victorylapping

Frankis recently asked me what Podcasts I listen to, so here are my four and the one he recommended:

1. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Current New Yorker fiction contributors discuss and read stories from the archives that influenced them in this monthly podcast.
Open it in iTunes

2. KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic
Nick Harcourt hosts this half hour to forty-five minute long cast with songs recorded live in studio and a short interview in the middle.
Open it in iTunes
It is not always updated in the iTunes store, but you can hear more of the sets on their website (the actual show is longer and features previously recorded music as well).

3. alt.NPR Poetry Off the Shelf
A product of the poetry foundation. Similar to the New Yorker Fiction podcast, but updated about once a week; writers and critics talk about poets work and poems are read.
Open it in iTunes

4. NPR: Live Concerts from All Songs Considered Podcast
Exactly what it sounds like. Recent shows included the Fleet Foxes, DeVotchKa and Kaki King.
Open it in iTunes.

5. KQED: The Writers’ Block Podcast
This one is Frankis’ suggestion. Authors read from their books, nothing more, nothing less. Listen to the Jack Pendarvis: Awesome episode, it’s just that.
Open it in iTunes.

-bryan

It’s been long enough since my last entry that I’m going to have to blame it on someone. Namely, General Amelia Downpaw Fluffytail the III. That is, my new kitten. She was born on May 15th, which puts her at an age where she’s a lot of fun but doesn’t know that her claws hurt (when she woke me up at 5:30 this morning by jabbing my shoulder, I inadvertently punted her off the bed by way of a reflex enhanced arm). I made some contraptions for her to stay busy while I’m away, which seems to be quite a bit of time each day, namely the snaps from cuff of the shirt I was wearing when I made plasma (a la grapes in a microwave) tied to a fishing line connected to the ceiling, a wad of paper connected in a similar fashion to a fan, and many many other wads of paper. Her favorite toys by far, however, are the manually operated cord to my midi controller and i-pod to computer connector cable.

Speaking of i-pods, on the way back from Dayton I listened to Minus the Bear’s Menos el Oso and Highly refined Pirates to decide if any of it could be cut to make space for newer acquisitions. I’m going to keep Menos, which is really a well executed album, and ditching Pirates, which has a deficiency in lyrical and musical content. Menos also reminds me of the time we spun “The Game Needed Me” on Dan Erck’s incarnation of Sit or Spin. Immediately after, an editing session commenced, which reminds me of the Pitty Sing song - Radio (not to be confused with the Alkaline Trio song [Or the product of the two names that make up an Elvis Costello song title{there have to be a billion more songs with similar name; I will stop there}.

If you were interesting in the conclusion of events foreshadowed in this entry have no fear, I got so far as the turnstile before finding out there was a 4 dollar minimum per person per peep session. That was too rich for my blood so I passed on into the night, ending up in Ann Arbor for the second time in a month. However this turn of events insinuates Randy, Trevor and Jen (but not Craig) in a plot for cheap peeps, which basically means if we find another house of the setting sun, our will be done, on earth as it is in porno.  Very very low budget porno.

The point of this entry was to link this article from the New York Times for Matthew because his pictures when they don’t involve the normal sentimentals of friends or random computer parts are pretty spectacular (you can see his kitten as well).

-bryan

p.s. Amelia has just invented the game fetch. I’ve been throwing a wad of paper across the living room for the last 10 minutes and she’s returned with it every time.

If you have been in contact with me in the past week or so, you probably know by now that I’ve been in Dayton, Ohio since Wednesday. Before my departure, I had posited the question, “what is there to do in Dayton?” and been answered, with resounding aplomb, “nothing.” Thus, out of my want to prove said sources wrong, and need to not be biting-my-finger-nails-just-to-feel-something-bored, I did the only reasonable thing there is do, I Googled “Disc Golf in Dayton” and packed up my second-hand discs. If you have ever thrown a course with me, you know my skills have been, to this point, variable, and never great, but it doesn’t really matter. Disc golf is to our generation what golf has been for earlier ones, a social place to meet, usually overly privileged (the courses are packed with mostly white boys from the suburbs), people with similar interests in networking. Much better way to meet people than a coffee shop or bar.

Anyway, I also asked our collaborators here where the most fruitful ventures might be in the general vicinity. They suggested the Oregon District, specifically Thai 9, which by the name of if you probably have already realized is a Thai restaurant. It’s in a gutted and minimally refinished building and the food is excellent, although on the mild side (my medium spicy order needed to be fortified with hot pepper oil before I felt any sort of heat [heat goes from 1-9 there, I had a 5; get a 7]). The Oregon District is really just one block with an amalgam of bars, artsy shops, a second-hand bookstore, and adult entertainment emporiums. It was not until I went into the bookstore (because I have an inability not to go into used bookstores and throw money around until it returns to me in paper back form) that I realized the extent of the porn industry in Oregon. The whole front half of the store is miscellaneous back issues of all sort of adult periodicals I previously had no knowledge of an am now highly intrigued by. I should probably make it known now that instead of buying nudie-mags I got Grendel, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, a second copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Voltaire’s Candide. I saw productions of the last two of those by MSU’s Opera Theatre, and am beginning to suspect that the interpretations by my well-lunged compatriots were horribly inadequate. But the thing that really caught my attention was, as I was exiting the shop, a sign across the street advertising “Peep Show: 25 cents”. My compulsive nature, and as to now unfamiliarity with excessively seedy and perverse establishments immediately perked my curiosity towards this venture, but my general prudishness denied me the ability to walk right in and see what it was all about. On the way to Belmont Park to play the course there, I began making phone calls to my trusted sources of moral guidance and relativity.

The course was on challenging, with woods, rolling hills, a few blind, and a couple long, holes, but overall doable. I played through with a couple of locals who both shot +2, and I shot +11. The guys I played through with (one was named Tony and the other, I think, was Ben), suggested I try the Oregon Express that night, as a local band, the Black Cigarettes, had a show there at 11. If you haven’t guessed, this would send me back to Oregon Street. We finished the course at 9, and, after about forty-five minutes of looking for a Starbucks, which was suggested for internet connectivity, without much success, I headed back to Oregon Street. I should say here, that from my experience, internet access is not so simple to find as it is in East Lansing. The Marriott I was staying at wanted to charge thirteen dollars a day for it, and local coffee shops are not in such abundance as I am used to. Paccini’s, a restaurant and coffee shop, where I’m sitting now, in the Oregon district, has access, but by the time I got there on Wednesday night, 10 pm, they were closing up. To my surprise, the barristas suggested The Trolley Stop, a bar at the other end of the street (if you haven’t gotten the theme of this entry, it’s that pretty much Oregon District is pretty much the place to go here). A bar wouldn’t be my choice of venues at this time of my life, as for both longevity and general mental state I made the decision to quit drinking a few months ago, but when you have a deadline, you do what you have to. I tried to order an Arnold Palmer, my recent drink of choice, but apparently people in Ohio don’t know that it’s half lemonade, half iced tea (the secret is a little more iced tea, and settled for a pepsi, which they did not charge me for. Around 11 I dropped off my stuff and headed for Oregon Express, which, because they were not charging cover, sort of forced my into ordering an Amber Bock for $2.75. I drank it as I listened to the solidly rock-and-roll styles the Black Cigarettes play. It wasn’t bad, but I’ve lost my taste for beer, and I don’t foresee myself having anything else alcoholic in a long while (extenuating circumstance being the only reason in this case). After the show, I chickened out of the peep show again, though a vote of good authority was beginning to form purporting the necessity of the decedent endeavor.

Thursday I played a round at Sycamore Trails, which is by far the most difficult course I have seen to date. Even locals were involved in frantic searches for discs that had gone off course. If you read the description on the aforementioned website, it mentions being designed over 3 years by a committee for challenge. As example, the fourth hole is a blind, left-handed shot through the woods with a steep gradient to the right. After that I went to El Meson’s for an elaborate Caribbean meal that did not disappoint (I had the vegetarian fajitas). The rest of the night did not end in me going to the peep show.

It is Friday afternoon now, my work is done, and there is very little left I can do to stall before facing the now unavoidable fate of what I imagine to be one of the more awkward experiences of my life. I have to do this because if I do not, my general position of being up for anything will be denied by a pretension against things of a publicly sexually deviant nature. I have never been to a strip club, nor do I really want to, though some of my purportedly feminist, and verifiably female, colleagues have expressed no disdain for said establishments. I could go on here about the philosophical arguments either way, but it makes no difference, as by now I have set a net of entrapment for my self so concretely webbed that even though the initial excitement of the thing wore off long ago, and now I regret having the idea in the first place, I must face it, and get the Hell out of Dayton.

-bryan

From this article

“The rescue alone could reverberate across the region. Hugo Chávez, the leftist leader of Venezuela who negotiated previous releases of hostages held by the FARC but failed to free Ms. Betancourt or three American contractors also rescued Wednesday, has lost the regional spotlight to Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, his top rival and a staunch ally of the Bush administration. At least temporarily, Mr. Uribe, one of Latin America’s most market-friendly leaders, has usurped the regional agenda.

The White House’s broader goal of stabilization for the Andes may still be a long way off. Coca cultivation surged by almost 30 percent last year in Colombia, which still provides 90 percent of the cocaine found in the United States. Meanwhile, drug enforcement officials here and in Miami say that traffickers have developed ingenious new ways to move their product, including semisubmersible crafts.”

Also, Randy, here’s that New Yorker article I was talking about on Saturday. I started to read Class Matters. It’s really good.

-bryan

This article will concluded our celebration of American Independence. If you didn’t know, my lab is run by Canadians. Tuesday was Canada Day. There was a barbecue and I climbed a tree to raise the Canadian Colors high above the smoke and way-too-hot charcoal, using some rope I made out of scotch tape. I also got a belt with a maple leaf on it.

-bryan

here’s a good example of how references can be pushed way too far.

I was watching this episode of Explicitly Later’d on VBS.tv, which reminded me of Howard Hughes, and made me remember I hadn’t finished reading Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger (for the connection there, the Gunslinger is on a quest to kill Howard in the book).

The page I open up to starts with the stanza:

“The furnishings are all strictly flat
That is, if you see a chair to sit in
You sit in the image of that chair
You fry an egg in the image of the skillet

which instantly brings up Margritte’s The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), and leads me back to this New Yorker article about the context of itching in nervous function and how the brain’s perception of something is based on a collection of sensory inputs which comes to a conclusion based on knowledge in the brain itself, which is then translated into what could be a problematic response (e.g., in an amputee, the phantom limb is due to the brain’s processing of the little data it has and coming to the wrong conclusion [read the article, it will make more sense]). When I first read the article, it made me thing that this might be part of the reason some Native American groups registered the foreign invaders as gods, etc., because that was the logical conclusion based on the data available.

Anyway, back to the poem, there’s a line “Where Fear and Surrender come and go,” which if you follow Eliot, smacks highly of Prufrock’s “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” Based on the construction of Dorn’s poem, and the later lines “After Lunch where they destroy themselves/ With madness,” which, if you’re up on the Beats, you might register as references to Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Ginsberg’s Howl, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” (see you get the naked part of lunch there), these seem like reasonable interpretations for the lines.

But when you take the lines “Don’t mean shit to him,” and “I think this is it Boss/ The crack we been waiting for” and your immediate thoughts are Mindless Self Indulgence (100 beats per minute baby/ don’t mean shit to me [from Futures off of Frankenstein Girls Seem Strangely Sexy]), and Nena (This is what we’ve waited for/ This is it boys, this is war [from 99 Red Balloons]), you know you have gone way too far with it, both for the anachronistic knowledge he would have needed to use them in the poem(though he does have a character named Al show up at that point in the poem as well [Paul Simon what?]), and that the probability of those artists reading Dorn are relatively low (though that Paul guy’s a tricky Mister).

Basically, you could follow this train down a rabbit hole so far even Lucy couldn’t get you back out (by the way, has anyone ever done a reinterpretation of the Peanuts with Lucy as the personification of a Lysergic Acid hallucination? Could explain the football).

-bryan

I got a subscription to Poetry Magazine for my birthday, and up until this month, there has only been a few poems in each issue that really stood out to me, but the July/ August issue is full of great material. Besides the new poems by Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn and Stephen O’Conner, there is portfolio of Jack Spicer’s work and a radio play by Yehuda Amichai. Spicer has been an influence to me for the last couple of years, and this look at some of his work I had not seen before did not disappoint, though the fullness of the issue is what really got me thinking. From the earlier issues of the magazine I have collected, this ratio of about one good poem per issue seems to stand, including my favorite Ted Berrigan poem, which, because I am not sure it was printed anywhere else, and because it is about forty years old, I will reprint below. A subscription to the magazine costs thirty-five dollars a year, and if I was only really blown away by one poem an issue, then ostensibly, the cost is about 3 dollars per poem, which is a pretty reasonable price to pay for something beautiful, that might even change the way one thinks about poetics.

As a bonus in this issue, there is a crossword puzzle. I haven’t sat down and really tried to solve it, but after reading a handful of the clues, I do not think I would get very far, though I know that the beginning of the rhyme scheme of a limerick is “AA,” Anne Sexton is a famous confessional poet, and Hart Crane is the Bridge man. Even though some might think it a frivolity of the now better funded magazine, including the crossword seems like a pretty logical inclusion for the magazine, as it fits the crowd that reads the magazine. Crosswords are the purest forms of allusion, as there is no clue in them that is not a reference to some outside source. Allusion is a dying literary device. As peoples frames of reference become more and more diverse, it becomes harder to justify an allusion to something for the weight such a reference can add, if very few people will know the reference, and fewer will put together the present evocation with their prior experience. Granted, one can still use the pillars of western thought, the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology, but finding a unique spin on them after thousands of years becomes, in my mind, a rather boring pursuit (how many poems reference Orpheus? Probably as many as ones that reference that, indeed, a poem is being written). Also, to invoke obscure references is to create a purposeful line of pretension, which to a great extent (aside from the fascist beliefs, which most people serious about art could overlook) is why Pound is not read very much anymore. His sources are no longer in the common pool of knowledge, so neither is he. It is for this reason as well, Spicer’s earlier work, upon revisiting, stands out as his better work in my mind; it does not rely on knowing a specific political or social reference of the time to be enjoyable.

Allusion, then, is really a selfish form, in and of itself, of artistic venture. Which is not to say great works can not be based upon allusion, but they will be great not for the reference, but rather for what they are without the presupposed knowledge of the reference. Apparently I’ve been rethinking the way I should be writing this thing, as I pretty much have just dropped a bunch of names in some of the other entries and hoped people will pick up on them. I guess there’s a counter argument that works around the thesis that if one is unwilling to share something with others, that thing has no value, as its only existence is dependent upon the singular source. This line of reasoning, then, necessitates the existence of the blog, to create a greater value (haa haa haa, that’s extrapolating way too far, but yeah, If one has more money than one can reasonably spend on legitimate pursuits, then the only things of value that person has to give are knowledge and kindness.)

It seems this is my new dumping ground for all the ideas that I don’t want to turn into papers.

Anyway, pick up a copy of the July/ August issue of Poetry if you have 4 dollars and are into poetry, here’s the poem I promised way up there:

Words For Love (for Sandy)

Winter Crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn
this, my weakness, smites me. A glass
of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
ness of clouds at one o’clock obsess me.
I weep for all of these or laugh.

By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost
in dreams of lists compiled by my self
for reassurance. Jackson Pollock Rene
Rilke Benedict Arnold I watch
my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams and sigh.

At night, awake, high on poems or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists
flow differently. Of words bright red
and black and blue. Boksy. Oubliette. Dis-
severed. And O, alas

Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston
it is 2 p. m. It is time to steal books! It’s
time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalypse
the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

Only this. My poems do contain
wilde beestes. I write for my Lady
of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely
but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If
I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, neverless

my heart still loves, will break.

Ted Berrigan. “Words for Love”. Poetry (1968) Vol. 112(3): 164-165

-Bryan

p.s. The title of this entry comes from Kelly Clarkson by way of Girl Talk (seriously, listen to Feed the Animals if you haven’t already)

Okay, as I’ve been fighting my mouse infestation (I’ve caught three so far, and highly recommend glue traps if you can figure out where your mice are coming from), I’ve been watching movies at my general pace, so here’s a back log of one you should see, and ones you should only see if you have enough free time

I highly recommend The Sea Inside, a bio-pic that might convince you Kevorkian had some valid points (if you didn’t think that already). Also up there is the more known Goodbye Lenin, and The Jesus of Montreal. The best part of The Jesus is the play-within-the-movie, and it would be worth a rent just for that (I really wish I was more aware of avant garde theatre than I am - I think all my sources are at least 15 years old, so I have no idea where it’s at now).

Unless you’ve never seen a movie where most the dialog is narration, avoid The Diary of a Country Priest. It really does not go much past the idea that a person who appears to be a simpleton might actually have a lot to teach others, especially if he drinks cheap wine and has stomach cancer. It’s a best a curiosity, but mainly a bore (and I’m someone who gushes over Koyaanisqatsi [no dialog, just a Phillip Glass score set to some incredible cinematography {similar to Baraka}]).

Another one to avoid is Luis Bunuel’s the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. I’ll save the discussion of a work based as opposed to writer/director based canon for another time, but just because you were half of the force behind Un Chien Andalou, doesn’t mean I’m going to like this drivel. I think I watched this at about the time when I started getting over the phrase “Ya get it?” but I’ll bring it back just that once to point out that even Faulkner did a more engaging retelling of a story from different perspectives (this would actually probably be the best time to talk about a work based versus author or director based canon; As I Lay Dying always has been, and always will be, a great book, and he pulled off his multiple narrator concept dashingly, but Absalom, Absalom! was, and always will be a drag). Granted, the tone of Discreet Charm is sarcastic, but this film is about as far as one can take the, “wake up, it’s all a dream” device.

Non sequitur, but if you want to see a great film told from the perspective of multiple narrators, rent Rashomon - you won’t regret it.

Not that great, but not hideous, The Dreamlife of Angels is like Marshmallow Coast in that, the former, you watch, and the latter, you listen to, both take some time, and you don’t feel bad about that time, but you don’t get any emotional response from it.

-bryan

Although I am a huge proponent of Walerian Borowczyk’s La Bete, as it is one of the most strangely provocative pieces of cinema I’ve seen - in the “what the fuck” sense - his Immoral Tales left something to be desired (no double meaning there). It may have been the misogynism of the the first sequence which put me off the rest the film (a very distant student asking for a girl to fellate him to completion as the tide hits its crest, “for her education”), but also, I did not feel (though this may be the product of years between the making and the viewing of the film) the tales were all that shockingly immoral, nor developed in such a way as to add insight into the inner workings of sexuality. The one redeeming quality of the film was, at times, the camera angles were set in such a way as to create provocative abstractions from what otherwise would be rather mundane human forms.

La Bete, on the other hand, treated its immoral subject in a much more refined manner. Although considered to be a surrealist retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it is much more in tone with the Fall of the House of Usher and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once again, it is the subject matter that is used to draw one into the film, the story unfolding over the course of the 83 minutes of the version I saw (there are 2 longer versions whose truncated scenes I have no knowledge of), with the choice of shots paramount to making the film what it is (as Jon James pointed out, it is a film where the story and characters are developed much more readily in the sex scenes than outside, a rare feat in cinema, and one that he wishes at some point to be able to invoke). In the end, one is left with many questions, but of the sort that almost necessitates thinking about it, as opposed to the, “why would someone make this film?” that comes after seeing the Immoral Tales.

As for One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’m not going to go into it too much, but I highly recommend Rabassa as a translator for Marquez’s works. He also did translations of the Leaf Storm and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Of those, Chronicle… is justifiably as good if not better than One Hundred…, with an emotional fecundity so great you might find oaks growing between your toes before you’re done.

-Bryan

Well, as lame as you might think they are, The Raconteurs new album is amazing. I was really impressed by their debut a couple years ago, but Consolers of the Lonely is much better. I first heard the majority of the songs performed on Bob Boilen’s NPR All Songs Considered Live Concerts. The podcast is available on iTunes, and features The Raconteurs shredding for appox. 1.5 hours.

Another follow up album that is a must is Tapes ‘n Tapes Walk it Off. I was turned onto Tapes ‘n Tapes by a guy at a record store in Grand Rapids, who recommended the band’s first album, The Loon. He mentioned that the album was “pretty good,” but failed to mention that Tapes ‘n Tapes pretty much reinvent the “garagy-I recorded this in my basement, but it totally melts faces” genre. The new album, Walk it Off, has some slower songs on it, but they are very well composed, and really demonstrate the growth and evolution of a young band.

The third and final must have follow-up album is Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer. Its Wolf Parade… go buy it. The album is being called neo-prog rock by several rock critics, but it just shows how far away from the days of prog rock we really are. This album has less influence from King Crimson and more from My Bloody Valentine, with the fuzzed out guitars and vocals that borderline incomprehensible over the noise from the background. Factor in the excessive use of piano and synth, and its a completely different direction for Wolf Parade, away from their former dance-rock style. You mentioned Built to Spill doing “Freebird,” well they also do a badass rendition of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” which is guaranteed to melt your face.

Randall