You Can Hear It in the Dark from Beyond What Was Once the Amusement Park

That's me, trapped in my car parked outside my house, recording Thursday night's storm. Yes I posted it last night too. I'm not trying to drive away readers I had said to K at Thursday Night Pints in response to her question of why the fuck I'm posting what the fuck I've been posting. I wasn't supposed to attend Thursday Night Pints - Thursday was my father's 80th birthday and we were to go out to dinner - but between my recovery from plague and Planet's full-on plague we cancelled, not wanting to give my father plague as his present. K has been asked to contribute to a site recently added to Because Left (I added it before I knew she'd been asked), she'll have a piece in a couple of months, she's threatened to start a blog for two plus years, go ahead, I dare you, it'd be like opening a nail salon in a dying strip mall, she wants to ask me blog questions, knows I want her to ask me blog questions, she studies this shit professionally, I fixate on it because I'm a dope. I wasn't going to write about this episode of Thursday Night Pints because it was mostly (FUN!) bleggalgazing. It's not that I'm trying to not drive readers away either, though bleggalgazing does it, almost as much as United posting. We hadn't heard of the Batman shooting, of course, but K sent me an email yesterday which included the line, I bet today is busy in Blegsylvania, and I responded no, not only because breaking news days drive eyes to big mouths in Blegsylvania, not only because Blegsylvania is dying, but because, what, another mass shooting spree in America, pfft, please, this is news?

• Yes! I think of the song below the links when I think of that song above the links too!
• Motherfucking Obama: “There are going to be other days for politics,” Obama told an audience that had gathered for what was originally intended to be a political speech in Fort Myers. “This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection.” He led the audience in a moment of silence “for the victims of this terrible tragedy,” their loved ones and for “all the victims of less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities every single day.” Today is a day for craven cowardice couched as polite decorum, especially in an election year. Someone tweeted - I'd love to give credit but I forget who it was, don't have time - or will - to go down timeline - that these bullshit timeouts prove the bullshit of the game.
• Oh, be fair to Obama, you say. OK: he'd be craven and cowardly even if this wasn't an election year.
• The price of gun control?
• This isn't over yet, Batman.
• The mystification of state power.
• Police state.
• Six reasons motherfucking Obama will hate Barofsky's book.
• Motherfucking Geithner. Which means motherfucking Obama.
• Please remember, the money doesn't exist.
• Occupy as anarchy.
• Journalism v propaganda.
• Eat less totalitarianism.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Yes, I know, but just because motherfucking Obama progressives doesn't mean motherfucking crackers aren't motherfucking crackers.
• Yes, I know, but just because motherfucking Obama's doesn't mean motherfucking Romneys aren't motherfucking Romneys.
• Speaking of United, they play tonight in Columbus so there will be a post tomorrow, though there's a big birthday thing for my father tonight: I might get to see the second half.
• Heh, the same bleggalgaze as me the other day.
• Dreaming of a world of no intellectuals.
• Fifty photos of Bill Clinton's forehead. Yes, the same joke occurred to me.
• Some Russian futurists?

BEFORE DAWN ON THE BLUFF ROAD

August Kleinzahler

The crow’s raw hectoring cry
scoops clean an oval divot
of sky, its fading echo
among the oaks and poplars swallowed
first by a jet banking west
then the Erie-Lackawanna
sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel
through the cliffs to the river
and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff,
full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park.
And the wind carries along as well,
from down by the river,
when the tide’s just so,
the drainage just so,
the chemical ghost of old factories,
the rotted piers and warehouses:
lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,
formaldehyde from the coffee plant,
dyes, unimaginable solvents—
a soup of polymers, oxides,
tailings fifty years old
seeping through the mud, the aroma
almost comforting by now, like food,
wafting into my childhood room
with its fevers and dreams.
My old parents asleep,
only a few yards across the hall,
door open—lest I cry?
I remember
almost nothing of my life.

Seven Minutes Trapped in My Car in Front of My House Thursday July 19, 2012, 2200 EDT, or: Autoblogography

Seventy-Four Today

High Holy Day in Egoslavia. Diana Rigg, first, 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. Have an old episode.

Taking My Plastic Medicine Seriously

I'm better, thanks! The grippe broke yesterday just after I saw a Sportsbog about St Benny of Olsen photobombing at a charity tennis event Tuesday night in DC. I'd been thinking this just a so-so fever, a When Did Wednesday Go From Being the Busiest Weekday in Blegsylvania to the Slowest kind of fever, but these two photos seared into my brain's rolodex as only images when first observed feverish can sear. Here's the standard homage to Olsen:





He's been elected to DC United's Hall of Tradition, to be inducted before the September 15 game v Ningland, and I didn't know he wasn't in the Hall of Tradition. I just assumed he was in. And what the fuck were 19% of the voters thinking. But yes, I felt better enough to get some reading done so links for you who tune in for links, not grippe updates. Whatcha think?

• Today in Swallow My Hypocrisy and Complicity and Like It: Olsen’s team, “The Stars,” also included radio personality Mark Plotkin, Ward 7 Councilwoman Yvette Alexander, former Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, ex-Louisiana Senator John Breaux (holding the trophy above), former Redskins linebacker Rocky McIntosh, economist Alan Krueger, National Economic Council director Gene Sperling, Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette and a few Kastles regulars. Motherfucking Kastles regulars.
• Obedience.
• Attic Amnesia is primarily about Greece, but does open with this shot: The catastrophic situation in Greece has disappeared from the headlines in recent weeks, replaced largely by lurid reports from Syria, where religious extremists aligned with al Qaeda are wreaking carnage with suicide bombers in the capital -- to the cheers of America's adamant anti-terrorists.
• Real democracy.
• Lands, empires, multiculturalism.
• I confess, listening to Republicans squeal about Corporate hardball intramural politics still makes my heart pitter-pat even it's lost the last ter in my mostly unsuccessful fight to untribalize myself. 
• I give that ter to motherfucking Democrats.
• What's a socialist?
• The answer is Yes.
• Against community.
• Good to the last drop.
• Things you might have missed.
• Measured existence.
• Want to see/hear. Buy me and Earthgirl and Planet tickets to Paris, hotel rooms, we'll pay for our own meals, thanks, for this weekend after tomorrow for my birthday, please and thanks. Ironically, I couldn't go next weekend because United has a home friendly v PSG. Go to both!
• Poemflow.
• Brian May, who wrote the two Queen songs below, is 65 today.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DOCTORS

James Tate

I like to see doctors cough.
What kind of human being
would grab all your money
just when you're down?
I'm not saying they enjoy this:
"Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it,
no hope! You might as well
hand over your wallet." Hell no,
they'd rather be playing golf
and swapping jokes about our feet.

Some of them smoke marijuana
and are alcoholics, and their moral
turpitude is famous: who gets to see
most sex organs in the world? Not
poets. With the hours they keep
they need drugs more than anyone.
Germ city, there's no hope
looking down those fire-engine throats.
They're bound to get sick themselves
sometime; and I happen to be there
myself in a high fever
taking my plastic medicine seriously
with the doctors, who are dying.

Fresh Name, Doner Game, Fair Meat, All the Same

More fever songs cause kaboom continues. It's not a coincidence all have been at least one month's Theme Song, the above at least four times. I usually know grippes are coming two days ahead. My body twinks that oh-fuck, I think, fuck, I haven't had a cold since when, two days later day one. This one, WHAM! in half-an-hour, no warning. Weird bout, good thing I'm not writing about it. I was talking with Mr Alarum Tuesday morning (I think I've landed another Harington fan) about POTUS 12 and Occupy (as in, where is it? rhetorically asking, wonder if the police kettlings and beatings achieved their strategic aim, plus how peaceful and thankfully chalk-free, if heavily policed, Charlotte will be this August), and duhdumpduhdump, I go completely blank on what I was going to say after I said I go back everyday to four years ago on this blog and read what I wrote then. I used to think it enough to support Obama because he'd drive the American Right nuts, I bet pints on his reelection based on his driving the Right scary crazy, and..... huh, fever wee-wooing and a behind the right eyeball super-sneeze catastrophically building....





Well, you follow. Anyway, if I'm upright I'm busy next two nights, I might tell you about them, if I'm prone I'm busy the next two nights asleep. I'm out until I'm back, though I'd urge you to check the Because Left, Right, there are new additions plus blogfriends who've been dormant stirring. Dance, please.

The Horns of Elfland Swing Past, and in a Few Seconds the World, as We Know It, Sinks into Dementia, Proving Narrative Passé

Shittiest week ever since the last until the next topped by a fuckingly vicious summer grippe. The above is the new 3rd Official Fever Dream Theme Song of Egoslavia. Immediately below this paragraph is the 2nd, the Official Fever Dream Song of Egoslavia below some links that need posting before they go stale. The song beneath the Official Fever Dream Poem of Egoslavia I heard last week, I like it, it has some strong fever dream qualities but doesn't quite rise to the proper hallucinatory standards necessary for said designation. Als0 to0, I reread what I wrote for today and am reminded don't publish anger written while at 101+ until editing once temperature returns to normal, so you are spared a fervid jeremiad (yes, as compared too....) if not spared an especially feverish blurt of self-indulgence. Verily, fuck it.

• Ennui.
• Party mask party.
• Choosing the boss that beats you.
• Gatekeepers. 
• Home drone.
• The Death of Evidence.
• Reflexive impotence.
• Neo-McCarthyism.
• Anarchists and Occupy. Here is where some of the embargoed arrgh was embedded.
• Popping the media bubble.
• This should generate some cracker outrage today.
• Bleggalgazing, of a sort.
• Purple Line! 
• Lispector, for those of you who do.
• Rereading Ashbery.
• Curse #7.
• Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros live 1999.

HOTEL LAUTREAUMONT

John Ashbery

1.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of
     Usher’s Well.”

Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds
we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of
     Usher’s Well,”
or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds
the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé,
or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again.

The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.
In any case the ruling was long overdue.
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again,
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.

2.

In any case, the ruling was long overdue.
The people are beside themselves with rapture
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure
and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The people are beside themselves with rapture
yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,
and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.

Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria.
In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.
Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward,
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

3.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.
Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,
when all we think of is how much we can carry with us.
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us
small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.

4.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,
to end the standoff that history long ago began.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open
but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.
To end the standoff that history long ago began
must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.
You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?
Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;
only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

Houston 4, United 0

Pontius had the ball on his foot in a situation where he'd scored all season and he gacked the shot, three minutes later Hamid stupidly dumps a Houston striker in the box, a turd of a game was assured. St Benny of Olsen made standard complaints about work rate and heart, what else is going to do? Me, beyond reiterating that the back line needs upgrading (I mean, Daniel Woolard is the best defender on the team, and what the fuck?), that the back line is what separates United from being good and being championship-threatening good, I'm gonna eat this turd quietly and see what happens this Saturday in Columbus.

Here's Shatzer unloading on Hamid, here's Webb, here's.... nobody else. Updates if and when, or not.

Born Fifty-Six Years Ago Today

Ian Curtis. Not a High Holy Day, but a Holy Day in Egoslavia nonetheless.

Finally All Indications of a Subject Began to Fade, Leaving the Canvas Perfectly White

That's a graph-paper canvas soaking in water and a mix of yellow and red calligraphy inks. As I type this I have not touched the canvas or disturbed the water or added any addition colors or ink in 36 hours, the longest I've been able to withhold myself from touching a curing ever and until the next time. This is wash number four, the first three wet washes, only five, six hours drying each. This is driving me fucking nuts, I'm going to try to not touch until the water completely evaporates beneath the paper, held up by seven columns of four pennies each. I suspect I need either break my resolution to wait for evaporation (UPDATE! Ding!) or break my religion of permitting myself only one curing canvas at a time.

• And that's today's Blog Days of Summer Saturday Bleggalgaze.
• There was a Thursday Night Pints, yesterday's High Holy Day postponed the usual Friday schtick. D graduated BA from Penn State in 1952, it was the day - it was two days now, now being Saturday morning; I know, a lifetime ago - Louie Freeh released his report on the Paterno scandal. His family is Butler/Sharon-based, many - all if they could get in and afford it - went to Penn State. Most of them, D said angrily, condone everything, defend Joe Pa, defend the university, say, Look at the library, Look at the works. We talked about power and money and powerful fine metaphors abounding. D said, what jackasses (I saw that Seinftein column Friday night) people are who think this is just about football: This is an opportunity for presidents to do something other than preen. They should take steps to ensure that no coach can ever again have the absolute power Paterno wielded. They should stop giving coaches multimillion-dollar contracts. They should stop building statues and naming stadiums, arenas and basketball courts for them — especially while the coaches are still active. They should also stop asking them to raise funds. Tell them to coach their teams and try to see to it that their players graduate. Period. Period, yo.
• For example.Watch, I said, Penn State with be ideological state apparatus-ed, made an example of and then paraded as the self-correcting moral instinct of corporate power while business goes on as normal.
• The weaponization of economic theory. 
• From welfare state to police state.
• Fifty shades of capitalism.
• The American model won't work for Europe.
• LAPD takes on Chalk Bloc. 
• The phony war on cops.
• Oh look, the $2B JP Morgan said it lost is now $6B. Oopsy, yo. And sheeyit, it's only $6B.
• Capitalism's boundless war.
• Priorities.
• The original lesser-evil.
• Neverland.
• The writer, not the words.
• Mutual hack-scratching.
• I rarely go to Virginia but I hope this happens, would go at least once, via White's Ferry.
• Fiorentina's home purple is gorgeous. 
• Big scare, good news. 
• Hungary wins European Penis Olympics. 
• A reason the literary crowd is smitten with Hungarians?
• Akhmatova tumblr.
• Fucking shoot me.
• Collecting sounds.
• You realize this blog is always seconds away from a GbV cascade?

THE PAINTER

John Ashbery


Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

Come for the Festival, Have Ye?

High Holy Day in Egoslavia.

Like One of those Novelty Dogs Destined to Gaze from the Back Windows of Cars

A friend thoughtfully sent along this Bush cover of Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, but meh, I never liked the song, never listened to Gaye but on the radio, but I'd never heard the Bush cover, never knew about it. There are three High Holy Days of Egoslavia this month yet remaining, Kate Bush's birthday one of them, so while the above song washes the sounds of the bad cover out of my ears you'll have to wait until then to hear more. Speaking of yesterday's serendipity continuing, Beth Orton has a show at 6th and I Synagogue on September 27, and I'm going. Who's in? Please let me know asap as I'm guessing it will sell out rapidly (though who knows). Hamster? Richard (who sent me the Bush cover of Gaye, thanks for thinking of me!)? What, you don't like Kate Bush?

• How's that for bleggalgazing?
• Police State.
• More on medals for drone pilots.
• Police State.
• Capitalism.
• No.
• Applebaum brings the duh.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Fear factor.
• St Etienne home kits!
• St Etienne:

• $50 million? 
• $50 million?
• Fuck-me-jig a no-brainer. For newbies, I will do a fuck-me-jig in front of my seat at the first game at a new DCU stadium, buds will record it, I will post it.
• Billionaire wants me to pay for his sewer. I drive by this fucker's house on the back route to Sugarloaf (Tuckerman to Falls to Glen to Query Mill to Esworthy to Seneca to River to Mt Nebo to Offutt to Edwards Ferry to Martinsburg to 28 to Mt Ephraim).
• Anybody know someone who teaches at Clarksburg High School?
• Obedience versus conformity.
• Whose voice?
• Silliman's always awesomely generous lit-links!
• Download a history of electroacoustic music.
• Miles Davis' blind-listening test.
• UPDATE! Off Peter Murphy's birthday, Murphy and REM songs.
• Live Swervedriver?
• Harry Nilsson on the Smothers Brothers.

KINKY

Denise Duhamel

They decide to exchange heads.
Barbie squeezes the small opening under her chin
over Ken's bulging neck socket. His wide jaw line jostles
atop his girlfriend's body, loosely,
like one of those novelty dogs
destined to gaze from the back windows of cars.
The two dolls chase each other around the orange Country Camper
unsure what they'll do when they're within touching distance.
Ken wants to feel Barbie's toes between his lips,
take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her.
With only the vaguest suggestion of genitals,
all the alluring qualities they possess as fashion dolls,
up until now, have done neither of them much good.
But suddenly Barbie is excited looking at her own body
under the weight of Ken's face. He is part circus freak,
part thwarted hermaphrodite. And she is imagining
she is somebody else—maybe somebody middle class and ordinary,
maybe another teenage model being caught in a scandal.

The night had begun with Barbie getting angry
at finding Ken's blow up doll, folded and stuffed
under the couch. He was defensive and ashamed, especially about
not having the breath to inflate her. But after a round
of pretend-tears, Barbie and Ken vowed to try
to make their relationship work. With their good memories
as sustaining as good food, they listened to late-night radio
talk shows, one featuring Doctor Ruth. When all else fails,
just hold each other, the small sex therapist crooned.
Barbie and Ken, on cue, groped in the dark,
their interchangeable skin glowing, the color of Band-Aids.
Then, they let themselves go— Soon Barbie was begging Ken
to try on her spandex miniskirt. She showed him how
to pivot as though he was on a runway. Ken begged
to tie Barbie onto his yellow surfboard and spin her
on the kitchen table until she grew dizzy. Anything,
anything, they both said to the other's requests,
their mirrored desires bubbling from the most unlikely places.

I Dreamt I Was the Needle in a Compass Some Orienteer Bore through the Forest with a Spinning Heart

I woke up yesterday morning with the above song in my head and posted it at 8:15 EDT. I don't know why it was in my head, though I love the song. Exactly five hours later The Quietus posts news of a new Beth Orton album and links to a new song. The astonishing grace of Serendipity always rubs my faith shiny and new. Beyond the happy coincidence of the Orton songs, an opportunity for an opening monologue during an incredibly busy two days, so songs, links, poem.

• On lesser-evilism. Includes photo of and quote from my governor.
• The myth of America.
• Anthropology of unequal society.
• Drone pilots to get medals for bravery!
• Police state.
• Weimar America.
• Banksters' Paradise.
• Oligarchy in the USSA.
• Down with the Supremes.
• Bobo blames you, bitch.
• The politics of getting a life.
• Apologies to Mexico.
• Rat race.
• Why links matter. It's a matter of Kindness as well as spreading info. As always, thanks for reading, check out the folks on blogrolls, if you're Kinding me and me not you, please let me know.

• So, Levien says he'll use a machete. Well, fuck-me-jig, he'll need one.
• A note of caution on Thorir.
• Heh, Woolard makes Ives second team.
• Dempsey to be a Scouser?
• Andy Goldsworthy is one of Earthgirl's favorite artists.
• Lit-links.
• Good news! Thanks to you and 735 other backers, FREEFORM OR DEATH, a documentary about WFMU has been successfully funded. If you were one of the other 734, thanks.
• RIP Lol Coxhill, who I first heard on WFMU.
• Two birthdays today, neither of whom were ever major favorites, though both were on the soundtrack of some good years. Vega is 53 today, Murphy 55. 

HOMEWARDS

Robin Robertson

Our phone call spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside and the town
like the mess of a knife-fight.
Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,
I dreamt I was the needle in a compass
some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.

I Study the Muzzle of Perished Rubber

When I was in fourth/fifth grade my parents sent me to a speech pathologist because I couldn't er, as in farmah, buttah, mothafuckah. I was cured, though I can't trill my Rs so from me a Spanish dog is a but. The speech pathologist asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said a play-by-play baseball announcer, so he played a videotape of a baseball game and had me do the play-by-play, stopping the tape, making me start over, when I said pitcha, catcha, battah. Very smart, I remember it like yestahday. I listened to Bob Prince broadcast the Pirates when visiting my grandparents. I switched allegiances to the Orioles first because of a girl but then because going to Memorial was a blast, Jon Miller was the voice, the best play-by-play man I've ever heard, if you've only heard him on ESPN you've no idea how good. Have I mentioned I once loved baseball? I've caught myself listening to Nats's games on the radio, the radio team was profiled in YFWP Sunday Magazine, and they're good. I remembered this story trying to not think about Sarah while falling asleep Sunday night.

Hey! if you'd looked at this shitty blog yesterday you'd have seen a clusterfuck-free front page (other than begging for a photo of the Fed's opulent dining room for Frances, no one has delivered), not a link, not a blurp, about the clustahfuck's actahs and enablahs, and nothing about United, who haven't played so long I'm going to rob a bank, not a word about DC United's ownership announcement today. Erick Thorir, an Indonesian business man, is buying a majority stake. The consensus is he wouldn't buy the club to move it to Baltimore, wouldn't buy the club without doing due diligence that a stadium deal with the District has proceeded beyond preliminary talks and some basic parameters have been agreed to even if brutal details need be hammered. My first thought was I hope Thorir doesn't order a Cardiff City on United and change the home kit to red for shirt sales in Asia. You heard it here first.

• Right, the clusterfuck, though bracketed by four old favorites.
• The lethal presidency of Barack Obama.
• On the above.
• HEY! It's Kill-List Tuesday! Who will Obama choose to kill today?
• Police state.
• Surveillance State Deal of the Day!
• Getting away with it.
• How Paris Hilton's dogs ended up better off than you.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• On the above.
• Deriving power.
• Heretical thoughts on Marx.
• Metaphysics of paper.
• A li$t of our fucking demand$.
• I can't promise this is the last time I'll post this, but it IS the last time until the next time I post it badgering you to give. Give.

• A history of United ownership.
• Washington Grove! I went to Washington Grove Elementary School, which isn't actually in Washington Grove.
• Pileated woodpeckers.
• The literary response to atheism.
• Five works of criticism to consider reading.
• e-Book virginity broken.
• Things you can buy me for my birthday.
• Next to piano I love cello best. 
• My friend Dr Z (who may or not read this blog off and on) is a huge Steely Dan fan, I'm reminded by this tweet, we talked last time about the sheer malevolent hate some have for Steely Dan, how we don't get it. We both hate The Mothafucking Doors, as should all intelligent people.
• The best there ever was.
• Obscure Sound's Best of June, w/sounds.
• Holyfuckedness!
• Woke up with this in my head. It's a good thing:

CAT, FAILING

Robin Robertson

A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into a grim towel. I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.

He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of  being
found out.  Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.

24th

Sarah

A great cat. Rest in peace.

Understand, It Was the First Thing I Saw, That Was Fate, It Was the Ballistics!

I woke up like I always do with a Pere Ubu song in my head, the one immediately below. Wasn't going to post today, but saw Carl at Impostume posted the above, so (it is good to reengage the what the fuck) Sunday music.





HEY! Some computer advice. My home desktop hangs on youtubes and when I try to shut it down I get a can't shut down because there's a programs still running, and that won't shut down so I have to force shutdown to turn the thing off. Happens with both Firefux and Chrime. When I turn it back on I get a message:

MICROSOFT VISUAL C++ RUN TIME LIBRARY

RUNTIME ERROR!

PROGRAM C:\...

Um, what? How fix?

Als0 to0, this guy sent me a link to a comic book of Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs (which reminds me, there will be a Magnetic Fields off the latest album added to the traditional July 13 post):





Als0 to0, another bud send me babies that look like Mark E Smith; The Fall cascade is still planned, sooner rather than later, tomorrow even maybe, but only if and after the traditional July 9 post:

Because I Am So Happy and All the Dismal Issues Have Been Made Tractable at Last, and So I Say to Her that the Late Symphonies of Gustav Mahler Are More Lucid If You’re Sitting Close To, and Above, the Orchestra, so that You Can See the Contrapuntal Lines Moving from Strings to Woodwinds and Then Back Again

Gustav Mahler was born 152 years ago today. Serendipitously, listened to the above two weeks ago, the first below last week, the second below this past Tuesday, found Mahler's name on today's birthday search an hour ago. I'd ODed on Mahler in my thirties, rarely listened in my forties, caught the end of the 2nd on the radio a month ago, and... Hey, I'm still trying to find a photo of the Fed's opulent dining hall for Frances, help solicited, maybe one of you has a father who lives across the alley from Fred Fernancke who can ask his father to ask Fred (to die painfully, slowly) to take a photo of the dining room with his iPhone and send it along for a blogpost about what a motherfucking Corporatist stooge Fred is. Als0 to0: Freeform or Death has received a challenge grant from two anonymous donors.  If we can reach $67,000 by Tuesday night, they will kick in $13,000!  This opportunity is a dream come true that will greatly improve our ability to make festival deadlines for this coming year and ultimately help bring the film to a much larger audience. So give here. Als0 to0, yesterday I read this on this guy's recommendation, I recommend it to you, a couple hours of magic, it's been awhile since I read a work of fiction and daydreamed of air-guitaring it. Als0 to0, the good referenced yesterday is still good, the standard standard, the shitty improving, I acknowledge it really serves no purpose other than excuse, but regular programming will resume soon, or not, though I insist it never stopped.





PLEASE MARRY ME

Charles Baxter

We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”
And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.

Co-Terminus with the Bleeding Hiatus

No Thursday Night Pints, as it should be on the Fifth of July, Redependence Day. Hey, Frances is looking for a photo for of the opulent dining room of the Federal Reserve building in DC for a project she's working on. If you can find one (I haven't so far) please send me the link or the photo and I'll forward it on. Life busy on three fronts, one good, one standard, one shitty. More later, or not.





APPRENTICESHIP

Will Alexander

     ... between impulses and repentances,
     between advances and retreats.
     —Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?


Here I am
posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets
sonnets as rare
as a live Aegean rhino

absorbing the cracklings of my craft
its riverine volcanoes
its spectacular lightning peninsulas
emitting plentiful creosote phantoms
from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas

scouring through years of unrecognized pablums
of constant arch-rivalry with extinction
bringing up skulls of intensive discourse
by the claws in one’s mind
which seem to burn with systemic reduction

one then suffers poetic scorching by debris
by inaugural timber which flashes
by friction which flares up & harries
by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass
of initial intuitive neglect

as if one’s fangs
were fatally stifled by incipience
by verbal range war didactics
by territorial driftwood
by sudden undemonstrative detractions
awed
by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante

one’s youngish body stands
devoured by reverential print trails
momentarily cancelled
by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval
stung
by demeaning neutralities
ravaged
by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis
by a tasteless collision of rums in transition
by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris

as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees
there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche
with indeterminate earthenware splinters
taking up
from aboriginal density
a forge of Sumerian verbal signs
cooked with a tendency
towards starfish hypnosis
towards psychic confrontational drainage
conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire

yes
apprenticeship
means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic
cringed in smoky interior cubicles
releasing various deleriums
as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star
with its dark incapable tints
with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna

poetics
an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies
stretching under a blue marsupial sun
like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed
fugaciously transfixed
upon an anomalous totem of glints
upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions
above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise

of course
kinetic
like magical malachite rivers
flowing from moons
blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas

I’ve looked
for only the tonalities that scorch
which bring to my lips wave after wave
of sensitivity by virulence

yes
a merciless bitterness
brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs
in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter
in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage
like a scattered igneous wind
co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath

resolved by flash point edicts
by consumptive stellar limes
by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue

mixing magnets
juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities
cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas

yes
hatcheries
floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint
to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette
its mysteriums
always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas
or leaking moon spun alloestrophas*
as if speaking
in irregular glossological green Dutch

a frenetic seminar on febricity
a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging
a ferocious vacillation
explosive as random “aggregational” nodes
mimed by a black consonantal dissection
its maximal priority
forked at “hypotactic inclusion”
with isochronous internal procedure
with ratios
with phonic penetralia by distortion
primed by anomalous “nuclear accent”
by a cadence composing syllables & compounds

yes
poetics
its force
jettisoned by “hypotaxis”
by ... paratactic co-ordination
& fire

To Encourage Pursuit of Intellectual Professions a City's Central Thoroughfare Might Be Called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the Edge of Town the Thoroughways and By Ways Could Commemorate Abstractions and Generalized Conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway)

Dig these three paragraphs:

But Regan bluntly asserted that Scottish football simply cannot afford to have Rangers outwith the top two tiers of the league structure, with his argument not confined to the commercial impact their absence would have.

“Without Rangers, there is social unrest and a big problem for Scottish society,” claimed Regan. “They have a huge fan base and to contemplate the situation where those fans don’t have a team to support, where those fans are effectively left without a game to follow, I just think that could lead to all sorts of issues, all sorts of problems for the game.

“Tribalism in football is really important. It is part of the game. People follow their clubs with pride, it is passed down from generation to generation. There are thousands of Rangers fans whose fathers and parents and grandfathers have been Rangers fans. You can’t contemplate a situation without that and if Rangers weren’t to exist that could have real dire consequences."

Dig this paragraph:

“Do this research. If we don’t have a season, watch how much evil, which we call it crime, watch how much crime picks up when you take away our game,”  [Ray Lewis] said.

Ray Lewis was referring to the poor who'd lose a vitally important source of income schlepping beer up and down aisles for fucks like me if stadiums lost their two preseason and eight regular season home games (see here, and call me when a Villager asks Obama about this and he bwahahas), the Scottish fuck worried that out-of-tribe peasants will inconvenience the rich with tribal violence normally flood-channeled into hating Celtic. Still, it's an interesting contrast and compare, the metaphors finely abounding.

UPDATE! Fuckyousaurus Rex.

• Said without exaggeration, holyfuck do I love that song and that video. Love love love. Every month when I think, wait, did I do a theme song, I check youtube to see if this song/video is embeddable (it hasn't been in xxx months) and it's always viewable, but the embedding, when it does appear soon goes away... So I have America's Independence Day to thank, looking for that Galaxie 500 song I discovered embeddable Theme Song July 2012, at least the third time it's been Theme Song of Month. Serendipity is Awesome, as well as finely abounding metaphors.
• Here's some background on Rangers' issues, if you've not been playing along. Use the google if you want to learn more.
• It pisses me off United doesn't have another home game for three and a half weeks, I'm going to rob a bank.
• The commie, John Adams.
• The hidden history of Independence Day.
• Police state.
• Rewrite.
• On republics.
• Why aren't we freaking out about the LIBOR scandal? I assume it's a rhetorical question.
• Bunch of LIBOR links.
• Time to get crazy?
• Give me liberty or give me endless internet arguments.
• A recommendation to diaperize the econ dept of George Mason. 
• There are asshole professors in all departments, but I can assure you, for consistence assholery, econ and MBA professors are consistently the biggest assholes on campus.
• This is a good thing.
• Pepis.
• The Portland home kit is gorgeous.
• Pepis.
• Orlando FC has a gorgeous home kit.
• Ranciere, for those of you who do.
• Badiou, for those of you who do.
• What is an Aaron Sorkin? 
• John Siddique? Anyone know of his poetry? Good thing I have access to a university library's Interlibrary Loan service.
• On email and love.
• Ken channels his Michael Savage. Go on, do yourself a favor.
• Waiting for Wotan's Korean vacation.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.

[THE LOST PINES INN WOULD BE A GOOD NAME FOR A MOTEL...]

Lyn Hejinian

The Lost Pines Inn would be a good name for a motel, or No Sheep in the Meadow, The Lost Egos, The Downtown Country Inn, Mike and Ann's, Doug and Diane's, Bob and Joe's or Just Joe's Hotel, Warm Toes Hotel, Anything Goes Inn, The Come Inn, The Company Retreat, The Hermit's Den, La Cave, The Little House Hotel, The Reliquary, The Happy Family Inn, The Rooster's Coop, The Corky Floor, The Henhouse Hotel, The Egg-in-a-Nest, The Rooks Retreat, The Cooks Inn, The Beat A Retreat, and a music group could call itself Crested Loader, or 10-Second Crossing, or 9 Car Train, or Thumb on the Space Bar, or the Unlike Minimums, The Shepherds Without Sheep, Sheep Without Sleep, Two Feminines, Autism, The Twice Maniacs, The Genetics, The Nasty Uncles, Interfering Women, but streets get named typically after numbers or trees of they're given the names of prominent as well as lesser-known citizens or the names of great cities of the world or the great letters of the alphabet from A to Z but in celebration of the things we consume the names of products and objects should be given to some streets (Tagliatelle Lane, Glue Stick Street, iPod Alley) and to encourage pursuit of intellectual professions a city's central thoroughfare might be called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the edge of town the thoroughways and by ways could commemorate abstractions and generalized conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway) and another great name for a motel would be The Soporif's Inn, or The Archive, and Duke, High Spot, Drummer, Archimedes, Shadow, Ranger, and Gamelon might name some of the 220 horses at work under the hood of the blue 2003 220-horse power P.T. Cruiser that got me home by bedtime.

Theme Song July 2012

The News from Fleabustan (a Pun It Took *Ten Months* to Occur to Me, WTF?), Plus Earthgirl's Power, Plus the Two Fourth of July Songs You'd Expect Me to Post

There Is a Certain Challenge in Being Humane to Hornets but Not Much

Here's the Long Fin Killie/Bows cascade I've been threatening. Because fine metaphors always abound, the SCOTUS Bowl and the post-game wrap-up and the post-Deracho powerlessness both serve emblematically for my scowling malaise here, there, everywhere, sorry for putting that McCartney song in your head, but it's in mine. Have I mentioned that in the midst of eye-slumps and heart-slumps and soul-slumps and general damn-slumps, my ears have never been better? Some may disagree. Here, have this Long Fin Killie song:

• Yes, horrible youtube, but that's my favorite Long Fin Killie song, please play it loud and fine metaphors abound. 
• His generation's greatest academic fraud (as always, I say this with genuine admiration) zizeks himself in a Zizekian defense of Zizek! I consider myself undefinable in ways beyond your comprehension too, for what that's worth, as do you you too.
• The myth of the toothless president. 
• Obamacarelessness.
• Fixing healthcare good.
• The movement for involuntary complexity.
• Yes, look at those blogrolls, Blog Days of Summer.
• A Schuyler of urgent concern. Saw that this morning at ::wood s lot::, which you should bookmark or RSS, eihdfmw. Serendipitously, I checked in a copy of Schuyler's Collected Poems a week or so ago, it's sitting on my desk. 
• Understatements.
• Live blogging Marmington Fissouri.
• The Millions list of upcoming books includes a new volume of Seidel poems and novels by Stephen Dixon, William Vollmann (a Seven Dreams!), Mark Danielewski, and William Gass! but no Ishiguro.
• Minor poets, major works.
• Blur never mwahhed me, but if you, here's two new Blur songs.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.
• Listening to Bows reminds me of Flunk, but that's another cascade.

BURIED AT SPRINGS

James Schuyler

I

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
billows, or so they look,
of feathery ripe heads of grass,
an acid-yellow kind of
goldenrod glowing or glowering
in shade. Rocks with rags
of shadow, washed dust clouts
that will never bleach.
It is not like this at all.
The rapid running of the
lapping water a hollow knock
of someone shipping oars:
it’s eleven years since
Frank sat at this desk and
saw and heard it all
the incessant water the
immutable crickets only
not the same: new needles
on the spruce, new seaweed
on the low-tide rocks
other grass and other water
even the great gold lichen
on a granite boulder
even the boulder quite
literally is not the same

II

A day subtle and suppressed
in mounds of juniper enfolding
scratchy pockets of shadow
while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—
stands shadowless in an overcast
of ripe grass. There is nothing
but shade, like the boggy depths
of a stand of spruce, its resonance
just the thin scream
of mosquitoes ascending.
Boats are light lumps on the bay
stretching past erased islands
to ocean and the terrible tumble
and London (“rain persisting”)
and Paris (“changing to rain”).
Delicate day, setting the bright
of a young spruce against the cold
of an old one hung with unripe cones
each exuding at its tip
gum, pungent, clear as a tear,
a day tarnished and fractured
as the quartz in the rocks
of a dulled and distant point,
a day like a gull passing
with a slow flapping of wings
in a kind of lope, without
breeze enough to shake loose
the last of the fireweed flowers,
a faintly clammy day, like wet silk
stained by one dead branch
the harsh russet of dried blood.

Bell Cosmos

Hamster discovered and sent along today a 2010 article on Chris Bell, Big Star's "other genius." I knew some of the history but not all; I haven't listened to Bell's I Am the Cosmos in maybe five years. I do have a Long Fin Killie cascade in the bloogercan but am too aarghed in real life and bloogerpooped here to fill in the blanks: verily, fuck it. Still, any excuse to post Big Star is a good excuse. All Big Star songs from Record #1, Bell singing lead.

(What's the Bus that Comes by Here?)

Just saying here so I don't say it there and I don't say it here tomorrow.

UPDATE! Als0 to0, Koi Pond and Bardo Pond.

United 3, Montreal 0

Couldn't make it, I feel horrible, but was on call because of the storm on four different fronts, couldn't see it because motherfucking Comcast blacks out Direct Kick in DC. Forgive me. Now there's not another home game until July 28, and that just a friendly, not another home league game until August 4th, weird-ass schedule this year. Here's Fullback, here's Goff, here's Webb, here's Shatzer.  Goddamn it, I feel I betrayed a faith.