The Shibuya-Kei Revival! More evidence. Call it "Neo-Shibuya-Kei"...

Get your Ramadan on.

“SPACE: 1939”

The tribe will not have spoken until
Twelve turns of the World of Luyten.
Joining the Firm will not avail.
It doth shrill and swell
And put forth every day off lurch
Bleed under take. And glorify Him early
And late. He it is who flying lungfish to leave
In die rain night ice acid
Wherewith he threateneth you will strike
And, O my people! Lo! They crystal do
Them desert. They off receive

Ink stomp of cold.

09 30 04

“Monologue at 3 a.m.

Better that every fiber crack
and fury make head,
blood drenching vivid
couch, carpet, floor
and the snake-figured almanac
vouching you are
a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so
under prickling stars,
with stare, with curse
blackening the time
goodbyes were said, trains let go,
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from
my one kingdom.”

--Sylvia Plath

"I found myself that year corresponding with Frazier & Charlie Manson, both of whom the media had dubbed as “hippie murderers.” The only thing the two had in common was that neither ever used the first person in their correspondence, Manson always referring to himself in the third person as “Little Manson,” Frazier simply drawing the smile of a Cheshire cat where an “I” normally would have gone." --Silliman's Blog

“THIS GARDEN BEING: THE HANGING OF BOOKS

I live between. I stalk space of these authors shunt
phrasing to a definition drops about trees.
But it is not their leaves. It is narrow
this shuttle amidst bows. Not much room in lots of pencil.
The knowledge is a temperature to be finished. And
the flare held to is a floor. Simple spellings amounting
stumps. Liars of Dynamism that smell out their slots in rates.
I guess it’s known that Bob Watson scored the millionth run
in baseball history. Baudelaire opened his chocolate in
lavender pretense, as I revealed my garnets on a velvet floor.
The world chugs alarming ‘tween thicks and thins, a
Rimbaud to stop it. The thighs of a wet mattress,
a million volts. At arm’s length Chirico’s farms, the boiling
sodium moles of a magnetic censorship. Tanguy in his liner
that would squeak dream peripherals. Vision is a monkey,
fiddling with a strap. And the ounces taken from gelatin
will starmap the block. I am caught, how will the walls slide,
to take up with pluck domain in this Magnetic Cheat.
Poe would deliver in a massing hover the crawls from the stares,
in a drift slipping the word from its droit. The mot juste
is not a puncture-sealer. Laughter is acidity of goal.
The rusty turns of a bird are the absent pipings of my nose,
a breaking back snide of sod brilliance. I examine faces
and I say to myself, Face off! The Imbrication of Chosens
in all this leash of bushes, yes, the rain will solve your tiles.
Here the broken snores of whole radiator zero. As you might
say to me, or a man decked out to the nines in Alexandrines
(Valery), it will take a geologically absent mind for him
to be finally fallen. The snore in the snow is a zero.
Let’s listen at the zinc door to the white chat. Rebaggage
the sore of the roseate tons, revelation here is no more than
a long black veil. I have picked at the hill of crusts
to reveal no less than a fine crystal drainage for the system of
a city. And that letter hasted from pipe to tube is a soap.
Stop farming. Be a pillar to this nation’s shade. all this
and in strains of magic i pace between. No more pressive alive
than the spines of trees. That here will be born
the preparative leaner.”
--Clark Coolidge, from Solution Passage (1986)--quoted in Messerli op cit

"In Plath's pursuit of ethical understanding her own journal was a
pantry, the storage place for ingredients that the practical cook
knew would be of use." --Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband (2003)

"Pluto's Phantom Blog" (Gadsby & A Void)

Now in an ill-fitting and
un-stylish khaki uniform
that only clairvoyants or
bring a sigh of swooning bliss from;
sprinkling grain into his carp's pond,
mustn't grab raisins!

09 27 04

"Hypochondria Periphery"

1.

was all snow and ask
a turn as balm a hour
thousand from my rain
across off am cold color
as storm out moon as story

2.

work a pariah
for his task as for corrupt
and tyrannical
humans avoid him as a
traitor nor is by mammoth

3.

than an was on way
from distant to corruption
on for that too much
humans aid or his caught two
untrustful and his only way

4.

love song longing for
star's chill mornings through a dark
this sleep and winter

5.

anti mentar ism
tablish ian dises

ys al dread par is

6.

corrupt snow and rain story
cold as pariah work too much
humans is my task thousand
caught tyrannical moon color
and as a storm nor by traitor
untrustful across

09 28 04

"Language itself is one of our phantom cities." --Ptarmigan (Sept 22)

"The Stories Of The Street

The stories of the street are mine
The Spanish voices laugh
The Cadillacs go creeping down
Through the night and the poison gas
I lean from mu window sill
In this old hotel I chose.
Yes, one hand on my suicide
And one hand on the rose.

I know you've heard it's over now
And war must surely come,
The cities they are broke in half
And the middle men are gone.
But let me ask you one more time
O children of the dust,
These hunters who are shrieking now
Do they speak for us?

And where do all these highways go
Now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still
That were coming home to me?
O lady with your legs so fine
O stranger at your wheel
You are locked into your suffering
And your pleasures are the seal.

The age of lust is giving birth
But both the parents ask the nurse
To tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass
Now the infant with his cord
is hauled in like a kite
And one eye filled with blueprints
One eye filled with night

O come with me my little one
And we will find that farm
And grow us grass and apples there
To keep all the animals warm
And if by chance I wake at night
And I ask you who I am
O take me to the slaughter house
I will wait there with the lamb.

With one hand on a hexagram
And one hand on a girl
I balance on a wishing well
That all men call the world
We are so small between the stars
So large against the sky
And lost among the subway crowds
I try to catch your eye."

--Leonard Cohen

"Sometimes—maybe usually—I think I’ll fail to continue to exist if I stop writing—that only writing makes me possible." --dbqp

" Grace Paley, a Vermont poet and socialite, described the appeal of the era, heavy on sardonic nonreference, as "antihegemony taken to the max, where it works as interior hedonism, too." " --Pantaloons

The final result--a sonnet (sort of).

Just thought i'd mention.

It's occurred to me belatedly that one could run a thousand fake blogs & make some pretty good money from those minuscule ad payments...Or this will destroy the ability for legitimate ones to cover their costs that way. (PS don't accidentally type in "bogspot" or you'll get caught in a nasty little mousetrap.)

"Are your lives so bereft of meaning and import that you keep trying to revive a decade that sucked farts from dead cats the first time around?" --Sclerotic Rings

"I think Kerry still has a chance of winning, but he has to somehow use the media to send the message to the population that the Bush crew is 1) robbing us 2) killing our children for no reason 3) poisoning our air and land 4) raiding our retirement funds 5) systematically bankrupting and weakening our country. Can this be done in the current media landscape without threatening people's realities to the point where there's a backlash within the population, causing them to retreat into a violently self-disempowering fantasy space where they have not elected a maniac, putting their poetic imaginations to use in the face of an unpleasant and unflattering reality?" --Overlap

An alternate history story in which all the things feared that would happen for Y2K, really happened. There would have been no airplanes flying & no September Elizzle; & though we might have been thrust back into an early 20c technological era, i think it wouldn't be hard to write the story to make it seem better than what we ended up with...

Now my blog is getting hits & cites from phantom (robot-generated) blogs--& when i trackback on them they get a whuffie...

"Hypochondria Periphery"

1.

was all snow and ask
a turn as balm a hour
thousand from my rain
across off am cold color
as storm out moon as story

2.

work a pariah
for his task as for corrupt
and tyranical
humans avoid him as a
traitor nor is by mammoth

3.

than an was on way
from distant to corruption
on for that too much
humans aid or his caught two
untrustful and his only way

4.

love song longing for
star's chill mornings through a dark
this sleep and winter

5.

anti mentar ism
tablish ian dises

ys al dread par is

6.

corrupt snow and rain story
cold as pariah work too much
humans is my task thousand
caught tyrannical moon color
and as a storm nor by traitor
untrustful across

09 28 04

"Rainy Landscape"

Shake it like an alien autopsy Polaroid.
Amid the glare and talking to the sea
I dreamed I had invented you, and when I awoke
The porter pointed up beyond the door.
I am of very fond bananas.
They from the dim inane and vague opaque
Sell droshky lite and droshky fake
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
And Minutemen, they say, is what we are.
That may sound entirely cryptic; in which case,
I refer the reader to the text.

09 26

"What's Going on Here?"

Shake it like an alien autopsy Polaroid.
Amid the glare and talking to the sea
I dreamed I had invented you, and when I awoke
The porter pointed up beyond the door.
I am of very fond bananas.
They from the dim inane and vague opaque
Sell droshky lite and droshky fake
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
And Minutemen, they say, is what we are.

9 26 04 (?)

Long talk with a fellow non-painting painter. We ended by sort of agreeing it's either the end of the era of artistic impermanence, or the end of an era of promised permanence--or both.

"Baboondammerung"

Shake it like an alien autopsy Polaroid.
Amid the glare and talking to the sea
The porter pointed up beyond the door.
They from the dim inane and vague opaque
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
And Minutemen, they say, is what we are.

09 26 04

Can Brain Surgery Matter?

Watten's non-blog here. (via everybody) Permalinks would be a plus, but i'm happy to see this in any form, e.g.:

“In the earliest times the intimate unity of word and thing was considered to be part of the bearer of the name, if not indeed to substitute for him,” according to an authoritative account. “Of about to within which,” was Ron’s considered reply.

More on Voynich. (via AlDaily) --A new poetics is born!

“Shadow Artforms”

The epicenters of power migrate, from place to place on the earth’s surface, but also across artforms. It’s easy to spot a culture’s major ones (follow the money); not so easy to realize the hidden economy of the others*. Once favor has shifted away, an artform may continue on pretense, like deposed royalty in exile; at the same time the culture at large may still go through motions of respect, without anymore having any contact with the living artists. Then, the image of the artist in that medium acquires a different, shadow-power. The artist becomes a symbol, & carries the weight of dreams that more mainstream art-heroes (whose lives are all too visible) cannot.

This process can be seen most clearly in movies which treat the lives of famous writers, but painters & poets as well receive the dubious honor of cinematic depiction. These comprise a subgenre, sort of a pornography of the spirit. Aside from the obvious difficulty that the creative process itself is about as amenable to pantomime as subatomic physics (maybe less so), leaving only the sad story of a messy life, the subject invariably turns into co-optation itself, or how a popular medium hungers for the high legitimacy it can never achieve so long as economic & not aesthetic factors control it.

Never mind the irony of, say, a multimillion dollar movie celebrating some “starving artist” whilst encouraging none of its poor viewers to consider patronizing their actual artistic contemporaries (starving or not). This is clearly the realm of myth. Gods do not walk the earth. Their impersonators do.

Are there advantages, besides nostalgia & the glory of resentment, to being the artist of a shadow-artform? One could argue that, as great artists develop, they often surpass the comprehension of their erstwhile audiences: a shadow-artist is spared at least the backlash of thwarted expectations, if not the struggle for economic & psychological survival. There’s no incentive for self-pastiche.

And that may be the deadliest enemy of all.

09 18/22 04

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*Shadow artforms: silent movies after sound, black & white after color, painting after photography, poetry after rock ‘n’ roll, the novel after television.