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[18 Jul 2008|01:04pm] |
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Pardon me, I've been in a spiritual coma.
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| Gene - "Speak To Me Someone" |
[15 Jul 2008|11:59am] |
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| Monday probe. |
[14 Jul 2008|11:20pm] |
1. What are you wearing today?
2. What is your least favorite mammal, aside from humans?
3. Do you believe in reincarnation?
4. If you had to eat a piece of candy from between the thighs of a poet, who would you choose, and what type of candy?
5. God damn you, Joe, you ______________! Fill in the blank.
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[11 Jul 2008|12:55pm] |
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That "damn, I wish I was your lover" song won't ESCAPE MY FUCKING HEAD.
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| Watch closely and you might find, as I have, that this is a clear statement of poetics... |
[09 Jul 2008|10:29am] |
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| Instead of fireworks... |
[07 Jul 2008|11:08am] |
 On the fourth I traveled with Shannon Tharp to the town of Petrolia, located on the Lost Coast of my adopted state of California. I've lived in this area for eight years now and that was my first time making the trek, no doubt because I hate windy roads, heights in conjunction with wide, open spaces -- it makes me so dizzy I come close to violently puking.
As we descended a series of steep curves, after floating in a cloud of fog and feeling as if we really were floating -- on the verge of plummeting to our demise -- I saw the road ahead rise again, nearly vertically (or so it appeared to my overwhelmed, skewed perception) into the hills. I freaked out. I asked her to drop me off, "you can pick up after you get back from Petrolia!" Anyway, I held it together. We made it.
The Lost Coast is an otherworldly landscape, even more so with the smoky haze from the forest fires enfolded into the heavy fog, and all of the weirdly stock-still cows, seemingly stoned on the weather. The town of Petrolia is small and as strange as the landscape that surrounds it. Alexander Cockburn lives there. On his property he built a guest house in the form of a tower (I know this because last night I watched his "In-Depth" interview on C-Span), and I'm contemplating writing to him and asking for a retreat there. I think it's worth a shot, a very long one.
The Lost Coast is so remote it immediately sinks into you, the fact that you're so far out, the strange safety of it, and the exhilaration of knowing that if you were to slip on a rock and break both of your legs you might just end up as food for a motherfucking pterodactyl or some other extinct creature taking refuge in the nooks and crannies -- the place is that untouched and gorgeously alien.
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| Before there was Goodreads, there was Glenn Danzig... |
[02 Jul 2008|10:39am] |
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| I don't think I'll ever stop loving this (now disbanded) band. |
[26 Jun 2008|02:22pm] |
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| Imagine... |
[23 Jun 2008|11:57am] |
You and I are buck-wild naked in a heart-shaped kiddie pool, and now it must be filled with a condiment of your choice. What condiment will you choose?
And what will be playing on the little boom-box in the tall grass beside the pool?
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| Three crucially important items: |
[20 Jun 2008|02:49pm] |
- A cruel joke: two cups of coffee down my gullet before I realized it's decaffeinated.
- Best spam subject line today: "Yearn to hide that salami."
- The radio show Cross-Cultural Poetics, archived at the national treasure PennSound, is really lovely. The host, Leonard Schwartz, sounds uncannily like a very relaxed version of Billy Crystal. If MFA students really want to learn about poetry, they should drop out of their programs and listen to a minimum of twenty hours of PennSound a week.
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| Thank you! |
[19 Jun 2008|08:20pm] |
...for all of the terrific music suggestions. I will get to downloading and listening as soon as I finish this audio version of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, as read by Matt Damon, ha! I'm digging it.
And I'm steeping green tea with some mint thrown in just for kicks, and digging it, and plugging away at poems -- caulking and cutting -- and thinking about you, all of you, and swooning like a big dumb dog at a barbecue.
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| A very important inquiry... |
[17 Jun 2008|06:22pm] |
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What albums do you put on when you need to relax, to clear your mind before and/or during creative work? I'm preparing to go on a downloading spree and would like to digitally obtain mellow but interesting music.
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[12 Jun 2008|03:35pm] |
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Who would like to get trashed with me and scarf down a shit load of "raw red plum, red Roma and red round tomatoes" like it's a game of Russian roulette?
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[12 Jun 2008|03:14pm] |
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The sun's a nice idea, but it makes me sick.
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| What am I doing on a Thursday morning? |
[12 Jun 2008|07:56am] |
I'm sitting here drinking coffee and watching videos about Scientology, one of my favorite activities, after being up all night due to a serious case of self-induced insomnia.
There's something beautiful in the blank facial expressions of Scientologists, the glazed-over, one-dimensional stares, unless they're engaged in "bull baiting" (L. Ron Hubbard's term for what basically amounts to a crude form of interrogation), in which case their faces contort into cartoonish interpretations of self-righteous anger, and even that is beautiful in a peculiar and grotesque way.
Take this video, the one I'm watching right now, for example. I don't know anyone but me who would sit through an entire hour-long video of a picket in front of a Scientology "church" and thoroughly enjoy each frame of it, but this one is particularly interesting because it turns into such a ridiculous cluster-fuck -- it becomes a parody of itself. Fifteen minutes into the video, dig the middle-aged android-like dude who repeats in a monotone "don't forget your eternity."
I well up with tears when I see displays like this, when the frailty of the human condition crystallizes into moments of utter absurdity. Tears of joy, I tell you. What an exquisitely black and hellish circus. The "eternity" racket is so awesomely cruel, I marvel at its dimensions and the sheer vulnerability and collective insanity of the human animal.
Now I must put on my cape, some dark eye-liner, and masturbate (with my own blood) to The Cure's Disintegration.
Good morning!
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[11 Jun 2008|07:13pm] |
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Would someone please kick me in the genitals?
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