rain on

Music is such a wonderful marker for memory, tied to the images, the emotions, the little crystallized fragments of our lives.  It’s better than any journal.  When I hear this song I go hurtling back in time to fall in love.  It was the day after Halloween, sitting in the back of a taxi on my way home from her place, back to my rooftop apartment in Taipei.  Everything was grey and streaks of rain ran down the glass.  He sang his shame and I smiled out the window.  I didn’t know it yet, but that moment marked the start of something profound.  In hindsight it was also very fitting.

“Oh, how the days will rain on you…”

B-Side: Don’t Pass on Me

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the forces that move you

drift along little log
go where you’re going
nobody is expecting you
to be anything you’re not
like a thing making choices
you just drift little log
on the eddies and currents
the forces that move you
so wonderfully apparent
nobody calls you angry log
or uselessly depressed log
nobody councils you on how
you are drifting incorrectly
you just go little log
for you there is no regret
and if you were conscious
in there screaming, well
it would be just the same.

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ape

You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father, who had
monkey hair and blood on his whiskers.

I’ve had enough monkey, cried father.

You didn’t eat the hands, and I went to all the trouble to make onion
rings for its fingers, said mother.

I’ll just nibble on its forehead, and then I’ve had enough, said father.

I stuffed its nose with garlic, just like you like it, said mother.

Why don’t you have the butcher cut these apes up? You lay the whole
thing on the table every night; the same fractured skull, the same
singed fur; like someone who died horribly. These aren’t dinners,
these are post-mortem dissections.

Try a piece of its gum, I’ve stuffed its mouth with bread, said mother.

Ugh, it looks like a mouth full of vomit. How can I bite into its cheek
with bread spilling out of its mouth? cried father.

Break one of the ears off, they’re so crispy, said mother.

I wish to hell you’d put underpants on these apes; even a jockstrap,
screamed father.

Father, how dare you insinuate that I see the ape as anything more
than simple meat, screamed mother.

Well what’s with this ribbon tied in a bow on its privates? screamed
father.

Are you saying that I am in love with this vicious creature? That I
would submit my female opening to this brute? That after we had
love on the kitchen floor I would put him in the oven, after breaking
his head with a frying pan; and then serve him to my husband, that
my husband might eat the evidence of my infidelity . . . ?

I’m just saying that I’m damn sick of ape every night, cried father.

-Russel Edson

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little fang

David Portner of Animal Collective, in his side project Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks.  While listening to this song, it occurred to me for the first time that Animal Collective never used a bass.  I could be wrong, but if I am I don’t know where.  Weird, that.  He certainly uses it here.  This song is like peeking into some parallel universe in which an icon of experimental screaming instead wrote pop.  Really good pop.

2

listening man

Sorry about the ads, the copyright trolls are out in force on this video from 2007 with 7,000 views.  I’m trying to give your languishing client free exposure, and your priority is preserving the sanctity of pop-up ads?  Copyright law lets artists eat, and yet you assholes are why people pirate music.  Clutch, clutch, clutch with both hands, until you have it all and there’s nothing left and you clutch your chest and die.

Sigh.  Anyways, enjoy The Bees.  No garbage.  Just plain, simple, sweet.

“Tell me something, away from trouble and doubting…”

0

To Seek a Shining Stone

Though I am lost in lightless ways
where the sun has never shone
still I walk while I am able
looking for my stone.

And when the moon is in the sky
and its light reflects my own
then I sing for I am able
lonely, yes, but not alone.

For what are we but darkened dreams
and lights that should have shown
if we are naught but here and now
then now we shall be known.

So walk with me this moonless night
through darkness thick with moans
and I will help you raise your light
and we will find our stones.

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i live my broken dreams

And then of course there’s Daniel Johnston, a guy who made it, despite crippling mental illness.  His became a spiraling, out of control schizophrenia that eventually had him on stage proselytizing and shouting about the devil.  My favorite moment involving him is the scene in Kids, when his “Casper the Friendly Ghost” plays in the air over Washington Square Park.  Man, what a movie.  He’s so earnest it breaks my heart.

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books on tape

Milton Melvin Croissant III, like Howlround, was just another nobody who never made it then disappeared.  A little looking and I found a website that says he’s doing commercial animation and design now in Brooklyn.  In any case, I got his stuff from Paul Bain, who went to a show where Milton was alone on stage and Paul was alone in the audience.  Afterwards he bought a cassette tape the guy was selling out of his trunk.  Not for nothing, Mr Croissant, but I’ve been listening to these songs for years.  In the end it’s not a choice– That has to be enough.

.

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tank!

Cowboy Bebop, the brainchild of Shinichirō Watanabe, is a masterful work of art.  Don’t be fooled by the medium.  If a space western about bounty hunters, done as film noir, set to jazz, isn’t your thing, well…  Then try his next work, Samurai Champloo, the story of two elite ronin and a girl traveling across feudal Japan, armed with swords and upgraded animation, set to hip-hop.  And if that’s not your thing either, well, what the hell is wrong with you?

“See you space cowboy…”

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new slang

So the statue of limitations ended on Garden State, meaning it’s okay to go back again and listen to this song.  I watched the movie as well, wondering why I hadn’t liked it all those years ago for the first hour or so.  Then I remembered it’s a movie gussied up to look like it’s about mental illness– Then is the opposite of that.  He’s been medicated by his misguided psychologist father his whole life for no reason.  He doesn’t need medication, he’s fine!  Well, huzzah for you, Zach Braff.  He’s also such a bad actor that I found myself giggling at the movie’s most self-important confessional monologues.  Am I ranting?  Nah, it’s not such a bad flick, aside from its central premise.  Anyways, this is about The Shins.

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what i’ve got and i’ll keep

how can it be that i sit still
in these trances adjusting
this bit and that trimming
changing reverting tweaking
everything again and again
until one last keystroke
one last pencil eraser mark
and a period and i think
it’s done and it is, it is!

and yet then there is nothing
beyond that feeling that
little moment at the end
and so what do it better
or stop caring but i can’t
it’s what i’ve got and i’ll keep
doing it here by myself
because i have nothing else
and sometimes it’s very pretty.

2

40oz for breakfast

Blackalicious: Mid 90’s underground storytelling hip-hop.  One of the very best.  They followed this with Blazing Arrow and finally got their recognition.  They always had the respect.

“So as I think about tomorrow, I hesitate and say…” 

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the farthest shore

“And though I came to forget or regret all that I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles.  And I would be content.”

-Ursula LeGuin

Sleep well, Ursula. Your prose was truly beautiful.

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i see a darkness

Sometimes you form a vague image of someone while listening to their music on repeat, which may or may not resemble reality.  When I first went looking for live Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I sat in shocked silence until the very end, when he looked up, bared his teeth, and hissed at the camera.  Will Oldham is a prince of the night.  He is also very sweet.

“Well you’re my friend…”

B-Side: Break of Day

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He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-William Butler Yeats

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screenwriter’s blues

Ah, Soul Coughing.  Deliciously weird spoken word music.  Dig the drums, they are musicians first.  I played this in the car for my father and brother once, long ago.  They… did not care for it as I did.  In hindsight that was an obvious, if earnest, error.  This, here, is where it belongs.

“And the radio man laughs, because the radio man fucks a model too.”

B-Side: True Dreams of Wichita

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a hit

Before Bill Callahan was a solo artist, singing wise songs about birds, he was Smog.  And Smog was something else.  Something primal, and personal, and sad.  This song gets me something fierce.

“I’ll never be a Bowie, I’ll never be an Eno…” 

B-Side: Cold Blooded Old Times

2

if you truly don’t want me

i won’t cry but i’ll go
to the glaciers at the end
of our time and they’ll cry
for they loved us to rise
as they wash out again
the sad waste of it all
i’ll float in the stillness
of a thousand years of ice
until nothing remains
but a sunset on waves
and that endless horizon
will disappear in the dark
and i’ll pick out a star
in the black of the sky
flowing up from the sea
and i’ll swim.

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b-side: anemone

They had everything you need to make it.  In another time, another place, they would have been The Rolling Stones.  Instead they got into heroin and went on tours of self-destruction, bad luck, and failed showcases.  For whatever reason, it never happened.  In the end they fell apart.  There is something to be said for making a bonfire of your dreams and walking through the flame– Just don’t expect to come out whole.

“You should be picking me up…”

A-Side: David Bowie I Love You (Since I Was Six)

0

a note and everything

he quit everything last night
this neighbor i didn’t know
him at all saw him once
for the first time last week
hunched and fat heard he paid
his rent in crisp twenties
used to work at the bakery
downtown quit or got fired
who knows something he had
with him i saw a blonde girl
friend in that house shut up
inside every day i saw her
often in passing off to work
maybe but him just the once
walking slowly along the dock
and then her sitting there
in the morning on the lawn
crying as cop cars flashed
their lights uselessly.

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b-side: breaking away

My theme song, my mode, my only poetry ritual. Before every reading I’ve ever given, I’ve found a quiet place to sit alone, put on headphones, and listen to this song.  To get my head right.  To remember.  When it ends I exhale, walk back inside, climb up on stage and leap off a cliff– Hoping, praying I sprout wings before impact.

A-side: Tacobel Canon

1

In a Perfect World

In the darkness at the top of the world is a cave.  Inside this cave, beneath the billowing snow, a series of spidering corridors slope miles down into the earth.  Follow them down, avoiding the dead ends and hidden gaps that drop off into sudden bottomless darkness, and you arrive in a huge vaulted chamber.   A long line of hewn steps lead upwards to the far wall.  There, in frozen silence, lies something entombed in the ice.  Something long dormant.  As you watch, it opens its eyes.    

–

Franklin awoke in a sweat.  He shook his head, rubbed his face, and went to take a shower.  Soon he was seated in a coffee shop with a large mug, an open notebook, and a pencil in his hand.  His mouth had bunched at one corner and his tongue peeked out as he worked.

“That’s not bad.  What is it?”  Franklin looked up and found the owner of the voice.  She wore glasses, had pale white skin and long red hair.  She was pretty, but what attracted his attention were her eyes.  Curious and alert and green as salad leaves.

“It’s a face from a dream I keep having.”  He showed her the notepad.  There was a sunken, skeletal face on the page, done in pencil.  She studied it for a moment, tugging at her hair.

“It scares me,” she said.

“Me too,” said Franklin.

“Why are the eyes the only bits with color?”

“Because that’s how it is.”  There was a pause.  “I like your eyes, they’re like salad greens.”  She looked at him for a minute, weighing that comment.  Finally she stuck out her hand.

“My name’s Abigail.”  He took it.

“Nice to meet you, Abigail.  I’m Franklin.”

“Well Franklin, it’s been weird.  I’ll be seeing you.”

“I’ll be seeing you, Abigail.”

–

There was blood in the cave.  In the chamber below, where once had been sheer wall, now was a cracked and empty fissure.  On the floor of the cave lay a fox.  Crouched over it sat the creature, looking up, squinting.  The animal whimpered, and the creature bent back to its ripping.  Blood dripped from the fox and ran to collect in a pool on the floor.  Outside the cave, great drifts of snow shifted and fell.  Outside the cave, the wind sounded like screaming.

–

“I thought I might find you here.”  Franklin looked up from his seat at the coffee shop and saw Abigail.  “Still drawing?”  He looked down at the pad.

“Still drawing.”

“Still dreaming?”

“Still dreaming.”

She took a seat and pulled the notebook from his hands.  He let it go without protest.  Flipping through the pages, her eyes narrowed.  “You’re obsessed.  This isn’t healthy.”

He took the notebook back and closed it.  “What do you do, Abigail?”

“I’m a sort of permanent temp.  Answering phones, word processing, filing, that sort of stuff.  It’s terrible.”

“That’s not what I meant.  In a perfect world, if you could do anything, what would you do?”

She thought about that for a while.  “You know, I don’t know.  I always wanted to be rich.  Being rich means I don’t have to do anything.  I guess that’s it, I would do nothing.”  She laughed.  “What about you?”

Franklin met her gaze.  “I would do something great.  Something perfect.”

“Something great, huh.  Like what?  Like composing a masterpiece?”

“Could be.”

“Like saving the world?”

“Could be.”

“Some people say Hitler was great.  Not good, you know, but when you look at what he did, all the people he killed, all that power.  Great.”

“Yes, that’s a kind of greatness.”

Abigail looked at him.  “You’re weird, Franklin.  Did I say that yet?”

“Yes, a couple of times.”

“Well, I gotta go.  Good luck with greatness.”

“Thanks.  Good luck with nothing.”

She gave him a wry look.  “Yeah.  Thanks, dick.”

“I’ll be seeing you, Abigail.”

–

The creature was working.  Bones littered the floor of the cave, and a layer of frozen blood lay black on the ground like a carpet.  The creature sat on its haunches, fashioning something of the bones, binding them together with strips of sinew and tendon.  As each segment was completed it was jointed to the others.  In the endless night that was this place, something began to take form in the darkness.    

–

“Put that down, I want to show you something.”  Franklin closed his notebook and stood up.  Abigail took his hand and led him from the coffee shop.  They walked a few blocks in silence, hand in hand.  Then Abigail stopped.  “There.”

Franklin followed her gaze and saw the pillared facade of a famous hotel.  He gave her a quizzical look.  “Inside,” she said.  She tugged him in through the swinging doors.  The lobby was massive, with marble floors and a large fountain in the middle.  She pulled him through and past the fountain, and there before them was a grand piano.

“They let me play sometimes, when nobody is using it.”  She let go his hand and went and sat on the bench.  Holding her hands up before her, she wiggled her fingers.  “Ready?”

“Ready,” Franklin said.  She closed her eyes and began to play.  It was beautiful.  She played like one born to it, effortlessly, years of practice dissolving before his eyes.  Time slowed and distorted, he had no idea how long she played for.  When it was over a warm sadness washed over him.  “That was beautiful, Abigail.”

“Thank you.  Now take me home.”

“Why?”

She smiled.  “Because I want to see yours.”

–

The creature sat on a throne of frozen bones.  The storm outside howled and lightning lit the sky.  Tremors rocked the earth as the ground rent and buckled underfoot.  Its skeletal jaws cracked open impossibly wide, and a churning inky darkness came flowing from its mouth.  The darkness filled the cave, teetered for a moment, then rolled squirming over the edge.  As the wind screamed and raged, it poured out into the world.

0

without pause or remark

the snow falls steadily on
the cars that have been here
for some time in this ditch without
sound without movement without
notice the snow falls steadily on
the skid-marks on the pools
of blood on the little one that was
thrown clear and broken the snow falls
steadily on this place that will soon seem
as two snowy rocks sitting sagely
beside the road but the snow does not
care for appearance does not
admire its work the snow
merely falls steadily on.

1

king of spain

It’s time for some Tallest Man.  His writing isn’t perfect, sometimes he tries too hard and wanders into nonsense, but he’s earnest, and when it’s good it’s really good.  His voice is what it is, and I enjoy it for that. First and foremost though, the man can flat out play.  Tunes the strings all strange, claps a capo halfway down the neck, then just… damn.  And when it all comes together?  He is capable of something truly special.

“Why are you stabbing my illusion?
Just ’cause I stole some eagle’s wings,
because you named me as your lover–
Well, I thought I could be anything.”

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the dead march

The American Civil War was described by Shelby Foote as “reciprocal murder.”  This was the first modern war, where the new weapons of precision and efficiency were used on a large scale against walled masses of men.  It was the deadliest per capita conflict in recorded history.  And one night during the 40 days, in the evening after a battle, in the lull before another battle, while the wounded in the thousands lay pleading between camps for water, wounded they weren’t allowed to help, the bands on both sides struck up songs.

First the Union, and I wish, oh how I wish I remembered what it was, and then the Confederates replied.  This tattered band of old men and pubescent boys in grey rags who could play something, anything, and hadn’t yet been forced into service– They played this song, over the countless campfires, over the cries of the wounded, over the men on both sides who would walk into shrapnel and amputation and death with the dawn.

They played this fucking song.  I can’t get the picture out of my head.  This happened.  Like a specter of all we could be, rising angelic and knowing, knowing, to rain down on the coming of blood and screams and bone saws and death.  They were humans.  This happened.  It’s so beautiful I could cry.

1

chasing cotton fluffs

the little fluffs
of cotton float
upon the gentle
autumn gusts

the fragile hands
of human flesh
reach to grasp
the little fluffs

the moving air
from moving hands

sends the fluffs

away.

2

apple pie

MF Doom and MC Paul Barman kill it weird as fuck.  Sampling Creedence and a funky little jangling guitar they lay it down playfully, lyrically, and intellectually.  So, so, so many good lines.

“It ain’t all about the dollar bill, you can be dead broke and be a scholar still.”

“That’s true.”

0

Life: a listless re-enactment

We go out to dinner
I pull out her chair for her
We chat pleasantly
I pay the check

We go back to my place
I open a bottle of wine
We drink together
I lean in and we kiss

We move to the bedroom
I undress her and myself
We fuck, she moans
I fall asleep

The televisions in every room
play the same thing
on mute:

a man and a woman are sitting down to eat.

the man pulls out her chair.

1

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