Showing posts with label Hike. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hike. Show all posts

2014/07/20

Ink-Black, but Moving Independently Across the Black and White Parquet of Print, the Ant Cancels the Author Out




High Holy Day in Egoslavia. Diana Rigg, first, still best crush ever, is 76 today. The Avengers, the Honor Blackman/Katherine Gale years in b/w, the Diana Rigg/Emma Peel years, but especially the first Emma year, in b/w, first, best crush ever. Two years ago I was able to post some episodes, last year some motherfuckers claimed rights and blocked them. Last year I was able to post the black & white opening theme song, this year some motherfuckers claimed rights and blocked that, here, have the vastly inferior color opening to the second Emma Peel season (which, fine metaphors abounding, was vastly inferior - though still better than almost everything else then, since, forever - to the first season in black and white):







That doesn't give me the toe-curling waves of nostalgic pleasure like the black & white opening still does. I haven't mentioned this here in a while: I remember seeing the Flintstones in color, the first time I'd see a color TV, I was five? six? I don't remember whose house, a relative's presumably, I know it was in western Pennsylvania, but I am convinced that seminal event, followed by a decade of TV repeats after school, home when sick or faking sick, color then B/W then B/W then color then less and less B/W as the old shows fell out of syndication, and especially the shows in syndication like Avengers and Get Smart and Bewitched whose first years were in B/W then toggled to color, influence, for good and bad, how I apprehend and interpret the world still.

Yes, I post a version of that paragraph every year on July 20. Here's the only black & white scene I can find:







Hey, then there's this email:

Hello,
Congratulations!
Your Google Apps domain name, blckdgrd.com, was successfully renewed with enom for one year. You can now continue using Google Apps through July 18, 2015 and your account will soon be charged for the purchase.
Please do not reply to this email; replies are not monitored.
Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

I'll believe it if this shitty blog is still here the morning of the 26th.












FABLE OF THE ANT AND THE WORD

Mary Barnard

Ink-black, but moving independently   
across the black and white parquet of print,   
the ant cancels the author out. The page,   
translated to itself, bears hair-like legs   
disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber.
These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning,   
destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence   
laying waste all languages, until, thinly,   
the fictional dialogue begins again:   
the page goes on telling another story.



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2014/07/14

If the Rich Can Survive Dust-Storms Thanks to Their Red-and-Gold Liveried Postilions, Then You Are Playing with an Alphabet Here: Nothing You Invent Can Be a Plenipotentiary, Turn Itself Inside-Out, Radiate Iron Spokes at the Mini-Landscape, and So Side with a Population of Bears, Who Knows?





Earthgirl and I gave ourselves a weekend, a drive Saturday southwest to below Charlottesville to hike to the top Crabtree Falls then a good dinner and sleep in Staunton (pronounced STAN-ton, don't you know), then yesterday drove the entire Skyline Drive south-to-north, stopping to hike the Rose River Loop. The video above is Earthgirl's photos of the Rose River Loop hike. Look for the bear - we saw two, only one stayed around long enough to be photoed. Oh heck, because I love you, here's a  mini-movie of the bear:







Crabtree Falls was OK, very crowded, full of fools, uphill immediately which is - for me - the worst a hike can start - no chance to warm up, to find the breathing rhythm, for old knees and ankles to loosen before work. Rose River Loop was wonderful, a hard hike with a payoff. It's the typical Shenandoah National Park hike: straight downhill on side trails off the Skyline Drive/Appalachian Trail spine through gorges and hollows and then straight uphill back in a loop. The Hog Camp Branch uphill of the loop was longer, steeper than Crabtree Falls uphill but not nearly as hard. We picked up the latest book of circuit hikes in Shenandoah at the Visitor Center at Big Meadows. Our $15 pass for entering Skyline Drive yesterday is good through next Sunday, so....

















KOREAN SOAP OPERA

John Ashbery

My sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore. 
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals 
don’t suit her teal, rust and eggshell color scheme. 
Of course, I was a buyer when she was still on the street 
peddling the Communist youth weekly. I have a degree 
in marketing. Her boyfriend thinks I’m old-fashioned. 
Well, I guess I do have an old-fashioned mentality. 
What kind of a mentality 
causes men to commit suicide in their air-conditioned glass boxes? 
It has been a life of adjustments. I adjusted to the postwar boom 
though it broke up my family. Some took their honor to the mountains, 
to live on wood and water. But the investment years 
wrought havoc with the landscape. Everything is modular now, even the trees. 
Under the dizzying parabolas of the railroad bridge, where the thud 
of laundry mallets used to resound, the swiftly flowing 
current is like green cream, like baize unfit for fulling. 
So old are the ways, 
for lunch one might select a large smelly radish. 
In the streets, as always, there is a smell of frying fish 
no one notices. The rain cannot make up its mind. 
Other people like it other ways. 
I need to interact with postal employees, civil servants, that sort of thing. 
Just being asleep isn’t enough. 
I must cry out against injustice in whatever position 
sleep overtakes me. Only then will I have understood what the world 
and servants mean by self-abolishment, the key, it is said, 
to success. To stand and contemplate the sea 
is to comprehend part of the package. What we need, therefore, 
is market gardens bringing a sense of time with them, 
of this time, honed to razor-sharpness. Yet the whole 
scheme is invisible to any shareholder, and so the feeling 
lessens, the idea that a composite portrait 
may not be so important after all takes over like the shoulder 
of a mill-wheel, slogging patiently under water, then back 
to the zenith, where the watchword presumably is. 
In schools they teach things like plus and minus 
but not in the gorge, not in boiling mud. 
Area residents were jolted to find what in essence 
was a large swamp, pythons and all, in their communal front yard. 
To me, this is insensate. I cannot stand the wind at my back 
making of me nothing, to be handed 
over, in turn, to this 
man, this man. For though he weathered patiently 
the name, the one that occurs to all of us, he went out 
and came in, not in the best interests of abundance; 
not, it seems, being anything but about to fall. 
Here’s a paradox for you: if the men are segregated 
then why are the women not? 
If the rich can survive dust-storms thanks to their red-and-gold liveried 
postilions, then you are playing with an alphabet here: nothing 
you invent can be a plenipotentiary, 
turn itself inside-out, radiate 
iron spokes at the mini-landscape, and so side with a population 
of bears, who knows? Who knows how much there can be 
of any one thing if another one stops existing? And the word you give to this 
man, this man, is cold, 
fossil fuel. 
One snorts in the laundry, another 
is broken beside the bed. A third is suspended 
in a baobab for all the sins 
no one ever knew, for sins of omission are like pearls 
next to the sin of not knowing, and being excused 
for it. So it all comes round 
to individual responsibility and awareness, 
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place 
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by.



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2014/06/09

Secret Belief in Perpetual Spring





There are only nineteen photos from yesterday's solo hike on Sugarloaf. I love hiking by myself, I love hiking with Earthgirl more. The slideshow will only take 38 seconds. Were you taught to type out alphabetically all numbers between one and twenty, start using Roman Arabic Numerals for numbers from 21 up? I was. Photos fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, the rock pile and the cairn (on this map it's the top of the hill between B5 and B6): I sat and shared conversation and their delicious hand-baked peanut butter gorp over water and catching breath with an wife and husband, combined age 167. They've lived in Flint Hill for 60 years (Willy Bayne lived in Flint Hill while married to Treva, exactly one of you knows of what I speak), have been hiking together - everywhere near, but Sugarloaf most - since they met and married and moved to Maryland. I love hiking by myself, I love hiking with Earthgirl more.

The below Lambchop was the last song on the shuffle before I parked, Lambchop was in my head the entire hike.







IN PERPETUAL SPRING

Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies   
and trip over the roots   
of a sweet gum tree,   
in search of medieval   
plants whose leaves,   
when they drop off   
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they   
plop into water.


Suddenly the archetypal   
human desire for peace   
with every other species   
wells up in you. The lion   
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,   
queen of the weeds, revives   
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.



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2014/06/08

I’ll Get a Library Card at Last and I Won’t Pay $100 for It Feeling Tired but Only as Tired as One Would Normally Feel at Sea Level After, Say, a Five Hour Hike




Earthgirl's leg is (a) better (b) worse (c) we have no fucking idea. (Background here for those who don't know/are curious why Earthgirl's knees are on the blog - short version, she took a bad spill on the trail last Sunday - and there were updates during the week.) The bruise migrates. She wouldn't have been able to hike today regardless because of a school project with the 5th graders but she wouldn't have be able to hike today because of her leg. She hopes she can hike next weekend. I'm out the door in ten minutes to do a seven mile circuit on Sugarloaf. I wish Earthgirl could join me. I love hiking by myself.

Have I been talking about electric cigarettes on this blog? I don't recall talking about electric cigarettes on this blog, but in the past week I've sixteen comments complimenting me on this blog's design and content and offering me links to discount pricing on top of the line electric cigarettes. I guess the bots have concluded they've solved my discount Viagra problem for me. It occurred to me that it was about this time last year that I enabled moderation in comments (and not for the comments the spam filter doesn't block) and looking back in archives it is. I was right to enable moderation, though I apologize for the delays that sometimes occur between when a comment is made and the comment is posted. Thanks to all who still play.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico:






  • :-p's Life Lessons.
  • I've yodeled about this before, have a long yodel written and in the digital freezer, but Thunder's comment yesterday on the Death of Liberalism draws these sentences out of me: I know honorable Liberals who, while not putting it this way themselves, feel that Liberalism went further in America then could have been dreamed of a hundred years ago, that Liberalism's retreat is inevitable, that advancing a Liberal economic agenda is impossible, and that the most achievable goal for current Liberals is to preserve as much of the economic gains vis a vis Robber Barons as possible. My opinion is, how should I put it, incoherent.
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  • The Baffler's week that was.
  • It's crap like moving a game to motherfucking FedEx field that's killing my United damn.
  • On the difficulty of reading poetry in translation.
  • Faye reminded me last night of Bogshed:








[HOME WHOSE NAMES ARE PRODUCED BY MOTION]

Lyn Hejinian

Home whose names are produced by motion   
is where people go (one following
the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself   
at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot   
the tales of which are spinning like blades   
on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate   
and desire, chance and intention, from time to time   
converge. Most people want things to be good   
but taking a programmatic approach to getting it
would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you   
except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy
at this very moment is screaming in jubilation   
at a silver toaster, I want it
even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down   
mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know   
the ones. The purport comes all at once   
at the end in such a way that one is thrown back
to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is
about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it
feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level   
after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same
when it was just getting light—a murky gray
that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break   
away from my conversations in order to barge in   
on yours and give the illusion that I often know   
where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty   
of motive to propel the prose
or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing   
where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip
will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience.   
There are birds chirping, smoke is rising
from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer   
and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive
sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge   
of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus   
I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!”   
I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel   
that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that   
after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing   
but motion to the composition.



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2014/06/05

We Crave Attention, Then Come Over All Coy




For those of you following along, here's Earthgirl's knee last night. (Background here for those who, um, need). The bruise is growing, larger and more colorful. There will not be a ten mile hike this weekend.

I've mentioned this before: my first love was baseball. After a bitterly delicious apostasy in the mid-90s (shouldn't all apostasies be delicious in their bitterness?) I've let baseball back in a few innings at a time though I'll never give my heart again. Still, RIP Don Zimmer, who embodied the wondrous daydream of the baseball-lifer and was a major character in baseball when baseball was part of my daily life. We had dinner with Hamster last night (who, along with Landru, took me to an Oriole game at Memorial, an 8-5 loss to the Washington Senators Texas Rangers, for my stag-party). He and Planet and I are going to try and get to a Nats game, perhaps as early as the next homestand (I didn't hear about Zimmer's death until this morning, Serendipity be great). Other Mocomofos and Bawlmer hons encouraged to join us.

I only link-fished friends this morning for new posts


otherwise have two songs (fell asleep listening to Stephan Mathieu) and a poem (fell asleep reading Mark Ford, whose name I mention here since the poem's title is the beginning of a sentence, whose poetry I am overwhelmingly pleased to have just discovered, who has just been given his own tag, there will be more here):







WE CRAVE

attention, then come over all coy, and start fiddling
with watchstrap and buttons, or talking about a friend
of a friend who claims to own the world's largest collection
of aquarium ornaments, yet has no aquarium. In the mean-
time the tough-minded argue each of us is loved not
so much for his or her oddities, as in spite of them, or even
faute de mieux! Families form, squabble on long
car journeys, invent nicknames for strangers; the tires hum
their own tune, and in shimmering forecourts
the baked atmosphere presses from all sides, searing
the lungs. We commend, internally, the wisdom of the soft-
voiced tycoon who acquired the land, only
to flatten it, then skilfully divide it into distinct
yet related lots; a spongy layer of wood-chips lines
the criss-crossing paths, and whispers faintly underneath.

As it was drummed into me, I would drum it
into others: the art or science of management never
pauses, though it occasionally lies low, or enacts
retreat like a Parthian archer. Invariably, speed and stealth
take advantage of the famous, non-existent 'margin' poor
Herbert Pocket kept urging upon Pip; a sound decisive
as the whirr and double click of a computer mouse
signals the arrival of the inner bailiffs, and an era
of thrift. Listen harder, and through the virtual prison-bars
comes swarming the buzz of creditors and debtors over
lunch, each pledging allegiance to the other, to knowledge,
to the mysteries of living on this air....



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2014/06/03

The Remainder Can Only Imperceptibly Dwindle, Retreating Backwards Until Their Long Lost Premises Turn Inside Out



That's Earthgirl's knee last night. Other things we learned from Sunday's hike, by far the most ambitious we've planned since we were twenty years younger. Eat. Eat healthy the night before, healthy in the morning, healthy along the way even if we don't feel hungry. Double our water, drink even if we don't feel thirsty. Stop more, more for the sake of enjoying the wood than for rest, though rest even if we don't feel tired. The next time the guide says "the trail gets considerably more rocky" believe the guide book. Next time one of us falls and bashes a joint or bone, turn around and go home. There will be a next time, goddamn it. And then another, motherfucker. I'd be surprised we get a chance this weekend, at least a long hard hike, that knee is going to be spectacularly marbled and colored for more than a few days.

Regarding the bleggalgaze - (a) when bleggal overlords stop by to see if there's action here then Blegsylvania is dead everywhere and (b) there will be a Pere Ubu post later today or, more likely, tomorrow (with a Henry Cow cascade), and (c): this:














LIVING WITH EQUATIONS

Mark Ford

As I emerged from my hip-bath it suddenly dawned
The facts might be remarshalled and shown to rhyme.

Now the era need never end: its coefficients learn
To crack their knuckles, or reach for a handful of silver.

I watch the entangled sums unspool, as if the weight
Of earth pressed fitfully upon their mad proposals.

Stray hints lead across perilous foreclosures, around
Noisy corners, then out into featureless, sandy scrub.

The devolved particulars - a shoe, a mole - reappear
In compounds that seem so explicit one forgets to gasp.

The remainder can only imperceptibly dwindle, retreating
Backwards until their long lost premises turn inside out.



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2014/06/02

Earthgirl's Knees




We were two miles up the trail to Signal Knob yesterday when, taking photos of gorgeous mountain laurel in bloom while walking, ouch. I said, once she was able to stand, those are going to swell, we should probably turn around, but she insisted we finish the hike. The photo taken at time of the fall. Eight miles later (three of them uphill to the peak) the right knee was the size of cantaloupe, by the time we were home even larger, an hour later the size of a volleyball. Drove her to Suburban, x-rays were negative (which we figured - she wouldn't have been able to walk on it if there had been a break), but since the thing kept swelling common sense demanded she get peace of mind. Next weekend, knees and weather-permitting, Veach Gap.

Slideshow perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not. My body is remembering how to hike - for instance, on hills, walk like a fashion-model on a catwalk, pulling your steps in towards the middle instead of allowing them their natural outswing. Breath through the nose as long as possible. Don't sit at lunch, stand, stretch, eat. I dislike rock scrambles, don't have a rock-climber's balance and confidence (and this hike had four miles of rock scramble - after Earthgirl's fall). Read guide books better. In the backpack? Mark Ford, who I had never heard of until I saw this Helen Vendler review of a new Selected. Fortunately, I have access to a university library's stacks. On the speakers in the car?








LOWERCASE

Mark Ford

Using the heel
Of either hand, how I’d like to knock-
Knock-knock-knock some raw, devil-may-care
Spirit into the echoing chambers
Of the brain. Around
My cranium the churned-
Up air falls still, is hushed, save
Where the weak-eyed bat, with short
Shrill shriek
Flits by on leathern wing, tiny against the violet
Evening sky, or a scything blur
Across the twisted boughs and the white, waxy flowers
Of the frangipani trees.
Meanwhile, a blast
Of Sheltox
Dispatches another cockroach – it flips
Over twice, and its legs
Stop moving; its shiny brown shell, now beaded with poison, looks
Like a chain-smoker’s nail. Through
A drifting mist of insecticide I hover
And roam, index finger
On the trigger, until the bitter fumes fade, and my interest
In killing what Sheltox kills
Fades… Relax
O muscles, in arms, neck, eyes and face – cast
Out remorse for this and other
Fits that wrench, wrench
And squeeze, squeeze and catch
In the throat. Let no man
Squirrel away what he owns, or thinks he owns, nor, ill
At ease in his own skin, swallow fire and so
Burn inwardly. As a fly.



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2014/05/25

Floyd Atmosphere Had His Cups Repossessed





Paul Weller is 56 today. These are the songs I play every Paul Weller birthday, I love each and every one of them, especially and forgive me this Style Council song (it has a false start, give it a few seconds):







We did a five and a half mile, two out and back, hike at Blockhouse yesterday. There is a new trail in MOCO that follows Muddy Branch Creek from its mouth at the Potomac near Pennyfield Lock north to the bridge where 28 (near Casa Satanica) crosses the creek. This is true, people can vouch: one of the sources of Muddy Branch is a spring in my parents' back yard. You can stand on the rock top, it used to be our pitching mound. We parked at the lot on River and did the 1.5 of the 1.75 to almost Esworthy Road (the last quarter of the trail was a gas line cut full of uncut grass and presumably ticks) and back and then the 1.25 mile to and from the parking lot down to Pennyfield Lock. Nothing special, but nice enough for evenings when we've limited time and a need to get to woods.

Today we take two cars to South Mountain, park one at the parking lot below Weverton Cliffs, double-ride north to Gathland State Park, hike eight miles south on Appalachian Trail, with lunch on Weverton Cliffs, to car parked below Weverton Cliffs, then double-ride north to Gathland State Park to take two cars home. Monday's hike TBD.

A postscript to yesterday's post: it occurs to me that I didn't think about The Grand Budapest Hotel at all yesterday - it never came up in conversation on the hike or around the house - until I read yesterday's post before starting to write this one. I did, however, hear Durutti Column songs in my head as I hiked while thinking about the Stephanie Young poem I posted yesterday as well as the Robert Coover novel I'm reading as well as a poem I'm near abandoning and calling finished. Today in Earthgirl's backpack is a watercolor palette and block, in mine the Coover novel, a book of Clark Coolidge's sonnets (the Coolidge below not a sonnet) and a notebook. I took into consideration portability and practicality for going into forests forty years ago when setting my priorities.








SETTLED IN AUGUST

Clark Coolidge

Floyd Atmosphere had his cups repossessed
they were amethyst and the buckweed falls
I think it's arbitrary the poem
shaped by idiots rising like a sun
thinking the universe doesn't get it
Gogo Flam arrived home goose step by back stoop
I'll give the wall everything even blood it's higher
Spodumene Bob presiding draws mouth on glass
a highway to the moon the only bout they'll join
ugh said the centipede it's a classic!
and Monk names tunes by trying to name them
well we'll see but now the loquat is gone
no semblance even but plenty of mirrors
aren't the heroes nervous? psilocybin notation
to outright cry and be ready for the beach
scooter then the cash cow the bulk finagle
I watch TV I'm no longer a Cherokee
just a live impersonation till the ceiling falls
join you then join you in bed maybe
I live in a borrowed multiplicity
my brothers are the smoke



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2014/05/18

the lane the streak the lining the hour





That video shot yesterday, we're walking across the Appalachian Trail footbridge over I-70 on South Mountain in Maryland, downhill left towards Frederick, downhill right towards Hagerstown. We parked on 40 and climbed over Knob Hill to the cliffs at Annapolis and Black Rocks, seven good hard miles to and from. My legs are rounding, my knees are rounding, my hips, lungs, and heart are rounding into hiking shape, my fucking ankles, they are fragile motherfucking castanets. Which reminds me of a song:







This is true (and my apologies to those who've heard this before, but Serendipity demands): forty years ago this Spring (in Spring 1974 I would have been fourteen, I didn't do the math until last night, this isn't a planned gag; or rather, it was a planned gag once I saw the bridge, I did the video with this gag in mind though I didn't start the hike with this gag in mind) I and seven other members of Troop 1097's Senior Patrol were on a training hike for a summer trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In Spring 1974 the hottest craze was Roger Miller's The Streak. Five of eight of us did, back and forth, across the AT footbridge over 70. Three split before we streaked, asking for ten minutes to get across the bridge before we streaked so they weren't implicated, we gave it to them, they waahed back to camp. In the video, when the camera nods up and down, that's where we stopped to wave to honking cars. One car didn't honk, a State Trooper, he bloop-blooped his siren, sped south to next exit. We made it almost back to camp thinking we'd won, dopes, but up the trail walks the Trooper and the Scout leaders. The three ratted us. I'll not pig latin their names: Mark Albright and Marshall Dobbins and Richard Bachmann, I hope you did not have the life of hell I wished upon you then, you collaborating motherfucking cowardly leader-worshiping future Fascist future Eagle Scouts, you.

I was going to quit after Philmont anyway. When asked to apologize for disgracing the Scout uniform, I said, how was I disgracing the Scout uniform by streaking?







FLAME

C.D. Wright

the breath               the trees               the bridge

the road                  the rain                the sheen

the breath               the line                  the skin

the vineyard            the fences             the leg

the water                the breath             the shift

the hair                  the wheels             the shoulder

the breath               the lane                the streak

the lining                the hour                the reasons

the name                the distance          the breath

the scent                the dogs                the blear

the lungs                the breath             the glove

the signal               the turn                  the need

the steps                the lights               the door

the mouth               the tongue             the eyes

the burn                  the burned            the burning



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2014/05/12

Galaxy of Minds Bent Upon Him











  • HIKING UPDATE! or Earthgirl and I are getting our fat asses in shape doing what we love to do: Friday after work four mile circuit in Little Bennett, only one small circuit and we would have done it all; Saturday, seven mile circuit, Sugarloaf, Blue to Purple to Blue to Northern Peaks; Sunday, four mile circuit to the above, Blockhouse Train off River Road to the above cliffs above the Potomac, just ten miles from the DC line.
  • How to tell a loved one her favorite book sucks.
  • Circe and Charlie will get an Elkin novel, I'm ordering today at lunch, get requests in by one today.
  • Sergio Chejfec (the anti-Escher?), for those of you who do. I saw his name and thought I should investigate and promptly forgot.
  • Hilda Hilst?
  • Beckett, for those of you who do.
  • Samuel Delaney, for those of you who do.
  • Zombie update (with Sun Kil Moon soundtrack).
  • C.A.K.E. Dave's new project.
  • It's hard to believe that after all these years Dean Wareham is putting out his first solo album.








FIGURE

Josephine Mills

A poem I keep forgetting to write
Is about the stars,
How I see them in their order
Even without the chair and bear and the sisters,
In their astronomic presence of great space,
And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving,
Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure.
Having not mathematics, my head
Bursts with anguish of not understanding.

The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments
Of a tortured victim, far from me
In his galaxy of minds bent upon him,
In the oblivion of his headline status
Crumpled and exploding as incomparable
As a star, yet present in its light.
I forget to write.



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2014/05/04

The Opposite of Lucky Is Wrong





Yesterday, first the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in West Friendship - look for the Border Collie herding sheep and for Hillbilly Jeff's Kettle Corn - and then Maryland back roads and then a five mile circuit hike in Little Bennett: we decided to continue filling in the map instead of going to Sugarloaf, there are just two of the twenty-two miles left to go. Back outside today. For links and clusterfuck engagement I refer you back to yesterday's post (this is, after all, Lazyass Weekend Blegging for Futile Weekend Blegging in Dead Blegsylvania), but because I love you (and because I am an attention slut) have two fresh songs and a fresh poem.








DANGERS

Rodney Jones

From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs,   
Happy to linger in shallows while others jackknifed from cliffs, wrong
To exact perfection from a sad piece or add notes to a proven tune;   
But ever the classicist:
                                     in swimming lessons, slowest to learn;
In fights, tentative, preferring the hammerlock to the jab and hook; cautious
In the earliest romances, choking in the clutch, fumbling the caress; or shy
Among the crew-cut Cupids bristling at the armory’s weekend dances;   
But shifty in every game, keeping it close. Always holding still   
And adjuring others to go slow
                                              until we leapt forward that night out of control
And pinned to the seats of Tyler Wilson’s outlandishly unstock Ford   
While, from the opposite side of the valley, scalding in each curve, came the black din
And brunt of Sonny Walker’s highjacker Chevrolet, everyone screaming   
And bearing down to be first across the bridge at Hurricane Creek.

Many trophies show us frozen: a leg poised for the hurdle, an arm cocked for the unanswerable spike.
What I remember through the windshield’s splintering lens is time, a mailbox
Rushing by, the letters TURRENTINE,
                                                      then darkness rolling inside;
Though memory, at best, retrieves maybe six percent in studio light,   
So even now I think we might have turned:
                                                               smart with his hands,
There is a kind of savior who blusters through the South, good with animals and machines,
Who surely somehow would have found a gap, through an open gate   
Into a marshy cornfield


                                    or up a logging road into a hillside wood.   
At any rate, there is just a little while, shy of any bridge, just as judgment
Balances its two blind alternatives and a third accelerates head-on.   
I’ve made a careful study: things that can only be accomplished in deep space,
In another language, in far history, at an almost incalculable speed. Courage is not included, or much foolishness.
They spin the purest glass, they split the atom, they speak with God.

They make a sort of Teflon hip and attach it with metal screws,   
Only the threads upbone keep stripping
                                                          so they have to operate
Again and again, and what she’s accomplished is more of a gait, really,
Than a walk, so when she moves toward me, across any room,   
I think too much of my own will
                                                implicated in that dragging brace.   
Each step is obviously trained, and the whole earned motion full   
Of muscle, plastic, and bone
                                           is coordinated by nerves even the   
Strictest dance does not require. She has said there is no fault,   
But even in such talk,
                                  grace occurs as an accident someone caused.   
If what I require is a thing too certain, braided from probabilities,
There is another thing
                                  articulated in the scars that saved her face—   
And no right now in that night we were shaken and rolled like dice, no right to
Say this guilt to be alive is love, or the opposite of lucky is wrong.



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2014/04/28

That Spasm Hymned as Repose



  • We thought we would hike Sugarloaf Sunday but when browsing through 60 Hikes within 60 Miles of DC trail guide while watching The Special One kill Scousers' dreams I came upon Bull Run Mountain Conservancy, we thought try something new. It was a terrific (kinda Sugarloafy) hike, a six mile circuit with a thousand foot climb to gorgeous cliffs with a great western overlook.
  • We left at half-time actually. Once Steven Gerrard cemented himself forever in Scousers' minds for a monumental fuck-up which gifted Chelsea a goal at half and cost Liverpool the title (provided City win at Everton next week) there was no way Liverpool was going to breakdown The Special One's buses.
  • A love letter to Elizabeth Warren. I wrote something catty then whittled it down to this: Elizabeth Warren will never be POTUS if she is who her advocates claim her to be. Which isn't saying she will never be POTUS.
  • Welcome to the Age of Meta.
  • Los Angeles: Double Face. Today's must, please.
  • Storck reminded me Sunday morning of Slugfuckers.













DEARTH DEMISE

Bill Knott

Satiety help me I have inhabit
of this world. Extant upon its designs
to be more aimlessly fluttering at
the window, to shadow all the patterns

it offers each sun. In frames far as eye
I draw my words towards a juggler's shards
as if our fallings-down our deaths occurred
but did not involve a lot of colloquialized

arm movements, the body language throws. Thus
the shape of your silence when it speaks me
is different than mine in saying you,

though both of them resemble that spasm hymned as
repose lifepause a happen of sorts the way
the horizon's a long way without meaning to.    


    
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