Recent Records of Note

Black Dice - Load Blown - [Paw Tracks]



The Darjeeling Limited: Original Soundtrack - [Abcko]

Party Party

nuts and bolts!

LAME DUDE WITH NO COSTUME

The Grand Marquis Coterie: We Put the Cult in Culture

Score!

Righteous Ruminations

The following may point to just how naive I am, but I find it wrong that Nissan, in all its corporate wisdom, has licensed a song performed by The Clash, a cover of the roots reggae standard "Pressure Drop," for use in one of its commercials. Given the nature of the products the company sells, including the SUV prominently featured in its latest advertisement, wouldn't it have made more sense for the carmaker to use, say, "Rock the Casbah" or "Bankrobber," instead?

Oh, the irony, the bitter, bitter irony.

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"The center is not the center." - Derrida

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I love quoting dead French philosophers because, in all frankness, the practice makes me feel closer to common folk.

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My Daddy was a bankrobber,

but he never hurt nobody.

He just loved to live that way,

and he loved to steal your money.

So we came to jazz it up,

we never loved a shovel.

Break your back to earn your pay,

and don't forget to grovel...

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The Grand Marquis Coterie "Song of the Week!" honors go to Teenage Fanclub for "Speed of Light." Yeah!

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One of the more curious headlines on the Internet: "Dating Advice: 'Help, I'm Falling For a Priest.'" Uh, is this supposed to be news?

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It must be pretty obvious to those who know me, but I am getting old. As in, I can see at least two gray hairs on my head, and that shit is pissing me off old. But if only that were the last sign proving that the ravages of age are upon me! You see, if I sit down for more than fifteen minutes, I end up having a dull pain in the left side of my hip. When I stand up to walk around, I feel as though someone had just place a two-ton slab across my body. Such is the terror that has befallen me, but I shall perservere through all attacks against my youth!

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We had chicken for dinner tonight. What did you have?

Ghouls and Goblins

What should I be for Halloween?? -LM

Definition of the Day

draw - to pull out to full or greater length; make by attenuating; stretch: to draw filaments of molten glass.

Sledge!

you could have a steam train
if you'd just lay down your tracks
you could have an aeroplane flying
if you bring your blue sky back

all you do is call me
I'll be anything you need

you could have a big dipper
going up and down, all around the bends
you could have a bumper car, bumping
this amusement never ends

I want to be your sledgehammer
why don't you call my name
oh let me be your sledgehammer
this will be my testimony
show me round your fruitcage
'cuz I will be your honey bee
open up your fruitcage
where the fruit is as sweet as can be

I want to be your sledgehammer
why don't you call my name
you'd better call the sledgehammer
put your mind at rest
I'm going to be-the sledgehammer
this can be my testimony
I'm your sledgehammer
let there be no doubt about it

sledge sledge sledgehammer

I've kicked the habit
shed my skin
this is the new stuff
I go dancing in, we go dancing in
oh won't you show for me
and I will show for you
show for me, I will show for you
yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do mean you
only you
you've been coming through
going to build that power
build, build up that power, hey
I've been feeding the rhythm
I've been feeding the rhythm
going to feel that power, build in you
come on, come on, help me do
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you
I've been feeding the rhythm
I've been feeding the rhythm
it's what we're doing, doing
all day and night

--Peter Gabriel

Poem of the Day

The Letter

I am not feeling strong yet, but I am taking
good care of myself. The weather is perfect.
I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea.
I expect to swim soon. For now I am content.
I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.
Time is very different here. It is very good
to be away from public ambition.
I sweep and wash, cook and shop.
Sometimes I go into town in the evening
and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit
at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer.

--Linda Gregg, from The Sacraments of Desire [Graywolf Press].

Wild Boys, 1984

The wild boys are calling on their way back from the fire
in august moon's surrender to a dust cloud on the rise
wild boys fallen far from glory
reckless and so hungered on the razors edge you trail
because there's murder by the roadside in a sore afraid new world

they tried to break us, looks like they'll try again

wild boys never lose it
wild boys never chose this way
wild boys never close your eyes
wild boys always shine

you got sirens for a welcome there's bloodstain for your pain
and your telephone been ringing wile you're dancing in the rain
wild boys wonder where is glory
where is all you angels now the figureheads have fell
and lovers war with arrows over secrets they could tell

they tried to tame you looks like they'll try again

wild boys never lose it
wild boys never chose this way
wild boys never close your eyes
wild boys always shine

--Duran Duran

Jean Valentine poem in The New Yorker

On a Passenger Ferry
by Jean Valentine

(For Grace Paley)

The deck is big, and crowded. In one corner,
an old woman, sick, on chemo, not in pain, is
writing in an elementary-school notebook.
Nobody else saw her, but I saw her.
I had seen her before. Her round, kind face,
smiling and still as a photograph
outside a window—


The New Yorker
September 24, 2007

Poem

Mango

Delicious slivers of mango
cut like long tongues--so it's as if we eat
our passion, this longing

sticky like the afterglow of our sex,
with skin the reddish mottle of mango skin.
How often had I eaten these alone

bought at some Upper West Side bodega
and cut open with a pocket knife,
sitting at Riverside park, sunset

orange in the Hudson below:
sunset orange with a knife in it,
bleeding orange in my hands.

--Gerry LaFemina

Originally published in the Winter 2004-2005 issue of The Southeast Review.

Spinner

Some recent records of note:

Liars - Liars - [Mute]

I'm not entirely convinced that Liars, one of my favorite bands, have written a cohesive, fully-realized record with this, their fourth release, but that particular truth may not matter, given that the new songs are more about mood and tone, as opposed to ideas. Having said that, it is best that would-be listeners not overlook Liars for what it is: a document of a daring, risk-taking music prepared by a band interested not in pleasing its audience, but in circumventing tired norms.

The tracks to which my ear is especially drawn include: "Leather Prowler"; "Sailing to Byzantium"; "Clear Island"; and "Protection," a song that can best be described as haunting (a falsetto has never sounded so right), and which is probably the best album-closer that I've heard in the last five years.

I will take your Polaroid / You will show me how to drink...

M.I.A. - Kala - [XL]

It has a good beat and you can dance to it.

from "Stars" by McGrath

We are human and our form is a corruption of starlight
poured like heavy syrup into soft-skinned molds,
like decorative soaps, or candles.

Like the stars we burn fiercely, reluctantly,
as a dragon consumes its golden hoard.

Of my eyes, of my skin, the stars shall know nothing.


--Campbell McGrath, a selection from his forthcoming Seven Notebooks, published in mipoesias.com

Writing Tips

1. Parenthetical Remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
2. Don't use no double negatives.
3. Proofread carefully to see if any words out or mispeld something.
4. Eschew obfuscation.
5. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
6. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Avoid cliches like the plague (they're old hat).
9. Be more or less specific.

Close, But No Fine, Hand-Rolled, Imported Cuban Cigar

Dear Danny _________:

Thank you for sending us "The Cartographer." We really enjoyed this piece, but it didn't work for (esteemed literary journal) right now. We hope that you will continue to send us your work.

Sincerely,
The Editors of (esteemed literary journal)

I love Google translate this page

Linee di Florinda Fusco, from www.editricezona.it/linee.htm:

“Like clearly enunciated sin from the frontispiece, those collections from the Fusco are `lines here', not “backs”, or “poetries” (even if the proposed tiration wants obviously to be offered like vicaria regarding such alternatives). `A line' is something of other (not “less”, even if is fuor of doubt the tone `in minor') regarding a back. But in what consists this difference? Or, said otherwise, and perhaps little better: what characterizes `a line' of the Fusco and of it it determines its same leggibilità? They said, a lot in order to express to me with a formula, the coincidence and nearly the superimposition, between `the capacity' of its development on the page (just in the sense of the amount of oral materials, of images etc that every `line' transports to the just inner) and its ritmica necessity. The prosodia, insomma, it is a category of analysis that with `the lines' works little: you notice yourself, in so far as, the nearly absolute lack of the enjambement, that is the ritmica figure that than more every other denunciation the collision between prosodiche requests and syntactic requests. For against, those turn out amplify all to you mark them (lines white women, inner spaziature to the back, paginations to step: and then also parenthesis, italics etc) that they stretch to isolate every single `line' or fragment of it like unit in sure measure self-sufficient person.” (from the famous one of Mark Berisso).

to have a north wind to two ropes (I could perhaps be raised)
I dredge in the water the shapes of I dredge in the water

the body that wheel (a grooved pleasure)

to prepare itself in the bottom of the sand/to imitate the shapes of the water

misurala as you can you remove the coat and misurala with the body

sordamente
the minimum sinks to articulate
glacial states of waking and generations
to go up or to wait for to touch the field

to have the just words to mistake with the words
to try the force points
to float like the north wind

(not there is certainty in repairing
in the repair broken one is something much
of untied frozen cut I confirm
broken one is something much
I want to say that the center is various from the side
the repair is maceration)

to soil the face of black
to be based to a small table in station