Panix

I'm sending the new Portishead record, Third, through my ears right now, and can surely say that I've never felt so creeped out listening to music. This album, which bears very little of the signature trip-hop sound which made Portishead famous, sounds positively psychedelic, with fuzzed-out guitars, organ stomps, and Beth Gibbon's mood-dulling vocals push, push, pushing me into my myself.

If I were to describe what this album sounds like to a stranger (perhaps you are one), I would use the following phrases: panic room, negative space, and Christ, I'm suffocating in my own presence.

Seriously, I feel uncomfortable.

*

The fine(r) folks over at McSweeney's are having a sale this week: today, all items in their store are 30% off; tomorrow, all items will be 20% off; and all items on Thursday will be 10% off.

I think I'll treat myself to a couple of books by Stephen Dixon which, as a bundle, are being sold for a grand total of $15. Go forth and help our struggling economy!

http://store.mcsweeneys.net/

[DR]

Not the North Fork

LM (Montauk Morning)

Apropos Appropriation

Hey, Archie McPhee! You ask, Who is Senor Misterioso? Well, if you weren't such a gringo, you'd know that he's Dr. Jose Gregorio Hernandez, future patron saint of Venezuela and a lesser deity in the syncretic cult of Maria Lionza.

Amazing what you learn while staring into the window of the Botanica San Antonio. But if the blessed Dr. Hernandez can do double duty as a Catholic and cult saint, he can certainly fill in as a hipster icon.

{gc}

Pinsky Tells It Like It Is

It's all about that last line, friends:

Frequently asked questions about poetry

I Don't Wanna Be a Pinhole No More

I just met a camera that I could go for:

Dowloadable Pinhole Cameras.

For, you know, photography, nudge nudge wink wink say no more.

Use Your Lightning Bolt!

At long last, the perfect storm of the literary and the geeky, all for a good cause.

I think I might actually do this. After all, there will be, you know, girls.

I would make this the Video of the Day, but I can't quite figure out how to do that.

{gc}

Selections from Cane

Oracular.
Redolent of fermenting syrup,
Purple of the dusk,
Deep-rooted cane.

Georgia Dusk

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
The settling sun, too indolent to hold
A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbecue,

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
Soft settling pollen where ploughed lands fulfill
Their early promise of a bumper crop.

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low
Where only chips and stumps are left to show
The solid proof of fromer domicile.

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Race memories of king and caravan,
High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footprints of the swamp.

Their voices rise . . . the pine trees are guitars,
Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . . .
There voices rise . . . the chorus of the cane
Is carolling a vesper to the stars.

O singers, resinous and soft your songs
Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.


Evening Song

Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,
Lakes and moon and fires,
Cloine tires,
Holding her lips apart.

Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon,
Miracle made vesper-keeps,
Cloine sleeps,
And I'll be sleeping soon.

Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters where the moonwaves start,
Radiant, resplendently she gleams,
Cloine dreams,
Lips pressed against my heart.


--Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

In Heavy Rotation (Deep Spinner)

1. Thom Yorke - The Eraser - [XL; 2006]
2. Daft Punk - Alive 2007 - [Virgin; 2007]
3. Against Me! - New Wave - [Sire; 2007]
4. The Black Keys - Attack & Release - [Nonesuch; 2008]

Refuse to listen at yr own peril.

Tragically yours,
[DR]

New American Tragedies

During one afternoon a couple of years ago at City College, while taking a study break in the English majors' lounge, I decided to look through the department's collection of literary journals, some of which dated back some thirty years. I could not help but wonder, as the name of writer after unknown writer passed over my eyes, whether, in time, another young man would come across my own work in some journal, and whether he would take a brief second to consider my life, my desires and impulses, my place in a world that measures its citizens by the weight of language. A grief then came over me, not because I feared that I would one day join the ranks of minor, forgotten writers (there are far worse identities to be had, to be sure), but because it occurred to me that so much of the writing life, this true circus, is about glorified failure, ready-made.

*

All of this is to say that I haven't written a single line of creative work since December 2007, which leads me to a certain preoccupation: Will the urge to write, once seemingly natural and ingrained, return? Will it be a matter of time before pen is set against paper, or will I have to relinquish that title, dear writer, I've worked so hard to develop?

*

Outside, somewhere in Prospect Park, parents are cheering their well-trained children, dressed in clean, multi-colored uniforms, running on the basepaths--perhaps at the expense of their own lives.

*

I should clarify that second point: I wrote a line of poetry just yesterday. It is only a line, a brief and not altogether good one, which, for the sake of readers not aware of the concept of failure, I shall keep to myself.

*

And now, a chorus of seven Vespas, so foreign, in a formation normally the domain of fighter pilots, on the road just beyond her third-floor window.

[D - R]

Drown

Junot Diaz has been awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a rich, funny, and full work that examines the Dominican immigrant experience and the ways in which the past refuses to release its hold on those who insist on living in the present.

Diaz, who arrived in the United States as a young child without knowing a word of English, is the second Latino to win the prize; the first such author was CCNY alum Oscar Hijuelos, who won for his sex- and drink-riddled novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, published in 1990. (This book would later be adapted into a film and, uh, a Broadway musical.)

While I do not know Mr. Diaz personally, I still feel quite proud that, in a country which insists its Latino immigrants are little more than border-jumping thugs, he has been able to reach this level of professional success.

The winners in poetry:

Robert Hass, for Time and Materials
Philip Schultz, for Failure

Congratulaciones, Junot, y mucha suerte!

[D | R]

W.

Isn't a bit early for this?

And who, I wonder, would you cast?

Just another karaoke hit...

Six o'clock already
I was just in the middle of a dream
I was kissin' Valentino
By a crystal blue Italian stream
But I can't be late
'Cause then I guess I just won't get paid
These are the days
When you wish your bed was already made

It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my funday
My I don't have to runday
It's just another manic Monday

Have to catch an early train
Got to be to work by nine
And if I had an air-o-plane
I still couldn't make it on time
'Cause it takes me so long
Just to figure out what I'm gonna wear
Blame it on the train
But the boss is already there

All of the nights
Why did my lover have to pick last night
To get down
Doesn't it matter
That I have to feed the both of us
Employment's down
He tells me in his bedroom voice
C'mon honey, let's go make some noise
Time it goes so fast
When you're having fun

Six Degrees of Everything

Last night, I saw one of the most enchanting (in the fullest sense of that word) and enigmatic films ever, Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). It's playing this week at BAM--I can't recommend it highly enough, even thought it's three hours long and has an utterly puzzling ending. It's at once more accessible and more mysterious than Last Year in Marienbad (which was the last movie I saw before this... all I need now is another viewing of Memento and I'll be fully Meta).

Thursday night, my friend Jennie invited me to the NYC Ukulele Festival to see her beau's band Dreamboat. They were delightful (in the fullest sense of that word, too): sort of what Combustible Edison would have sounded like in a pile-up with The Squirrel Nut Zippers and The Style Council.

Wednesday night, I was reading David Halberstam's fairly brilliant and densely textured history of the Korean War, The Coldest Winter. In 1967 Halberstam, working as a foreign correspondant, was kicked out of Poland after writing an article criticizing the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka. He took his Polish wife of two years with him, the utterly gorgeous actress Elzbieta Czyzewska... who just happens to be one of the stars of The Saragossa Manuscript.

A sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance,
Synchronicity...

{gc}

In Memoriam MLK (and K.L.O.*)

from Parturition
by Mina Loy

I am a circle
Of a center of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being

. . .

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

. . .

Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

. . .

LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Touch of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe

Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat

. . .

The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tip-toeing the red pile of carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware
I once heard in church
—Man and woman God made them—
Thank God.


* Kitties’ Lady Organs

The End of History: On Baseball & Memory

Every year around this time, with the opening of a new season of Major League baseball, I cannot help but to think of possibility and promise. I also think of those times during my childhood when life was little more than launching tennis balls over chain-link fences with a wiffle bat, trading baseball cards with Nelson ("Do you have Don Mattingly?"), visiting the Stadium to watch my beloved Yankees, or trying to find a left-hander's mitt that felt just right. It all sounds like nostalgia, sure, but to me baseball is far larger than training one's eye on the trajectory of a curveball, tight and sharp; the game, rich with contradictions and history, is representative of life as an adult: the brute force of the daily grind versus the grace and candor of time spent with family, loved ones.

*

I'll never forget the first time, during the early 1990's, when I walked through the gates of Yankee Stadium. I remember gasping at the sight of the infield, the empty seats, and the famed facade, a hold-over from the Stadium's early years, when names like Ruth, Mantle, Maris, and DiMaggio held significance not only over the rest of professional sports, but over New York City itself. It all seems so much smaller on TV, I thought to myself as the Yankees warmed up on the field prior to playing the Milwaukee Brewers (then still a team in the Central Division of the American League), and of course the Stadium was much larger in real life than it could appear on television or in the mind of a little boy.

On that evening, whose warmth I still feel every single time that I hand my ticket to an usher at the Stadium, I heard for myself the thunderous crack of bat meeting ball--"that's a home run!"--and was witness, for the first of many chances, the home team managing to eke out a win in the early summer, in what would be another hopeless season (the Yankees would only win about sixty-five games that year).

Oh, to feel that wonder again.

*

My Dad accompanied me to a Yankee game once and promptly fell asleep. His verdict? "So boring!"

We haven't seen eye-to-eye since.

*

During my sophomore year in college, I decided to take a summer job at Shea Stadium, home of the Mets (just like the "Cathedral" in the Bronx, the ballpark in Flushing is due to come down after the end of the current season). It was one of those thankless jobs, one of many that young people take in order to make some money during the time between semesters, in which I was charged with selling bottles of Coca-Cola, hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, lemon ices, and, if lucky, cotton candy.

With my Mets jersey, to which a button with the price of a soda ($3.25) was attached, I walked into the stands and belted out my tired refrain:

Hot dogs! Get yer hot dogs, heee-ah!
Ice cream, ice cream! Get yer ice cream, heeeeeee-ahhhhhhh!

The most I ever made during a game that season was $50. The least I ever made was $3.00, when I was told to sell lemon ices during a game in which a massive rain storm passed over Shea. Needless to say, the stands were empty when the skies cleared during the sixth inning, and I walked around trying to sell ices to the fans that decided to remain, over and over. Over and over I walked, the ices melting, melting...

*

Yankee Stadium, like so many other fields before it (Seattle's Kingdome and Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium come to mind), will be razed at the conclusion of the 2008 season, will meet its fate with crane and wrecking ball. With it will go the memories that I've accumulated over the years: the yelling, the tears, the pure joy that could only be the product of the perfect game that is baseball, of a creation that, in some ways, is more about myth than reality.

*

A new season has begun. Will my team reach another World Series, or will I have to keep making excuses for a collection of players who make upwards of $200 million?

*

I know I am more whole, somehow more alive, when I am holding a ball in my left hand, its red seams tightly wound and crisp, staring a batter down into oblivion.

[D | R]

Dogs schooling babies

CLOSE THAT!
CRAWL!