Lavamatique

2007-01-08T15:35:00.000-06:00

After a night at a former speakeasy with still-boozey paneling, 2nd story railings one could brawl through, prohibition-era escape route, a metal curl of stairs on stage strung with Xmas lights looking less weight-bearing and more DNA, I declare an intent to rewrite all rock lyrics. OK, says J, but you need rules. OK, says I, Bienvenue ala Ort Cloud Candelabra. “The possibility of song within that world… like saying ‘yes’ to sunlight” (Paul Blackburn) and other statements of poetics put some Vitamin D back into those pursuits.

2006-10-03T11:16:00.000-05:00

tonight!

2006-10-01T11:05:00.000-05:00

fell asleep in public twice today. first in a yoga class- understandable. later in a darkened loft outfitted for showing films, on the very last film in the program, the one i had gone there for, though the rest of the program was thoughtfully curated and a tour de force in strategies for inducing hyponotic states.. so perhaps, with dorsky, it was the appropriate response that between nods i saw wide shots of lean, glittering waves and "the most beautiful lawn sprinkler in the world." looking forward to more of this series, which i understand is spreading from prov and taking up chi residence. i was totally unprepared- and had no trouble staying awake- for jean rouch's les maitres fous which leaves me with several still resonant questions of how transferable are the psychic states of power that can effect a group of individuals to organize themselves into a collective possession.. acting out affairs of the state while frothing at the mouth, and what sociological function this serves (catharsis?).

2006-09-30T08:39:00.000-05:00

though my running mate is out of town and my knees either inactive or flaming for the past two weeks, i decided at the last minute to do the kommen 5k this morning just to see. it was beautiful weather (for running on lower wacker) and i turned in a 31:09 (which is good for me). queued up at the start right behind the elite women runners and ate their magnificent dust. went straight from run to german class- which everyone takes very solemnly- and i got to be the first, when called on, to admit i wasn't following a bloody thing, so the teacher wrote on the board how to say "next person please" and moved on. p.m. dinner and drinks with m & l around the corner from an octoberfest headlined by the human league. saw that tomorrow night there are dorsky films down the street, brought to us by providence.

2006-09-27T14:49:00.000-05:00

Last night’s poems: These poems are being made to reduce knee pain, therefore any and many use/s of turmeric and ginger. Curried quinoa pilaf with raisins and almonds, and ginger roasted acorn squash.

*

Math Ados (or Word Problems)

There was a berry-picking on the line

to show the median of

the numbers displayed by the people

participating in the contest

plotting, numbers for pints

of berries picked at the end of the Earth day

…

Had five numbers been mean, and growling, woken you, with a flip, pinned you to stair, shaken you free of the near sixth iteration of snooze, mingled sleep with news of the ninety-seven pound carp, bighead, that lept the fish fence, electric, and is imminent to all our waterways, weighs ninety-seven pounds, water in charge of collecting the daily low temp of Faith had five sand bags to her name.

2006-09-26T15:41:00.000-05:00

Got passport picture taken today. I am shifty-eyed and look like I am concealing drugs. In the hot pink and grimly paneled photo joint, a sign: Make checks payable to the Baltic Sea.

Liberal Media?

2006-09-25T20:38:00.000-05:00

The Gray Lady is getting about as lame on her geopolit coverage as she's long been in the book review dept. But what's it about? Are there any words in the book itself?
Some clarification/keeping it tidy.
Or is tidy the new bias?

Then the old liberal is simply verbose?

Then: "Do you have an appetizer in your mind?"

2006-09-23T19:58:00.000-05:00

Practicing our uuuuhhhhrrr, J getting sicker as the uhr progresses and our accent- not what you in the Midwest here call an O- progressing or sort of.. what do you call this? but this. what do you call a snooze alarm then? Nothing, we just wake up.

Oh man, Europe is kicking our ass in golf too.

Tonight's poems: oat bran banana bread and a quiche of thyme, gruyere and mushrooms. cleaning out fridge for perhaps a move as soon as next weekend.

*

9 p.m. last night realized Colleen was in town and playing at the Bottle. Get there immediately. It is purely acoustic instruments, cello with the price tag dangling, sleepy effects pedals.. which is to say me likey.. more process on display than I would have thought, but what she does with a hand-cranked music box with distortion and loops is pure enchantment. In the Wire misc. of the event, she is preceded and followed by spleen-jostling aggression, though the latter was less spleen and more Brazilian Gold Chains meets Grace Jones, a.k.a. phat beats and lame (um, in need of a grave there).

*

(Another niche market:)

In Art Institute today, in Art Institute gift shop, Look! There's Hiroshige on a wife-beater!

2006-09-22T13:57:00.000-05:00

Just remove this city from my mind, tending Hiroshige or the 15th century in this morning’s to-the-skin elements. Good train karma this week, at least, knock wood. The weather that’s sent us in, making last night cranberry-pumpkin walnut cookies that decided to be little scones, and boding a weekend full of something to do with squash. Hopefully also The Waves, a last peek at the Callahan photos and film, a play, and German lesson number one. Another element of sport, use up the cabinets in advance of dubiously-imminent move. What to do with all those breadcrumbs, pistachios, or a guy on the phone who’s teeth sound very white. Oh spinach, be done with this outbreak already and return.

2006-09-21T09:58:00.000-05:00

Reminded of this bit of Warhola by chance by looking at television last night after savasana beside an elevated stop, after wondering how a poem would say, We have accomplished a majority of what we needed to do and no longer need your services. Good luck with your art: "I was walking in Bali, and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died, and I realized that everything was just how you decided to think about it. Sometimes people let the same problems make them miserable for years when they should just say so what. That's one of my favourite things to say. So what."

2006-09-20T10:41:00.000-05:00

Oh Design (swoon).

2006-09-19T09:42:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Andy, for nudging my attention toward Rhinofest. Looks like there's a lot to check out there. I'm putting What Where, The Jesus Fields, and The Climb Up Mount Chimbouzo on my list.

2006-09-19T09:10:00.000-05:00

Toward the end of The Immoralist the protagonist possesses no sympathy for others or humility as he regards his quest for life-knowledge supreme, and all others, especially “men of principle,” deluded by their removal from their essential nature. Previously a thinker, a scholar, enrapt with all the subtle beauties of art and the natural world, he says amid the trough of his demise, “Art is leaving me, I feel it. To make room for what else?” That somehow seems one of the more sinister passages of the whole book.

Putting this next to an anecdote told by the rabbi presiding this weekend over a friend’s wedding- since bride and groom were both artists, he mentioned a Kabbalist scholar who interpreted one of the texts dealing with the creation of the universe, saying that G initially filled all space, and there being no room for what he wanted to create, he contracted or withdrew part of himself to make space for man and his world. This, it was proposed, underscores how inseparable humility is in the process of creation. It’s a resonant metaphor, especially when creativity can seem like the most egotistic of pursuits. Anyone who can direct me to a name and/or article that mentions this interpretation more specifically I’d be much obliged to.

2006-09-18T10:41:00.000-05:00

Terrible dreams of wounded animals. Again/still thinking (redoubled) of being expats. Fire drill planning a foray. Decembery, this week friends from overseas in plaid rooms. Riding bikes to Hamlet and back after dark weaving through early concert leaves around the museums. Hearing final strains as Tom Petty, alive is just down the street. Hamlet –and much else- enriched by time away and meanwhile years encountering the princes and nincompoops of the world. All week now with the squeaky knees and kale. Blood types, jammy pants. Trying to find a next place to live, trying to find out who keeps taking our mail.

*

Such attention is the only thing that seems to make cheerfulness possible again, regardless of the ways the end is being written around us.

*
today's poem output: roasted yam and black bean tacos with tomatillo salsa.

2006-09-13T11:02:00.000-05:00

Why does the Merch Mart have snowmen in their windows? At nearer seeing, they are the hollow-bodied brides in Vera Wang. Didn’t know I was glassless in all this drizzle.

*

Good fall for the MCA with the design exhibit Massive Change and Nov. Tuttle. Mau gives a talk on Saturday for anyone not attending nuptials.

in my sonosphere

2006-09-12T15:44:00.000-05:00

podcasts about food, johannes ockeghem, daedelus tried and true mix on radio anda, elliott sharp’s inbox and persian 45's.

2006-09-11T10:06:00.000-05:00

as a weather
convert ‘ve
been away
so long feathers, silverfish
fall out of books
kept next
to the bed when
was the page
where I picked up at “frost in the face”

2006-09-10T18:40:00.000-05:00

This weekend: bloggers incarnate, D Series in its new space, thanks People Who Came, thanks mustachios, picking bindis and fruit salts, faking it at wine to get another pour, convincingly for the good stuff, the rules as we go, walking forth, just forth, and finally asleep under a spider armature of opera’s greatest hits at mil park on the first feeling night of autumn. Today raining around the coyote and baklava in the atelier.
*
I thought I should be reading fiction, but then there would be nothing else to say.

2006-09-07T13:50:00.000-05:00

away from poetry for a time for food
travels music and
running but the season of discrete
returns and monsters set me aright or so
says KSM “no I am not OK, you sat on me/oh well, enough about me”

2006-08-16T16:41:00.000-05:00

This week’s poetry output: oatmeal raisin cookies (critically acclaimed), green bean and chickpea curry w/ raita (to the tune of "paperback writer") and baked sweet potato fries. All reading lately is how to: work specs and recipes. It's like the brain on new math.. or how it's supposed to… simplify eventually… toward the elegance of no remainders. A clerk waiting for me to pay him for a magazine and me waiting for him to give me a receipt. "Transform your anger" he suggests, pointing to the copy on the front of my magazine. "Oh, I'm not angry, I just forgot how to pay."

2006-08-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

my regional and language hearts go pitter pat when the discussion turns to chicago dialect...
vouching for most of this, it's stuck on me, especially after a few beerce. or when i call my parents who live far enough away from the lake to have totally different weather: what's it doin by you? "how's by you?" made it into a poem last year, but it's never gotten a single caw of recognition when i've read it out at readings. ah well.

2006-08-11T10:19:00.000-05:00

Caution Mathias, the lavamat is where memes go to die, but anyway..

Brain gargle book- The Anti-Aesthetic: essays on postmodernism edited by Hal Foster
Xanax book- I-Ching
Tofu-pressing book- Life Style by Bruce Mau
This week's train book- The Immoralist by Andre Gide
Giddy book- something something Jacob Delafon by Keith Waldrop
Book that I just lent out based on some random conversation that I hope I see again- Black Elk Speaks
Human heart book- Some Thing Black by Jacques Roubaud
"My neuroses could be even more jeweled" book- The Atelier Tovar by Guy Maddin
Book that I wish didn’t mean Poetry to most people I say "poetry" to- that navel-gazing verse by Jewel, whatever her book's called
"Maybe next year" book- Ulysses
Absinthe book- The Last Days by Raymond Queneau
Air guitar book- Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown
Book that makes me want to wear a doublet- Hamlet
"It’s all been thunk before" book- Silence by John Cage
Book that I always want to be reading- Your Ancient Sea Through by Hoa Ngyuen

2006-08-10T13:55:00.000-05:00

last weekend, driving: john wayne’s birthplace, stereolab through prophetstown, the history of the beatles’ revolver, corn is high, tassled and the road not afraid to be boring, no radio or cds for most of the trip and I am not afraid to be bored, ronald reganalia, driver at a rest stop lurching onto sidewalk takes out a planter- concerned iowans immediately repot the flowers- driver then casually exercises his poodle.

last weekend, still: horse stance, virtual poets are real and eat african food (thanks again, anne!), movie starring john wayne, movie starring jet li, feeling an abdomen (not mine!) for a foot, qi-conscious and fairie-like orbs in my photos of a construction zone.

*

this week
cooking like mad:
almond-fig muffins
seven vegetable moroccan curry w/ couscous

(tonight)
wilted greens (Red Russian Kale, a.k.a. Ragged Jack) from Jenny’s garden, wild rice w/ pine nuts & cranberries and poached sole w/ lemon, thyme and white wine

(tomorrow)
spicy sesame green bean salad
mango sticky rice

j:
veggie chili
dissertation (!)

2006-08-03T14:39:00.000-05:00

dusting off my Discrete helmet and getting things ready for the fall season- see sidebar- and came across this interesting blog and post by kass. she's the one writer i know who makes expansive and crystalline creative use of the cultural critique i often hear lit-critically minded folk talk over beers. well beyond the kvetch scale, where the onus is usually assigned to those arbiters of one convention or another, she reassigns the onus to herself- and hopefully, by example, us (sentence fraternizers).

*

i'm hitting the road for omaha early tomorrow morning. what else clears the head like an 8-hour drive through corn? bringing a friend's dictaphone to try a new process.

*

fell asleep on albert brooks' real life, but will attempt another watch when fully lucid. the ungainly helmeted cameramen attempting to blend in while "real people" "act natural" are hilarious. apparently long before the advent of reality television brooks was spoofing it.

2006-07-30T16:11:00.000-05:00

did it in 35:18

most unexpected: realizing my deep littering taboo. post mile 2 gatorade sip and toss, kept asking my mates, "are you sure we throw the cups on the ground?"

note: get some sunglasses

2006-07-28T15:09:00.000-05:00

Feeling ready for Sunday’s 5K only I had to see an interactive graphic this morning on the BBC of the body’s gradual disintegration into heat stroke. And then local alarm on the radio all morning about the HEAT DOOM upon us from now until Tuesday. And everyone I see lately is in one of those black, velcro cast boots saying “running” and/or “surgery.” Within this nervosa I find lines read and misreading uplifting from the mighty Dusie Kollectiv chaps. Especially Kaia’s Heart on a Tripod. Maybe I’ll be cramping due to potassium loss mid kilometer and thinking “my last outlasts,” and how all “behavior [is] a clutter of blood,” or “a pox on the metric system.”

2006-07-27T22:19:00.000-05:00

last night's cooking class.. what's funny about making a meal with strangers is the wordless negotiation of who does what. tip: let the control freak blow out her tricep whisking the hollandaise sauce. i've got to return this haircut.. i don't recall asking for a mullet. i was slow to catch on, but it's worse than the last one that was also borderline m-bag.

oh librarianism

2006-07-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

j confesses he's been listening to sufjian stevens.
"i think i like it."
"but why? it' so polyphonic spree."
"yeah, but it's really well-researched."

*

looking for a particular page on the website of the society of american archivists = "page not found"

2006-07-22T17:19:00.000-05:00

it’s noon and I want to know it.. briefly.. the trash is full.. and a tenor is visiting next door, sings, “pass the salt, por favori,” to which children squeal. got my license back in the mail with a receipt that looks like I just bought a carton of eggs, cat litter and bananas, except it says, “payment type—guilty.”

yesterday.. errand to the workplace on a day off.. staying unseen, get in a run, a snack with J at the Chicago Diner—note: fresh carrot-ginger juice, drink more of—presenting gifts marking the anniversary. Happy 6th! In honor of…how about some knife skills? Plus a class in hollandaise, lemon cake and curd. continued gastronomy later for a late, long meal at the italian restaurant where one time a bottle of red wine was uncorked all over my wedfrock was no stress or matter.. something to remember the day by, I’d thought… long wait at the bar in spite of reservations gave chance for chats with strangers from SoCal, a volunteer med team following a beach volleyball tournament presently in town. they’re glad for our 6 years and that Chicago isn’t too cold or hot. part of dinner became gratis from the manager because we had waited without being assy, so we added a few courses, including crème brulee and cognac like we never… it was later remarked that “we supped well”.. long walk home at midnight, post-rain 70 degrees. encountered out of place throng upon throng- had originally thought- what evacuees of the Gay Games are these? (since that’s been making crowds around us the past week).. turns out to be post-Bon-Jovi-goers Soldier Field let out.. became another interesting endeavor upstream.

just past noon today and walking toward a big fountain to look at people for a while.. as an aside, two boys are chasing each other across a stretch of lawn. Boy A chases Boy B until he hooks a foot in front of Boy B, sending him down. Boy A proceeds in kicking Boy B in the stomach. since I am walking, a hedge takes out my view of Boy B and I can only see the body of Boy A torquing with continued kicks. a small rat runs in front of me and into the obfuscating hedge where things are left off unceremoniously.

a sit, a walk, a bottle of water, another walk, another sit later, I am in my favorite spot since 1994 of fountains and low hanging, thorny trees on the AIC’s southern face. the light is always interesting on the ground beneath these trees, and it’s particularly good today. “It’s nice out here, isn’t it?” says a man in a cowboy hat as he hands me a leaflet about the price of my sins. I pretend not to speak English, but accept the leaflet anyway. he seems pleased/goes away. twelve students in a line with easels just drew this scene. the light is interesting today. a cardinal, but drab- a female- clips back and forth.. above a woman who works a kinetic pose of fun for someone with a camera.. swinging arms in slow-motion. people fascinate the shit out of me lately. J’s gotten extremely adept at pal'ing quickly with strangers. like after thursday night’s reading, all poets adjourned to the woodlawn pub and after a time I found him missing.. found him at the bar with another chap.. I’m greeted, “oh hi honey, this is eric. we were just talking about the holocaust.”

there’s the male cardinal now. somehow his brilliance is overtaken by the sunlight acting on the leaves. now someone is taking pictures of the twelve students drawing this scene. sometimes, who doesn’t need a break from reflexivity? so I pick at a little mandelstam, gide.

in the museum.. I’m here to see the Harry Callahan show.. even more exquisite than his prints is the one film he ever made, a 9 minute, 16 mm, black and white, silent montage called “Motions.” I’ll have to return to that. on my way out, a docent sounds abrasively- “he’s not telling us what to see, but how to see!”- in front of a monet waterlily.

2006-07-20T14:43:00.000-05:00

aspiration is just
an entendre in the shiny mind
go stand in
the weather underdressed
this is
could be anything
july

*

on the native, or is it on restoration?

the call of a species
saying maybe i will call you
saying maybe i will call you back

*

"welcome to positive self-esteem-land," checker shoe
"two hours is infinitely doable," (reply)

*

in the last few days..
reading Gide, watching the Third Man, watching a man on the train eat the biggest honeybun I've ever seen and then pull out of his bag The Art of War and read.

around reading

2006-07-16T11:24:00.000-05:00

after a week of job stressfest.. if this button doesn't do that "heads will roll"... yesterday four hours (round trip) on a train for caving surrounded by static conversations... teenage boys on "bitches," adults just on money.. how much does he/she have? how much is made? how much appreciation? j gives me a look that says never that-- and never hawaiian shirts (previously: "is that where the crazy goes?"). (misread) "my memory/is walking instead/of itself." question of the day: can i claim italian citizenship? the timing of great relations naturalization to look into. caught the last five minutes of bonnie and clyde. spelunked in an attraction where crowds of the 1940's snapped off small stalagtites for souveniers.. thinking they'd grow back soon. sooner than 40 million years. some mailed back, "apologies from mt. horeb." j: "i really hope i married an italian citizen and didn't know it." saw a performance piece about john wayne, cancer and gunplay. the shootist reminds me of the quietist, at least as words. (misread) "the largesse of empty slippers." stalagtites are hollow mineral formations that, when young, resemble a straw. driving on a non-descript country road, the person driving recalls a fatal crash he witnessed in that spot -"between the second and third telephone pole"- fifty years ago. but it's a religious country. "what do you call this?" if by religious you mean. "the firebug sets the pulpit ablaze."

(some quotes partially or in tact from warsh's chapbook "flight test.")

2006-07-10T14:40:00.000-05:00

serious case of monday nacrolepsy--
strageties for staying awake:
up and walk the maze. up and get tea. climb stairs up five flights from lobby. go breathe in a bakery. read news articles/commentary about zidane. tell story of man in gold lame hotpants doing aerobics while reading the 20 Best Vegetables poster in the grocery store yesterday.

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

a Japanese expression- mono no aware- roughly the moving intimacy of things

and today still appalled at the bush scrape, and j lunching on a roof is buzzed by the slow and ominous 5 copter escort

it's like a monarchy, the ceremony of power

and my formalish lunch out with a department at a restaurant serving 3 portions for every one human- odd that no one saved anything, so much became waste

carried mine home and half a block from the site of last night's show of force someone asks me for money for something to eat..

no change

but 4 tortillas, a mess of vegetables and a nectarine

keep asking how writing can show the no-boundary of artmind and citizenry, whether to scream at tinted glass windows at injustice when it also implicates me -or if maintaining the attention toward the humane is adequately serving both principles

thinking of this and my working definition of the ecological poem: a text of interdependence aside from any mention of a blue-footed booby

2006-07-06T20:04:00.000-05:00

that's two politically visceral scrapes in as many days.. visceral, yes.. the skin crawls.. just walked out my front door to go to the store and walked into a roadblock and convoy of police.. just as the dogwalkers next to me said "the president" the limo with flags on it went by and parked.. pulled into a tent erected in the street a block away.. steak joint with the mayor.. one woman stood with a sign that said "liar" but the rest were curious, surprised and destination-oriented. after walking blocks out of my way, i stood across the street from the restaurant with my groceries, seeing if i could get past.. a most direct route with my bulbous mesh bag would have been preferred. fox news doing a live feed next to me, the shellacked correspondent asks some guy: "do you like the president?" "yeah, he's ok." and then passing me (agape) up for a woman who had outfitted her terrier in a flag hat who gushed "we live in the best country in the entire world and he's doing a great job!" i felt like i had just been punched. i did, at least, stagger through their shot.

le sang d'un poete

2006-07-05T21:58:00.000-05:00

making a beet-fennel-ginger soup
*
[certain associate] is amped about an upcoming night of yacht rock at the empty bottle.
[ca]: “it’s going to be great. [friend ten years younger]’s generation would hate it.”
“?”
[ca]: “they think irony is so passé.”
“you mean it’s all ours? awesome. i’ve been waiting for our defining thing.”
[breaks into song] “I’ve been waiting, for a girl like you, to come into my life.”

2006-07-05T14:22:00.000-05:00

Haunted by conversations of 4 July party last night, at a friend’s house, the company of many various neighbors, schoolteachers telling me poems must rhyme, former soldiers telling me the papers lie/force and secrecy is right/Iraq was “fun.” Wishing I were home to write and watch Portugal v. France. Instead ran for 36 minutes at lunch, touched the city line. Weeding through old bugs, listening to Bach Suites for Solo Cello, not my usual worktronica, but in headphones I can hear the performer’s breathing complimenting the physicality of the cello, an instrument I’d like to learn more of than to simply hold. A certain human fragility audible there, in player and chord, that quiets my speculation over what a boy in a baseball cap eating a hot dog checking his voicemail talking about Vegas then war had done.

Would you politely move a spider?

2006-07-03T23:50:00.000-05:00

how seriously I’m off to require
more access
more hours dreamt we met famously you
complete the mileage there align saline
clouds off my aim smell medical
I really don’t know how
a body removes timbres or gets up and stands still
Why I don’t don’t I? want

to work I think
mustaches fluctuate in time
looked nothing like you
about art, fighting words

ledge: I think we’re attached
I’m your covering-- matches

my breathing: Morton Feldman’s String Quartet (II) (1983)

2006-07-02T11:12:00.000-05:00

in case i was worried about what i would do with myself once the world cup is over, this looks like a fabulous timesink.. LibraryThing.. oh my weakness for things with thing in the title. what i really need is submissionthing, grantwritingthing, riddingcomputerofvirusthing.

2006-07-02T10:34:00.000-05:00

neighbor moving strangely
in her house who needs that much space slow sideways bending
why we think with the earth
moves makes it our morning and
soccer's afternoon finding the channel we pass
someone doing the same bending thing

2006-07-01T09:08:00.000-05:00

if crowds are your thing
if fistfights are breaking
out by the Corner Bakery and you are
stranded bodily this much
some people choose a strand of lakefront
blanket aquarium to see exploding things
can i stay (awake) Arizona wants
to go but our roads are too small too full

2006-06-30T09:11:00.000-05:00

Feeling for a while like driving and me should break up.. not necessary where I live, do it mostly out of laziness while enriching chenies, etc. but last night’s commute home was the cincher- after a one hour crawl down sheridan through rogers park there was that momentary liberation of first getting on lake shore drive, an open expanse in front of me, windows down on a beautiful afternoon that should be the start of my weekend but at the last minute isn’t/wasn't, music turned up, forgetting the car is red, and suddenly I’m being pulled over and written a ticket. The fact that I haven’t gotten a speeding ticket since I was 16 years old notwithstanding, the real cruelty of it is driving one more block after the ticket and ending up in another hour of gridlock. Phone suddenly lost, ice cream melting beside me on the seat- this sucked. Later, the desire, the need to just walk- walk many miles to atone for too long spent driving.. and past Summerdance which was acrowd with Romanian band and dancing circles within circles, then to the Gehry bandshell for a surprise wandering into a packed night of world music.. some African jam band that made many rapturous with hippie-dancing. About to leave, picking up a discarded program, discovered that we had earlier missed right there and for free Seu Jorge. Bugger. And I had thought all the Brasil shirts in the crowd were for good World Cup chi. Walked back after dark down Columbus which was staged for the start of the Taste (starts today), which in all my years as a Chicagoan I’ve never attended because impromptu gang fights and sweaty crowds eating slabs of ribs and comically large turkey legs has never been my thing, but this was magical- as magical as the clouds of bright blue and green dragonflies at the foot of the mountain I climbed last week- like being on a movie set, the artists still there painting last-minute bricks onto the faux pub booths. We walked through reading the menus for everything: sauerkraut pierogies, pav bhaji, vegetarian tamales, flan, beignets, stuffed pizza, baklava, mango rice pudding, pickle on a stick, rice and beans with kelewele (plantain sautéed in garlic sauce). Then past the solid block of semis dark and unpeopled, the reinforcements buzzing with refrigeration.

2006-06-28T17:34:00.000-05:00

Oh Barack, not you too. Is this really the strategy? "Oh yeah? Well I like Jesus more than you do."

misc.. fill space!

2006-06-27T22:40:00.000-05:00

day 2 back at the when-did-i-ever-find-any-time-for-poetry-in-my-day? job... funny though, the tech writing is pouring forth with boulder-limbered ease: "When you have finished adding all the features you want in your custom template, click Done."
*
saw word play last night- sweetly geeky.
*
daniel nester's in the 773. caught up at myopic and drinky afters where, appropriately, the jukebox turned queen.
*
tonight made this spinach-parmesan-couscous stuffed poblano thing.. 20 minutes prep time my foot.
*
just realized i have a virus- a minor one- but on a mac.. who knew? so all those editors i'm waiting to hear back from probably pitched my attached contagion straightaway.
*
i'll be reading in the first installment of a new reading series in hyde park curated by bill allegrezza. july 20. other details shortly.
*
zing! hello midnight. you don't know me, but i'm that 4 p.m. double espresso.

quick poem for bean

2006-06-25T16:45:00.000-05:00

ok, white cat headbutt
you are so in my way
so on my bladder
jumping like i never knew your love

2006-06-25T15:51:00.000-05:00

let's go sister who teases
what money can buy/not talk
to me like that rumored ticket tuts relation
must cost the afterlife brought to you by
exelon oh bless
bless the tourists so they go back
and tell of all the nice sneezing they did
the nicest place i know to wear a seatbelt
now let me out
teasing sister

2006-06-25T15:42:00.000-05:00

looks like it was a western tanager we saw on the rattlesnake gulch trail in eldorado canyon.

2006-06-23T14:57:00.000-05:00

End of week and no completed writing project to show for it, but that's an arbitrary- and not very plausible at that- assumption. It's been a good 5 days of intake. There's a been an almost daily cycle of clarity and confoundment as regards my ongoing writing practice. Still in strategic mode. Strategically speaking, it's a pile of goo. At one point I thought/wrote: "Still in strategic mode. Ideas of place. History. The History Channel. Ecohistory. Echo."

Then I wrote-
perspective as the plane's
shadow in profile
its childish form (other childish forms?)
the same size as a house without a person or tree
for reference, only a continuity of surface, a gesso
of low growth the texture and color of a sweater
worn by a woman under the roof,
the simple shape- one story or two-
the plane below.

Then "Eureka" and some notion about deconstructivist architecture and empathy.

All I know is that I am not a bat. That I can walk up a mountain 700 feet. That I ate a raw oyster for the first time at the invitation of Laird and it was less than gross. That the graffiti says "cause I love you." That I saw a family of raccoons cross the street and disappear near the curb where I walked- gingerly- moments later. It may have been the same day McClure called us "mammal patriots" that a student was actually bitten on campus by a very forward squirrel and Joan said, "Your mind: you can be the proud owner of this formidable machine."

monday

2006-06-23T14:01:00.001-05:00

first impressions of denver-
flatter than I thought.. mountains hung in smog.. fewer trees than I thought.. people still drive really big cars here.. big scape.. The Bigscape.. so this is where all of our american values for bigness come from... woman on the plane that when I first asked her if I could sit next to her paused for a long while before saying yes, then revealed she didn't want anyone "large or weird" sitting next to her but she guessed I looked "like a normal enough lady.." so this is where all of our american values for My Space come from. (not the trademarked virtual My Space, but funny that. what is your list of fav bands in hectares?)

*

notes from ElizaRob's lecture--

ecology- a preoccupation with balances.

beauty is an offering, a form of hospitality. the response to irony should be the same as the response to beauty: yes and no.

beauty should dislodge the dislodger or iron wall of irony.

beauty is imperfect, transitory.. (full of?) processual truths, not fixed

quote via e.r. of i don't recall who-- "to perceive at all is to be vulnerable to one's perceptions."

"irony gives us only a __(can't read my handwriting here.. curlier than usual)___."

an ecology of associations.. to work with imbalances.

creating an ethical and aesthetic ecology

misread but claiming it as my idea: irony is beauty preoccupied with error.

beauty is in the eyes of the community-- many versions (word origins in turning), many beholders.

*

also day 1. boulder. i am looking for some sign of mork and mindy. the only evidence is that i am old enough to have watched too much television in the 70's. i am taught that this is a place i can walk in front of cars. i attempt this but end up running anyway. staving off an altitude headache. where are you from? sea level. this isn't heat that everyone's talking about. whenever i'm teaching i'm wishing i were a student so this is just right, but i can't unring that bell aching my student mojo. the peak of the bell tower is being hammered on the lawn outside the classroom's window.

2006-06-20T08:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at opening panel on Poethics Joan R. talking about her process over years of merging "direct action with the luxury of poetry".. and talking about occupying two distinct communities simultaneously in DC during the Vietnam years, the experimento poetry for one that did not overtly engage in political subject matter and political action groups. Seeking artistic offshoots of the latter, she found "audience-manipulating theater and rhetorical forms doing exactly what the repressive, authoritarian regimes were doing that we opposed."

Later during the Q&A, another panelist said to her, "I admire your faith and your commitment to the work of poetry and its reach." JR: "It's not faith, it's optimism, which is constructive pessimism."

*

From the prompt
How do I know I m not a bat?

because I think "which?"
for an American pastime?
to write to it
to be thinking of the time
to be located by things beyond
my own senses
for guidance
trying to make a point of
reference out of devil's thumb
to be thinking of ominous creatures-
am i one?
to be counting. countable, able to
discern within a mass its scale and context
context like a rib shack just around the bend
text like, "for decorative use only"
which is something inedible- though perhaps
it moves- to write to it, moves again, and
moves located by things beyond the rib shack
to have seen it on television
to have immediately asked
for a landmark with a name
a way of making the senses more acute
the senses, a name, if it can
be remembered- written down
even- and the scale of it made
by context, to notice, "that is not my local brand
of y" - is it edible?
can i buy it?

2006-06-18T08:10:00.000-05:00

Creative Satisfaction cont'd...

*

last two lines of a poem by Kodojin:
"In vain I have the feelings of 'wind and tree':
I'm ashamed that I've done no real writing!"

*

I'll be spending the rest of this week in Boulder.

2006-06-17T22:55:00.000-05:00

In Lincoln Park more pubs showing US vs. Italy than the Cubs game, which would be notable except that the Cubs pubs were at capacity whereas soccer fans enjoyed more elbow room. Ate at a yummy Algerian creperie and saw a Prairie Home Companion. Thinking of the agency of the fictional (Guy Noir) on the “real” and vice versa (Xtian Texan as NPR axeman).. all Altman for that matter.. why I like his work.. this one was slightly less cacophonous, less spooling and quixotic.. tighter editing for a larger release? (and a spare 90 minute-ish.) Holding the regional humor throughout instead of front-loading it would have pleased this regional crowd even moreso, (one zinger of a Midwest in-joke, GK sings an advert ditty for Jens Jensen fish sticks- in Norwegian, no less- though Jens Jensen is not a 21st century fishmonger, but a 19th century landscape architect whose innovative notions of allowing design to honor local wilderness, rambling creeks and prairie plants spread his name around the parks of the Midwest (Humboldt Park, for one)), but as it was people were applauding the screen, a dynamic I’ve never understood.. what exchange is to be had there? Is this how familial we’ve grown to the medium? Nevertheless, if the oughts go down in the books as the era of “truthiness,” this film will have an important place in that history.. though the WMD fiction was never this entertaining.

2006-06-12T10:14:00.000-05:00

Catching up with L after her spell out of town and the Monday, the work day, beginning reluctantly for us both, going out for coffee, taking a slow walk back with coffee, sitting down finally outside The Building on the picturesquest of mornings.. talking about what other ways she could make money that would not so bother the painting life.. hold for despair, then a broken sound from the street, a truck hitting a bump with extraordinary thunder causes us both to look up.. the side of said vehicle reads large: “Creative Satisfaction.”

Ahoy

2006-06-11T08:26:00.001-05:00

My lapse in blogging is partly due to an uptick in bicycling. Chicago is currently considered the best city in the States for bicyclists, and this week is bike to work week.. um, that's a 15 mile lakefront trek for me.. perhaps, perhaps. I guess sometimes the States aren't a totally backward place.

Also this week, my niece tore up an anemic dance recital with her moonwalk and Thriller solo. Was ballast in my first ever sailboat race (thanks Bill). Reading first 5 pages of an armload of fiction from last week's book fair booty. Found out that Os Mutantes are headlining the Pitchfork Festival the day before my birthday. That's a show I'll stand in a crowded park on a 98 degree humid day for. Caught a butohy carnival at what will be Discrete's (hott) new venue in the fall.

2006-06-08T09:36:00.000-05:00

Yet to check out: Pandora, Ariel Pink (FF), new oculus by James Turrell.
Misread: floats like a gif.
Image is of a collage of the Wisconsin woods made of plastic bags by Ben Potter, from the show at Navta Schulz.

2006-06-08T09:31:00.000-05:00

how shape
adheres to shape
along the lake
a woman walking her
head balancing a box
and two parrots next
to lake shore drive
going
are we sure
the mayor's wife is really in-
to birds
so much of the news
drinking out of fairy cups
that europe colludes in flight
only engine and air
exempt
even leave
sound

2006-06-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

“We call it Europe, but it’s really the imagination.” Tod Thilleman

Nighthawks salon alone or scissor- the first of their scissoring I know- over Fulton Market, a street, not a market exactly, except that still many aproned meat men hose floors between gallerist and gallery. Worked on my red at Promontory Point, high sun hours and Calvino no protection factor. Night’s bicycle in the sensorium. Lox at Eleven. Fiction spoils of the Printer’s Row book fair. What time is it there? (In Dutch) Believe me, someone tried to break in. Paranoid American, put your electronics in the dryer, no one will look for them there. Salon tip: effectively punctuate the end of a poem with “Fuck em!” or “Reagan was president then.”

2006-06-01T14:24:00.000-05:00

I am thinking of a word problem. Today I was given three pink peonies and three Bollywood movies. The other day I was given a dictionary. Yesterday I was hit in the face with a flying pigeon. More accurately, grazed. The peonies remind me of a hulking bush of them alongside a house, petals dizzy with ants. Its wing was soft against my cheek until I thought of the germs. I was walking at a constant speed determining me south on the el platform; the pigeon was also constant and direct about its course. If anyone else’s math had worked, they didn’t say “your shoe’s untied” or “if I want to go to Wrigley field am I on the right platform?” Just before we had been talking of Shakti, and Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi scripts the way the signed point from a distance is. Determined, I thought, was more accurately the word for shaking all the ants out. I looked it up (probably good form) and found that every rigid motion of the plane owes itself to either rotation, translation, reflection or gliding aviary.

2006-05-31T00:14:00.000-05:00

2006-05-31T00:03:00.000-05:00

what didn't come in the mail today: Saint Hello of the Looms in midnight, tango or egg.

2006-05-30T09:48:00.000-05:00

As if this weekend were all strings and no theory, an expedited passport can go virtually missing with a shrug “computer’s down.” Where armed guards stand in front of a triumvirate of frames: W-Cheney-Condi. Have no overreaction. Or is it Mercury racketeering. Friday the passport turns up. Pause for food-borne illness. Embarkation for Monday back on. The flight is boarded. Then late. Then last in line on the runway. Then subject to a perilous rain. Three hours on a tarmac and finally revelry at the sound of motors. The sound of motors horribly wrong. This flight is being cancelled in Spanish due to engine malfunction. Nothing else is known. Embarkation for airport to pick up He of the Tarmac Day and another halting. Moments after his car accident the motorist is facing me southbound in 5 northbound lanes. His look of surrender before emergency crews arrive. Thinking about time and how I used to confuse coincidence with consequence in a spelling grade. My signaling past the debris. Airport. Home. Late. We are the only neighbors with windows open. We do not prefer climate control and so are the few or only to hear the first screams that I mistake for a small dog but then become Help and the mismatched sounds of high heels and speed. We call. We are witnesses. A witness rescheduled to fly today.

2006-05-21T18:20:00.000-05:00

"If today and today I am speaking to you, or
if you/I whisper, touch, explain"
rhythmically reminds me of this game
(picture below) also realizing
more prominence than I sensed before
of a Stevens in Gizzi's tree

2006-05-21T18:17:00.000-05:00

2006-05-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

Easy to see how people get consumed with the meaninglessness of work. Meaninglessness, OK. Work, something to do in retreat. Attempting to surface with grant-making to Japan (Japan, please have me), well foretold, I think, by a dream earlier this week in which I am serving sake to Mr. T. Also, in bike ride along the lake and an all day spent outdoors and Ethiopian free jazz. Also, in gallery-ing night to a cavernous warehouse of electrified cellos playing in dark corners and canvases and white walls making a thin, new guise over hulking structures of industry. And then to a gutted bar down the street where a painter in bankruptcy hung his work under rusted punched-tin ceiling nymphs, in a room also adorned by a refrigerator and a column of BTU’s. The story of his life a study in echo- living in towns with the same name, creditors, creditors. So less easy train reads and US magazine on the treadmill. Must get back to throwing heat.

2006-05-15T11:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday granted admittance to one of the church megaplexes I'd only read about. It's astonishingly true, in the case of intimate spiritual experience, Americans are saying "supersize me." Though the distance of the carpark offered a pedestrian experience rarely known in big boxlandia, one my stagnating arteries welcomed, it was insisted that we board a triple-trailer golf cart for our door-to-door conveyance. An anatomy of zippers were tended to ensure our staying dry beneath a plastic sheath fitted over our battery-powered omnibus. I hollered out to our good Xtian driver as I was nearly mowed down off the back end of our caravan by a good Xtian Cutlass rampaging out of a handicapped parking space. Taking the curb a little faster than would be ordinarily prudent, he narrowly avoided my consumption by Oldsmobile. Praise him. Once inside it was clear that I had entered the new American cultural frontier (still under construction). Retail, cafe and plentiful symptoms of branding dotted the polis ensconcing the stadium-like center of the holy business. The edition of the Bible speckling every pew featured a handy index one could quickly access for the Biblical antidote to host of maladies including peer pressure and divorce. Once the commencement was under way, it was clear from our distance that we would be relying one of the three jumbotrons for our virtual participation. Since I always travel with a tech expert, it was duly noted that the mic'ing did not account for the delay ensured by the cavernous space, so the lips and voices of the speakers moved with subtle disembodiment.
Caps. Gowns. Speeches. Brief thought of returning to earn the velvet beret and bell sleeves. Oh horse feathers.
Later, one may inquire of the nine-year-old about her vocabulary list for the week which includes "Richter Scale" and "seismograph" beside a layer cake buckling with a raspberry subduction zone.
We are given a camera with a perpetually open shutter. My feeling exactly.

2006-05-10T09:48:00.000-05:00

Tenure never looked so unglorious as when someone being forced out must accept a token hunk of crystal beside a photo of himself on an easel with his bio, in a room lined in illuminated glass cabinets full of jade curio and the tightly stitched who utter “interesting” and “extraordinary” and speeches, and other empty pageantry that only a wine bar makes tolerable.

2006-05-09T21:28:00.000-05:00

Poetry saturation point reached lately, or due to feelings of general atomization, it’s a retreat to prose. Reading Selections from the Journals of Thoreau recollects an early college flutter, and here where an imminent t-storm shakes an awning, awnings of Arigato, thanks, a place, thinking of the daily stream of places as a novel of many thanks. A sentiment that offers one a chair, a mirror to sit beside, a neon outline of a fish, a view of a copy store across the street. Where the door is left open for a moist wind and the paper shades hung from the ceiling wobble slightly, thinking if stars could stumble there would be a resemblance there. Someone has already made a simile of it anyway. I am alone except for a man waiting to cut a fish, a starched version of the Brandenburg Concerto and a server that punctuates every phrase with “today,” making every fulfillment of one’s request decidedly temporal. It’s been too long, or seems, since the continuous present and I have checked in. The minutes remind me, made audibly similar by refrigeration’s drone. Me and Henry David Thoreau.

2006-05-04T09:09:00.000-05:00

I’m like so busy
with work
mostly, not mine but a surprise
technically writing, I like
forgot language
could be so orderly, kind
of like a miniature
variety, miniature
and tone deaf, erect in no kind
of dickinson way, just
so. like what ever
happened to that stencilled
alphabet that was all the packaging
generic could hope for? the beautiful
symmetry of its aisle in spite of variety:
potato chips, lima beans ration the alphabet
unobstructed, a favorite
memory works really,
not mine

2006-05-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

History lately inflects my hardly waking, my effort at present, presence— is that a cardinal overhead or a dragon belief derived from fossil remains? Is this humid chill a Lake Nemi of houseboats, Calligulan, Diana afleet?

Instead of falling into the train for the second half of a morning sleep, where doors close and take us with them and an announcement is enough to rattle my clothes— time, news, briefly forgiving the car in which Alyssa Milano reads Anne Bradstreet.

miraculous, part 2

2006-05-02T08:29:00.000-05:00

Move over Thatcher.. (miraculous, part 1)

2006-05-02T08:24:00.000-05:00

2006-04-26T08:42:00.000-05:00

I’m certain I’m the last person to have read this book, though it’s been at the top of my list since before it came out and she read from it in Providence in the spring of 2002. I remember then I –and it seemed like everyone I knew- was still so stunned by the events of the fall of ’01 and the proliferation of flags and the tough act our government was putting on for the world.. and while we were bewildered, Gladman’s vision cut right through this: to a microcosm of activists who are both uncertain and undeterred. At one point in reading I thought, “when people want to be inspired by words it’s really a desparate time, perhaps they have already given up.” The action here is of human relation and its sustenance of subtexts.. that when characters actually speak out loud it is like a tracery weapon- precise in its own right but revealing every contrast of truth made by its very existence.

At one point a reporter says, ”Now speech is hardly noteworthy. It’s only what one has thought.” Perhaps there was much to predetermine this, but it’s only now that some public debate has begun- 3 years after the invasion of Iraq- about the media presenting white house p.r. as factual news, the unseemly process by which preemption was justified, the choreography of “leaks”.. that average readers like myself can read this and marvel at Gladman’s perceptiveness in her ability to wage the insurgent efforts of a handful of characters who doubt themselves and one another at every turn just slightly less than they distrust a speaker who says, “We are all one.. against an abomidable enemy.”

2006-04-25T09:40:00.000-05:00

Since Friday: At what point does Illinois give? Mapquest me. If I could swim. The X-burbs making a moat of traffic around the city. In time. For the best open mic ever at Woody P. Ro’s continuing Bicycle, surprise Lisa not yet in New Z, and afterwards. To the P’lish Falcon where TV was convinced away from hockey to the lip-reading edition of a VH-1 Jim B. Where balls were examined for signatures by George Bowering, where I was continually limbo to pool. Late. Saturday driving back past all the deer carcasses I would have killed the night before, and after brunch, walking, falling mid-day asleep to Cubs game. In this, thirty years unchanged. Out. M, L, and J confer. Being an asshole is the new nice. In this, pragmatism seeks a flair for the dramatic, like Skynard opens a wound. Monday: God save my technical difficulties, increase my bewilderment in other things.

2006-04-20T08:44:00.000-05:00

Current reading has that Francis Bacon je ne sais quoi.

*

Stories from a country pastor about driving a magazine delivery truck in Chicago, being pulled over and paying off cops with Playboy and Good Housekeeping (for the wife).

*

Things found in a house from 1864:
2 pillars made of redwood, a photo of Alfred E. Newman, a hosiery box containing 1 dried rose, 1 woman’s hair bow, a lock of hair, coupons for hose guaranteed not to run, someone watching from the second floor.

2006-04-19T08:49:00.000-05:00

Poem beginning with a line misread

one hundred clouds empty sincerity
one in counting
clouds one hundred of anything
empty one for me
clouds one hundred under one
sincerity’s once over
once over empty clouds
once empty one
empty sincerity
one hundred too empty
a number to number
to empty a cloud into a gauge
to number sincerity possibly
passibly
passibly empty
passible hundreds
one hundred empties
distribute into a shape
about everything

2006-04-18T11:34:00.000-05:00

Didn’t notice Easter this year, didn’t have to be in a room with a ham.

Monday.. the taking, the talking, the clarifying, the finishing, the passing, the handshake of oral exams (J).

Photo of a blind and armless boy maimed in a WW2 bombing reading braille with his lips at AIC struck me more than all the modernists yesterday. Also the exquisite tile work and manuscript pages from 13th century Iran. Pouring the absence of depiction into calligraphy, the devotion to the word as the object of art.

Are we pissed off enough yet with our leaders?
Accountability several years in the making, though he did one good thing in office with the moratorium on the death penalty. Will that be discredited with him?
Pulitzer journalism, is the media making a comeback?
And Jules’ research gets a mention from a former supporter of the war.

2006-04-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

three male purple finches on our porch today? i think.

started reading this today and will have much more to say.

so far
her opaline
epistemological wingbeats.

2006-04-16T11:27:00.000-05:00

My reading yesterday took place in this room with the look and smell of my first grade class c. 1980. Fabulous. Reading amid the coda to last week's flu=The Mudra by Johnny Cash. Nice actually. Finally able to hit the low notes in It Ain't Me Babe too. Afterwards a walk through Uptown and a noodle sandwich amid streets of little Vietnam's phosphorescent sweets and beef steam.

2006-04-14T22:39:00.000-05:00

I just finished 400 years of history in 3 days checking a thing that was the Mayflower through the W. years.. that's more violence than I can take without a $3 beer special at the end of the day. And so.. before the special, before everyone else's Good Friday furlough, for two hours well-killed, I gathered the Concerto Form under oaks planted when Northwestern U. meant of the far-flung territories and read in the sun and under the rain of seedy tendrils clicking off 40 feet above, noting other things in bloom: hyacinth, tulips (some), forsythia, daffodils, magnolia (just starting) and a flowering white tree I'm not sure (dogwood?). This is my parlor trick for- supplements my lack of stamina- my running mate, naming things. I need to study up. On this day in history: lincoln was shot, the titanic hit the iceberg and a grade school bully was born.

2006-04-13T18:15:00.000-05:00

just as i finished the weather a bundle of bronze skull chaps. five goodies by inman, mead, sims, samuels and timm. sporty good weather for reading outside like good weather for fantasy/foosball. little here is the result of my looking for days at pre and civil war websites for the beige. oh you primary sources, i just may.. (add a pound?). other mail delights: "see the world through tut's eyes... and save!" misread: "one hundred clouds empty sincerity."

2006-04-11T15:53:00.000-05:00

Made it back among the living and strength returning by the hour after strange morning of near-aneurysm. Reading The Weather and “spring seems begun” got me out and buying flowers, making bouquets and leaving them secretly in the cubicles of the never-get-outs, the stressed, the menstruating… lovelies all... count that one point against the beige.

2006-04-10T16:14:00.000-05:00

Watched depressing film full of great chasms between art and life. Very NY, very 80’s, which helped to discredit it enough for me to not completely abandon the rest of the day.
*
The signal bell of rush hour trains. The blinds slapping the dusty sill with sun. Basketball being played in the alley outside my window- one of the few irregular rhythms of the city- probably why it drives us crazy. Give me the el. Behind in everything. Virus featuring fever, day three.

2006-04-06T13:50:00.000-05:00

William Carlos Williams, the heartbeat of America.

*

misreading: I'm writing sentences here of an unbred resort.

*

week please end.

2006-04-05T12:26:00.000-05:00

If it’s an 08 Jeb I’m moving to Berlin.
If it’s a night at SonoTQ it’s an I Ching of muggees and expats telling me to move to Amsterdam.
If only we had a vital union movement like France.
I’ve been tattooless this long and haven’t yet gone to Japan.
If I’m managing to get any work done today someone who’s still talking about Janet Jackson’s nipple will opine “…classy. Probably one of the most positive movies about cannibalism ever made.”
If I miss the Danny’s reading tonight it will be for making up a sleep debt.

*

My photo “my” is up at UES this week and just Sunday I noticed that that building is up next for demo’ing.

Saturday will begin our search for a place like “my” to live in that is further away from the devilish forces of spiffing.

I want a T-shirt that would make my el stop proud.

2006-04-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

saturday, part 2: what we do to be near fire.. bon voyage party of a friend going to build a desert utopia: “you know in star wars where they went to buy the millennium falcon? it looks like that.” and party was 20 feet up a shaky ladder positioned in gangway to old tracks where a living room had been made of lamps, hubcaps, bonfire, tables and chairs. eventually this will be a “linear park” but now is the most roguish fun one can have steps from fully gentrified bucktown seeping west. we walked to california along this high up and weed trees were full of birds and humboldt blocks typically raucous were silent. thinking of getting down, were told an embankment one block west existed for those who preferred a mere scurry to the steep, shaky ladder descent. stories of the homeless brandishing screwdrivers near said embankment and general paranoia as we stepped over charred mattresses and strewn clothing denoting camp did not prevent us from seeking the scurry option. scurry option cut the height in half, but resulted in 10 foot drop to the street which we declined. thinking of going down the ladder with much trepidation, a woman ascends replete with sandwiches, entire platter in one hand. thoughts of bathroom and not having to climb with sandwiches aided my descent.

missing our former hood and a block from our old place where we learned never to assume that green means go because someone is frequently making an escape through the red, two cars attacking each other with a smash and continued pursuit past us with parts akimbo like mel gibson was clutching the hood equaled a night beyond the usual taco cap.

2006-04-03T08:22:00.000-05:00

saturday, part 1: pierrot lunaire at the mca
i like spectacle, i like gamealan shadowtry, but on puppets, as in the production here, i still range luke warm to fully creeped. especially when their handlers are a squeaky-floorboard, unmasked crowd.. doesn't do it for my suspension of disbelief. that said, the first piece on the program and the schoenberg were beautifully staged and performed, especially by 8th blackbird musicians who move around the stage and are a very animated part of the whole. the costuming for pierrot was also notable- the flutist's garb resembled a highly constructed upside down tulip, the carinetist resembled an inverted bell of his instrument.. a quilted, straight-jacket theme unifying the ensemble with the whimsy of a midsummer night's dream. the soprano rendered her struggle with the muse with precision and moxie with a presence and tone more debra harry than brunhilde. it's reassuring to see "experimental" music given such resources and venue, but really, this is part of the canon, so it ought not be that unusual. this piece is nearly 100 years old.

2006-04-02T21:55:00.000-05:00

more for the bin of the never-saw, but just discovered the website: Art: 21.

as soon as there's time, more to say on pierrot lunaire with creepy puppets, how to get up and get down from a party on abandoned elevated train grounds, 2 a.m. smash-up derby and car chase down north ave. perpendicular to a green light and us, car signaling pursuit with the vibrato of a perpedicular wheel. remembering when scary was fun.

2006-04-01T18:17:00.000-06:00

Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday!

2006-03-31T13:14:00.000-06:00

Today: Churlish like a Chloe at computers, a Tarzan something makes my day after morningvendorjerkism. Wind patrons rubbing gusty, particulate eyes sitting down to mango lassi following, that is, we, last night’s flashlight on fish readiness (BBQing in the night). Damn it all, vendorguy in indiscriminate city giving me e-lip, Oprah and the World Cup’s successful coup on our EuroJune. So what. It’s nice out. Finally. Back to Plan A to get out of town to perfect my grammar and frequent usage mistakes that impede or distort meaning? TGITarzan and lovely rubricspeak.

*

“why are you walking like that?” tells me it’s a good day to forgo the run.

2006-03-30T13:35:00.000-06:00

Happy bday lavamat.
Your present will be a blanching
of this moldy backdrop, a tepid white,
this year’s must-have, and do that
without losing
history or other muckings up.
In a physical phase, a daily
run and writing in the margins
“peace and so forth.”
I’m yours, vicarious,
gleaning my common stains-
olive oil, ice cream,
wine- the pastimes of managemen.

current reading

2006-03-29T08:19:00.000-06:00

in glowing paypal eyes i misread
petroleum hat oscillates at a higher velocity than even spin
bed bath and beyond redemption
as if i needed convincing the brilliant line
i was too sleepy to get out of bed
to write down ended in afford's adjective sense

**

overheard on train:
"sometimes i think that if i was horribly injured by an accident and didn't die i'd be so grateful to still be alive that i wouldn't even sue anybody."
"not me."

2006-03-28T18:55:00.000-06:00

low res "is going to be a hit hit hit"
fela koti, dishwasher safe
high res Rue with a beard of food
sweetening the b-
actor in the sound booth
sound more angry you history
pre-contra low res shadowy
insurgent restless leg

2006-03-27T10:31:00.000-06:00

Someone stole some laptops in the office over the weekend. Dusting for fingerprints, a plush frog only knows. This weekend, revisited 1994, determined I’m (old/)in wardrobe and lyric-knowing only there anymore. Visited the “position of getting all initial responsy on your ass.” And popmodernism.org. Took a beachball in the face for art, part of a performance about intelligent design. Today I like your skirt/hair/shoes/eyes/nose. Thanks figured it was time to bring the legs back out.

2006-03-24T15:44:00.000-06:00

At strange metabolic odds with myself this week, the result of an inherently lazy person starting to run. Jog. Dash. Tread. And drink coffee. And stay up late. Cultivating the frequent sensation of wanting to simultaneously nap and leap. It aids 2 a.m. yammerings that first generation NY School is sweetfully decoy by degrees. That thankfully it’s there saying that one isn’t always singlemindedly stroking a horse or stroking that horse algebraically. And being told by a psychologist over beers that we do a good job of analyzing ourselves is either horrifying or a comforting, new disorder. Like not counting little imaginary things, for example my Points disability. Or, more accurately, my lack of faith in points. My troubles include: sports points. Being a teacher and being expected to enforce Points. Edible points otherwise known as spaghetti. My jerk streak says they're just another iteration of heaven.. the leftover carrot/stick of our animal origins. Call me a hungry crank with an achy vastus medialis. Oh let the random air bring me the office sprite bearing sweet, sly meeting-edible things who I haven’t seen all week.

I also learned last night that in spite of lenten promotions, bowling alley vegetarian sandwiches are inedible. Or is that unedible? I was too busy watching the children behind the counter toddling near the deep fryer to notice that my sandwich was a hoagie roll concealing a mess of blue-green sweet relish and a sheet of plasticine cheese. Looked like it was leaking antifreeze.

Discrete’s tonight. Please come. Flyers for the French event are actually made. In advance.

2006-03-23T08:54:00.000-06:00

“Days/
are shorter, more limpid, are like a kiss,/
neither dry nor wet nor on the lips/
that sends a light shock in rings/
through all the surface of the skin.” (from Going, James Schuyler)

I need to mate my phone with my home computer to bring here some fuzzy pics of my lunchtime peninsula, how I always forget, my thoughts too peninsular, that work is a ten minute walk from this- is it man-made, a spit? This is where I sat with a marching band audibly distant. This will later be inserted. A silent campus bets you the lines are down at Mt. Everest. I bet it is quiet at the buffet Everest. I haven’t heard these kind of waves in months, more than one, several harmonicas. Are these waves just now, a buffet progression.

2006-03-22T10:27:00.000-06:00

now he'll never let me sleep past 6... bean made famous by zafusy.

also, jordan is kind.

this all reminds me of the film of tokohiro sato making one photograph. over the course of several minutes we watch as he swims to various points off a rocky shore and shines a mirror back at the camera (video and still cameras in the same location). swim. repeat. a lengthy process of relaying light. a lengthy process of relaying one moment.

2006-03-22T08:10:00.000-06:00

more legitimate dangers. um, yeah. the oil bone connected to the war bone connected to the debt bone, but only over beers would the rapture solve anything, settle a bet. didn't realize rapture anticipation was national policy. put the environment on its to-do list.

the news isn't all bad. just in time for our trip to spain, a chilled out eta.

*

blogger has been foul the last few days so here's hoping it's going to recall posting a post without all the template scurvy. how's to.

name that fungi.

this morning on train a man next to me talks softly, taps, points to consecutive bags of dried mushrooms. beautiful specimens all, hooped together on a silver ring. like carpet samples. i have to break his concentration to leave. wishing general thoughts of good luck on all mushroom tests.

dreamt of an uber nasdaq that was like the polls reporting in, a daily rating in dollars in the stock we put in celebrity, like any other brand(ing). i open a newspaper with new purpose and there in the fineprint, as if i were first learning to read, is Britta right next to Brittany Spears. now i understand business, i think. Brittany's got to cut in front of somebody in line at the Walmart today to boost her share.

another consecutive thing.. a series of graffiti pieces- some roof, some building- crossed out in memory yellow and the large, bad handwriting above, "smile you are being watched."

2006-03-17T11:05:00.000-06:00

great post and comments going at tony tost's regarding online poetry culture. until online journals and blog community are deemed legitimate by the institution wing, it strikes me as a euphoric time/"place" of quality work enjoying an even playing field. the unassociated phenomenon in austin sounds like it was a progressive chapter in virtual community making a segue into actual, fleshy community too. how long can it remain a secret? shh.

**

coincidentally, jameson is giving a lecture at northwestern on 4/3.

**

kind of related- a woman i've never met here in the office keeps bringing me food. three times this week "psst. kerri!" has preceded a croissant or fruit salad being passed to me like a drug deal. i haven't asked how this started or what it's all about, just nod conspiratorily and accept the offering.

2006-03-16T13:06:00.000-06:00

repeating myself, oh my god, was that (reading last night at danny’s) good. it was like a séance for berrigan, ginsberg, others i am leaving out who have picked poetry up and moved it a mile down the road for a better view. and not just because chuck wrote some extra howlers into a supermarket in california, or that the spitfire candor of susie when she reads is something one can see jump off the page and join her.

but because i was too agape to take notes, because chuck said godforsaken computer that the greeks chose not to name, and because susie said i like tits but only my own.

someone with a press or just money, please bring her work back into print.

influx of several good, new books in the last week, I’ve read the first page of them all, maybe next to read the second page of them all and on, glitch rock for far sight and antsy.

see also: kenny g’s letters

what was the yummy trappist beer poured in a tulip-shaped glass we were drinking that ended in sous? someone who also drank it please comment in.

2006-03-15T17:10:00.000-06:00

"when's this bitch gonna feed me the good wet kibble?"
right now, early, so's i can scoot to danny's for chuck and susie's reading.

2006-03-15T13:40:00.000-06:00

Type A morning but delightfully tourist to others' everything as points points. And J unexpectedly on my block for lunch and to Thai place B where we decide so many things are lining up Buckminsterly. He has some mail that he's brought all this way because it looks unexpected, a happy package of surprise book from James- thanks James!- and something forwarded from former employer as a love letter from one of my ladies which is really hate mail and not meant for me but someone else on the staff with a similar name. "The stirfry stinks! And you misspelled Goulash!" Universe, thanks for reiterating.

**

a very good ides of march getting (J) palpably closer to done/doctorism, a final concert to be put on next month will be anything but "a 40-minute stretched out moth fart."

**

here heres (or is that hear hears?) to stephanie's consideration of avatar manipulation amidst an awp roundup that, like many other roundups, sounds like it was more dazzling- all out woodstock- than the chicago year when there wasn't nearly as much of a nexus of unassociated activity. was it that the unassociateds were less eager to vacation to a chicago march when true march is upon every other last nether? like tonight: 2-4 more inches of snow coming. goundhog, how you vex me.