MTV loses its weenie

The odd headline for an otherwise good article chastising an attempt by big media to make a dollar from the Occupy Wall Street movement reads as follows:"MTV Loses Its Street Cred". That was something of a jolt. When did MTV ever have street cred? The thing that sold MTV to the masses was that it did not even try to represent anything alternative or non-corporate; their job was to absorb anything new, fascinating, interesting into the mainstream and make it salable.

That is to say, it neutered the power of any trend or idea it got its hands on and made it inconsequential once the audience was saturated and bored with the new toy it was given. Politically and culturally, MTV is the epitome of the gutless wonders, spineless hustlers of distractions and minor key naughtiness. It is suitable that they abandoned music altogether in favor of more profitable reality shows, stemming from the extended run of its program "The Real World" , which has demonstrated for over two decades that eighteen and twenty year olds randomly selected and placed into a large house well stocked with alcohol are more than capable of being an unpleasant , whiny , self-obsessed bunch of know-nothings who you wish would dissolve into some corrosive ether.

It is a sad, pathetic thing to see that MTV desires to make a corporate buck off the Occupy Wall Street ; perhaps next they will bring the survivors from "Jack Ass" so see how many unemployed will allow their nuts to get wacked for a fifty dollar debit card. My hope is that the movement is more resilient than any media presence's attempts to have it contribute to a bottom line.

Obiter Dicta

Talking to people about their problems makes for frequent miscues of speech and grammar, a habit stemming from something no more profound than that most of us don't know how to talk about ourselves and our personal problems to another human being. Hence, we come to the habit of trying to sound clinical, distanced, as if we have some clear grasp on what's the matter with our inner lives or internal organs. Either way, it makes for low-grade comedy, and it is a struggle not to laugh out loud or lecture someone on sloppy usage. I want to keep the friends and acquaintances I have. One of the most egregious uses I can think is the promiscuous use of “potentiality” when the simpler, punchier, less ambiguous “potential” would do a better job. There's a confusion of the number of syllables in a word with the precision of expression; the more trills the tongue has to glide over, the clearer the communication.

Another coinage that sends static crackling through my ear is the frequent use of the bizarre formation “unconformability”. Again, there's that self-conscious nervousness that mistakes terms with centipede rhythms to be superior to more succinct words, but this instance is even more problematic, (that is to say made more confusing) by an unintended, un-Empsonesque ambiguity. Are we to think the speaker is in a state of “discomfort”, which is what one arrives at through context, or is he addressing his ability to be uncomfortable at will? The literary possibilities are rich, but this is of no aid to someone who needs to emphasize that he needs an aspirin, a therapist, or a licensed sawbones to alleviate the particular disorder, physical or psychic. It's not that I object to multisyllabic words in everyday use, since one requires certain words to convey more elaborate ideas, but I do require that the words exist, in the dictionary if not in nature.

Ugly coinages wind up in dictionaries each year, complete with the varied pronouncing keys and definitions of the different uses the term can have, but they are awkward words all the same. My favorite personal tale of someone being needlessly (and unwittingly) unclear in stating what should have been straightforward when I was a graduate student. I had asked  a department chair if a particular Shakespeare sequence had vacancies. He told me the classes were “impacted”. I considered myself a smart guy who was fairly keen with words and their meanings even in the Seventies, but this was unclear to me; it was a strange application of a word associated with other meanings. I asked what he meant, to which he said, “The classes are full.” What I took from this was that there those folks who have a fear of being caught saying simple things simply; their obscurity seems to them to be a source of power.

Homepage - Slate Magazine

Homepage - Slate Magazine:

'via Blog this'

This is some recent nonsense from Slate, which , besides trying to be the most current and genuinely contrarian magazine on the we, slavishly goes after the celebrity gristle that the low brow, porn addicted knuckle busters in their readership seek and consume with the constancy of a drunkard with a key the liquor box. The headline, 'Are Virgins More Virile than The Rest of Us?" makes me think of only one thing; if they are virgins, indeed, untested, untried, barely aware of what it is they are itching to try, let alone know how to scratch that itch, what criteria do we then use to judge their virility?

Hermanuetics

Herman Cain is dangerous because he does not seem to realize how gargantuan a moron he actually is. He has the ability to contradict himself and issue forth such a persistent stream of nonsequitors and still maintain a straight face. Indeed, he seems to not have any other expressions save for that smirk that seems to just a centimeter or two from blossoming into a grease-dripping leer. Odd that it is the GOP that has become the party of Practicing Surrealist; between the fumings, rantings, jeremiads and proposals for the nation that are severely divorced from any kind of vetted reality you and I can speak to , we are witness to what seems a gaggle of folks who've made themselves drunk with fear and resentment who have cures that can only kill the patient. The saddest truth of it all is not that perhaps they are not aware of how insane they are, but they just do not give a FLAT FUCK.

you walk over the bridge

early fall, leaves curled and dry as the air

that falls between us,

between us is a river

that rises

before the storms

and recedes

during the rain

that cannot satisfy the thirst we have,

the thirst we have

leaves our throats

in empty mugs

we put to our lips

in case we have anything interesting to say

after the rain

on the bridge

staring down to the slick rocks and mud

where watered flowed

an hour ago.

A GOOD HEART ( for Tom Marshall)

Handy in a fix I dash off

 and join a legion of honor 

divine of dishes served on spreads of bread best toasted

in a heat of passion locking

the jaws and ambient teeth

 squirreling away better roots for the future.

Yet the filial rifle I was given jams 

and again the walls are raging 

with the threat of new cracks upcoming, 

but there! those were not the remarks I was making.

The sands of tine clog my crank case,

anger rears its rumored beef, 

what was said gets twisted, 

and honor rolls over and plays dead.

Better I should have an oily complexion

 to ward off a future so rank, given the weather; 

I’d be busted for sure if my left boot knew 

where my right boot was tromping.

ALICE THE GOON

There are only the branches

I tore from my hair to give you

when the night goes churlish

and retires in whispers cluttered as vapor.

Our lives as something resembling

ice packs on a bad knee scraped and

scratched with branches bearing

reasonable wounds for part time warfare.

This is a hat trick I pulled in a carnival game, a stick joint hawking English pool shots to nit wits groaning with local beer, the dime toss across the way was knock about and the flattest store I ever saw, some guy, old and gnomey in his money belt and raincoat, bellow to the moon, drowning out the gasoline purr of the generators before and after the flash goes on and off the fish net.

I lived around here

when there was a barber shop

with magazines that hadn't been

changed since the switch from daylight

savings time some thirty years earlier.

The Beach Boys - I Just Wasn't Made for These Times - YouTube

The Beach Boys - I Just Wasn't Made for These Times - YouTube: "http://youtu.be/TFZYi1aUAqM"

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TFZYi1aUAqM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The old and admittedly stale joke about the positive side of having Alzheimer's is that you're always meeting new people. Too often it seems I have forgotten the old joys of tunes that lie in my record collection , only to have a pleasurable re-aquaintence with the music decades later, out of now where.

This Beach Boy tune, from their landmark album Pet Sounds , is one of those songs, significant because principle songwriter Brian Wilson had begun to wander from the teen beach-babes-cars-surfing tropes that endeared he and the Beach Boys to the world and began to write material that contained a telling element of introspection. This melody is gorgeous, the peerless harmonies gliding along like light feathers on the breeze of a tentative and ascending melody, the odd intervals combing for an effect of naive plain speak, a young person aware that there is something more to this world than distractions.

What is one supposed to be in this world? What others expect him to be? Or to be his own person, ignoring advice, constraints, societal mores and laws? Or a combination of all these things, somewhere in the middle, defined, distinct, whole, happy, productive, creative? The song is not profound in message, it is not even poetic or artful in any way rock critics would desire,but it is beautiful in terms of being that moment when the music softens,the drummer lays out, and someone removes them self form where the action is to some other space inside their soul, reflective for a moment, perhaps indicating a prelude to a searching, innovative life. Nice jam/

dgwillsbooks.com

Paranormal Light-Painting Activity

Paranormal Light-Painting Activity:

'via Blog this'

An interesting piece in Slate tells us of an emerging photographic art called Light Painting; the appeal , I suppose, is that the photographers eschew computers for the most part and create their effects "in the camera". There is the thrill of zen purity and existential exactness of the manipulated image being formed at the precise moment a shutter opens and shuts. Heather Murphy describes the process rather well and enthuses over the results to the extent that she and other fans of the form have witnessed mountains being moved and skies being opened.

Hyperbole, of course, gets you only so far and the article reminds of the times that I've read brilliant , favorable reviews of novels, movies, albums only to be let dramatically disappointed when the item itself is presented, either through purchase or as a gift. Prose sounds mannered and unnatural in their literary styling, movies drag or become helplessly vague in their attempts at atmosphere and suggested emotion, the music on the record albums makes you think alternately of different kinds of cream, too thick or too thin, neither of them satisfying.

Murphy's article didn't sink me into one of those minor-depressions-bordering-on-untoward rage, but there was the let down all the same. The slide show of the light paintings described were nifty indeed, strange swirls and circles of light suggesting sorcerer's light or neon lights enacting their own form of back lit mitosis, but there seems to be a limit to what you can achieve here. The accumulated effect is something like coming to an end of view of a grand son's collected finger paints; so many bold swirls, splashes, dashes in so many rich, crashing colors. Your jaw begins to hurt from all the polite smiles and a bad taste develops in the back of your throat, something acid and burning like a coarse guilt over telling even polite lies about how wonderful something is when it is, in fact, awful and killing you by the inch.

I hope Heather Murphy actually likes this kind of thing, because I would rather not think that professional writers of any sort can in good faith string so many rosy descriptions over what appears to be junior league surrealism.

Don't bank on this poem

Ed Hirsch is one of those poets who runs hot and cold; when his idea is served by fresh language that eschews  cheap irony, is develop with restraint and is not burden with the crushing , arbitrary banality of social significance,  we get some real lyric verse. This is a set of instincts I wish he would take better care of, because when his bad , the birds fall of the powerlines His poem "Lottery" is a lead weight all around; it is a premise strong enough for a short story or a sequence in a longer novel, perhaps by the likes of Russell Banks, who's books are full of sad men at some post-crisis point in their life, recollecting over drinks, lots of drinks, about the intensity of a youth that is invariably squandered in is depressed tales. The failure of the poet, perhaps, is that Ed Hirsch isn't a good enough writer of fiction to have plots points segue into revelations of character, the revelation of a world view that has the grit of felt experience.

This might as well be a TV Guide synopsis of a movie being broadcast after hours when the house is quiet and each incidental sound due to sagging wood beams or running water are too loud, prohibitive of serenity or self-reflection. Banks, not the perfect narrative artist, was convincing in the worlds he chose to bring to book length;his types of tale, with narrators bordering on suicidal depression, are not the things that make for a lyric poem. This poem is blunted by the fact that Hirsch stops himself from using his prerogative and writing longer; he wants the pathos to be suggested, whispered behind the collective reticence to show emotion. The poem instead just lays there like a dead wife .This poem is nothing but lead weight all around; it is a premise strong enough for a short story or a sequence in a longer novel, perhaps by the likes of Russell Banks, whose books are full of sad men at some post-crisis point in their life, recollecting over drinks, lots of drinks, about the intensity of a youth that is invariably squandered in is depressing tales. The poet's failure, perhaps, is that Ed Hirsch isn't a good enough writer of fiction to have plots points segue into revelations of character, the revelation of a world view that has the grit of felt experience. This might as well be a TV Guide synopsis of a movie broadcast after hours when the house is quiet, and each incidental sound due to sagging wood beams or running water is too loud, prohibitive of serenity or self-reflection. Banks, not the perfect narrative artist, was convincing in the worlds he chose to bring to book-length; his type of tale, with narrators bordering on suicidal depression, is not the thing that makes for a lyric poem. This poem is blunted by the fact that Hirsch stops himself from using his prerogative and writing longer; he wants the pathos to be suggested, whispered behind the collective reticence to show emotion. The poem instead just lays there like a dead wife.

Dreams for Barking Dogs

The thought of barking dogs
at the center
of the intersection,
doing what they do
when the tires
are turned to the curb,
blunts the pure memory
of having hands to
direct populations to
matters clean in
their marrow,
serene
in the middle of a man-made lake
as the boat drifts without oars
to a shore
on a tide even the
scars of the moon
cannot disrupt,
it's pay day all over the globe.

It's dogs that bark

all night

on the way home from

a friend's apartment,

how the tires

sing on the wet

asphalt,

My name cruising like a hiss of a low leak that starts loud as a squeal yet fades as the words find their form and meaning from a dead language that was killed with a stick, dogs who've heard me thinking in musical alphabets behind each utility pole in the city, howling at jokes I didn't know I was telling, it's yelps and nips at the heals of enterprise, love comes undone like cheap sandals, grace is rubbing the feet where all the dog days have been lived.

I should say that I still love every excuse I've ever worn, all the women's eyes

show green flecks and blue radiances of dances dogs could bark to when I brought scissors and carpet rolls to the prom, long limbs and tips of index fingers dotting eyes on

soft shoulders begging for cuts in line for school meals that are dead on arrival on paper plates and plastic forks, I love every eyes I fell into not knowing either the dead man's float or the breast stroke, I am still in love with faces I can't see yet whose profiles I trace with tips of all fingers while hands find populations that always need a chaperon, a mysterious other,

punk dogs
at the side of the pools
and sleeping on
the beach on the clean towels
I brought,

Some one I love is leaving town,

some one I love has left the

house,

some one I love has left the planet,

some one I love has left the earth,

some one I love is with the earth,

some one I love is adding to the future,

some one I love

hears dogs at her feet

and dances despite corners
and wet paint ,
dogs who smile
insanely bright
starry night
or halo or a phone call away,
some one comes home whose feet are too heavy,
the night caps are loose,
the bottles clink together
but no lights come on,
is everyone still asleep,
are you
awake dreaming of me dogging it again
or are asleep seeing me crawl
through the window
under the grace of
stars and head lights
and spill on to the
rug like molasses
from bottles?

The dogs

are barking
and trees

are their address.

Dreams of Milk and Honey

What song is going through my head? An old one, really old, "Dreams of Milk and Honey" by Leslie West and Mountain, from the second side of their album Flowers of Evil, recorded at the Fillmore East in NYC in 1971. It is one of the great moments of Hard Rock guitar, with a great, lumbering riff that distorts and buzzes on the low strings with crushing bends and harmonics squealing at some raging pitch that might make one think of natural calamity, a force that cannot be withstood. West, never the most fluid guitarist, had, all the same, a touch, a feel, a sense of how to mix the sweet obbligato figures he specialized in with the more brutal affront of power chords and critically nasty riffing. The smarter among us can theorize about the virtues of amplified instrumentation attaining a threshold of sweetness after the sheer volume wraps you in a numbing cacophony, but for purposes here it suffices to say, with a wink, that is a kind of music you get and accept on its own truncated terms, or ignore outright. There is an aesthetic at work here, but it might as well come to saying that you had to be me, at my age, in 1971 when I was struck by this performance to understand a little of why I haven't tossed the disc into the dustbin. He is in absolute control of his Les Paul Jr., and here he combines with bassist Felix Pappalardi and drummer Corky Laing in some theme and variation that accomplishes what critic Robert Christgau has suggested is the secret of great rock and roll music, repetition without tedium. There are no thousand-note blitzkriegs, no tricky time signatures, just tight playing, a riffy, catchy, power-chording wonder of rock guitar essential-ism. I've been listening to this track on and off since I graduated from high school, and it cracks me up that my obsession with this particular masterpiece of rock guitar minimalism caused a number of my friends to refer to me listening yet again to my personal "national anthem." I might have even lit a Bic lighter for this tune.

Innocence, in a sense

Innocence, it seems, is a nice way of saying ignorance, which would imply that the gaining of wisdom is a hard process, full of rude awakenings, startling revelations, melodramatic shifts in cosmology as one continually learns that the neat scenario one had while younger , with their neat and simple relationships predicated on convenient cause and effect, is grossly inadequate. God gave us senses so we may learn from our experience and cobble together as we go along, a practical philosophy of everyday life. Wisdom, if you like.

It seems that one is likely to realize that they are a victim whether they like it or not, and that the blissful sleep of ignorance of one's state of being exploited and abused is illusory at best. Norman Mailer had once said that he thought stupidity was a choice people make , and ignorance, likewise, often enough seems a willful defense mechanism that relieves one of their obligation to use their senses to grow and work within the world as an active, creative agent. This is the crucial issue for William Blake, to believe in a God will intercede and make everything okay with a kiss and a feather or a promise of endless bounty on the other side of this life, or that one is here with the senses a Creator gave him or her, with a brain that can process and organize experience into a framework, narrative perhaps, the keeps the world that is both fluid and coherent. The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.

The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. --Wallace Stevens

The belief in a fiction, I assume, is that one believes less in the fiction's generic outline of the relationships between personality and the delicate details of the atmosphere , and more that the fiction works as a means that enables individual and collective imaginations to commit themselves creatively to what other wise would raw, unknowable data. We are the author of our own book, so to speak, we are all writers of a particular fiction that enthralls us, and the key to a belief in an malleable storyline  is to realize that we can change, alter and modify the fiction as needed. Not that it's an easy thing to toss off, as an after thought. But we make our narratives from the things we do , and this reminds me of the oft-quoted line from Vico, paraphrased here: Only that which Man makes can Man know.

Dry City

Only sometimes the city  fails to amuse
strangers just off trains with the hard recesses
of its skyline, a profile of brow, nose, jaw
on a pillowed mesa staring up toward
radio waves the million eyes of open windows
cannot view but which can be heard as songs
by regular citizens driving cars or else walking to work,

Every corner seems empty for mere minutes
before lunch and after the whistle blows again,
factory life and gleaming towers amuse strangers
just off trains that there are the remains of decent seats
where band stands stood inside auditoriums composed of bricks,
for mere minutes only the leaf blowers and the radios of the hired help
fill those gaps in the recesses between the buildings and factory vents
while most everyone else hunker in their cubicles dialing clients
and crunching numbers like ice cubes under tenderizing mallets,
everyone else, mostly, unless it's their day off
or they died trying to have one,

On occasion there is no last bus
which means you stand  there
on the corner next to the bridge
and Marine Recruitment Depot
until the end of time because
this day cannot end
and no  one goes home
because the whistle
will not blow
and the elevators do not work
yet there is talk of angels in the machinary
who will turn off the lights
and make the engines steam up again,
the strangers will take their leave,
and from the corner of your eye
you think you
saw horses
crossing the tracks
horses stubborn in their equine poise
rearing a head, eyes insane
and on fire, a train approaches,
one air blast, now two,
citizens in parked cars cheer and unwrap candy bars,
nay, nay,
this all ends tonight,
the way out   of town
is on our backs
if you can catch us,
nay , you can't
and we are gone


And gone
too are the last bits of rubber
yet to fall off your tires,
you look about
and let loose a long held breath,

the traffic lights
continue to change
red to green to yell and back
all night
and forever
when no one else is looking.