms whatsoever."

More inside. Television criticism should always be this good. It's language at its most alive. Be sure and read it aloud.

Recently acquired

2006-06-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when I acquire more music than I can possibly listen to in a reasonable amt. of time, much less index and blog about: backlogs form.

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Aphex Twin, Richard D. James Album. Besides posing one of the most frightening album covers ever, Richard D. James enjoys his status as one of ambient techno's foremost innovators. Witness "Girl/Boy Song" for proof.

Erin Bode, Over and Over. I can't say this disc has wowed me yet. Comparisons to Norah Jones are not unwarranted. Ms. Bode has a dusky, alluring voice, and a willingness to re-arrange Paul Simon's "Graceland" into something quite different, and that's admirable. If you're a windowsill type of soul, may I present Ms. Bode.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah, you've heard all about these fellows by now. I've just recently gotten my hands on a copy, and shame on me. This disc is killer. A little derivative of certain indie-rock trends, one might say, but I'll expand that to say it's the best kind of derivative: you have the attractive and earnest yawping of bands like the Shins and Wolf Parade, and the driving post-punk / dance rhythms of countless sub-par outfits who shall remain nameless, and an overall aesthetic of what I'll have to call "sweet punk", in which there are few chords, there are many lyrics about outraged and injured youth, and all of the keys are major keys.

Dave Chapelle's Block Party, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. The film which accompanies this album comes out Tuesday. It's a who's-who of banner rap: The Roots, Talib Kweli, Mos Def. You know, the good stuff. Also, there are conference call outtakes between the songs: Chappelle & co. are discussing the planning and logistics of the block party to come.

The Dirty Three, Whatever You Love, You Are. Ambient and sparse shoegazing post-rock. Think Low, or Yo La Tengo at their dreamiest. Lots of emotional violin solos. This is one of those albums for which the cover serves as a good representation of the overall sound.

Elbow, Leaders of the Free World. In a world where Coldplay does exist - for better and for worse - I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to like this disc. But it grew on me rather quickly once I started to consciously not care about the stadium-ready pace and the radio-ready production. These are good, big rock songs, and damn the comparisons.

Sarah Harmer, I'm a Mountain. Elegant mountain balladry from a young student of the country's rural tradition. It's simple, sure, but extremely accomplished.

Hem, No Word From Tom.

Jolie Holland, Escondida.

Jolie Holland, Springtime Can Kill You. In the vein of Cat Power. Jolie Holland is part of the Be Good Tanyas when she's not putting out amazing records which are amalgams of folk (of course), blues, and jazz flourishes. The generally even keel on which this record rides doesn't prevent it from sounding like one of the year's most accomplished records so far. It's this Recently Acquired's Reigning Top Disc.

Charlie Hunter Trio, Copperopolis.

Choir of King's College, Cambridge, Gregorian Chant. Pretty standard devotional Masses.

Shooter Jennings, Electric Rodeo. Son of Waylan Shooter turns in this batch of somewhat bombastic electric country. See Hank Williams III (at bottom).

Kids, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Daniel Johnston contributes some excellent material to the soundtrack of this rather disturbing 90s film about that era's kids with their sex and their drugs and their lost innocence. Daniel Johnston was an inspired choice for this project, if you ask me; not only has he struggled for mental well-being for most of his adult life, but despite / because of this Johnston allows his performances an admirably slack character. His voice has an endearing squeak, an awkwardness, about it; there's a fey sweetness to his melodies; and the lyrics often involve imaginative youths and harmless ghosts and magical thinking. Juxtapose that with the more ominous work of Folk Implosion (which is less folky and more implode-y), and you get a pretty apt aural analog to Kids' subject matter and take on same.

Loose Fur, Born Again in the U.S.A. Lousy with A-listers from Wilco (Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche among them), and with avant-garde-minded console-minder Jim O'Rourke on board, we have Loose Fur's 2nd album. These are songs that were probably left on various cutting room floors for being too "easy" or "straightforward," but I won't call them that. I'll call them "fun" and "good." Check out the video of "Hey Chicken." There's a dance-off with a monster at the end.

Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, Hang It High, Hang It Low. Sadly, after three or four listens, I have to say that this band's name is more fun that it is. The zydeco cha-chas the Zydeco Cha-Chas offer up here sound pretty much all alike. As a set of music seen live, it would make you nod along and tap your foot, but you wouldn't be impelled to get up and dance. And zydeco must make me dance.

The Notorious Bettie Page, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. What a soundtrack. I haven't seen this film yet, but the soundtrack's tangible and tacile enough to make me feel as though I have. This has it all: well-chosen jazz cuts from Art Pepper and Charles Mingus, a sassy novelty tune by Jeri Southern, a heartbreaking number from Julie London (of whom you must have more) and impeccable boom, BOOM BOOM boom kinds of numbers from Mark Suozzo that'll have you hopping in the car with all your buddies, aiming for the seedy side of town, and changing all your twenties for singles.

Robinella, Solace For the Lonely. With a sound that's very near to Jolie Holland's - and to various other songstresses rooted in folk - Robinella nearly beat out Springtime Can Kill You for this week's Reigning Top Disc. It was a bloody fight. Broken banjos all over the place. Freshly plucked posies lay on the eyes of the wounded as they convalesced. Reams of sheet music belonging to both sides made a gentle do-si-do on the field of battle. And when it was all over, the voice of Robin Contreras floated up over the scene, renascent, indomitable, in the same tone you use to whisper your promises.

Otis Rush, All Your Love, I Miss Your Loving. Just a killer set of live Chicago blues. Get this. Everything about it is right.

Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces and Other Russian Village Wedding Songs.

T.I., King.

Hank Williams III, Straight To Hell. There's a lot to love here. In his disregard for the world's shame-shaming his drinking and cussing and rabble-rousing, Hank III blusters and stomps like Back to the Future's Biff and sings in a reedy sneer like Back to the Future's Marty McFly. Speaking of Back to the Future, you know that scene in BttF III, in which Marty and Doc are trapped in the old West, and one night they go down to the Hill Valley Hoedown or whatever, and there's a killer fiddling outfit barnstorming it up under the stars? Here, Hank sounds like that but three times as fast. I can't remember the last time I heard such manic, excellent playing in a country record. Hank III also takes modern Nashville and the country contemporary machine to task for putting out, well, terrible music. And that's just Disc 1. Disc 2 is one of the strangest aural documents ever committed to record. Even Pink Floyd with their signature freak-outs and slowed-down monster voices has nothing on this disc. I want to say that it's an aural representation of a ramble across the country, with very long trains whistling and rattling by, and gurgling streams suddenly appearing ahead, and so on, as though we're somehow telescoping at a great rate through the middle of the country... but there are too many other interjections for that to hold all the water: tape loops, ambient noise, sudden flourishes into ditties and song. It's completely unpredictable and completely captivating.

The GMA

2006-06-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

I don't usually weigh in on political matters, although God knows my brow darkens when I read the news. I like to keep DJ relegated generally to matters that involve music, poetry, fiction, media / cultural studies, post-postmodernism, how to make a sandwich, and my lost brother Jon.

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But I have GOT to weigh in on gay marriage before our President Chimpy McSmirkster weighs in. The GMA refers not to Good Morning America, but to the proposed gay marriage amendment. Word from CNN is that a statement is to come down the pike sometime on Monday night, in which Bush is to finally offer an amendment to the Constitution to ban gay marriage. This idea has been batted around quite a bit, but the matter seems about to escalate.

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I for one am feeling the burning white hot indignation of a thousand suns.

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I understand that opinions on this matter run deep. I understand that personal issues of faith and tradition seem to demand a conservative approach.

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However. All day I've been continually returning this comment, made this morning on MetaFilter's comment boards. Sure, MetaFilter runs toward the blue side of the spectrum. Listen:

Amberglow: "Our country's history is [a history] of the continual expansion of rights, and not [of] votes on whether certain people should have rights or not."

I submit to you that Amberglow's right. Try and think of an example of this country's proud history of *rolling back* rights. I'm being serious. Do we want to live in a country that will one day have reason to look back on its history and say, "Ah yes, remember when we disenfranchised the Xs or marginalized the Ys? Weren't those good times"? One of this country's core values - I don't use that word lightly - is the extension of rights to others. The very nature of the Constitution is the safeguarding of rights, not the selection of rights as applicable for a special few. It has taken decades, centuries even, to make demonstrable progress in extending full-on, no-shit rights to women, African-Americans, the disabled... so on and so on. And even after the rights are extended, society's slow to catch up. The thought that this country's leadership, and its base, would consider the deliberate discrimination of its own people appalls me. It submit to you that you, too, should be appalled. No matter what your own personalbeliefs may be. Because personal beliefs are precisely what's under threat of Constitutional ban. It is precisely the individual's right to think and act according to one's own inclination that's in peril.

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I realize that this site's (modest) readership might come from various parts of the political spectrum; I realize further that religious stances are going to similarly vary. But I submit to you that THIS IS NOT A RELIGIOUS ISSUE. IT IS A POLITICAL ISSUE. I ask you to divorce your personal and/or religious views from your consideration of this matter. I ask that you remember that this country is built on, is built from, a tradition of tolerance and understanding. A tradition of listening to the drunk nut at the corner of the bar, letting him say his piece, paying up, saying "Hey buddy you've got some nutty ideas! Take care though!", and going on your way.

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I ask the opponents of gay marriage, in all seriousness, if you think that the marriage of a homosexual couple is going to impact your life in any way.

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I ask why in heaven's name these Americans, who want nothing more than to be allowed to live committed monogamous lives, should not have that right.

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These are serious questions, and I invite responses. I don't want DJ to merely preach to my own assorted choirs.

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Against my pretty basic argument of "live and let live" / "as long as you're not hurting anybody, knock yourself out" is this: someone might argue that gay marriage actualy does exact harmful effects on individuals and families. You might hear someone raise the point that "the family is in danger" and even that "the forces of hell itself" are evidenced in the pro-gay marriage movement. I say to you now that this is not true. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Families are not in danger. No matter what acronym comes after your name, you cannot make blanket statements about "the American Family" and blame its decline on "those gays." I'm sorry, but fuck that noise; it's an impossible correlation to make. The burden of proof is too high. Like Iraq having nothing to do with 9/11, this is a fact. In other words, even if you don't believe that gay marriage has nothing to do with "the integrity of the American Family", you cannot prove that it does. Because there is no one generic "family," people; like homes, families are what you've got. Families may not look like your own. Your mileage may vary. THIS IS A GOOD THING. Have we really forgotten to affirm and celebrate this country's essential diversity?

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"Our country's history is [a history] of the continual expansion of rights." This country cannot allow itself to abandon its tradition of tolerance and essential freedom. That seven-letter word has meant less and less these past six years. I'm tired of seeing it erode and erode. I ask, whatever your political or religious stripes may be, that you consider the meaning of that word in a nation that restricts its applicability to those who meet a certain norm.

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No Chicken Little, I must admit that the odds are low that Bush's agenda will go anywhere; the Senate is having a hard time mustering even fifty votes. This is a good thing. But I urge you to say something. This issue may sound tired and old-hat; it isn't. Its moment is very much right now.

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Write your representative.

Write your senator.

Breakthrough, poetry-wise

2006-05-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

Feeling very alive right now. First real poem in months. Very, very alive.

DJ updates

2006-05-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

Added a shot of my gnarly mug to the upper right corner: you can see it now, can't you. The text on the paper reads "I am very sorry for not listening well." Long story.

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Added many neat blogs to the blogroll. Say hey to Lizzie Laroo over at Viva Las Vegas and The Pangrammaticon, a poetry blog where currently there are some interesting comparisons being made between Ryan G. Van Cleave and Michael Magee about whom more in a moment.

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Added a new section to the Links at right: "Why not read some webcomics?" is the shortlist of the webcomics I make time for. Sometimes more time than I really should.

Almost forgot to shamelessly plug

2006-05-30T19:04:00.000-07:00

There's a somewhat-untimely poetry review of Spencer Reese's The Clerk's Tale over at Half-Drunk Muse.

Save the date

2006-05-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

There's a pretty well-known Halloween (or "Treehouse of Horror") episode of The Simpsons in which Homer sells his soul to the Devil (ably played by Ned Flanders) in exchange for a midnight snack. Homer chooses a donut, and BAMF a donut he has. Luckily, Marge intervenes, and stops Homer from eating the last crumb of the donut; even more luckily, Marge points out that Devil-Ned won't have ownership over the soul until the donut's been eaten in full. This explains the shot, in the Simpsons' fridge, of a smidgen of donut with a little white folded sign propped upon it, which says "Homer's Soul Donut - Do Not Eat!"

Segue. In the basement freezer, there's 3/4 of a Stolichnaya bottle. This is Jon's Soul Vodka, and is labelled as such. It is not to be drunk until July 8th, 2006, when it will be parcelled out by the dram (or perhaps by some larger unit) and held aloft in a toast. Why this date? By whom will this Soul Vodka be imbibed? Who will be there to become steward of Jon's spirit and spirits? These are good questions.

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

1 PM to 10 PM (although of course no one will kick you off the grounds)

Camillus, New York

will be the date, the time, and the town to which we welcome everyone who knew Jon, as well as everyone who helped us and helps us still with the fact that Jon's gone. I may sound as though I'm overstating the matter when I say that I extend this invitation to absolutely everyone I've ever met or had contact with; I'm not overstating the matter. This is one of those situations that absolutely depends on hordes of family and friends. Sheer numbers of people are required too because we hope to tell our Jon-related memories, impressions, stories and legends at great volume and with much joint sadness and mirth.

Bring some towels for the pool, and that spiffy folding canvas chair you said you'd use on all of those camping trips you haven't gotten around to yet, and whatever else makes you happy. Drinks, needless to say, will be served. And there will be Dinosaur barbecue crew present to handle the catering; if you don't know the Dinosaur, well, then that alone is a big reason for you to come.

Once again, wherever you live, whatever you're up to, please feel free to come if you have the ability and inclination to do so. Email me for the address and directions. These were exactly the sorts of revelries at which Jon seemed happiest. I hope to see all of you there.

Music Review: Josh Rouse's "Subtitulo"

2006-05-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Following the old-soul smoov grooves of 2003’s 1972 and the general excellence of last year’s Nashville, much was made of the fact that Subtitulo, Josh Rouse’s next LP, was recorded in Puerto de Santa Maria. Spain, that is. Stickers affixed to the jewel case herald this fact specifically, as though it’s some Nintendo Seal of Quality or royal imprimatur. Sure, if an artist wants to incorporate another region’s sound, it befits that artist to put some boots on the ground. It worked for Paul Simon at least once—twice if you count The Rhythm of the Saints. But these marketing dudes wanted to imply that recording studios in Spain are set up right on the high tide mark of a scalloped sea that’s just lousy with bathing maidens, and intrigued gulls perch on the neck of your cherrywood guitar as you play, and the distant cries of kids at play aren’t loud enough to rouse you from a light and blissful doze.

Well, to listen to Subtitulo, all of that may as well be true. But the canny listener should contextualize this origin story. Contrary to what you may have heard, Subtitulo is no mere exercise in regional airs and traditional instrumentation. Instead, it finds the Josh Rouse sound in full effect, with benefits. And yes, these benefits do take the form of subtle triangles, an affection for the bossa nova beat, and a host of lightly-picked acoustic guitars. “Quiet Town” starts us off on this vacation with a tambourine beat, a dependable finger-picked riff, and Rouse’s perfect perfect coo. For Rouse does possess one of the smoothest voices in pop music today. Moving on: “Summertime”’ could be a Sea & Cake / Sam Prekop outtake sans the time changes and paranoid rhythms; its acoustic guitar runs to and fro the way sandpipers do. As a competent instrumental segue piece, “La Costa Blanca” comes across as slightly heavier stuff than the rest of the album’s material, but it still belongs on that Pacific Coast Highway mix you’re planning to use this summer. “It Looks Like Love” is the most rocking of the tunes, and the nearest example of Rouse’s previous work. Monster hooks, an impeccable lead vocal, flirty lyrics delivered with a roguish half-grin, and a footstomping lull 2/3rds of the way through that makes the reiterated chorus sound even more lush.

There are missteps: “Givin’ It Up” has a few too many pious strings, as though trying to make up for the liquor-based debauchery described in the lyrics with orchestral flair and a driving beat that’s a little too steady. And the end of “Wonderful” features a needless (and thankfully faint) ethnographic outro; this brief faux-Survivor theme sounds like Rouse’s proof that he really was in Spain, he swears. But all’s not lost: Subtitulo heads into evening with “The Man Who…”, a coy bossa nova duet that tries too hard to transcend its influences via a stock backbeat that struck this listener as pretty incongruous… but then a slide guitar comes in, and another acoustic guitar comes in, all twang and one-raised-eyebrow, then Rouse counts off a whispered 1-2-3-4 like some anti-Springsteen and kicks the song back into its particular sort of delicate overdrive. And finally there’s album closer “El Otro Lado”, which sounds like what we can expect from Iron & Wine if Sam Beam ever writes a song from a hammock.

He’s always been a traditionalist, this Rouse; in the course of acknowledging the 70s soft rock he loves, he’s risked committing the same sins of overproduction and too-smooth sonic textures. With Subtitulo, he avoids the trap yet again primarily because he’s a such a canny student: he knows his AM radio, he knows what makes a song sound like a sunshot island’s soundtrack, he knows his own developing aesthetic. Rouse’s grasp of pop music history and where he fits in it is what lends him his distinction, and it’s what makes this record seem—at a scant 33 minutes—like the passing seabreeze it really is. Which is a strong selling point. I’d put it on a sticker.

Music Review: Loretta Lynn's "Van Lear Rose"

2006-05-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

Loretta Lynn being one of country music’s reigning queens, it’s safe to say that her 2004 album Van Lear Rose will have its share of gems, and it’s in the reviewer’s best interest to get to all of the songs in short order. But getting past the first and eponymous track is no easy business. Here’s why. It’s a good story, for one; most of Lynn’s songs are. “Van Lear Rose” describes a bit of family backstory that’s obvious but delightful in a “Tell it again, Daddy,” sort of way. And. Lynn’s voice is way up in the mix so that you’d swear, if you kept your eyes closed and finished your drink, that you were sitting right next to the stage. Plus. Lynn’s got a knack for easing up on the throttle, quieting things down for a verse, and allowing the consonants and glottals of the lyrics do their own work: she sort of both talks and sings as the band hushes up for a bit, and that’s such a consummate storyteller’s moment that you might as well be watching Mark Twain (or one of his imitators) slap the stage with the ball of his foot, adjust his white jacket with both hands and a shrug, and rogueishly harrumph. You can see Lynn sing this song. She’s either just behind or just ahead of the beat, and you suspect that she’s a little bit off this way because she’s busy bouncing up and down in front of the mic, the hem of her gingham dress in her fist, swaying fro and fro and to.

Then there’s “Portland, Oregon”, a sly account of a too-short night in that eponymous, incredible clean city, and let me tell you that this contains one of the biggest hooks this side of a New Pornographers tune. When Lynn and Jack White spiel out the “uh-huhs” on their way to the bridge, with all of the emphasis on the “huh” part, it’s like a gigantic two-finger come hither which you are powerless to resist. A big ol’ Come on. A monster Grab my hand and let’s get to the dance floor right now, Hot Stuff.

What’s that? Oh yeah, Jack White? Of The White Stripes? Did I not mention? He produces the whole album. That I don’t mention him until now says a lot, I suppose, given that White duets with Lynn on that second track and basically does a bang-up job as a slide guitarist, backup singer, and console-minder. Even so, there’s no question whose show this is. There’s precedent for this kind of something-old, something-new partnership; the most recent and famous touchstone would be Rick Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash in the nineties and with Neil Diamond in 2005. Rubin’s M.O. was mainly to strip down his musicians’ sound until they felt vulnerable, barren, and human; in the process he himself garnered this not-totally-undeserved reputation as a canny student of his older, greater collaborators, and pretty soon that was what you heard more than you heard the music itself: “Rubin really gets these guys, you know? He like really understands them.” You know? Here it’s not like that. White makes Lynn feel so young: every song has a ramshackle immediacy that turns out to be a sorta-new way of thinking about adding records to living legends’ discographies. Why do the bare-bones “O Death” routine when you can do what “Have Mercy” does, “Have Mercy” being a dirty blues that depends on a pounded-out triplet figure before seguing into this jazzy bass vamp that’ll make you shimmy? Or “High On the Mountaintop”, which is is a footstomping hootenanny that sounds like a guest-singer outtake from Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions? If Jack White needed any more kudos, well, here they are.

Not every song will register the way the aforementioned songs will and do. But that doesn’t mean the record lags toward its end. After the racounteurish “Little Red Shoes” and the frowny “God Makes No Mistakes,” it’s on to the slow inferno of “Women’s Prison” and the this-truck-ain’t-got-no-brakes of “Mrs. Leroy Brown.” Somewhere, Jim Croce’s cracking a wry smile. And he’s not easy to get to smile, Jim Croce. Jim Croce being, well, passed on from this earth. But you know who's very much alive, don't you. Loretta Lynn. After listening to this record twice or thrice, I read that Lynn turned 71 back in April. 71. I believed it not. Neither should you.

Idol Update: 8:54

2006-05-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

Taylor: yeah!

Idol Update: 8:43

2006-05-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

McPhee's song "My Destiny": The thousand monkeys who wrote this song are blowing doobie-smoke at the screen, hooting and throwing their green visors in the air. Gad, what a terrible song. Randy's right: it's not totally her fault. But gad.

Idol Update: 8:32

2006-05-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

Taylor's not leaving anything for the trip back. Ever see Gattaca? One brother to the other: "How were you able to beat me? How did you manage to swim back?" (Genetically-flawed Ethan Hawke and his genetically-perfect brother would swim out into the ocean until one tired, and therefore lost). "I never saved anything for the swim back," sez Ethan. And Simon's awarding of "rounds" (McPhee takes this round? WTF?) is to Idol what Crossfire was to meaningful debate: needless oversimplification.

Idol Update: 8:25

2006-05-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

Yes, Katharine McPhee: I also like Chet Baker's Embraceable You, and the solemnly-picked acoustic guitar accompaniment is working well. Here's the thing. You admire McPhee. But Taylor Hicks thrills you.

Idol Update: 8:16 PM

2006-05-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

Why Taylor's going to win: that velvet jacket. My buddy JBG has one, and while he pulls it off, Taylor pulls it off.

In which my HTML skills

2006-05-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

and their general inadequacy become painfully apparent. How can I place a photo in this blog's upper right corner? I.e. so it is outside of the Post window, and is a regular fixture of the upper frame? Anybody able to help is entreated to do so. By me.

Three unrelated tidbits

2006-05-23T13:20:00.000-07:00

Got this neat little Julius Caesar thing going after my haircut this afternoon.

*

Lots of talk about the Best / Most Influential Books of the Past 25 Years. The New York Times as usual seeks to and does locate itself at the center of an invented yet important discussion. Beloved by Toni Morrison wins. Opinions? For my part, I have no qualms with Beloved's victory. I'd have loved it, but been surprised, if Don DeLillo had won out. He's one of my boys, no question, one of our very best, but I think he'd be more liable to win on this site than in any Times survey. The list of judges is long and distinguished, and that more than anything else means that I can't take any issue over the result. But while I have no qualms with the survey itself, I think that there's a great deal more to say which books were chosen and why, and what books were omitted and why, and what that means about the art. I wouldn't consider anything that received a vote to be very cutting-edge or experimental. There's a conservative bent to any discussion in which your task is to ID the "best" of something, maybe. I dunno: I guess I'm more prone to digging on that work which risks. I'm not hating on Beloved or any of the books on this list. But I miss me some Corrections with its incredible scene of talking poo; I miss me some Mark Z. Danielewski circa House of Leaves; I miss me some inestimable IJ. Even Nicholson Baker's stuff (The Mezzanine, say, and know that I'm excluding Vox entirely) would rate a mention in my list.

*

There's a thrift shop in the basement of this church in Skaneateles; it contains the most ornate, lovely old cash register you have ever seen. When I paid for my porcelain cup and three CD's ($3.25 plus NYS tax), the woman helping me said "Don't leave: I have to give you your 2 cents. I am so going to give you your 2 cents!" She did. She's wins today's Best Person Ever award.

Recently acquired

2006-05-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

Various Artists, The Back Room Vol. 1. This is on Kinkysweet Records. And the liner notes, while brief, are as overwrought as you might expect on a CD that bills itself as dance music for, well, the (ahem) mysterious (wakka-chikka wakka-chikka) back room that is supposedly a staple at high-end clubs. But no: those are my fantasies leaking through. "Whether it's a t home, in our cars, at a bar with friends, at home with closer friends, or poolside, sipping a Mojito; we love the sound of dance and electronic music..." Well, cool. Not lurid, but cool. And oh yeah the music. The music's alright. A decent compilation, I suppose, but nothing really distinguishes itself.

Joan Baez, Bowery Songs. A live set from '04.

Beethoven, Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61 / Romance No. 1 in G, Op. 40 / Romance No. 2 in F, Op. 50. Perf. Maxim Vengerov (violin) w/ the London Symphony Orchestra (Mstislav Rostropovich conducting).

Beirut, Gulag Orkestar. This disc is something else. The thematic and lyrical content, as well as the sound of the record, makes you think of the Reichstag on fire. Make no mistake: it's indie pop. But it waltzes. For those of you who will get the references, imagine Rufus Wainwright joining the Decemberists circa, say, "The Mariner's Revenge Song" from Picaresque. Beirut, who is a rather young boy, nails both Wainwright's popera vocal style and the Decemberists' quirky instrumentation. Mandolins and brass sections both make prominent contributions. For those on whom these references are lost, let me try another: you know that scene before the big final battle in Saving Private Ryan? The young translator's sitting around with Ed Burns and some other troops, and they're reminiscing about their lives as an old phonograph echoes in the background right before the Nazi half-tracks rattle into earshot? This record sounds as if those troops had had the chance to start a band. It's that kind of wounded and beautiful. It's highly stylized, very baroque, and completely captivating. I could also reference Antony and the Johnsons as well as the cut-up cabaret of the Dresden Dolls, both bands that seem to be looking over the same sepia war photographs that seem to haunt this Beirut character, but I'd rather just go ahead and play this disc again. Sam. I christen it the Reigning Top Disc of Recently Acquired records.

Anouar Brahem, Le Voyage De Sahar. The oud is an Arabic lute. Anouar Brahem uses it to play jazz. Makes a great twofer with Beirut's Gulag Orkestar.

John Fahey, The Yellow Princess. M. Ward fawns over this record in the liner notes. You'll see why by the time you get to track 3, "Lion." An analogy: John Fahey is to the steel string guitar as Art Tatum is to the jazz piano: you'll swear that multiple people are playing at once. You'll be wrong. Some of the fastest most overwhelming instrumental folk guitar you will ever hear. This came out in '69. Where has it been all my life?

Madlib, Beat Kondukta Vols 1 & 2. Supposedly a soundtrack to a never-made film. Instrumental hip-hop with excellent samples (Sam Cooke among them). And, as I was driving home late last night, I was pretty sure I heard some sort of 8-bit Nintendo sample skittering along.

Cass McCombs, A. Cass McCombs hails from Baltimore. (Thanks, EmC!) He's a singer-songwriter for the times, which is to say that you can't be sure if he's serious or not. Pitchfork hits on this issue quite well. It's sweet, gritty, muddled, and melodic. The production's lo-fi and charming, and tries to sound serious but not too. The adjective "slack" should also get some play in this capsule. It is slack. Let's call it slack-rock. There's more to be said about this later, I suspect. Highlight? The final track, "My Master", which goes on and on and on about how YOUR master's in there talking to CASS'S master, and maybe that means Cass is in trouble, and Cass already had enough to worry about.

Watermelon Slim & the Workers, Watermelon Slim & the Workers. Watermelon Slim drove a truck for most of his life. Watermelon Slim had a near-death experience recently and has been singing the blues ever since. Watermelon Slim holds degrees, like me, from the University of Oregon. Watermelon Slim rode shotgun in the devil's Cadillac. Watermelon Slim, rumor has it, is a member of MENSA. Watermelon Slim, as you can see here, is out to getcha.

Narration question

2006-05-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

One of the very interesting things about David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is how little happens in the immediate scene. The vast majority of the novel's 1000 pages are given over to explaining what has been happening, or explaining the (exhaustively complex) pre-conditions that explain why what happens what happens. If you take Randy Lenz, for example, the squirreliest of Ennet House's residents and generally not one who's going to succeed with its anti-drug programs at all, let's take a look at what happens to him in the novel's immediate scene. Not much. I hope that it is not doing the novel or the character a great disservice to say that Lenz enters Ennet House, a halfway house in Enfield (Boston) MA, struggles with the protocols of starts taking walks, develops a habit of killing small mammals, which leads him one night to a house full of Canucks (Canadians are somewhat maligned throughout IJ; tensions with our neighbor to the north are high, for involved reasons), where he does something that's not nice at all and admittedly does set in motion of IJ's most high-pitched action sequences. But that's sort of, well, it. With Lenz, as with most of the characters, we read more about what they've done than we do about what they do.

I'm generalizing a tiny bit in hopes of making a point. Plotwise, IJ is so far and away one of the 20th century's most complex literary structures. The number of POVs and social spheres that we as readers are intimate with and privy to staggers. And let's go ahead and submit that, barnone, every sentence brims with linguistic attention and innovation. And, with each one of our Points of View (Marathe, Orin, Lenz, Mario Incandenza, and of course and most importantly Hal Incandenza and Don Gately), we receive in each section a compendium of facts about what's happening today in their day-at-a-time existences. But when you get down to brass tacks and look at the way the novel's attention's spread between the actually-happening now and the happened-back-then-but-trust-me-it's-informing-what-little-is-happening-in-the-actual-now, you can see that it's the latter style / approach that defines much of the novel's shape and content.

Again, don't get me wrong: there's a great deal happening in the novel's present. The novel's descriptions and accounts of what's happened previously, however, outweighs what's happening in the "now." This perception might be in error; if I had a scale and the time and the inclination to sacrifice my copy, I'd do a weigh-in. But it feels accurate. And it's therefore a mammoth testament to IJ's achievements that all of this exhaustive accounting never causes a reader to smack brow and say "What about what's happening with the X situation / Mrs. Y?"

This quality heartens the hell out of me. Good Ground as it stands is squarely on the IJ side of things in that a majority of the pages to date involve what's happened to its characters; what happens in the now is somewhat fleeting. At times I've worried about how "immediate" the actions taken would seem. But, and while this post isn't meant as an apologia, I'm beginning to think that such an approach of "past-heavy" narration in fiction need not necessarily lose anything in terms of immediacy, vividness, and being able to see the characters as they are, acting in the now.

Maybe this approach offputs the Joe / Josephina Q. Public. What do you think? Do you like your novels up front and pepping / zooming along? Do you mind being filled in? What if you're filled in in a peppy / zooming way?

Yesterday vs. today

2006-05-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday: Woke up way too early with ambitions to write my face off with pages for Good Ground. It didn't pan out. Lifted some weights, noodled around on the Internet. Tried at least three times to actually write, get into it. Didn't work. Before heading to the Big Top of Capitalism, I reread the suicide note. I have done wiser things. Listening to Grandaddy's Sumday on the 690 and just balling, which is strange, because while that record is not exactly sunny, neither is it the maudlin emotionally-overdone kind of schmaltz you'd think would inspire full-on gasping type crying. Labored for 8 hours. It's strange to be in public and be unable to stop yourself from having your emotional reactions. To interact with strangers who are paying just a hair too little attention to notice what's happening in your face.

*

Today: Woke up at a more standard hour. Typed out a sentence which popped into my head from nowhere; who knows if I'll use it. Started writing and got about 2500 words over the next 3 hrs. Went for a long run up Corporal Welch, past turned-over fields that will bear corn in a few months. Past the Boom Boom Mex Mex Taqueria, which is on the corner of Howlett Hill and Corporal Welch, in a squat white building with a sunken parking lot; it may've once been an antique shop or gas station with the gas pumps long since ripped out. Smells wonderful up there now. Here's hoping it has good eats. And past the Howlett Hill Presbyterian Church, which I believe has celebrated its sesquicentennial sometime in the last few years. Down the long hill of Munro Rd., back up to the house. Made a stellar sandwich. Cleaned up. Sat down. Here I am.

*

And what I realized via this competition between yesterday and today is that my writing amounts to a kind of shield. The pages I fill up are like shields that deflect the thoughts of this tragedy and thoughts of my own personal doubts and fears and worries, like, kerTWANG! As long as I've written something, these things kertwang away harmlessly. But if for some reason I haven't done a poem, haven't done some paragraphs, then I am effectively unarmored. At least one good friend will clutch his brow on reading this, for it might not be a very good way to go about things from the novel's / the poems' points of view. I've been trying for years now to be maximally prolific, and arguably this is to the detriment of the work and sometimes myself. But what I think I'm learning is that it's not just about the work: it's about me as well. Does anyone else experience this paradox? Wherein your mental health seems bound to something you must do, something that some people will tell you will suffer even if it might help you yourself out? I'm trying to parse this issue out. This inspiration vs. habit issue's been on my mind in one form or another since January 2000, when I decided I would write every day. And I'm still of the mindset that habit breeds inspiration. If I just waited for inspiration, I might never put words down again. Pisco Poet Liz H-F told her students that "there's no magical mystical moment" - poems / prose depend upon dogged, painful, habitual effort. Poems almost never spring Athena-like from your forehead (meaning you're Zeus). But what I know now that I didn't know 48 hrs. ago is that writing this novel, writing these poems, while not always easy, is, well, sort of saving me.

*

But then and plus, is it psychologically unadvisable to "shield" oneself away from the things that lay us low? Is this approach to dedicated artistic production tantamount to denial / issue avoidance? If it makes me happy, can it be that bad? I need to put on some music (not Sheryl Crow) and fix a beverage. I have that post-run constriction of the forehead. Not a headache, quite. But close.

Stanley Kunitz

2006-05-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

I can't confirm it via any news source yet, but the grapevines indicate that Stanley Kunitz has passed away this Sunday morning. He was getting on 101 (!) years old, was one of the kindliest looking men you will ever espy in this world (see above), was a consummate gardener, and authored some top-notch free verse.

Yesterday a fellow in the music shop picked up some Wilson Pickett, and when I mentioned that he'd recently passed in January the fellow blanched as though struck: he hadn't known that the soul singer had passed, and seemed spooked that the whim to pick up a Pickett CD would strike him so offhandedly.

I received this poem of his in an email. It's textbook Kunitz: a subtle, conversational tone that doesn't seem cutting or even memorable until I come to the poem's end and find that several lines have lodged themselves in my mind. I suspect that lineation's one of his strong suits, but his diction is so plain and he sounds so utterly approachable that it's not immediately clear how well these poems succeed.

But what am I doing. Let's allow the man to speak for himself. After you toast your mothers today, toast Stanley. One more drink won't hurt.

Passing Through

Nobody in the widow's household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren't for a census report
of a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother's address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I'd have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.

Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don't take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I'm passing through a phase:
gradually I'm changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours:
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

I broke laws to take this

2006-05-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

I walked past this tree in the forest the other evening. The land belongs to a few theoretical farmers - I've never seen them - whose yellow "No Trespassing" signs make them seem way crotchety. The paths run through a fairly lovely middle-aged forest, only sparsely interrupted with cornfields. This tree smelled wonderful. It was sort of, um, bridal. There's no less awkward or more suitable word for it. There was a time when I'd've seen a tree in bloom like this and instantly gone to write something maudlin about it. But now I think that there are simpler and better ways to approach it.

A return to poetry

2006-05-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

Yes, again.

*

There's been some interesting back-and-forth in the comment boxes; thought I'd chime in. Tony wrote that "the poetry that interests me as 'new' lately is the poetry that can be the most up to date in its inappropriateness." Let's take as given that we're all in pursuit of not only what's new in poetry, but what's new and succeeds at making us feel something. (I'll have to chime in on Goldbarth and feeling later tonight.) But a poem's "inappropriate" qualities would therefore seem to take on a new level of complexity.

Segue: I don't want to name these poems as inappropriate, because I don't think that they are, but D. A. Powell's work in Cocktails -

- seems to be both new and, well, *surprising*. Again, I can't say inappropriate, because there's nothing inappropriate about these words, issues, or images. Rather, the words, issues, and images gain everything through the way this guy's staggering his lines - setting up syntactic expectations and thwarting them, thwarting them. He's doing things with rhythm that I haven't seen done before, and not because I haven't read everything there is to read. This fellow's rhythmic sense, coupled with his subject matter and his, ah, articulation of his consciousness, reads new.

*

This is less a response to those comment-box comments, I suppose, and more a related tangent. But I like this conversation.

Recently acquired

2006-05-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

Alligator Records, 35 x 35. Thirty-five years, thirty-five tracks on two discs. When you're driving to a smoky rib joint for lager and pulled pork sandwiches, make these blues your soundtrack.

California's answer to Sigur Ros's glacial soundscapes. Somewhat more minimalist than that Icelandic group, The Album Leaf loves to use gentle electronic breakbeats and sunnier, less anthemic melodies. If Sigur Ros songs express a pretty full range of human emotion, then The Album Leaf's songs express that sort of emotional repose more common in small island towns. Small island towns in the future. Play this when you're travelling to a small town on an undiscovered futuristic island.

Lewis Black, The End of the Universe. When you're travelling through Atlanta's airports or over Atlanta's apparently intractable freeway systems, listen to this, because Black has some insights about specifically those subjects.

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Ballad of the Broken Seas. Campbell is one of Belle & Sebastian's vocalists - she's the sultry pixie-voice harmonizing with Stuart Murdoch - and Mark Lanegan I have to research further, but his voice is Tom Waits-rough. Strange bedfellows, I know, but it works. It is, however, not good-time music. Listen to this when you're passing through, like, Wichita, and it's raining, and all the diners are closed even though it's just a typical Tuesday, what gives?

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, Furnace Room Lullaby. Listen to this when you're driving home from seeing your sweetie, with whom you cart around a good lot of baggage.

Cloud Cult, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus. Contrary to what your ears will tell you, Cloud Cult is not another side project of Bright Eyes's Conor Oberst. Cloud Cult doesn't believe in musical genres. This disc is all over the map. Listen to this when you're using Google Random and you feel ready to investigate, at length, the next neat thing you happen across.

Cowboy Junkies, Early 21st Century Blues. When you're driving through Virginia on the interstate and traffic's been slowed to like 5 MPH thanks to a pretty awful accident up ahead, and your soundtrack needs to apply itself to the beauty and the sadness of the rain and the line of red headlights stretching out in front of you, well here you go.

J Dilla, a.k.a. Jay Dee, Donuts. 31 tracks of funk-soul-hip hop samples. Here's the soundtrack to that montage of your travels through New York City, the one you've been having such a tough time scoring - you know, in which you're jump-cutting scene to scene, and having a devil of a time finding your best buddy, who's arriving from the other side of the country, but all the same you're meeting garrulous and insistent shopkeepers who try to sell you baby tortoises, and speakers are toppling from apts. above you and narrowly miss crashing right down on you, and then in the intersection up ahead 8 cabs have gotten themselves into a traffic-choking jam, all of their horns and radios ableat, and you just walk between their bumpers, whistling.

Goldfrapp, Supernature. I like my dance music to be a little less Spartan. This isn't exactly bare-bones, but it leaves me a little cold. Have I danced to it? I don't have to answer that question. Listen to it when you're on your way to the record store to pick up Mylo's Destroy Rock & Roll.

Man Man, Man in a Blue Turban with a Face. I saw Man Man open for Okkervil River this past November. There were about eight band members, dressed alike in unembellished white tunics. The lead singer and keyboard man, Honus Honus, had a magnificent black mullet, and a killer Rollie Fingers mustache. Their sound? Imagine the Muppets - not the Electric Mayhem, but all of the Muppets - set loose in a vaudeville theater and told to play, for the first time and without sheet music, Tom Waits covers circa Waits's Rain Dogs / Swordfishtrombones era. And it's 3 A.M. And there's an open bar.

Mates of State, Bring It Back. Mates of State took the "no-guitar" page from Ben Folds Five's rulebook. Mates of State consist of the husband and wife team pictured here. The members of Mates of State, when playing live, stare into each other's eyes as much as possible while pounding a fuzzed-out organ and a drum kit. Nothing here is as good as "Goods (All In Your Head)", which is on the All Day EP, but considering the rudiments involved, some of the songs here get pretty anthemic. Listen to them when you're driving to see your sweetheart.

Minus the Bear, Highly Refined Pirates. Listen to this record, well, today, in case you're like me and haven't heard it all yet.

Miss Kittin, Mixing Me EP. Listen to this when you're not in the mood for Goldfrapp.

Sinead O'Connor, Throw Down Your Arms. This is that reggae album of O'Connor's you may have heard about. She recorded it in Jamaica with session musicians who clearly know their stuff. O'Connor does too. It's funny, but this record has gotten me into reggae for the first time. Sort of the way I came to dance music through David Gray's White Ladder. I realize that these two admissions may remove my musical opinions from serious consideration in the eys of many of you. But I'm nothing if not honest. The title track and "Curly Locks" are just radiant. Listen to this if you're taking a road trip of medium length and you want to save your Stevie Wonder for later.

Soweto Gospel Choir, Blessed. On any sunny Sunday morning, whenever you happen to have your breakfast, listen to this.

Tilly and the Wall, Wild Like Children. This band doesn't use a typical drummer. Instead, they do this: one of the band members is an accomplished tap-dancer; the band records and amplifies this sound and there's your rhythm section. It's less out there than it sounds; at no point does the tap dancing-as-drumming get as complex or jaw-dropping as your average Gregory Hines routine. But still. As for the rest of the sound, well, it's quaint charming indie pop.

Writer's block

2006-05-07T16:07:00.000-07:00

Big time.

Emotion 98.6

2006-05-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

This is the track # of Mylo's Destroy Rock and Roll which you should have on repeat if you want to feel like making progress on whatever creative buns you have in the oven. And by buns, I mean poems or stories or paintings or articles, or possibly yeast-based buns. Just to clarify.

*

This'll have to be short because I have aspirations of novel-related progress tonight, and this shouldn't be considered a full review, but I spent a good part of my afternoon reading Here, Bullet, a collection of poems by Brian Turner, who is an alum of my creative writing program. Quickly, Here, Bullet's poems derive from poet Turner's time in Iraq during the ongoing U.S. presence there. They are, needless to say, rooted in the soldier's experience.

By and large, I applaud these two poems, but too many of the volume's other poems seem to hew to straight reportage. In this last poem, "Caravan," there is a stronger element of the confrontational element implicit in this act of witness and presentation, what with the body parts of the dead shipped to the White House. But more often than not, there's too little of this confrontational spirit. That doesn't mean that these poems should have in them more finger-wagging at this wayward administration, or at that bloodthirsty aspect we've all got in us. Rather, these poems present themselves as accounts of events - traumatic, terrible, nightmarish events - but still just accounts, and little more. You know what they're like? They're like ledgers of figures and names and numbers; they're sketched out, granted, in orderly columns and rows. But there's no analyst teasing out what these figures might add up to and mean.

I don't discuss this here and now as a means of indicting these poems for what they might accomplish or fail to accomplish. I discuss the matter instead as a way to question the role of such contemporary artistic production. Let's cite Auden, of course, on the ol' "poetry makes nothing happen" notion. This poetry may not mean to make anything happen; in fact I think that it seeks only to represent, in terms that are cutting and stark, what has happened. Oftentimes I would finish reading a poem in this volume and feel affected by what had happened in its lines, but my feeling was just as often kindred to the feeling I have when I read effective coverage of Iraq or Darfur or any other world hotspot: it may've been a sensation of having been newly informed, saddened, and certainly moved... but lacking from the experience of reading such coverage - and, I'm sorry to say, these poems - is a sensation of enlightenment. The news tells you what happened. So do these poems. I was looking for these poems to put some sort of challenge to me: they didn't.

What kind of challenge am I in the market for when I read me some poems - regardless of how concerned they are with contemporary events? That's a great question. My best answer isn't very complex: I'm in the market to be asked to think about something in a new way. I realize that that statement is so vague as to be wholly meaningful, and it certainly amounts to nothing like a poetics. But to boil it down: a poet's got to yoke together items - images, ideas, ideologies - in such a way as to imply a new image, a new idea, a new ideology. Otherwise one is merely describing an event with the appropriate amts. of beauty, love, fright, or horror. And one has sufficient quantities of those elsewhere.

Feels sorta familiar

2006-05-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

Not like me at all.

Just now finished

2006-04-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

~ An unseasonable yet awesome mug of coffee with hot chocolate,

~ Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin, for which a review is forthcoming provided my ducks are not hostile to the notion of being put into rows,

~ A poem in the 2nd person, and, with it,

~ My eleventh notebook exclusively devoted to poetry.

*

I'd be silly to equate productivity with good poetry; I've never allowed myself to confuse the two. Still, to pen a final encapsulating quotation on the inside rear cover ("I'll believe in anything" - Wolf Parade) and to fwap the book closed... these things lead, maybe twice a year, to just this moment of quiet, uncanny contentment.

*

Health is O.K., incidentally. Thanks for all of your concern. I saw my doctor today, and despite a battery of tests he decided that, indeed, I remain the sort of strapping American youth you tend to see in all their raw profusion and staggering unremarkability in each one of these 50 industrious and budding states.

It's the start of everything

2006-04-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

I got the job.

His countenance was modified

2006-04-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Nursing a headache today.

*

Last night I was returning from the Big Top of Capitalism and had just pulled into the driveway, listening to this astoundingly average Marigold EP. An EP so average that its chief worth will be to keep it around in my record collection solely to instruct the curious and the musically wayward on the subject of average, blank early 00s rock.

As I began to carry out standard parking-the-car procedures, my right hand began to tingle. The steering wheel wasn't quite where my right hand expected it to be. Neither was the shift. And, as far as my right hand was concerned, my car keys were so slippery as to have been not only alive but also desperate to escape my grasp. I labored to fish them out of the ignition for way longer than is normally for any normally functioning person. As a normally functioning person mentally, however, I was well-aware of all of this.

*

I hadn't been drinking. I hadn't eaten anything strange. I hadn't been upset about anything.

*

This arm tingle continued as I tried to key open the side door. The keys still seemed like willful and evasive creatures. It was around this time that the tingle began to migrate heavenward along my arm, and even I, no doctor, knew enough to be concerned. Then again at the same time, I realized that I wasn't a doctor and further realized that an actual doctor might have dispelled such symptoms and such worry with a scoff and a waved hand. So it was important to consult some medical authority quickly, because we've all heard about strokes and sudden afflictions and people dropping dead.

*

In fact, just yesterday morning, I'd heard about a situation just like the one I thought was beginning to afflict me last night: a friend's significant other's cousin had very suddenly and without warning suffered what had to have been an aneurysm. This person had died where she'd stood.

*

On the kitchen table, underneath the lights which are often left on for me, was a manila envelope. Despite my affliction and concern about same, curiosity got the better of me. It was from the Fort Collins Police Department, and contained the statements of the attending officers on December 17th. There were four statements, all written in layman's terms. They were organized roughly in an order of descending pertinence to the case, so that the first officer there gave his account first, and the officers who took pictures and indexed the items in the room gave their accounts next, and so on. I read all of these in rapid succession without becoming upset. I did experience some conscious "huh" moments, as in "Huh, the white male they're discussing in these statements is my brother." I imagine that this account played a similar role for me that the 9/11 Commission Report played for direct victims of 9/11, in that that report, itself written in a direct, unadorned, and "you-are-there" style, probably served to reanimate that morning and its root causes by virtue of its simple language and swift plotting. Police reports, by way of their necessary emphasis on fact and what happened, are absorbing in the extreme.

*

I had not, at any point yesterday, heard any official word from the Las Vegas school.

*

I consulted WebMD and found out about Transient Ischemia Attacks, which portend strokes, and brushed up on what I knew about strokes. Because this is the kind of person I am, I decided action was necessary.

*

Discussions with family members revealed that I couldn't talk quite correctly. I had all of the right syllables, but these syllables were jumbled together and not forming the words of which they were part. I was speaking the way I imagine a dyslexic person reads. My thinking was relatively clear - I was thinking in clear sentences. But I was unable to speak the sentences I had in mind in an accurate, untroubled way. As anyone who knows me will understand, I was very conscious of how terrifying this notion was to me: I was unable to use my own language. Communication was just plain cut-off. And then of course there's an exponential increase in this effect when you're aware of it, because the terror I felt made it more difficult to think and speak, and the speech paralysis seemed to deepen and establish itself. Whatever had caused it, it threatened to become self-sustaining.

*

Speculation would suggest that my reading the report exaggerated my symptoms last night. Anyone have any notion of what those were symptoms of? But how odd it is that the symptoms began before I even arrived home. That's a coincidence, if you ask me. Still, the ensuing symptoms and the content of the report, and the fact that I didn't react to it as I read it but that, instead and strangely, I began to feel those symptoms accerlerate just after I'd read it, well then I have to say that the whole episode now seems to teach me something about the way the brain, when simply unable to process an overwhelming amount and type of information, must translate that information into something - if not into conscious understanding, then into another form of expression.

*

Anyway, my health's alright today. I hope all of you are well. I promise to talk about

a) Post-postmodernism / "The New Sincerity"

b) Recently acquired music

c) This particular posed photo of Jon and some other Gunner's Mates, about 12 sailors with guns and no-nonsense expressions, arranged in some Illinois hangar

soon.

Good Ground - Excerpt #1

2006-04-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

While I realize that this might be confusing to read outside of the context of the rest of it, I'm still interested in off-the-cuff reactions. Basically I'll set the scene just by saying that the novel takes place in the Hamptons of Long Island, and that there's a very chi-chi organization called the Northampton Hamlet Town Board which is dedicated to the ideal of founding and running a whole town for a certain stratum of the rich and the elite. For instance:

*

At 3:30 a.m. every morning the bakers of Hilsbeck’s Deli gather to enter through the deli’s rear door, the first obstacle to which is the two keys needed to unlock it, one key on either side of the door and far enough away from each other that no one person can unlock it, this being an adaptation from Cold War missile launch command centers. At 3:30 a.m. in the morning the needed synchronization can be a difficult feat, with some bakers choosing to steady themselves by leaning their foreheads up against the cold brick and just listening for the signal to turn their key, half-dozing. Once they’re into the main room they enter, one by one, the hyperbaric flash chamber, strip nude, don goggles, and wait for the generator, which powers up slowly and with the warbly rising note of an electric guitar about to overload, and finally flashes like a camera’s flash, this process searing off in one painless instant the baker’s outermost layer of skin and with it any sort of bacteria that could potentially find its way into the bagels. Off-color comments about this wee-hour nudity and skin-searing process are rare and, if encountered in recent Hilsbeck’s hires, quickly nixed with blank looks. Everyone’s responsible for their own flashed-off skin, which in the next room is airblasted from their bodies, sending onto the floor a dry white snow that they’ve all got to broom off to the shallow brushed-steel gutter that runs the perimeter of the airgun chamber. Estimated cost of the isolation booths and decontamination installations was vague but rumor had it was somewhere in the tens of millions. Then it’s a smaller shower room with jets embedded in the walls firing scalding water with an antiseptic solution; those who’ve been around Hilsbeck’s long enough know that it’s a good idea to keep their goggles on, considering the no-nonsense chemical compounds in the solution. Dressing in the Hilsbeck’s white jumpsuit is next. If Long Island were ever to be nuked, Hilsbeck’s would be, for those who knew about and appreciated the extent of its safety measures, the most logical place to find safety. When you think about it, it’s strange that according to the Charter there’s no need for hairnets. Getting all five or six bakers into the kitchen and front counter area takes about twenty minutes, although if something happens with any step of the sterilization process, a clogged water jet in the shower room for instance, they are to contact the NHTB Standards of Service Dept. Under no circumstances are they to proceed into the food preparation area until a tech crew’s been dispatched and the chambers have been fixed and everyone’s been properly decontaminated. These crews are actually surprisingly swift in coming, as though they’re constantly on call the way firefighters always are. Then baking. The bagel dough that’s been chilling overnight’s unsealed from their vacuum-locked stainless steel vats, which are stored in ceiling-height refrigerators with two thermometers inset in its door, for redundancy. The front counter area is manned by a cashier and prep person who, although pals with and sometimes related to the rest of the crew that had arrived and gone through the whole decontamination skinflash process, tends to be somewhat distended socially from the rest of the Hilsbeck’s crew. By the time the first hungry people appear at the counter—construction workers on their way to some seaside estate, usually, and sometimes staffers of local hotels and caterers, who know what their patronage of Hilsbeck’s will mean for their various business concerns—the crew’s boiled, seasoned, quality-tested, and sent at least a gross of bagels through the airlocked chamber on a conveyor belt that is, on its return trip, constantly being irradiated and dusted free of crumbs. Before it became the norm, morning TV news anchors loved to estimate the crowd of mobile diners in line with their open Posts, idling with bottles of juice taken from the refrigerators that are right there on the floor, reached somewhere into the 200 range. Think Zen is one of the mantras drilled into each Hilsbeck’s staffer mind as they strain to be become practiced in those swift and expedient motions that define the efficient food-service establishment—egg and proscuitto bagels wrapped in wax paper like a geometric model of some thorny math problem, napkins slipped into paper bags with the speed with which a criminal divests himself of hot dollar bills. Twice an hour, no matter how far out of the door the line of morning diners goes, one of the front assembly staffers is to leave their post in order to cart a ladder to the front door, ascend it with a spray bottle full of a gentle soap and water combination in one hand and a chamois cloth in the other, and there at the top giving a thorough polish to the plaque on which, in a protruding oval of black obsidian, the golden words “Northampton Hamlet Chartered Institution” are expertly inscribed. The plaque never needs the polish, but it’s in the rules, and it’s considered wise to direct attention up there as often as they can.

Freaking sweet

2006-04-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

It's National High Five Day.

I just found out about this myself, but high five somebody today, especially if you're not on the East Coast and have more time to high-five.

Unity, power, awesome!

Now wait just a minute. How did it go in Vegas?

2006-04-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

Oh, geez! Right! I forgot to tell you about that, didn't I? Well, I hardly know where to begin. Maybe if you asked me some questions first?

You taught a class, didn't you?

Oh yeah. That was an adventure. I found out on Thursday while sitting in the Atlanta airport that the class I was slated to teach was reading Austen's Persuasion. Maybe I've already mentioned this. So we went out and snagged the book, and I made it my life for the weekend. Most of the weekend: one must make time for barbecue. But I read it through all the way, and it's a good thing I did: I learned on Monday morning that the class wasn't beginning the book but was ending it. This turned out to be a blessing, as I could ask larger questions about themes and techniques and build on what the students hopefully already knew.

So, how did it go?

You know, I'm unsure what sort of confidentiality, if any, I would be prudent to observe and abide by... but let me say that it went very well. I had about ten pages of lecture and discussion questions and made it through about half of them; we filled the 55-minute period handily. Always overprepare. Resident wise man Tony over at Geneva Convention advocates that one "prepare less and teach more", which means that while there's a lot of worth in preparing lectures, that worth is really based in priming the teacher's mind for the kinds of sudden tangents and chance pursuits that an engaged class tends to provide. Prepare, overprepare, but then go where your students and your own inclinations lead you.

OK, but I can't quite see you in this picture.

Small half-circle of students, observing faculty behind them. I'm in a corner of the room, with a white board on one side and a chalkboard on the other. The chalkboard is primed with a chart: is Persuasion subversive or is Persuasion conservative? The white board has a large ring of characters' names. I range between the boards with my a dry erase marker in one hand, and when I call on a student I do so with my right hand, which has the text splayed open in it. A passerby, stopped in the hallway for a minute or two, would hear at least one laugh.

Sounds great.

It was. It re-lit something forceful in me.

How about the rest of the day?

Well, again, everything is still pending, but it was rather pleasant. Sure, I had to be "on" all day, looking for ways to parlay what I was hearing and learning into an explanation of how I'd fit into X situation or solve Y educational need, and that's expectedly nerve-wracking. But the people with whom I spoke were delightful, really, and clearly keen on doing their work well. I'm sold on the place. The rest of the day passed with half-hour or 45-minute conversations with various instructors and administrators. And one killer lunchtime session with the Student Ambassadors.

Killer how?

Killer as in, Wow, these kids are sharp and incredibly invested in their own education. See, this was lunchtime: I was having lunch with about 15 sophomores and juniors. I'd expected the conversation to be intermittent, allowing room for me to, you know, eat. Instead, it was one question after another. If I'd let myself relax at the start of lunch, I quickly got back into "on" mode. I felt the way a batter feels with a pitching machine that's been set on a surprising high setting - which felt even better because I was knocking back these pitches fairly firmly. Questions ran the gamut from the sorts of workloads I'd assign to my hobbies to the subject of my dissertation if I had to write it that second instead of years in the future.

What was the subject?

Post-postmodernism and contemporary poetics, of course.

I'm sure that went over like a lead balloon.

Hardy har-har. You're funny. No, actually it went over well. Because you have to understand that this particular -ism derives from the very media that young persons today traffic in, morning noon and night and after their own fashions. But yes. In fact I began speaking of Campbell McGrath, and as it happened I had his American Noise in my shoulder bag...

"As it happened"...?

I know, it sounds contrived. But really, I didn't plan it. I brought the book as a sort of good-luck charm: so many of his poems take as their theme the notion of striding out west with a sense of bewildered possibility. So I read them two sentences of "Angels and the Bars of Manhattan", and with McGrath you have to realize that two sentences might go on for pages, with all manner of sonic texture and rhetorical flourish... it's a poetry that lends itself well to being read aloud.

How did they like it?

They liked it a great deal.

Pretty thrilling.

I know!

So when will you hear back?

Scuttlebutt says Monday.

What's on the agenda now?

Some more applications, lunch soon, unpacking, perhaps a poem, definitely some time in the weight room, and this new book Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin, which 40 pages in is pretty good.

How's your book coming, anyway?

This interview is OVER. Hahaha, no, it's coming along. But no, seriously. Let's talk about that later.

Recently acquired

2006-04-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

Spiritualized, Let It Come Down. British 90s druggy space-rock with gospel choirs singing backup.

Spiritualized, Live at Royal Albert Hall, 10 October 1997. A two-disc sprawler of a live set. It occurs to me that this band's like a proto-Sigur Ros: grittier, bluesier, less likely to stargaze and sob. It's dense, difficult, soaring, and yet somehow religious. It's not easy to take in all at once. And just imagine if you'd been there.

Built To Spill, Perfect From Now On. Ten songs at six-minutes apiece. Apparently each one's an epic of guitar fretwork. Haven't heard this one yet. But this band? They're dependable. "Going Against Your Mind," first track from their new disc You In Reverse, is just stellar.

Brother of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, who played on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Nat Adderley's big song is the title cut. Let's hear it for brothers getting time in the spotlight.

Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine. There's little I can say to expand on the critical praise this disc has rightfully garnered. I will however say that these melodies will snake into your subconscious with a quickness. Fans of Rufus Wainwright and Tori Amos, be on notice (and vice versa, too). "Be kind to me, or treat me mean / I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine" - and the way the melody jumps through the "exTRAORD" syllables will make your shoulders just shudder with delight.

The Bad Plus, These Are The Vistas. Hot goddamn is this disc fine. Piano, bass, drums: your standard jazz trio. Piano, bass, drums as played by these guys? Crazy good. It's innovative without studio magic or synths or anything else: just crack musicianship all the way through. I don't know enough about jazz to explain everything that I suspect they're doing, but I do know that there's a whole lot more to love here than the almost-famous covers of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Blondie's "Heart of Glass" - which are also fine.

Pictures I didn't take

2006-04-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

This is a picture I didn't take of me tossing Jane Austen's Persuasion up in the air on Jeremy and Liz's new sofa; you can tell from the one-raised-eyebrow museful smirk on my face that I've just finished reading the book in its entirety - 180 pages since 7:30 a.m. this morning.

*

This is a picture from yesterday, when I'm diving into Liz and Jeremy's pool after a run that took me down past the Stratosphere on the Strip. I'm all sorts of exhilarated already. The pool water was maybe 70 degrees. A half-second after this was taken, I broke the surface and was heard to exclaim "Sweet Mother of God!" Greg Louganis!

*

This is a picture of Jeremy and I mid-stride as we cross Fremont Street beneath the lasers of the Fremont Street Experience. These are our going-out jackets. Mine is Jeremy's: a slick form-fitting number made of suede, I think. His is purple velour: a smoking jacket that Hugh Hefner, were he to pass us on the street, would notice and offer a passing compliment about. You can tell by my wild-eyed, mid-sentence expression and Jeremy's vaguely disdainful look that we're badly in need of food.

*

This is a picture I didn't take of Jeremy, Liz, myself, Mike, and Jen in the family room as the sun came over the rear fence and through the sunroom to fill the family room with the generous effects of a warm, windy April night. Clearly, from the way Jeremy, Mike and I are learning forward and high-fiving each other, you can tell that that we're reminiscing, thoroughly, about the names of first- and second-generation G.I. Joes (Duke, Scarlet, Lady Jaye, Flint, Gung-Ho, etc.) and classic NES games (Bubble Bobble, Contra, Super C, Blades of Steel). You'd be right to conclude from the way that Liz and Jen are sitting with their fists in their cheeks looking askance that they are less than fascinated with these minutiae.

*

This is a picture I didn't take of myself this morning as I sat reading in the half-shade of the pomegranate tree which overhangs the pool. It looks as though I'm oblivious to the commuter plane - a Ted flight - which sits hugely over my head as it comes in for a landing, but I'm not. It's just that by this point in the morning I've seen like six flights land, and I'm used to them.

*

This is a picture I didn't know was being taken of me as I leaned over the Hoover Dam this afternoon. I'm leaning over the open-space side. You can see the dozens of transmission towers on both sides of the abyss. The larger guy wires indicate where the new bridge is going to go sometime before 2008, when it's scheduled to be finished. My eyes are closed because all of the wind from the river valley is shunting together and flying up the dam into my face, and that, when coupled with the perspective of the very small industrial complex far below and the stippled patterns of the rocks, produces the sort of calm that makes you feel you don't need the use of your eyes to understand where you are or feel the scale of what's happening.

Las Vegas means The Meadows

2006-04-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

The setting: JBG's very 60s pad in downtown Las Vegas, which house features white brick highlights, a killer sunroom, and a bright yellow Formica kitchen table which some of you might remember from the Hollyhock house in old Eugene, OR.

What we did last night: went to the Artisan lounge in downtown Vegas, where there are no slots and no games.

What we talked about: English pedagogy, Campbell McGrath, where to get married in Vegas and avoid "that Vegasy feeling", home renovations.

What I'm teaching on Tuesday: Jane Austen's Persuasion.

How I'm feeling about that: Surprisingly confident.

What the weather's doing: Mid-70s, overcast, a few incidental raindroplets that do nothing to interfere with your plans or your mood.

Best simile that goes a long way toward explaining why taking care of a pool is so engaging and fun: "It's like a big witch's brew."

Plans for today: Purchase and read Persuasion - OK, maybe just a couple of chapters for today - then pick up some batteries for the camera, snag a smart-looking jacket, hit the In-N-Out Burger and order off its secret menu, and then, then, it's the Strip, the Strip, the Strip.

What's on the stereo right now: Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People, "Pacific Theme", which more than any other song you can think of is the soundtrack to this whole trip and all of your impending victories.

I'll believe in anything

2006-04-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

My fingers feel more loose - looser? - than they have in a while. Wine helps. But so does Wolf Parade.

Apologies to the Queen Mary is a sweeter Modest Mouse - a Modest Mouse gorged on some sweet French cheese I've never heard of. But I tire of explaining bands and my enthusiasms for them by means of other bands. That's lazy writing. So be it known that Wolf Parade features hazy vocals full of reverb, yawped out over sharp clean guitar lines and a drum kit that's typically being whomped on with great vigor and spit. Their whole sound is ramshackle - but not lo-fi - in a charming way, as though that boy you were eyeing back in high school but stopped eyeing because he wouldn't amount to anything turned out OK in the end after all, and his songs are about God and guns and love and la-la-las, the latter two being boppy, powerful counters to the former two. The song this post is titled for is a goldurn masterpiece.

*

I've been emptying my head into a Word file I've started specifically for pedagogical and educational review. Because you see, I have a major. Major. Interview coming up this Tuesday the 18th. This interview will take place in Las Vegas at that city's foremost preparatory learning institution.

I'm pretty excited about this.

Part of me wants to say that further discussion would jinx the proceedings, and I should be more demure and Zen. Part of me simultaneously remembers Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio in the James Cameron underwater adventure film The Abyss, who, as her yellow submersible capsule is being craned into position over the unruly ocean, is wished luck on her mission. "Luck is not a factor," she says, and wrenches at the lever that releases the sub from its tether, and she plunges into the water.

Zonked

2006-04-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

Best word ever for that weird feeling of displacement and sustained fatigue that stems from travel. Last weekend in Milwaukee I was zonked for most of the travelling and the wedding, although I wasn't so zonked that I couldn't cut a rug (dance) with my baby.

*

I'm not very religious anymore. This is Palm Sunday, and I didn't even know it until we arrived at the church were my cousin's baby Aiden was to be baptized. Actually our arrival was sort of funny: with my dad driving and the Dostoevsky somewhat inadequate to the task of keeping me awake, I slept all the way there - conked out, you might say - until I rubbed my eyes and there stood the church. It's hard to describe how beautiful the temperature, the weather, and the church all conspired to be simultaneously; I'll satisfy the descriptive task by swiping a phrase that JBG used to describe the weather in Vegas. (More on Vegas soon.) The phrase is "golden blue." It was that kind of a day. Inside the church, which was a grand, recently renovated sight to see made of light beige stone and much interior space, was packed with people who'd been standing, sitting, and kneeling since 9:30 AM. Catholic calisthenics. As it turned out, that had been the bishop himself up there officiating, and that's why the mass was still going on by 10:45 or so. You could tell by the number of people slipping off to the restrooms that it was the kind of mass where you sing every verse to every hymn. And so there we were -

Here's a quick family tree-style primer or refresher on my family's setup, if you need one,

Baba (Grandmother) - Pa (Grandfather)
/ | \
The LeBeau Family The Filonovich Family The Lobko Family

with lots of grandchildren and a swelling number of great-grandchildren. It's really something, considering Baba and Pa's immigrant origins fleeing pogroms and hunger and futurelessness. So there at the church a whole slew of grown grandkids and great-grandkids are scampering around waiting for the ceremony to actually start. Greetings ran to the garrulous side of things. I was wearing my sunshine yellow sweater and feeling particularly daisy-fresh thanks to the nap and thanks more simply to just seeing everybody. It felt more, well, holy than any kind of "Quick get into church mode" conduct could have. I had no interest in taking communion.

I'm really very interested in this. I was thinking about Jon at various points today, in part at how unlikely it would have been that he'd have been in attendence had he happened to be in Syracuse and, well, alive.* It hadn't been for sure that I was coming until two nights ago, when I first heard of it. (I tend to be removed - not by choice or anything - from the funny catch-as-catch-can lines of communication.) I can picture him there, in gym shorts and a white T-shirt, or maybe even if we really tried to get him there a button-up shirt of some solid color such as charcoal grey or royal blue. But I can only so picture him because I know that it's a fiction. I wouldn't lay good odds on his choosing to attend if he were around. He hated church. And I don't think that it was merely with the disdain some people have for organized social activities. I'm surmising and inferring things left and right here but I suspect that religion was a nettle in Jon's side less for the obligatory C.C.D. / Religious Ed obligations that all young Catholics are made to endure, and rather had a lot to do with what he regarded as its mysticism. Its easy-answer appearance. Its profession to know one's soul. One of the tragedies of Jon's life was that he didn't learn to depend or trust other people; he wasn't accustomed to enlisting anyone's aid. He was one of your roughs; you could say that there was bred in him that brand of rugged individualism that would have made him a good frontiersman circa the 1870s. I think his take on religion was somewhat Marxist, actually, and in opium plus masses.

Kneejerk responses to this (potential) position of Jon's would center on faith. Namely that he didn't have it. But I'm not really interested at the moment in the theological implications of Jon's stance on these kinds of activities and ways of thinking. Instead I wonder what he considered holy. I don't mean to confuse what he felt to be happiness with what he felt to be holy. Happiness and holiness are distinct, one potential distinction being that of the scale of the emotion or experience. Maybe happiness is a sense of personal fulfillment, and holiness is a sense of a contentment and happiness within a larger communal or even cosmic context. I see a picture like this,

or this,

and I have to hope that these moments were, for Jon, more than simple moments of a transient happiness. I like to think that they represented bigger instances of that happiness that is hopefully typical in our daily lives. And that any such expansion of scale in this happiness had everything to do with Jon knowing that there were people around enjoying themselves and himself. That there was this rapid-firing back-and-forth acknowledgment, both implicit and explicit, of the fact that everyone there is glad for everybody else's being there, and for everybody else's being happy - on and on like that. That sounds about right for the definition of holy I want to sketch here.

*

More pictures follow.

Max and Shane playing with toy soldiers at the edge of the font. The toy soldiers were the kind with firm oval bases. I loved this part. I snapped a photo that inadequately captures the game Max played with his younger brother Alec; Alec, 2 and 1/2 years old, started dipping his finger in the font behind the priest's back and commenced baptising by chasing them down and wiping his finger off on their skirt or pant leg. Max got in on this soon after. Then they began baptising each other, but without any of that pesky ceremony. It was as though they wanted to see who could make the other brother more hallowed, or something.

Aiden was dipped three times. Didn't cry. It was actually awesomely cute. The priest dipped him in the water and Aiden vocalized his displeasure with this crotchety-sounding old man's cry. As soon as he was lifted out, he stopped. Think of a Geiger counter being brought near to and away from radioactive material. It wasn't a real cry, but let you know that if you left him in there then he was really going to cry for you.

Oh, well now here's that shot I mentioned. "You're blessed!" "No I'm not, you're blessed!" Running in a circle, thinking thoughts like that.

My cousin Tasha and myself, surrounded by posters lauding Italian mobsters of the silver screen. And Tony Montana.

* I realize that that sentence has some redundant elements, but I stet it because such redundancies actually remind me, in writing, like right there BAM on the screen, that Jon is in fact dead. At times I must resort to saying it repeatedly, as with a mantra, for it to sink in.

Happy disarray

2006-04-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

Because every few months or so it's time to demolish, in a controlled way, the tower of papers and paid bills and letters and newspaper clippings that I keep on the floor of whatever room I'm staying in. These towers of paper pass for my file cabinets, and sooner or later it comes time to empty them out so to speak. Stacks for personal correspondence / letters, Good Ground-related documents (such as Long Island train timetables, there on the bed, pamphlets and brochures of memorable places I've blundered into (the stack by the coffee cup there; if you're ever in Southampton NY, go to the Publick House, and if you're ever in Steamboat Springs, CO, stay at the Iron Horse Inn). And does anyone else have a hard time throwing out old Times Magazines? I have three issues in the lower left corner there.

Post-postmodernism Sighting #33

2006-04-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

I liked what Tony Hoagland wrote in his article "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment," published in the March 2006 Poetry. Hard to argue with the primacy, or at least the ascension, of a looser nature to the contemporary lyric. Narrative has fallen out of favor. Not to say it it's no longer being written. Hoagland himself is after all a narrative worker through and through. His work might be more jammy and fun than most narrative poets allow themselves to be: see this stanza, taken at random from those pieces of his available online:

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

and you have to wonder if narrative is a harder tool to use effectively. It turns out that Hoagland does have a surprise or two in the next stanza and line - "some kind of light is coming from her head" he says - but I think that Hoagland believes that this is a belief that's common among practitioners of what he calls the Poem of Our Moment. Which is "a more lyric and dissociative thing" that doesn't hem us into a poetic story. Hoagland theorizes the decline of narrative and the rise of the loose weird just-kidding lyric this way:

"The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. It hesitates to enter a point of view that cannot easily be altered or quickly escaped from."

Hoagland's dead on when he points out this and some other reasons that conventional narrative can feel restrictive to practitioners of what Hoagland calls the Poem of the Moment. It makes sense that contemporary poets would want to chop up their narratives and stitch them together and chop them up and stitch together again: narrative can be stifling to write. I could take issue with that but suffice it to say for now that he's sketching a case for why the skittery hey-no-hands! lyric has become more popular. Fine.

He's pretty close to the mark when he points out the drawbacks of that jumpy magpie-on-E poetry that's replaced conventional narrative as the Poem of the Moment. It's a little naive to assert that there's one Poem or Poetics of the Moment, obviously. But his description of the Poem of the Moment does strike gold:

"Poems like 'Improvisation' showcase personality in the persona of their chatty, free-associating, nutty-smart narrators. It is a self that does not stand still, that implies a kind of spectral, anxious insubstantiality. The voice is plenty sharp in tone and sometimes observant in its detail, but it is skittery. Elusiveness is the spearker's central characteristic. Speed, wit, and absurdity are its attractive qualities. The last thing these poems are going to do is risk their detachment, their distance, their freedom from accountability" (Poetry, March 06, 513).

And then what's greatest of all is that in the end, his discussion of Aragon's "Pop Song" hits chords that are not only akin to post-postmodernism, but, like, define it dude.

"Aragon's bold, clownish poem, typical of this strain of French Surrealism, is an exhortation to wonder. Its leaping, erratic movements... the mention of death, the progressive intimacy of the voice, the arrival at self-examination and tonal sincerity, all mark this poem which combines rhetorical performance with interiority" (Poetry, March 06, 516-17).

Key words as follows: sincerity. Again with the New Sincerity. But the meaning of that word is this context and how to get it is a matter that's for another post. Also: combines rhetorical performance with interiority. So Hoagland's argument against the conventional narrative - even though that's not the bone he wants to pick - is that while there may be interiority, there's not enough rhetorical performance, and the poem seems rote, familiar, even insipid. And his argument against the loose free-associating lyrics that does seem popular if not dominant - and this bone is being picked, big time - is that while there's a great deal of rhetorical performance in the PotM, there's not enough interiority.

That said, it's not going to help the Post-postmodernists' and New Sincerists' case if we're to disregard the possibility of reading "interiority" and "tonal sincerity" into work that would seem initially to lack it. Hoagland indicts the PotM for demanding a "freedom from accountability." I understand why he says this: in the poem "Improvisation," which he bases much of his critique upon, there is a sense of skittishness and "don't pay attention to me, I'm mad" when we read lines like "In the future there will be less to remember. / In the past I have only my body and shoes. / The gut and the throat are two entirely different animals." But Hoagland doesn't give the poem, or the poet, enough credit. He's right to say that this leaping around confesses a certain disregard for the narrator's and the reader's emotional experiences, but at the same time he doesn't dig very deeply into the possibilities of what such lines might be hiding.

Hey, you know what? This is is nitpicking. Hoagland shoots three times - One) at the narrative and why many poets have left it behind, Two) at what he calls the Poem of the Moment and how the PotM seems obsessed with this funny combination of erudition and confusion (very postmodern, that), and Three) at this new approach which makes use of postmodern methods of composition and rhetorical performance and arrives at an articulate emotional experience. It's not a How-To, thank God. And it's not quite a manifesto. But as an essay of the times it scores, three times, and describes what post-postmodernism is. Not what it should be, but what it actually is as represented by work that's happening out there. Yes. I've got to say it. This is really happening, kiddos.

Sigh.

2006-04-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

Less $ in my account than I realized. And now to pay roughly $400 in bills. See title of post.

Today's Russian Master Says...

2006-04-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

"Oh, no; there are people of deep feeling who have been somehow crushed. Buffoonery in them is a form of resentful irony against those to whom they haven't yet dared speak the truth..."

~ Alyosha

F. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Millywaukay

2006-04-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

was great. To wit:

This isn't a good shot of either of us, but I post it for the sneery look of the guy in the background. Far be it from me to say he represents Milwaukeans in general. Nevertheless, as with clowns, there is something frightening yet funny about the look he's giving us.

Usher and longtime member of Kristin's crew Matt Parsons there on the left. Groomsman and brother to the bride John Fagan there on the right. There's a funny story about John which I don't feel at liberty to share, really, but I will say that if you're in an unfamiliar city and overindulge at a bachelor's party and take a walk, take your shoes with you. And make sure someone knows where you are. Or at least be sure about whose couch it is you've collapsed onto, and in whose apartment the couch is. Or don't, and freak everybody out!

Good souls Anne Chang (Bender?) and Nathan Bender.

Groom Aaron Stockum. His betrothed gave him some real Spidey webslingers there. Which I think is a very loving gift. It really is all about the thought, I've decided. I've never been much into the idea of goods that are traditionally "valuable." Jewelry, designer clothes, they don't even make me shrug I care so little for them. But gifts that consider the pleasures another person can take in something you or I might consider unlikely display what is in the end a real understanding of that other person. Because Aaron loves him some Silver Age comics. Great thinking, Shira.

One of our better photos ever.

*

Milwaukee is actually a fairly hip place, in certain districts. I wouldn't call it thriving, but I would call parts of it charming. Places to check out on returning: the Museum of Art; Broad Vocabulary (a bookstore that may or may not have, um, specialty material ["Broad" being meant in its non-P.C. 40s / 50s sense, i.e. "dame"] ); the Miller Factory. On your visit, try the Lakefront River Walk Stein. And the wedding was lovely. 25 minutes. Kudos Aaron and Shira. Thanks for having us.

Gotta go

2006-03-29T21:57:00.000-08:00

, but only until Monday. I'm off to New York City, where I'm sure the MacDowell Colony will offer me an internship, and where I'll have a large dinner and a bottle of red with, well, let's call her someone very special. Then it's off to Milwaukee, or, as we say in Algonquin, "The Good Land", where Shira Fagan will wed Aarom Stockum. Pre-emptive congratulations, you two! Um, do you need any silverware or other wedding-gift-type stuff! Because we are unprepared!

In the meantime, be well, all of you. Stay tuned for upcoming posts including a review of The Flaming Lips new album At War With the Mystics, to be released on April 4th - read about it hear first. Depending on your web browsing habits of course. Who knows, maybe you've already read about it. Cheers and kudos.

So I took off on my bicycle

2006-03-29T10:14:00.000-08:00

Recently acquired:

Andrew Bird, Weather Systems. It occurred to me, listening to the final track while lifting weights, that there's a possible paradox implicit in pairing weather and systems. I still like my Jeff Buckley-meets-Rufus Wainwright description of Bird's sound. Lots of string arrangments, a delicate tenor voice, lyrics that are actually lyrical and not just words to be sung. The melodies aren't as full of hooks and pep as those on Bird's Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs, but there's enough cautious power in the last song's drumming to intrigue and comfort just about anybody. I humbly submit. Bird writes music for people who are confused about the world - his melodies themselves can sometimes stymie or make you go Hmmm - but he always slips in a track that argues for the eventual improvement of whatever's wrong or off.

Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll. Dance music that isn't all about sustained crescendo and breakdowns. Very fun stuff, very warm. "Sunworshipper" samples a precocious lad who one day just had had enough. Over a very gentle hip-hop beat, the kid says "Well to solve all my problems, to get outta drugs I'd I'd hadda enough of that, I'd had the college I'd had the earning the money and the material trip, I just decided I was gonna find a new way of life... So I took off on my bicycle." Then it breaks down into some decidedly post-rockish drum beats straight off of a Tortoise record. Then back to the cool bicycling. The whole record sounds like Air - super-cool French band Air scored The Virgin Suicides starring Kirsten Dunst - if Air were to put some stronger beats beneath them.

Alpha, Stargazing. If Massive Attack and Portishead took some uppers instead of downers, they'd sound like UK duo Alpha. Cool James Bond-style female vocals will make you want to pose in very slo-mo ways while brandishing your thumb-&-forefinger gun.

Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People. Not as likely to make you slap your forehead as the heavier, poppier, thicker mix of Broken Social Scene's more recent self-titled record, this one's worth your time as well.

Who is Chris Chubbuck?

2006-03-28T21:55:00.000-08:00

Huh.