Joanna Newsom - New Untitled Track (Live - 10/07/07)

Ok this qualifies as a criteria. I know Joanna Newsom is one of those "devisive" artists. But this song just well, I turn into some kind of retarded, gaping pumpkin whenever I hear this song. As in if you were my GI system and you made an emergency call while this song was playing, I'd probably have to do a load. Let's just leave at that.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! - Dads

Ok at this point I'm very drunk and angst ridden. I may be headed for a nervous breakdown or I may just be laughing and howling at this because it's fucking hilarous.

Terrell Owens throwing popcorn in his face is still the dumbest touchdown celebration ever.

Mmm fractal.

Paris


That one's a little inside

and here's another one

Men's Group meets tonite

Blog Note

I want to thank me
for being me

Squirrel



Today is my day off, what should I do?

I think I have hemorhoids.

Today is my day off, what'll I do.

I think I have hemorhoids.

Today is my day off, whaddaya want?

I think I have hemorhoids.

Today's my day off, whaddaya want man huh please pass the freakin
steroidy cheez?

Armantrout’s brief stanzas are skeptical about almost every source of human confidence, trust, hope, joy, strength or belief. I don't think this is true. I think they're skeptical of the forces that variously act on these "human confidences".

Why is it that just because they don't offer the preferred consolation tents with pitiable decor of most poetry, they have to be read as somehow unfeeling? What I think they withhold is reassurance, which is not the same thing as distrusting humanity.

So yeah today I took Joe's advice and read poetry that I like, though I had to do it at the workplace. But this is actually a job where we are encouraged to read during the downtime. And well, Joe is right. I read Alice Notley, Clark Coolidge, Rod Smith and a little Ceravolo. And I also read Arlo Quint's book Photogenic Memory. It's pretty great. It falls apart and puts itself back together again. That's a compliment. I love it when poetry does that. I don't think any other artform achieves this combination of cognition and viscerality quite the way poetry can. It exists on the tongue, in the brain, in the body, and out there all at once.

I'm in a pissy mood. I will probably remain involved with the "community" in a half-assed way as is my want. Sometimes however I wish I could "drop out" and just become a recluse. Of course I can do that, but I won't. I'm going to say something that is not directed at any one person. It's often hard to see what the point is of links, connections and various correspondences. Being a part of the "community". But then if someone was all like "Hey Mike, I wanna publish your book." I'm sure I would be all like, "Oh my God, the poetic community. Me and Uncle Creeley and Auntie Gertrude Stein. Oh where would I be without it!?" I always said that I didn't want to turn into one of those bitter poets. I don't know what really makes me a poet. Where am I going with this seriously? Where am I going with this "blog post" and this "poetic career". The fact is I just don't work very hard. I don't really try to get my poems published, I don't really try to do readings, I don't try to be a part of the "community". I don't say where the press is from that so and so had their book published by. I don't know how important any of that is. I guess I shouldn't be complaining about some percieved indifference.

There have been alot of times when I said to a friend of mine here what amounts to the opposite of what's above. But that's all really important. Sharing with your peers. Having an audience. I don't know if I ever actually said "community".

And now it is the next day. I'm a chubby frail human being. In the morning I'm writing on the other side of a "pissy attack", so things haven't gotten started yet. Though I know they will. I wasn't sure last night whether to publish this, but it's like what the hell.

1. poets are all so short

2. all you have to do is be there

3. good taste is important

4. know the dialect

5. know your 'damn role'

6. gesticulations: when to / when not to

7. a poet's wit : bear with big fangs & claws

8. recipient of : little rabbit being jostled

I've got those non-existent middle class 'rich people all think they're smarter than me' blues.

____

Mishearing in Cat Power's 'Taking People': "Who's wrong to day-trade you?"

Indeed, Chan Marshall.

"Too much goddamn tradition-worship around here as it is now, that's what's wrong with Creedance Clearwater and a half a horde other wasted talent that could be kickin' off doorknobs and hinges if they weren't so allfired concerned with respecting all that stuff from the past and doing things the Right Way as learned from the old farts insteada just kicking their musical asses around the rumpus room until it might begin to sound like something new." --Lester Bangs

Yep, I would say that's the problem with 99% of today's music too.

I was having a discussion today with Karl about about what a Collected Comments From Silliman's Blog might be called. And first off let me just say typing that kind of made me shiver. Let's at least make it a very very slim Selected. Like one of those little The Essential... volumes. But then that word leads to all kinds of other questions that trail off at the corners of my mouth like so much gravy from a Philly Cheez Hot Pocket. But I'll go ahead and say let's call it Fuckin Wit My Head: The Best of Silliman's Blog's Comment Threads 03-07. Now if we can just get the rights to Jim Behrle's cherry-red dong.

Of course this will all be moot once Salacious Banter, ed. by Hauser and Saffran, hits.

I know I will sit down and eat and walk around and try not to use the phrase 'cobalt sky'. Use commas less in my writing because that is how my heroes write. ON drugs.

Ok so they are not all on drugs, but I had this fancy the other day, if you can imagine me having a 'fancy', that I would like to pay some person to dress like Jim Morrison, sit in a spinning chair with shades on and recite my poems under a single spotlight. Sort of like in that Oliver Stone movie about the doors. I would have to pay them to do it.

My only direction would be to 'take it easy' and 'know which way the wind blows'.

By the way it really irks me 9 out of 10 times when people (still) try to incorporate Dylan lyrics into an editorial piece. I know that almost 45 years after the fact is a little late to be complaining about this, and the piece I have in mind isn't really gonna cause anyone to reconsider anything. But how anyone could think 'watch the parking meters' was meant to be or could be viable in any political context is beyond me.

I have today off, what should I do?

Rereading Frank O'Hara almost newly shocked anew at just how fertile a poetic ground there is there. He is the major poet of the last 50 years I think, seriously. Without him there would be no langpo no flarf no various generations of the NY school for sure. To be sure many poets now would still be grappling with difficulities that reading Frank's poetry shatters and liberates us from completely. But one thing I've also noticed is how much his poetry bleeds into my poetry while I'm reading it. It's completely accessible and yet has every bit as a wide a vocabulary and breadth as any of the so-called Great Modernist Works. And you don't need a guidebook.

But I don't want to just imitate Frank, but then how can you not. He showed a way that was just so fucking liverating (what?) and intoxicating. I read the back of Lunch Poems and it really kind of surpised me because I've never really read any writing about O'Hara that resembles the deceptively simple explanation he himself gives for their "method".

"Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch his favorite meal."

I especially am intrigued by his use of normally avoided words like "rumination" and "pondering" in reference to Lunch Poems, though he may not have been 100% earnest in his use of them. That and the fact of "never forgetting to eat Lunch his favorite meal..." Last night I was typing a poem called Convo and realized when the pizza I ordered arrived that I really wanted to eat it, so I finished the poem a little more quickly than I would have otherwise. I think that was part of O'Hara's method too. I mean if you're hungry then that probably affects the poem no? But anyway, there's just nothing like O'Hara. Who the fuck else, even after all the imitations and flattery, could write something like this from Poem (first line "So many echoes in my head"):

but where in all this noise
am I waiting for the clouds to be blown
away away away away away into the sun
(burp), I wouldn't want the clouds to be
burped back by that hot optimistic cliche, it
hangs always promising some nebulous
healthy reaction to our native dark

Slowdive

quick a poem before I crap my pants
the bombs falling in full
brain stock bloom

Slowdive’s “Allison” like a
steep anchor pill

fastidious gospel annoyance

or the glorious writing we pen
in golden foyer breath
the insane trangender gesturing

beyond the old familiar death
the ideas of blank proportion

the politics of wells
perhaps humping atomospheric
drones

donning special garb folkways
choo choo blink in bling style

take this brother may it
serve you well

Maybe it's nostalgia talking but Times New Viking's Present The Paisley Reich is taking me on one hell of an indie nostalgia trip joyride right now. Not since the treasure map of early Pavement recordings has such a blissful lo fi racket entered these ears. I don't know why I am writing such lavender prose, I guess I'm just in a weird mood. But this band really is kicking my ass more with each listen. And what's more, maybe this is one of the secret ingredients, they actually rock harder than most lo-fi of yore. Which makes the blissed out joyful racket that much more blissed and joyful. On the group's myspace which lists the members as Hamish Kilgour, Brix E. Smith, Mark Ibold (nudge nudge wink wink) and "///ron house on tapes", a note from Matador informs us that TNV will soon become the cache of "exactly the sort of people you can't stand to hang around with". And Matador, that towering Chrysler Building of Indie Rock tm, should know because having signed the kids they're gonna be the ones bringing these 'sorts' to the party. But oh well it was never my party anyway. Since teenage years I've been mostly content having Transmissions from Satelite Indie beamed in from a distance. What's really of note is that Siltbreeze Records revived itself to bring out TNV's Dig Yourself. And that hearing "New Times, New Hope" offers a rush akin to seeing some lost beloved denizens returning from the Arctic Shelf with the news that yes it's melting but we can still party etc. Andy Mister has probably already heard Times New Viking, but I wonder what he thinks.

Ssh quiet, the poet is dining on a cheeseburger.

I have written the first song for Nothing In That Drawer below.

________

Bat Absorption

unfrisk follies
propped lovingly stagingly
can control climate control

wait for the lovelies
and your fangs bleeding
our first song is about a monster

your town once
wagged it’s tail

we are now here to celebrate the breakdown
we are now here to celebrate the breakdown

can the locks go
abrasively total drugstore
the trash bin’s arm

can the supple
poo stick remember
the oak shaven tears

and his bungle
made every boy purr

we are now here to celebrate the breakdown
we are now here to celebrate the breakdown

Someone help out with this. What is the Williams poem that has something about standing naked in a room while swinging some garment over your head?

Trying to catch up with the recorded output of Lisa Germano. I stopped paying attention after about Excerpts From A Love Circus. Happiness and Geek The Girl were albums I would listen to when I was in a very specific kind of mood as a teenager. Heavy heavy shit. Spare. Very plainly sung and lyriced. By far one of more the interesting 'indie singer-songwriters' from the 90s.

Does anybody want a Welsh Corgie named Ollie?

My new job captioning gives me time to read, so I've been reading Alli Warren's No Can Do, John Wieners' Cultural Affairs In Boston, Jack Spicer's Heads Of The Town (in the Collected Books), Vital Source, MKE, The Onion, The Shephard Express and Sports Illustrated. A number of those are free weekly mostly pretty crappy boring local newspapers. I pretty much knew that I would love No Can Do. I feel like I'm just starting to "get" Wieners somehow. I'd never really delved into Spicer's later work, and I'm liking it alot of course. In SI, I was actually reminded that there's something about sports that's very comforting.

And alot of Mr. Show with the commentary track on, which is almost as funny as the show itself.