April 28, 2006

I've been learning a lot about Oakland over the past few months for professional reasons. Crash course style. Labor in Oakland. I'm from Detroit, have been a member of more than one union in my time, but still there's always a learning curve when you talk about different industries and circumstances. The International Longshore & Warehouse Union have so far been nothing but utterly helpful. In fact, they have been stellar. Much more on this front later.

April 25, 2006

Donald Brittain and Dan Owen, Ladies and Gentlmen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965). 78 min.

I'm home ill, and my first Netflix arrived.

Beautifully over-serious:

"In my journey, I know I am somewhere beyond the traveling pack of poets. I will remain here until I am sure what I am leaving."

With hindsight, we see the arrogance backed up with talent. This was filmed before Cohen became Leonard Cohen, songster. The footage of his readings shows him doing basically what amounts to stand-up routines to get the audience in the mood to hear his poems (let us not forget he was a fairly good poet). Crowd working, more poets should try that, seriously. Cohen reading Cohen, although it happens less than I wanted, is reason enough to check this out. We can chalk up the fact that the audience camera pans are always on attractive 20ish females (sometime bespectacled) to the times. When was the last time poetry was shot sexy? The commentary at the end is all early post-moderny: Cohen shot viewing himself pretending to be sleeping acknowledges his uber-privileged status. Are we making similar movies now about younger poets? Why not? This was a great watch.

April 25, 2006

Lainie Penebaker posted this last night in the comment box for Feb 21 about the Arks in Oakland...

Imagine Sitting Astern an Old Landmark
John Barleycorn revisited
by Lainie Penebaker

The Tidal Canal once housed families on it's shores,
a colony of people living above the ocean floors.

On fishing boats the men worked the rough seas,
so they could return to feed thier families.

It's where Jack London spent many a night,
when the weather was cold and there was no moonlight.

There was always a friend on which he could rely,
and a safe place to sleep, unwind and keep dry.

Now imagine...

One day spent with him upon one ark,
and tell me you're not sitting astern an old landmark.

April 25, 2006

Anyone interested in the use of line should research Lambert, Hendrix and Ross.

April 22, 2006

Gautam Verma, In Ladakh (Shearsman Books, 2005). 18 pages. Free.

There are many outside factors (religious, geographic, political, economic...) that make Ladakh heavy with meaning in and of itself. But Verma's poem can be read as a pilgrimage narrative in which the pilgrim takes in and processes every aspect of the journey, finding no detail unimportant or unworthy of recollection. Everything from traffic, the perilous road conditions and the signs that warn drivers, to the striation of rocks... nothing escapes the pilgrim's attention:

a convoy of trucks
a truck at a time

on roads as these

occasionally
a river crossing
where the mountain stream has breached its channel (8).

In places Verma inbeds a subtle anti-colonialism into the text:

at Baralacha we are equal in height
to the highest peak in Europe (8)

The pilgrim acheives his goal at the temple:

the great drum roll (vibration
that's right through you)

like no music & no noise
either

some other listening
than the ear's (14)

The attention to natural phenomena depicts as beautiful a landscape as I can remember in my recent readings. The Tibetan Buddhism that is central to the text gives it a concreteness that can be understood and appreciated by anyone. In fact the writing is so sensory, it verges on overload. A beautiful read for a Saturday morning.

April 20, 2006

Notes from the Coliseum

The Tigers won 4 to 3, and only me and the guy in the orange and navy-blue striped polo shirt (where'd he get that?) out there with me in the "bleachers" were happy about it.

The Coliseum's bleachers are not bleachers; they are the same green plastic seats you get everywhere else in the stadium. I feel like launching into multiple stories of me in Tiger Stadium (the old one) as a kid and exchanging heckles, stats, etc.. with the "Bleacher Creature" beside me. In Oakland anyway, there are no Bleacher Creatures, there are just folks who realize that the tickets in Right or Left Field are also the cheapest. Energy level ultra-minimal.

I'm not sure why Tommy Craggs complained as much as he did in Slate about the upper deck being tarped. There were only 15K in attendance which meant that about half of the available seats went empty.

April 20, 2006

Frank Gallagher, Days of Fear (Harper Bros., 1929).

Owen and David have been in again... There are thousands waiting outside... Their anger is growing... God help us if it breaks before its time... There are tanks, machine-guns, rifles ready for it if it breaks before its time... G.H.Q. are right... They have ringed the prison round with barbed wire and are waiting until the first death turns the praying into howling... Then after a little time there will be many silent. They have trebled the cordons... "And they ... made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting guards."... They are afraid that the people may get sudden strength and, coming by night, steal our bodies... How horrible the subjection of a people!... But the people are stronger than they... The line of unarmed Volunteers who are standing between the people and the troops, these are stronger than all their men and all their armament... I can hear the people gibing the Tommies in their warkit... I can almost see them falling back before the Volunteers in their shoddy... I wonder are Ernie and Farrell somewhere in the Volunteers cordon... They will mind... I suppose they are thinking of the night... and the laughter when the danger was over... It is painful to remember laughter... (89-90).

April 19, 2006

Once a syndicalist...

April 19, 2006

I will have reviews of the following posted at Eileen Tabios' Galatea Resurrects in the near future:

Ernesto Priego, The Body Aches: [Poems and Hay(na)ku] (ExPressoDoble, 2005)
Edward Stresino, On Every Empty Lot (Editorial ABC, 1968)
Bryce Milligan, Lost and Certain of It (Aark Arts, 2006)
Olivia Cronk, Gazooly (Beard of Bees, 2006)

April 16, 2006

Curtis Roads with Brian O'Reilly, Yusuano Tone, and Florian Hecker at Recombinant Media Labs, April 15th.

To begin with, the blackbox at the Recombinant Media Labs were set up with wall to wall video projectors and 16 high end speakers. You can tell from the sound inputs in the wall the lobby (over by the piano) that RML have well prepared for multiple uses of their space.

Curtis Road's sounds seemed dominated by Brian O'Reilly's room encompassing video projections. Road's used a familiar vocabulary for computer/noise performance: initial quietude/build up to near climax but not quite/silence/repeat. O'Reilly's video looked good and gave just enough information to offer a read without being representational. Roads would shift his sonic elements when the video elements changed. The repetition of the video elements brought about a repetition in the sounds. Or at least this is how I was processing it.

Yasuano Tone's links to Fluxus among other important groups made his appearance in Bay a can't miss. It was hard to discern what exactly his set-up was (it looked like a radio maybe two and some electronics triggered by switches; Jorge says that Tone was using a tablet and writing caligraphy that went through a midi to trigger samples). The dynamic for his set was near constant with shifts in location of the sounds and the combinations of sounds providing the main drive. I don't know why, but I found myself thinking about Pauline Oliveros and her deep listening techniques; then about midpoint into Tone's set I realied that I really didn't need to (couldn't) listen to his set all that deeply, and that this was okay as all the music was already present.

Florian Hecker's set seemed shortish (RML had another show at 11, so this might have been a house decision). Hecker was more for the full frontal attack on the noise front. He used a lot of high pitches to top off the sheer body shaking volume of the mids and lows.

All the musicians' sets would each have been enough to carry a show. Having all three sets together in one evening had each set building on the next. This speaks well for RML's curatorial team, and has me waiting to see what acts they will be putting together inthe near future.

April 15, 2006

No man--no moon,
No morn--no noon,
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day:
No sky--no earthly view,
No distance looking blue,
No roads--no streets--no t'other side the way.

quoted in "The Mythology of Polynesia," The Westminster Review 152 (April 1862): 163-83.

April 14, 2006

Michael Carreira demonstrates how to make an underwater listening booth.

"If you're serious about music and you want to be ready for climate change, you've gotta make one of these listening booths."

April 10, 2006

I've been chatting with Walter Lew and J.D. Mitchell recently about baseball, and have been getting the usual sympathy Detroit Tigers fans get: laughter mixed with pity. However, I noticed today after the Pitson's stomping on the Pacers that the following was true:

The Red Wings are 54-15-8 (116 points)=best in the league
The Pistons are 62-15 (.805)=best in the league
The Tigers are 5-1 (.833)=tied for best in league
(Luckily, the Lions are off-season.)

Sure, the Onion can joke today about salvaging my hometown for scrap, but at least the city has three top league teams at the same time.

This will be the last time I mention sports on this blog unless one of the above mentioned teams championships, at which point I will most likely drop into a several day delirium.

April 8, 2006

Ye Chen, Travel Over Water (Bitter Oleander, 2005). 63 pages. $14.

Some of the poems are too Sylvia Plathy for me:

I wear my watch on my right wrist
to cover the scar,
but people will see it ("The Scar," 13).

but when Ye Chen isn't in confessional mode, the images are striking and the poems read like dreams we have had but which we can only remember the gist:

The sea has disappeared,
only the tide
chalks the boundary.
Walking towards the night water
is like walking into a black-
skinned drum --
its insides a swinging crib,
but the beats rolls on...
pass the order:
Do not enter.

Above, the clouds in their web
dissect stars ("The Sea Dragon," 23).

April 8, 2006

Ultraman has changed a bit since I was 5, but it's still recognizable as a Japanese nationalist trope. "If Ultraman wins this battle, fate may be changed."

April 4, 2006

Process

here and here

April 4, 2006

Both Both (March 2006). 24 pages.

Quickly becoming one of my favorite poetry zines. March's edition pairs Laura Moriarty and Armand F. Capanna II. Moriarty's contribution is a single, long-play poem chock full of allusions, direct quotes, and lines that swing to cause blunt force trauma:

We can't tell our friends
What we think of them
...
We are enemies but I have decided to forget all that. You are more introspective and lyrical or maybe it's me.

How Moriarty just drops references in the poem to force an indirect appropriation creates an interesting and immediately effect: "[Robert Duncan, "Ode for Dick Brown"]."

Capanna's second page is reminiscent of 1970s microcards (yes, I work in a library). I think more work needs to be represented in this vein. Why print 12 pages of material on 12 pages when you could fit 36 or 48 pages onto the same pages? The visual elements (including text layout) drive the reading into familiar and strange territory, like science diagrams gone haywire. At first glance, everything seems clean and orderly, but the longer you work through the material, the more chaotic (read open) the page becomes.

Edited by John Sakkis.

April 3, 2006

Drill 7 (2006). 60 pages + CD-R. Free.

Man, this CD-R should inspire everyone to download some audio shareware and start making their own tracks. jUStin!katKO's tracks take his text to the verge of nuclear noise attack.

On the page, Derek Beaulieu's visual poetry is certainly one of the highlights. This is a true miscellany, with process, visual, form (I love how Dorothea Lasky just goes for full on repetition of words rather than rhyme in "Little Billie made an eye," even if I'm not 100% convinced of the poem itself), prose etc... all represented.

Included: Eric Unger, jUStin!katKO, Dorothea Lasky, Luke Daly, Aaron Lowinger, Barrett Gordon, Piers Hugill, Sheila Murphy, Tawrin Baker, Michael Slosek, MichaelKoshkin, Maureen Thorson, Andrew Peterson, Francis Raven, Ian Duncan, Derek Beaulieu, and Scott Shanley.