de riv in red ribbon

Why I love/hate New York.

So it's about 4:20 in the morning and I'm fully immersed in R.E.M sleep. I am slowly jarred out of my dreams (and my memory of my dreams) by some very close-sounding music and cackling. I'm confused. Are the Swedes next door throwing a raging party? Is someone blasting their TV? It gets louder. It's coming from outside, 3 stories down. But this is not the usual local teenagers yelling at midnight. I'm pissed. I stumble out of bed to the window and look down. Directly below my bedroom window is a scene out of my dreams or a Fellini movie. There are about 5 couples, dressed in dark outfits, dancing on the sidewalk, dancing some kind of strange ethnic ballroom dance, with their giant van blasting the craziest instrumental music I've ever heard, some kind of traditional Greek or Hebrew party music. Are you kidding me? What kind of music is this? The song is repetitive and strangely hypnotic. And too loud. This cannot go on. And just as I ponder shouting out of the window like an old italian widow (but realize that would be futile as they could never hear me), the music fades. And just like that, the couples rush back into their car like a chinese fire drill and speed off into the dawn.

This was not a dream.

Are these the party roosters who christen the sidewalks of those who are getting old?

The Top Musical Recordings of 2007, an Unbiased Assessment

1. Interpol - Our Love to Admire - [Capitol]

Once maligned for sounding too much like Joy Division - thanks to Paul Banks' morose vocals - Interpol has truly come into its own with this record, on which the band reveals a maturity in massive, sprawling tracks like Our Love's closer, "The Lighthouse." While the comparison's to Manchester's finest will always dog them, Interpol's newest should mark the beginning of some very interesting (important?) music.

2. Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English - [XL]

Moving away from the grime scene in which he made his name, Maths + English finds Dizzee Rascal, a rapper who describes the dystopia that is East London in all its violent, bloody glory, expanding his musical palette to include the funk and rock samples on which old-school hip-hop was founded. What remains strange, though, is Rascal's ambivalence about the gangster lifestyle - he turns from praising the murderers he knows to later questioning those same people - making it difficult to get an idea of the very young man (he's only 21) behind the microphone. What's important, I suppose, is that he still able to write and produce songs that leaves most of his contemporaries by the wayside. [Thanks to Anne for a copy of this record, which was not released on disc in the States.]

3. Daft Punk - Alive 2007 - [Virgin]

Playing out like a flawless mixtape (featuring songs from their debut, including "Around the World" to the track featured on an iPod commercial), Alive 2007 is the result of Daft Punk's most recent world tour, and it's clear that those who weren't at their shows missed out on the concert event of the year.

While I do not like the idea of live records taking a spot on these kinds of lists, Alive is just too fucking good not to be considered for one.

4. Von Sudenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions - [Domino]

Von Sudenfed includes the German production duo Mouse on Mars and Mark E. Smith of the Fall. On paper, this pairing sounds nothing but strange and unusual; however, on record, the mixture of scattershot electro-beats and Smith's seemingly drugged/drunken, off-the-cuff vocals work to great effect.

5. Bad Religion - New Maps of Hell - [Epitaph]

Once and always a stalwart of California's punk scene, Bad Religion - which for some reason finds it necessary to have not two but three guitarists - has returned with their best record since The Gray Race (not to mention Stranger than Fiction, my favorite punk record of the 90's). While their lyrics remain focused on the anti-establishment, anti-religion themes that they've covered since the early 80's, New Maps of Hell is something of a resurgence: it is loud, brash, and entirely unapologetic. In a word, rad.

Honorable Mentions:

Radiohead - In Rainbows - [TBD]

Battles - Mirrored - [Warp]

Black Dice - Load Blown - [Paw Tracks]
Peter Bjorn and John - Writer's Block - [V2 Scandinavia]
Kylie Minogue - X - [Capitol]

What did you listen to this year? Are there any albums that should be added to this list?

New Year on Dartmoor

This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you
Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There's no getting up it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat.

--Yet another Plath

The smile of the snow is white

Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick" spliced with "Wintering"

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters--
Sir So-and-so's gin.

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs...

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Chinese yellow on appalling objects--
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,

To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going, The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady

(They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.)

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.

Winter is for women--
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,

The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Plath takes on new meaning this century

Blackberrying

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks ---
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

--Sylvia Plath, 1961

Paul McCarthy: Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug

Paul McCarthy's latest show, currently running at Maccarone (630 Greenwich Street) through 24 December, employs themes that the artist has been discussing for decades: unbridled sexuality, iconography in popular culture, the role of fame in public life, politics, and the nature of violence. His new show continues a number of these themes, if only in a manner that can only be described as charming. For this show McCarthy turned the gallery into a fully-functioning chocolate factory, in which workers, under the direction of master chocolatier Peter P. Greweling, produce 1-lbs Santas composed entirely of, well, chocolate. However, McCarthy's edible version of the holiday icon, sold at $100 a piece and packaged in boxes filled with shredded copies of Artforum, is accompanied by a molded butt plug, that most democratic and accessible of sex toys. (Do we really need another reason to eat in bed?) McCarthy, of course, has always been interested in psychological disruption, shock treatments, and in exploring base desires--as well as the impulses that drive them. Using foodstuffs to explore these themes (like mayonnaise, hot dogs, and ketchup), McCarthy makes it a point to jar us out of our emotional and physical havens, as if to reinforce the notion that comfort has no place in the modern world, and that even our most precious of cultural artifacts are subject to corruption. Collectors, get your checkbooks ready.

http://www.peterpaulchocolates.com
http://www.maccarone.net
http://www.ubu.com/film/mccarthy.html

My true nemesis is Rachael Ray

She is currently interviewing and having coffee with John Cusack.
She is not a trained chef and cooks like I do, yet gets to dine with leading men like this...
The difference is I would not sell out and support Dunkin Donuts...I would keep it real and do commercials for Illy Espresso.
I am currently eating Danish sugar cookies for breakfast and watching daytime television. (Edgy just stole one of my cookies and ran off with it.) Where is the justice?

Wow Poem from Slate

The World War Speaks

When I was born, two incisors
had already come through the gum.
They gave me a silver bell to chew on,
brought me home in a wicker basket,
and kept me by the stove's coal heat.
Every morning my mother boiled
a huge vat of mustard greens,
steam drifting over to my crib and
after a few hours, souring into a gas.
I breathed it all in. I began to walk
so they fitted me with braces.
I began to run, so they fitted me
with books: Mars, hydrogen, Mongolia.
I learned to dig a deeper kind of ditch.
I learned to start a fire in three minutes.
I learned to sharpen a pencil into
a bayonet. Sometimes at night
I'd sneak into the house of our neighbors,
into the hall outside their bedroom,
and watch as they moved over each
other like slow, moonlit fish.
Sometimes my mother would comb
my father's hair with her fingertips,
but that was it. They wanted an only
child: the child to end all children.

--Sandra Beasley

i didn't eat your Ho Hos

happy holidays...buy a fake tree today

So THAT'S what happened to my manuscript...

From Scott Donaldson’s excellent biography, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2007):

Neither Robinson nor Peabody understood how the fates—and human frailty—were conspiring to prevent publication of Captain Craig. Normally, EAR would have received proofs early in 1901. He did not and could not, for on a cold winter’s night a member of the staff at Small, Maynard paid a visit to a Boston brothel, left the manuscript behind, and quite forgot about it. Robinson wanted the script back for revision, and the publishers were forced to stall him while they turned the office upside down in a futile search for it. Months went by before springtime, with the sap rising, lured the erring staffer back to the whorehouse. There the madam presented him with the manuscript she had carefully preserved.

Unfortunately, Small, Maynard had by then gone into receivership and decided not to publish Captain Craig after all.

SNOW

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window
was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes--
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of
your hands--
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

--Louis MacNeice

Why I Love Jack Black

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkWKvMCzqA

WBOR

You're listening to WBOR Lite FM, where we play the safest, most insipid reggae this side of Kingston. Up next, “Red, Red Wine” by UB40...

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"Superstars of Asian ladyboy scene invite you to the backstage for some fun."

I suspect that the term "backstage" is some sort of euphemism.

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"Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.” - George F. Will

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Up next on WBOR Lite FM, some music to do some light house cleaning, or, perhaps, get an early start on preparing those taxes. But first, a check of local traffic conditions...

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We are interested in shock - in convulsion. We are obsessed with the failed attempt at producing objects with a vertiginous obscenity attached to them; in being purely gratuitous and rejecting critical worth. But even more, we are interested in how even the most abject object is recuperated to 'use value'. We are interested in the redemptive value of transgression, and how morality is squeezed from sin. We fantasize about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia - a series of works of art to be consumed and then forgotten.

I find it terribly funny that the Chapman Brothers (Jake & Dinos), those English rabble-rousers of the modern art scene, have desecrated prints of Goya's Disasters of War by drawing clown faces all over them. The official title of such subversive acts against the establishment? Well, Insult to Injury, of course.

And speaking of the Chapman Brothers, somebody needs to get me their book, Unholy Libel, for Christmas.

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This is WBOR Lite FM, where we play the music most suited for hibiscus planting. Or needlework. Yeah, needlework. Ah, how relaxing. And now, a ballad from America's princess of lite-pop, Celine Dion in duet with Whitney Houston...

disney world is highly disturbing...

Let Us Go Then, You and I... No, Really, We Gotta Go

Poems by myself and Mr. Rivera are now appearing on the Smyles & Fish Poetron.

I am wrongly identified as a "Spanish Diplomat" (everyone knows I serve at the pleasure of the Queen of Portugal). Mr. Rivera is identified as someone who can't keep a secret (true--don't tell him the combination to the wall safe... SERIOUSLY, DON'T TELL HIM!).

Mr. Rivera is also the author of a review now posted in the Editors' Journal at The One Three Eight.

Does anyone at all read this except for ourselves and our significant others?

{gc}

Movie Movie

No Country for Old Men is an excellent Western Noir, and quite faithful to Cormac McCarthy's grim vision. I was thinking about it in terms of the classic Western tropes and realized that it's basically Shane, except for the fact that Shane never shows up. Then I realized that Javier Bardem's stone cold killer is Shane, walking into the sunset with a broken arm, a force that even the universe cannot kill. Kudos to the Coen Brothers--this makes up for their utterly misguided remake of The Ladykillers.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a crackerjack example of the crime-gone-wrong genre, but the real reason to see it is for its painful delineation of a family that lost its way long ago. Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance is stunning, but then his character is the crux of the whole tragedy: a man who, as he puts it to his drug dealer at the Trump Tower (!), "doesn't add up," and who doesn't understand why this is so. Kudos to Sidney Lumet, who can knock this sort of ball out of the park at 83.

The Darjeeling Limited is another fine example of Wes Anderson's sensibility, and even with its flaws (it becomes fairly pedestrian after the bravua funeral/flashback sequence) is pretty enjoyable. If for no other reason, Anderson should continue to make films for the soundtracks they inspire.

{gc}

Rocky Rococo, at Your Cervix...

Never trust a man in a fez.