APOLOGIES & SIMULACRA

DEVENDRA BANHART AND THE END OF THE FUTURE

2008-11-01T19:35:00.003-05:00

"His Seahorse is a statement for this generation"

--Robert Christgau [Paraphrased from a quote that used to be on Wikipedia]

I'm high, I'm happy & I'm free

I got my whole heart laid out right in front of me

& I finally can see

The way its always been

The need for peace starts from within

So I leave my possessions to the wind

Yeah I'm done with ever wanting anything

I can die satisfied, no desires do I hide

Not today, not today, nor for the next 1,000 lives

I want to be a little seahorse

Well I'm scared of ever being born again

If it's in this form again

Well I want to know how, why, where & when

& then I want to see you be the bright night sky

I want to see you come back as the light

--"Seahorse" by Devendra Banhart

If Seahorse is a statement for my generation, then that statement can only be: God, we miss The Doors. He is getting high marks for reconstituted hollow 60s spiritualism. I don't have to go into my rhetoric about the on-coming closed-feedback-loop of Rock & Roll. There's really just something about Robert Christgau ratifying what I already thought to be true that strikes me as especially depressing.

THIS BLOG IS ALMOST OVER.

2008-08-02T20:33:00.003-05:00

I don't think I can defend it to myself any longer. Not to mention the fact that A, nobody reads it and B, it only reminds me of Another Thing I Haven't Done. And although it's nice to see my photographs on The Internet, it isn't nice enough. To Boot, I may as well cash in on my suspicion that Real Writers Don't Have Blogs and just end this thing, for keeps. My Novel would appreciate the severing of another distraction, I'm sure.

I think I'll leave it up for another couple days, to see how the idea sits with me. I wouldn't want to do anything rash.

ONE DOWN

2008-06-15T00:57:00.002-05:00

BOMB MAGAZINE has sent me a Pass.

It has been added to the wall with the others.

My Ego has sufficed.

On the other hand, a friend of a friend showed me how to work my camera that much better, so pictures might start coming up.

THANKS.

SUBMISSIONS END AS WALLPAPER

2008-06-02T00:10:00.003-05:00

As of moments ago, I have e-mailed a handful of Flash Fictions (with titles like WASHING, SCANNING, & ADMITTANCE) to The Avery Anthology (www.averyanthology.org), & Quick Fiction (www.quickfiction.org). By tomorrow, I will have snail-mailed the same handful of Flashes to Bomb Magazine (www.bombsite.com), & Marginalia (www.western.edu/marginalia). Wait and See.

I also found that the Poets & Writers Magazine website has a database of hundreds of journals with all of their contact info & submission guidelines & tastes, though you'll want to follow every lead, because some of the listings are out of date. If you need help, go to www.pw.org.

I am reaching 100 pages of The Novel, and to finish the 17 pages of LIGHTING THE OUTBOUND TRAIN, I'd still have to figure out how that knife fits into things. I'm thinking of going back to work on revising it, because it does me no good to let something I think is so great languish in a drawer. More to come on all fronts.

I am also writing an essay/reaction to Sufjan Stevens, though that is going painfully slow.

NEW HAVEN REGISTER

2008-04-11T13:21:00.002-05:00

I received my first publication, in a roundabout way. My band, The Field Recordings, was approached to provide an article for the New Haven Register's "Making A Mix" article series in which members from local bands write a descriptive sentence or two about their favorite songs. My gracious bandmates, Jared & Nicole, allowed me to provide those sentences.

Anyway, the article is out, in today's issue of the paper, as well as online, for those of you with serious wood/pulp allergies. Here's the link: CLICK.

ENJOY.

THREE MORE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME TYPES OF THINGS

2008-04-04T15:33:00.005-05:00

FIRST: SOMEONE ELSE'S PIANOS

*
SECOND: LIGHT BULBS

*
LAST: MYSELF

"REMEMBER: My Self-Portraits Are Only As Good As How Little I'm In Them."

END.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF SEVERAL DIFFERENT TYPES OF THINGS

2008-04-01T11:34:00.011-05:00

FIRST: PEOPLE.

*

*

SECONDLY: THINGS.

"The State Of Design"
*

*

*

"Do Your Early Stuff!"

LASTLY: DETACHED BUILDINGS.

*

END.

POEMS FOR ANNA

2008-04-01T11:03:00.002-05:00

INTRODUCTION
These two untitled poems are from a correspondence I've been carrying on with a dear, dear friend of mine. It started as a writing exercise, a small muscle flexation. It only lasted for two pairs of exchanges.
*
ONE {JUNE}.

I have to keep
Reminding myself
That I'm still able
To leave a mark on people.
*
TWO {JULY}.

I feel like
Laying next to someone
Like an automobile accident.

I would finally break
And mangle them.

END.

"JACKSON POLLOCK, HOUSEPAINTER."

2008-03-03T21:23:00.001-05:00

*

I swear I will post words again, someday soon.

SEVERAL COLLAGES & ONE STAND-ALONE

2008-02-26T11:23:00.005-05:00

"Hand-Made Steam Engine."
*

"Small, Far-Away Birds."
*

"Typewriters."
*

"James Brown? JAMES BROWN!"

THIRD DIGITALS.

2008-01-26T15:51:00.001-05:00

"Break-Up Flip-Book."
*

"The Sea Captain."
*

"Man Surrounded By Pulp."
*

"Good Poetry Screamed Thru Device.".

SECOND DIGITALS.

2008-01-21T13:58:00.000-05:00

"Sad Animals."
*

"The Walking Entitled (One)."
*

"The Walking Entitled (Two)."
*

"Sad Woman, Sleeping Dog."
*

"Old Books."
*

"Jeanie & BOOK."

FIRST DIGITALS.

2008-01-17T22:20:00.000-05:00

"Amanda, Blown Out."
*

"Glass Trinket Pond."
*

"Televised Monets(?)."
*
EXPECT MORE.

THIS ARE THREE BAD FLASHES.

2007-11-29T16:39:00.000-05:00

ONE: SHE ALWAYS WANTED THAT FACE BACK

His mother had always wanted him to shave that awful beard of his and since she was dying now, he did. (He stood with minutes passing in front of his plain metal-framed white-bathroom mirror—listening to his answering machine fill up with grievances he hasn’t answered—before drawing away hair that started piling in the pit of his sink, shaking and sweat rising on the backs of his hands with every pass of the razor that started defining a face he thought he’d said goodbye to for keeps) He did it before he went to visit her and to this day he still isn’t sure if she passed in front of him from the deletion of her chewed-up lungs or the sight of her son’s six-year hidden clean-shaven face.

*

TWO: THE THREE-HUNDREDTH BOOK

He had just finished his three-hundredth book in just over five years and gotten tired of how the living room couch by virtue of its construct heated his entire frame. So, he drove out at 12:26AM—spooning the sped-up late-summer air in through the window—to the only gas station in town that stayed open indefinitely.
In the car on the way over, he kept looking at his hair in the mirror—it being the only thing as of late he’d been proud of accomplishing (it was a sort of left-handled shock and sweep).
He had to stand outside of the doors to the station while the all-night attendant who always kept the doors locked opened them.
When he’d asked for cigarettes from the top shelf and the attendant had taken three other packs to the floor along with his and then had to pick them up, he apologized.
As he was walking back to the car, he heard the attendant click the locks back into place.

He wanted to be speeding home.
In an instant, he wished he had an idea he was hurrying home to write down, and that a policeman had just seen him run the stop sign a mile from his house and had pulled him over for it. He wished he was the kind of person that could ask to borrow the officer’s pen so he could write the idea on the back of his copy of the ticket while the blue and red lights sent around a blown-up Rorschach test against the backdropped sky.
Then he would imagine the look on the editor’s face that opened his submission in the mail, and out would’ve fallen a Xerox of the scribbled-over promise to appear.

He wasn’t sure if he hadn’t said anything in a while because he’d been tired lately, or because he just didn’t have anything else left to say.

*

THREE: CHANGES I

Changing lives—personalities—is begun by changing clothes.
Only the thin can change lives.

He is finally free to change his life.

*
END.

I DIDN'T JUST FEEL WHAT YOU DID TO ME.

2007-11-29T16:34:00.000-05:00

The Brass Ring is gone.

McSweeney's has followed the others, and rejected what I'd given them to accept.

I'm going to post some of my lesser Flashes here, since they are unpublishable, mostly an exercise in brevity, & because I haven't published any writing here in literally calendar months.

Is this Bad Omen or Positive Reinforcement?

SIDEBROW

2007-11-12T14:49:00.000-05:00

Sidebrow just e-mailed me a nice Rejection. The Collection grows...

I just got back from Belize, C.A. There might be pictures of things you could see anywhere posted soon, as well as some phrasings from journals and paper scraps.

NOONTIME

2007-10-14T12:43:00.000-05:00

Another rejection came the other day from Noon, again. What's worse, my intimately handwritten note asking Diane Williams for some feedback on my Flash Fictions went unanswered--just the same fashionably boxed form letter.

AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT: I am now rewriting "Lighting The Outbound Train." The decision to do so came to me after a critique from the Brain Trust behind The Great American Photo Blog. So, now I know its faults, through and through, and the Lit Mags already have them in their hands. What now? What are the odds of being able to get them to look at it again? Do I have to watch for the rest of their rejections and then send out the polished product to entirely new places? When I called my university's Office of Alumni Relations to get an answer, all they said was "That's for another department."

NEVERTHELESS: Everything could come from the rest of the magazines listed to the right.

PAINFUL EMBRACEMENTS

2007-10-04T16:04:00.000-05:00

Well, this being the '00s and all, I decided to submit to my first online literary magazine. This one, 5_Trope, who just received in their inbox my "Lighting The Outbound Train", happens to have Gary Lutz as a contributing editor. You should know who that is already.

Still waiting to hear back from everyone, still pludging along in the novel.

MORE AS IT COMES TO ME.

WAITING ON THE MAILS.

2007-09-26T11:07:00.000-05:00

THIS IS NOW OUT IN THE OPEN: It has been a month.

NEVERTHELESS: I am still waiting on reply from McSweeney's, 580 Split, Sidebrow, & Noon. I haven't been working on my novel at all, save for yesterday, when I had a 5-page burst. Aside from that, I have only just brought out my old manual typewriter, and on this I find sentence fragments that sound nice when I wake up in the morning. Its main function is for working on things that will appear on my band's website (www.thefieldrecordings.com). No photos either, because photos require monies I couldn't possibly lay hands on yet.

YOU WILL HEAR JUST AS SOON AS I DO.

SASE RETURNED (II), SASE SENT.

2007-08-21T13:22:00.000-05:00

A rejection came back from The Paris Review a few weeks ago. The Light can still come from McSweeney's, Sidebrow, or 580 Split.

I've also just mailed out three (3) "flash" fictions I've been writing instead of my novel (of which I now have 50 pages) to NOON, hoping to at least receive comments in lieu of publication or mere rejection by Diane Williams, one of the premiere practitioners of the form. TITLES: "She Always Wanted That Face Back", "The Three-Hundredth Book", & "Admittance".

More to come.

SASE RETURNED

2007-07-17T00:21:00.000-05:00

I have now been rejected from NOON. Today I received an aesthetically pleasing form-rejection letter from them. Regardless, they are still fine people, and they publish the finest of things: www.noonannual.com.

The Hope, however, is still alive with: McSweeney's, Sidebrow, Paris Review, & 580 Split.

MORE TO COME.

ALL BUSINESS.

2007-07-12T16:15:00.000-05:00

To be honest: There is really nothing I can post.

I've sent my short story LIGHTING THE OUTBOUND TRAIN & an essay written as a math problem to Noon, McSweeney's, 580 Split, The Paris Review, & Sidebrow. The only other writing I'm doing is on my novel, of which I have about 50 pages. I have no money for film, otherwise there might be pictures to post. So, it looks like this thing is going to stay pretty staid until something happens. That could be money for film, or a directive telling you readers to go buy issue #X of Literary Journal That Accepted My Piece. I will inform you of disappointments as they come in.

HANG TIGHT.

"WRITERS COLONY DISPATCH"

2007-06-10T23:28:00.000-05:00

I've been here for a week, with three more to go.

Basically, I'm in workshop Monday thru Thursday from 2:30-5PM. Then, Monday thru Friday, I'm in what's called a "Literature Salon." This, is a trumped-up, academic book club. We have a book for each week that we need to read, and a room to meet from 6-8PM to discuss the book in. We discuss it from a technical, shop-talk angle. Then, on the last day of that week's salon, the author of the book we've been reading all week comes to read, discuss, and talk shop with us. There are a lot of questions from the audience and mid-priced white wine. The books we're reading and the weeks we're reading them: WEEK 1, "The Emperor's Children" by Claire Messud. WEEK 2, "The Collected Stories" by Amy Hempel. WEEK 3, "The Uses of Enchantment" by Heidi Julavits. Then, scattered throughout the week are electives...readings, discussion panels, walking tours, etc. that meet at various times and on various days. This goes for 3 weeks. Or, 2 more.

I've, arguably, finished chapter one of my novel. I've also begun work on chapters 2, 3, and 4. Expect some small fragments, and/or handwritten diagrams soon.

IN RE: "RECORD CLUB: CT"

2007-05-25T14:17:00.000-05:00

THE ISSUE IN QUESTION.

I am subscribed to The Believer magazine, a tiny division of McSweeney's (www.believermag.com). A new issue seems to come every 3 days. I have a stack of some 20 issues I haven't read. In an effort to correct this, I am reading them now.

I just finished their 2005 Music Issue, which featured an article by Rick Moody called "How To Be A Christian Artist." The article delt mostly with a Christian band called The Danielson Famille, etc etc etc. They play religiously inquisitive art-rock, while dressed as giant trees and doctors on stage. The point, however, is that Moody heard them through a Record Club in NYC (www.recordclub.org). This is a club whose members get together and they each bring two songs (SOME OF THE RULES: ALL HI-FI!), with record sleeves or liner notes, etc. If you want, during the second listening of the first song (THE SECOND SONG IS ONLY LISTENED TO ONCE!), you can talk about why you like the song, what it makes you think of/feel/etc. At the end of the meeting, everyone leaves their songs with the leader, and about a week later, you recieve (AT NO COST TO YOU!) a CD of the audio "Minutes" of the meeting. The meetings go from around 6-6:30 to 10-10:30PM. Their website is not helpful, or thorough. It does not list any contact information, nor address for the Record Club. Nor does it state that it is a members-only, closed-circuit gathering.

HOWEVER: I would like to start a Record Club in CT. One that would truly bastardize the rules of the NY Rec. Club. If anyone becomes interested in this idea, please drop me a line.

"MORE OF THE SAME MISTAKES"

2007-05-15T01:37:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION
More failed Street Portraits and Still Lives. You've got here some portraits taken from a moving car, your standard issue Suburbs Kid Enchanted By The Dejected Life On The New York City Subways picture, and a woman agonizing over Hallmark Cards in the happiest place on earth. Today marks the last day of the semester, and with my Summer Writer's Colony starting June 4, there will probably be some novel fragments coming in the next few weeks. Fragments. ENJOY.

* * *

* * *

"STRANGER EXPERIEMENTS, AND A RETURN TO THE OLD STYLE IN FAILURE"

2007-05-14T14:12:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION
The following color/35mm photos are the first batch of the 3 rolls I tried to shoot at people. The most blaring problems with my subjects, is that I was too far away from them, too nervous to be caught taking their picture. The result is a dozen portraits that could've been better. The live portraits are first, and pictures of things follow them. MORE TO FOLLOW.

* * *

* * *

This seems to be a mechanical accident, it's the same picture in split frame, so something must have happened with the film spool that I did not intend. I will, however, still take the credit for the product.

"GLASS BRICK WALL"

2007-05-13T19:15:00.000-05:00

"GLASS BRICK WALL"
This is a poorly cobbled-together series of photographs of the blurred-glass cubes in our bathroom.

MORE TO FOLLOW.

COMING ALONG.

2007-05-06T01:04:00.000-05:00

In the past 2 weeks, I have shot 3 rolls of film. Some 72 exposures of color. Being that I came into these rolls by way of an un-packing accident, they felt free of charge or the responsibility to be used carefully. With this in mind, I tried shooting people. This, is something I've never done, usually having been most comfortable with still life or self-portraiture. So, in spite of my comfort zone, I used these rolls to photograph strangers: The Homeless, The Witless Shoppers & Employees, & People Waiting On Things To Happen. THIS IS SHAMELESS: There is a woman that sits in Union Square that I've yet been able to catch with my camera on me. She sits on a foldout metal chair, surrounded by garbage-bag suitcases with a sign that says only this: "Tired Of Prostitution. Please Help." I'm not sure of the ethics of photographing such a turned-out soul, but as it's one of the saddest things I've yet to see, I feel compelled.

I also futzed with 6-30 second exposures, which were mostly done walking around in my bathroom. There are also pictures of my brother and I sweeping out the 200-year-old basement of our last house--the lighting in this place lends itself to post-apocalyptic despair and disrepair. Hopefully these have come out.

As soon as I develop these rolls (which, in all probability, should be tomorrow), I will post those that deserve it, the experiments that came correct.

As far as more writing, not only am I entering the 4 days of Finals (which means near 40 pages of academia), all I'm working on at present is "Lighting The Outbound Train" which I would much rather get published than post it. Then, on June 4, I am moving to The City for 4 weeks in an Intensive Writers Colony--all seminars and workshops and salons and walking tours. After that, I'm getting to work on my untitled novel, hopefully on a typewriter, because this machine no longer does it for me.

"THE ERA OF GENRE WRITERS (Or, The Rise And Fall Of Honest Sentiment)"

2007-04-29T15:43:00.000-05:00

A REVIEW OF TOM WAITS, WITH ORPHANS: BRAWLERS, BAWLERS & BASTARDS PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND

I can't even say that I've gotten nearly through the 56 songs on Tom Waits' new triple album, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards. At least not enough to have paid them each enough attention. By Waits' own admission, the albums are supposed to be the 3 things he does, Brawlers being mostly his twisted blues, Bawlers being his fuzz wash ballads, and Bastards being a mix of his spoken-word soundscapes and horror-film ring-leader eulogies. The lines start to blur, however, because there is a mix of all three styles on each album, not a one of them being as pure in intent as Anti- Records' Press Kit puts it. It is immense and intimately packaged and recorded. It is whole-heartedly stylized. Everything's here as usual: Tom Waits' earnest bark and wail, the constant wush of the snare drum beads, the warm live-room recordings, etc etc etc.

I'm drawn to this album the same way I'm drawn to The Beatles’ White Album or The Clash’s Sandinista! Double and Triple albums are more intensive than single LPs. They require more of us as an audience. They free themselves to explore. And, while a lot of songs on Orphans could've been cut off, they are still necessary. Just as "Wild Honey Pie" on The White Album was and is. Songs like this help along the patchwork of the mindsets and times these artists recorded them. Instead of a condensed, more-commercially accessible single LP, whose only function is to put forth a collection of solid songs for radio and purchase price, an album the size of Orphans serves to tell a thousand stories. Not alone in song, because the sheer undertaking of the thing betrays a snapshot autobiography of Waits himself.

If The White Album serves to illustrate the extreme decadence and spiritual free-footed drowning of 1968, then Orphans, to me, serves to underline the creative desperation every artist is facing now.

But, what does Orphans really betray about Tom Waits?

What thousand stories does it truly try to relate?

In this capacity, Orphans, is just another collection of his storytellers: The same preachers, the same vice-gripped fools, the same triumphant lounge actors… No new ground is breached here. These puppets are telling the stories they’ve always told, and you’ll still be put in the 3-Card Monty game of trying to figure out where Waits is. Because Tom Waits is another David Bowie. Another slick vaudeville act capable of changing shapes and sounds for whatever suit they want to wear now. Bowie has been an alien, a Nazi, and a lounge act. Waits has been a dry-throat rasp bluesman, a moaning and roiling preacher, and a determined jazz balladeer. He goes from "Jesus Gonna Be Here" off Bone Machine, to "Chocolate Jesus" off Mule Variations. The former is a pared-down sinin' and repentin' blues character's vow to "...keep my eyes open/So I can see my Lord, yes," the latter is about a man buying himself what he really needs, not church or religion, but a candy Jesus: "Well I don't go to church on Sunday/I don't get on my knees to pray/Don't memorize the books of the Bible/I got my own special way...I got me a Chocolate Jesus/Make me feel good inside/Got to be a chocolate Jesus/Keep me satisfied." Where is he in all this? Where is he poking his head out and saying something he means?

What tortures me most about musicians like Bowie and Waits is that it's so easy to play the satirist or the genre-writer, because it's easier than admitting we're not turning out anything unassailably original anymore. THIS IS THE ERA OF THE GENRE-WRITER. Only at a time like this can a movie like Grindhouse thrive, because we're at that point of giving people credit for "paying homage" rather than conjuring something up. I'm tired of the tongue-in-cheek Postmodernism of Waits and Bowie and Tarantino and Wolfmother etc etc etc. And while I like a lot of Orphans, I keep wondering how much of this guy's shit can I trust? Keep in mind that when a lot of other cloaked shape-shifters were in the limelight, we were still in the Modernist era, where trust was usually validated, meaning it was more dangerous and provocative at that time to contradict yourself in song and speech. To keep people guessing. As it is now, it's not that daring. It's an easy mark. It's a low-slung hill.

The fact is that I love these albums. It’s exactly what I want from him. More of the same from Bone Machine on. This, is my sin as a listener, being that I am completely satisfied with well-rendered stagnation. I expect so little of you. It’s also the reason that Waits has been prosperous in turning out what are experimentalized knocked-off old blues albums since 1994. We no longer get that stuff. We’ve missed the birth kick of every genre. Think about this: Getting into a band after they’ve been long over. Talking Heads, The Beatles, Velvet Underground, etc etc etc. Once you get close to owning every one of their LPs, you start to slow down, and pass them over in the record store. We hate to come to the end, slowing down makes you feel as if they’re still putting out albums, that these explorations don’t have to end. Then we end up transferring this frustration to people like Tom Waits, those who continue the thread in our own time. All the old bluesmen are dead, and the genre itself has long been stripped apart and stretched out. BUT, in Tom Waits we can still get those same warm sounds that make us think of far hung-over lonesome men playing a guitar in a one-room shack on a stool, wondering if the late hours can hear anything they’re moaning out. We personify in him the continuation of Robert Johnson and a million others. Just like how Wolfmother brings back Led Zepplin, and Bowie brings back the idolatry of Rock’n’Roll.

"SOLUTION POEM"

2007-04-26T01:37:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION
I'm not exactly sure what this is or why it happened, but every once in a while I end up writing a poem that is supposed to be funnier than it sounds. This is one of those.

* * *

I am tired of looking, dear.
So I'm asking you to
take out my eyes with your hands.

I am so tired of trying to talk.
If I had the money
I'd hire a foot to step on my throat.

"THE SPINS"

2007-04-24T01:07:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION
This, is one of the pieces that was denied from both LUNGFULL! and Fence Magazine, independently and within the same week. Since LF! is a poetry magazine, I called it a Prose Poem. Which, arguably, it could be. When I sent it to Fence, I just called it a Flash Fiction piece. Judging from both magazines' responses, it just never seemed to "fit" no matter how I labeled it.

Regardless, I suppose it's a short piece about writing. A sort of 3-page Ouroboros.

* * *

And then there was fire. And then there was nothing. And then there were buildings. And then there were two people that did nothing right. And then there was an empty, carpeted room. Then, there was everything at once. And then someone took a walk, and was stirred up by an even wind. And then we wondered what the sky would look like if it were clear, like an open window. Then, we made it rain, and just for the smell of Spring parking lots. After that, our hands trembled, our minds spun out. And then there were two people who used to read their journals out loud to one another. Then there was a group of people, kicking bottle caps around the floor in front of someone singing a song everyone knew, until the sun started to punch holes in the tree line. Then we had them stack books in misshapen piles, like we could never bring ourselves to do. And then there were people who snapped words at one another like once-folded belts. And then there were Friday nights spent listening to old LPs in groups. Then, we wrote out nights of sleep the likes of which we never have. We made a world in which everyone knows what to say. Then, we unmade that world and all those dialogues. We put them in the strangest of places: Closed-down factories taking pictures, walking along State Reservoir rock piles.

Then, after everything, there were two people who just stuck it out.

And then nothing came.

Then we unfolded space on top of space. And then we drew strong lines on borrowed papers. And then they were gone. And then we watched them walk past, through bars we put between us and them. And then there was so much sweat. And then we sat on sidewalks, wring-ing our hands. Then, we watched them wake up in crooked positions, cradling heads that were so far hung-over. Then we gave them everything. Then we hid it, and are waiting for them to find it themselves. And then we watched both of them sit up the whole night through, on the floor. We hid lessons in the oddest ways, in far-flung places. And then we watched them stum-ble, and get down on themselves. And we sympathized. We locked ourselves in dusty rooms, and gave them all the space they needed. We watched them eat thousands of plain meals in plain places.

And then we threw them into cluttered drawers, and ignored their painful standstill for calendar months. We knew we would always find them there, tapping their feet in white, white doorways, waiting for us. And then we threw them over the highest of hurdles, and watched them come back down as fast as they could. We wrote in our journals about how they screamed at every old, unbreakable truth! Then, we wished we could take ourselves away from them for keeps. But we couldn’t, could never. We got exhausted from filling in their space, and took it out on them in the worst of ways. And then we learned to say “I’m sorry.” Out of frustration alone, we gave them new jobs, had them killed before their time, we made them walk away from their families and then come slowly back...then we helped them nurse their movement-whiplash.

This, they did all on their own: They found people they couldn’t hide behind their backs. We watched them having their moment in the middle of an over-produced street, getting ready to walk in opposite directions.

And then, and only then, did they watch us go.

Dean Young's "EMBRYOYO"

2007-04-19T02:36:00.000-05:00

THE FOLLOWING IS A BOOK REVIEW WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO HASN'T FINISHED THE WHOLE BOOK HE'S REVIEWING. THE IDEAS EXPRESSED, REGARDLESS, ARE MEANT WHOLE-HEARTEDLY.

Charles Bukowski, in a holiday postcard sent around his publisher, wrote a 7-page poem, on the subject of poetry. Here it is, in its entirety: "As the spirit wanes, the form appears." Meaning, that poetry is as boring and formulaic as you've always suspected, and it's written more for academia than to express honest sentiment. Poetry is the Traditional Jazz of the printed word. Go electric and be accused of shaming the method. With this in mind, go buy Dean Young's "Embryoyo." Because it contains lines like these, "Why am I so afraid of nothingness? / My soul is a baby wolf." Here is a picture of the book, as sold by McSweeney's:

"Regression Inside of their Chants for FOUR MORE YEARS! Or, How to Talk to Ann Coulter (if You Must)."

2007-04-15T21:55:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION
This, is an op-ed I wrote for the Norwalk Community College paper, The Voice on November 7, 2004. The piece has its moments, and I think it lends comment to the Democratic candidates we're dealing with now.

* * *

The Pundits are crashing down on my ears with a frantic clang. It happened. George W. Bush has won his first election. Circumstantial as it was, he won. All it took was for Osama to rear his mangled head, and the Dissent lost its voice and rolled over like a kicked dog. And all us Liberals can muster in the aftermath is to sit around licking our wounds and coming up with another lame candidate for 2008.

Since November the second, in this doomed year of our Lord, two thousand and four, I’ve been grappling with this failed experiment in Democracy and all of the reasons that it folded under its own momentum. It started on the afternoon of Super Tuesday, listening to a lot of very nice people explain to me just why they voted Right. They wanted a president who could do more than list his economic plan on his website. They could trust all of the Swift Boat ad copy. They want to see Hillary in ’08. And for all of those people, I have but one thing to say: there is blood on your hands. Plain and simple. Apparently, watching Hillary Clinton struggle to move all of her opinions to the Center in time to start hinting at running in the big game for another 3 years is more important to everyone than keeping civil liberties and human rights from dwindling down to closet-hanger abortion clinics and bootlegged civil unions.

This volume of bad publicity would’ve killed a lesser man. He lost 2.7 million jobs. Slashed and burned the public schooling system and Left Every Child Behind. He’s killed 1,000 and counting troops in a never-ending search for the coveted Location of all those WMDs that they made up from doctored photos and dusty surveillance tapes. He’s accrued the largest deficit (four billion dollars and counting) in World History. He’s amassed a Nixon-style list of enemies from every alienated member of the UN. And, most importantly, he managed to turn the presidential debates into one commercial-free Non Issue…

The New York Times just released an article that stated that there are 600,000 monogamous homosexual couples in the United States. Six-hundred-thousand. That’s not even one percent of the total population of the country. But, if you were following the news stations, the sitting administration had us believe that Gay Marriage was a problem that all of us had to face. We were duped. If W wasn’t plucking that tired string, he was attacking John Kerry’s war record, and Kerry, obediently enough, went entirely on the defensive. So, instead of talking about the flailing economy, the crippled job market, or the bidding war in Iraq, Bush took the whole thing and turned the issues into excommunicating homosexuals and a senator’s war record from a war Bush had never even bothered to show up for. And unsurprisingly enough, Osama peeked out of Dick Cheney’s room in The White House long enough to issue a chic communiqué, just to let everyone know that his money was riding on Kerry.

Regardless, we wouldn’t be in this mess had Kerry not faltered like Ted Kennedy on a ten-cent beer night in some lonesome karaoke bar in Chappaquiddick. He allowed himself to be pushed into a corner and huddled up in a ball. The first mistake of any failing Hopeful is to allow themselves to be put entirely on the defensive. Kerry allowed the debate on foreign policy to turn entirely into Bush crabbing about his war record and Kerry crabbing about the war in Iraq. No matter if he won that one or not, it was the beginning of The Fall. From there on out, Kerry seemed to be trying to hide the fact that he’d already laid down.

However you want to look at this thing, the GOP Disaster Squad was just plain better at storming onto Native American Reservations and signing their names to pox-infested voter rolls. The Republicans have always been a vengeful, belligerent beast that suffers from an incurable case of Blood Lust, an unstoppable breed. And, sadly enough, the Democrats have always been a scared and easily frightened animal that will roll over and dance for quarters to a Republican Government that is drowning in hookers and Blood Money. Suffice it to say, we’ll have to find some way to overthrow the Old Hats of the Democratic Party and finally elect some leaders who will fight for peace, social and environmental consciousness, and a reinstatement of our civil, and sexual liberties. The day we do that will be the most interesting episode of the O’Riely Factor any of us will see in our lifetimes (even better than when he got caught playing grab-ass with a female employee).

Well, I’ve run out of space, and the Deadline will wait no longer. So, I guess I’ll see everyone in prison when Rumsfeld starts adding all of our names to McCarthy’s dusty rolls of Communist Sympathizers and dragging us behind his pickup truck. My advice to everyone, until 2008 (or whenever Jr.’s impeachment trial begins), is to start paying attention to the kind of America that is being built for us, because I can’t believe that we care so little about the people and environment around us as to vote this three-legged puppy into office. We voted the way we did out of abashed Fear, and it will be forgiven only once.

"SOJOURN DISTILLATION"

2007-04-15T21:36:00.000-05:00

I imagine my head is ringed in flat solid gold like in all those old Catholic paintings of Jesus Christ.

All the highest gates surround the churches.

I wandered through Central America for thirty days and thirty nights, waiting for You. Each day our missionary work flagged, I was trying to reach up to the sky. Trying to make the journey to me a little easier for You. I spent those empty, sweating days fighting tooth and nail. Holding out for The Faith.

I was keeping both eyes out for signs.

The only ones I could see were hanging Coca-Cola marquees on every rusting shack-restaurant, Dickies factory out by the airport, vacation casinos by the water rising like the Tower of Babel, Traveler’s Check resorts with armed plain-clothes guards at every door.

FROM ON HIGH, I HEAR: “Beatify everything!”

FROM ON HIGH, THEY HEAR: “Begrudge no one The Spirit at all costs!”

I’m trying to build something I want to believe in.

My world is now split in to Temptations and Purities.
***
We would spend nights in the missionary bathroom in the basement, swinging out the black iron three-lock door onto the yard, smoking and proselytizing, complaining elegantly and helplessly. We would sit on the cement porch overlooking the green/black ocean bay, turning away desperates at the locked chain-link gate. Our hearts were heavy.

Our two weeks in Belize City were up, and so we fled to the jungle, Banana Bank, for the last two. To drink in beleaguered ferocity. Something my professor said about Beat Literature comes to mind, “People like this, living their whole lives with their feelers out, they all escaped to abuses of any drink and drug, because those were the only hours during which they felt fine with feeling little.”

Two patrolmen were added here last week, to fan out in vein patterns, weaving in the dark with a flashlight and loaded rifles, to prevent another hostage situation hours away from any police. The owner says, in his meandering Wyoming tongue: “You got to take care of yourself all the way out here. Ain’t nothin’ ‘round except the river on that side and the farmin' community on that side.”

What we’re doing out here is what makes the robbery/stand-off so hard to take, because the owner built this hotel in the 70s, and brings teams of missionaries to stay at below cost so they can build cement homes over heat-fractured wooden ones for any family that needs in in The Valley of Peace, the farming community built on a grid of dirt roads for El Salvadorian refugees. The criminals couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

FROM THE BACK OF MY HEAD, I HEAR: “I portend that Belize will assuage our White Guilt for years, until we find the rationalization that will allow us not to come anymore.”

"MINUTAE"

2007-04-14T15:44:00.000-05:00

(RIPPED-OFF FROM “THE BODY” BY JENNY BOULLY)

“I.(1) ”

“They.(2) ”

“Television.(3) ”

“Fear.(4) ”

FOOTNOTES:
(1)A footnote is a small thing. All it does is interrupt flow. It denotes asides, unimportance. People dread footnotes when they see a handful of them on the page they’re reading. They drag us down to the smallest of things: Attributed materials by other authors that were quoted above (making the appearance of the footnote that much more frustrating, being that most people, if they’ve bought a book by a person they believe is trustworthy, it matters less and less where their research came from, because we are a trusting people. These things can be put in the back, where we will never read them, yet we can take comfort in knowing they are there.). Footnotes lose your place.

(2)Yet, if the footnotes pertain to the anecdotal, the playful interruption, the wasteful but well-meaning funny story, the footnote is always read. You cannot wait, in fact, for the author/scholar/biographer to tell you another good one about the person or time you are reading about. Both you and the writer acknowledge that these minor details weren’t important enough to disrupt the body of the text with parenthesis, and that their place is at the bottom of the page, taking up as little space as they can.

(3)Being a footnote is a fucking rebuke. A retraction. A negation of my breath.

(4)The fear of becoming a footnote has driven Progress for the entire span of Life. Manifest Destiny, The Crusades, Our Involvement in WWII, Staying in Vietnam Far Longer than was Reasonable, Mass-Market Cars, Clean Drinking Water, Central Air, Airplanes, Sneakers, Public Schools, NASA, Moveable Printed Type, Pocket Books, The Penny Press, Automatic Weapons, Pamphleteers, GREENPEACE, Supermarkets, Public Transit, Health Care, Religious Controversies, Participatory Democracy, Dictatorships, Paved Roads, Free Commerce, The Dow-Jones Industrial, NASDAQ, Hollywood, Tabloid Newspapers, National Hot Dog Eating Contests, Piled-Up & Piled-On Orgies, The Guinness Book of World Records, Literary Journals, Lewis & Clark, Christopher Columbus, The Trail of Tears, The Internet, Multi-National Chain Stores, His & Hers Plasma TV Screens, Tripple Live Albums, Concert DVDs, Electric Stoves, TV Variety Shows, Digital Radio, Canned Soup, Webcasts, MFA Programs, Eating Utensils, Audio Commentaries, Presidential Campaigns, Extreme Sports, Public Access Channels... A footnote can be a grave.

NEW MEXICO DISASTER

2007-04-13T01:23:00.000-05:00

The following were all taken using B/W 35mm film in Old Town, NM. I would've taken photographs of the caricature cowboy theme bars or the patients in the waiting room at their hospital (it's biggest medical advancement in recent years was the opening of a Subway restaurant in the cafeteria), but I was too busy sitting in the hotel watching Big Trouble on Comedy Central while she was throwing up and crying in the bathroom. There is a story in all this, which came out to near 40 pages of unpublishable relationship-bloodletting, called UNDER, UNDER. I will post this next.

"BARE, BARE FEET"

"BIBLES"

"LOBBY"

"LOBBY TWO"

"NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM"

"SEVEN CELEBRITY SINNERS"

"SEVEN CELEBRITY SINNERS"

"S/W SKY ONE THRU SEVEN"

PS-That grainy look that all of these have taken on that only occasionally works FOR them is from my scanner.

THERE WENT THE LAST ONE

2007-04-12T14:10:00.000-05:00

Now, with Kurt Vonnegut being dead, we're completely nil for great living American authors. HST, gone. Algren, gone. Tom Wolfe, gone. And now Vonnegut. His website has a nice memorial up. So does McSweeney's. Now comes the Collector's Squeeze, on eBay, in the secondhand stores.

If he's gone, then it must be fair game.

"Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."

GOD BLESS YOU, MR. VONNEGUT.

POLAROIDS

2007-04-11T16:02:00.000-05:00

KEEP THIS IN MIND:
INTERVIEW: DAVID BYRNE "What do the words of your songs mean to you, I mean, you don't write love songs, do you?" DAVID BYRNE: "I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house... Love is kind of big."

START

ONE

I seem to gravitate towards photographing lights. In my room, I have 5 in the ceiling, and two desk lamps. In the room photographed above, I had only the one.

TWO

This one is a failed band photograph of Jared. The idea was to take 9 Polaroids of just heads, then middles, then ends. Then, jumble them up. The Name Of The Band We Ripped This Off From Is Talking Heads. I include it here because of the way his hand looks like emulsion, or sun spots. If I were an Artist, I'd call it a "Found Accident."

THREE

This, is an abandoned 24-hour coin-operated carwash I used to wash my car at. The flash was supposed to do more here.

FOUR {START MANGER SERIES}

This is the first of a few, taken at night in the nativity scene set up at Our Lady Of Fatima. OLF is sat on the side of Route 7, which is a self-important access-road that services dozens of Wilton Police Dept. cruisers and people who work in the city. When I drove into the church lot, we had to close off the headlights, so as not to shine them into the rectory that sat right behind the nativity scene. Then, there was hurried quiet.

FIVE

You've already seen this one. I like it so much because I think I was able to capture the feeling of flight. And, her feet are aligned perfectly with the bottom-right-hand corner of the photograph. Now, since I didn't see Mary by Jesus' cribside, I can only imagine that THIS is supposed to be her, in the air. I know the Catholics place more importance in Mary than other divisions of the cross would see fit to give her, but I don't know if they go as far as giving her the power of flight.

SIX {END MANGER SEQUENCE}

I only have a re-sized scan of this. NEVERTHELESS: You will see no immediate point to this picture. It's just a piece of stone with words written on the plaque that you can't read. HERE'S THE PROBLEM: The photographic world is never what I want it to be. In this instance, I wished I could take that stone apart, and float the words I wanted read right up close, so that those would be the only ones read. In fiction, I am unimpaired by the impossible, tangible world. I can paint the world I see, simply. You all have to trust me. Here, in photography, everything becomes painfully unmovable. I appear in self-portraits the way I actually look, and the picture I want vs. the design of the camera is something I have to worry about. Photographs are a struggle to break chains, and I envy those who can create a made-up world by focusing on that which is real.

END.

AUTOMATICA INTRODUCTION

2007-04-10T18:58:00.000-05:00

This, is the Original Sin.

Everything I do will be moved from my old hand-made http://apologyandsimulacra.tripod.com to here.

THE OLD AXIOM: "Give me Convenience or give me Death" RINGS TRUE.

I WILL BE HONEST HERE: I will only post in full things that I don't believe I can sell. ALSO: There will be many, many things here in the next few weeks.