Is Door to the Forum, Is Cutter of Keys

• Was reminded by Storck an hour ago of Loud Animal Group.
• Capitalism's growing problem with anxiety: Consider the panic of losing a mobile phone, of having no access at all to the internet, to one’s games, movies, photos, or common nodes of social interaction that we call our friends or followers. A power-cut, a burglary… would it be wrong to call them addictions? Yet we have neither selected this basis of social organisation, nor should we guiltily consider ourselves lucky first-worlders gorging gluttonously on the backs of the deprived billions. Whilst digitised technologies have abstracted and placed many cultural forms on a single homogeneous platform, personal technologies have the worker connected and potentially labouring at all hours in ways that operate, at minute level, the exchanges and processes that neoliberal capitalism requires to function. Against such a backdrop, our politicians, the public face of neoliberal capitalism, cajole us through fear and envy to keep up our duty as citizens: spend, borrow, buy, 24/7, 365 days a year, be it Christmas, Valentine’s or whatever, one must never shirk in one’s duty to service the economy.
• The zombification of the West.
• Privatizing science.

• The only two Louder Animal Group songs I could find. 
• We just put Planet on an airplane. Egoslavia's Holiest Day is five days away. See tag Planet Poems.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• There are new additions to the blogrolls, please check them out as they float to the top. Recommendations for new things for me to read solicited. Later today those blogs that haven't updated in three months will be moved to Moribund. No one will be purged except those blogs that suicided. If you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
• Brad's serialized short story, part the last.
• riverrun.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Creeley, for those of you who do.
• Chris M just reminded me of Current 93.

BETWEEN

Marie Ponsot

(for my daughter)

Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks

of groceries, unloads them, straightens, and stretches her back.

The child was a girl, the girl is a woman; the shift   

is subtle and absolute, worn like a gift.

The woman, once girl once child, now is deft in her ease,   

is door to the forum, is cutter of keys.

In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free   

between her mother and her child the woman stands   

having emptied her hands.

Clapping 123123

Re-posting as fresh Monday morning last night's post (with links and poem added):

Sunday evening is the stupidest time to post and certainly the worst time to beg (I've heard Sunday night is the biggest stupidass soap opera night on TV), but WFMU has just started it's marathon and I need you give them money for me. I can't imagine not having this resource - I - I'll try not to badger the fuck out of you. I also need you give them money for you; you either know why and would be an ingrate not to give or you need find out why and not be an ingrate once you do.







All four songs in this post were culled from four different shows from the past week (Storck, Bethany, Berger, Davidson). No, I couldn't wait till morning, a chance to be a slut for more than just me? I will post these songs again in the morning as a fresh post (with the template below filled in, a new title - a line stolen from a poem - and this section rewritten) unless someone comments, in which case I'll find four more songs from four different shows. Hint.

Added Monday morning: No one took the hint. No one read the post Sunday night.

• The making of capitalist patriarchy: an interview with Silvia Federici.
• The political use of extreme poverty.
• Use Politics and Prose instead of Amazon when ordering books.
• On hording books. (UPDATE! Hoarding, not hording: see comments)
• UPDATE! By DJ request I'm twitter-bumping the post. They need the money.
• DC United has a new shirt sponsor, Leidos, a gov't contractor. Can't wait to hear what fucks they are.
• Gaithersburg! Creepy as Fuck!
• You got good taste.
• Mandl's Marathon DJ CD cover!
• What to do with pleasure.

BEASTGARDEN

Lucy Ives

first garden

Beastgarden.

second garden

Bees go mad on late summer evenings, should

People stray from their jobs towards water

Beastgarden.

third garden

Who makes the rented red boat's

Oars turn

Who is the younger one always

Turning up

Who professes to be better because

He is just looking

Who says he is worse off as

He cannot look

Beastgarden.

fourth garden

The unicycle girl, thin

Like one with a sexual problem,

Goes through

The Schlosspark. This follows:

Father rolling his eyes

Beastgarden.

fifth garden

The man from Manchester

Has my breast in his hand

These are funny

They don't do anything do they

Being burnt by a fire I say

Beastgarden.

sixth garden

Similarly, if only

You grasped some

Titanic misery or a

Love like an old man's

Beastgarden.

seventh garden

Where were we

A ballroom competition goes on

A yellow satin bikini

A fuchsia floor-length are

Dancing; an audience is

Drinking, clapping 1 2 3 1 2 3

Beastgarden.

That's Right, the Mascara Snake, Fast and Bulbous

From his show today, Fabio's Beefheart birthday celebration playlist continues below the fold. Always with the Beefheart, me. I promise this is the last Beefheart I post until the next time I post Beefheart.





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("Mere Protocol"? - More Like a Second Backbone!)

• Holyfuck, listen to my new obsession. 
• Aesthetics, morality, politics, and disaster.
• The Kafkaesque world of data mining.
• Auto-pilot! 
• Sirota brings the duh.
• Hillarian inevitability: campaign against Obama's legacy from the right. Of course. And with that I hearby proclaim I suspend the use of the terms Hillarian inevitably, motherfucking Clinton, and motherfucking Clintons (which means they won't be mentioned at all) from this blog NOT because those terms aren't completely valid but because they are (though I allow myself this one last Fuck the Clintons, the two of them the perfect symbol for all that's fucked in American politics).
• Should be easy until 2016, then, probably not so much, though there's an obvious way to guarantee there's not talk of them in 2016 on this blog, executed on my end.

• Reminder (to me): field-recordings, music, poems, aargh-free links if links at all, one weekend post, tomorrow.
• BRT!
• CCT!
• Did you know new water-heaters cost $2600? It's true!
• Wolfson's has closed! (h/t SeatSix). I mean, it's been years since I was inside, but there's always been a Wolfson's on Diamond Avenue.
• Scharpling's show on Tuesday night's on WFMU never worked for me - I don't want to hear talk on the radio - but news of his retiring Best Show is noteworthy if for no other reason that it, by far, raised the most money during marathons.
• Fabio played an hour-and-a-half tribute to Lou Reed yesterday, but listen to the show for the two Meredith Monk pieces.
• Fifteen problems.
• Sebald, for those of you who do. I confess I have not felt compelled to pick up another since finishing Austerlitz, though that's more a matter of enthusiasm for other stuff than never-minding Sebald.
• Joyce Carol Oates v Robert Frost.
• Auden and ecopoetry.
• In Evidence: 3.
• New Eno interview.

INTELLIGENCE

Tom Sleigh

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed

bugs and mikes,

                           intercepted letters

full of passionate declarations, contradictory

intelligence—

                           how attached he’d grown

to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging

the influx of intelligence

with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost

                           like love: he felt

the cool gray eyes of his superiors

trained on him, rebuking him

                           for swerving, for letting

himself go—such tender obsession

occasioned by the file!

                           Not quite the professional style

he or the Agency expected…

But such official loyalties

                           seemed mere protocol to this!—

what was wrong with him,

                           he wondered, that he construed

the documents to make the subject

seem a hero,

                           a bastard whose sole patrimony

was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword

left by an unknown father beneath a stone?

And yet his exploits in the tabloids,

the headlines screaming,

SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!

HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC

                           were these heroic

different in kind from the rumors,

unverified,

                           of a rape, a murder?

—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!

To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…

On balance, for such a life,

                           the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:

think of the opportunities for evil

                           a man of such qualities must have had!

How well he knew him—an essential innocence

that followed impulse, blind

to protocol, not noticeably more kind

                           than he was cruel.

But to stamp Case Closed and cease

                           gathering intelligence,

to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,

like a lover…:

                           such limits the hero

unknowingly transgressed!

And the Agency, cold-blooded where

                           limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—

more like a second backbone!), committed

                           to keeping order, could not afford

such sentiments—the Chief of Security

felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence

                           should lead to this…

He leaned back in his chair and sighed:

                           a forged genealogy certifying

that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual

assistance pact

                           to aid in taking back the usurped crown:

he could see them now, the wind

blowing lightly, the two of them sweating

as they climbed the cliff, discussing

                           the terms, exchanging information,

intelligence—

                           how would his own face look

staring down across the sea

                           as he gestured earnestly toward

some island, saying,

                           “According to our sources,

the tax revenues…”

                           And then, edging

the hero closer to the cliff, pointing

                           out the harbor, he’d push.

In the Meantime, in the Regular Weather of Ordinary Days, It Sometimes Happens that a Man Has Changed So Slowly that He Slips Away Before Anyone Notices and Lives and Dies Before Anyone Can Find Out

• Jim's mention of WFMU DJ Frank O'Toole in comments put O'Toole's signature show-ender in my head all day yesterday and into this morning, I just finished a section of Sebald's Austerlitz in which Austerlitz, talking about his upbringing as an adopted child in Wales, riffs on the physical sensation of nostalgia, and I get a physical charge of nostalgia every time I hear that Nelson Riddle song. It's the song, not the show. I don't remember watching Route 66, ever, my father and mother must have watched it when I was too young to know what was going on on-screen, but the music? Boom.
• On Miriam Carey's temper.
• Fred Hiatt senses chance to destroy Social Security, urges Obama to cave.
• Which has been the plan all along. 
• Avedon Carol's obamapostasy.
• Pain is not a dolphin: on misunderstanding analogies.
• Dear Moron Tool at the Gazette: 270 goes nowhere near Potomac. It's called Rockville.
• Nighthawks: on dreams.
• An incoherent list of books!
• Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do. I picked up Seiobi Down Below this past Tuesday at Politics and Prose, it's after the Sebald (it's working; more later, or not) and the Coover (and maybe the Pynchon, what the fuck; more later, or not).
• September Song part one.
• September Song part two.
• Woke up with Zoviet France in my head:

A MAN MAY CHANGE

Marvin Bell

As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap

escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water   

is how a man may change

and still hour by hour continue in his job.   

There in the mirror he appears to be on fire   

but here at the office he is dust.

So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains,

he stands easily on the pavement

and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one   

cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others,

and life stands on the brink. It rains

or it doesn’t, or it rains and it rains again.

But let it go on raining for forty days and nights   

or let the sun bake the ground for as long,   

and it isn’t life, just life, anymore, it’s living.

In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days,

it sometimes happens that a man has changed   

so slowly that he slips away

before anyone notices

and lives and dies before anyone can find out.

Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia, or: Four Hours Left, Give

Streaming video by Ustream

Watch! Give! Yes, for me mostly, but it's in your interest too.

You'll Need a Spieliologist's Desire for Rebirth and a Miner's Paranoia of Gases

Jeabus, sorry, those of you on readers, I hadn't brainfarted and accidentally published a post before it was finished in half a year. The above Sonic Youth song played last night on Dan Bodah's Airborne Event (and all artists this post taken from past Airborne Event playlists), usually Monday nights nine-midnight, last night from his living room because Sandy knocked out the electricity to WFMU studios in Jersey City; DJs are broadcasting from home on their laptops through an MP3 machine, or something, WFMU-in-Exile! it's called. Irwin's going to do a four and a half hour show this afternoon (UPDATE! and because the show wasn't terrestrial but internet only Irwin was able to use his full vocabulary and imagination, pray that it's archived!). Sandy has also knocked out WFMU's three day record fair, a major source of income for WFMU, and today is the last day of 31 Days of October, their silent fundraiser. They are $200K short of money needed to stay on air and on internet (Dan's show last night, for instance, would have been archived for your streaming by now if not for hurricane). SEND THEM MONEY please and thanks.

• Meme logic.
• The cost of voting the lesser evil (h/t Mr Alarum).
• A progressive's case for voting Green.
• UPDATE! Pierce endorsed Obama, he couldn't resist taking a shot at those of us on the Left who won't follow orders, used the tribalist rimshot-word "unicorns," (ouchy! dagger!).  I didn't feel like responding to his taunts. Thankfully, Susan did.
• A progressive's case for Obama.
• Still puzzled.
• Who's to blame?
• He's not voting for Romney either.
• >>Deleted scab-scraping<<
• Occupy was a success?
• Maintaining fidelity to Occupy.
• A very good question.
• Thoughts on Graeber's Debt.
• The machine stops.
• >>Deleted bleggalgaze<< re: >>Deleted scab-scraping<<
• Ninety-Fifth Street.
• The next new thing.
• The Museum of Hypothetical Lifetimes.
• Corson's Inlet.
• Randal's Halloween playlist.
• The Dowser's Ear.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

HOW TO LOVE BATS

Judith Beveridge

Begin in a cave.

Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects.

Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later,

you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones,

                                                       but for now —

open your mouth, out will fly names

like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,

listen for a frequency

lower than the seep of water, higher

than an ice planet hibernating

beyond a glacier of Time.

Visit op shops. Hide in their closets.

Breathe in the scales and dust

of clothes left hanging. To the underwear

and to the crumbled black silks — well,

give them your imagination

and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind.

By now your fingers should have

touched petals open. You should have been dreaming

each night of anthers and of giving

to their furred beauty

your nectar-loving tongue. But also,

your tongue should have been practising the cold

of a slippery, frog-filled pond.

Go down on your elbows and knees.

You’ll need a spieliologist’s desire for rebirth

and a miner’s paranoia of gases —

but try to find within yourself

the scent of a bat-loving flower.

Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl.

Its face is the biography of propaganda.

Never trust a hawk. See its solutions

in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets.

And have you considered the smoke

yet from a moving train? You can start

half an hour before sunset,

but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted

and that you never discover

the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles.

Spend time in the folds of curtains.

Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms.

Practise the gymnastics of web umbrellas.

                                             Are you

floating yet, thought-light,

without a keel on your breastbone?

Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos,

on mastering the thermals

beyond the tremolo; reverberations

beyond the lexical.

                                           Become adept

at describing the spectacles of the echo —

but don’t watch dark clouds

passing across the moon. This may lead you

to fetishes and cults that worship false gods

by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb.

Practise echo-locating aerodromes,

stamens. Send out rippling octaves

into the fossils of dank caves —

then edit these soundtracks

with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats

and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering

about the evolution of your own mind.

But look, I must tell you — these instructions

are no manual. Months of practice

may still only win you appreciation

of the acoustical moth,

hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need

to observe further the floating black host

through the hills.