August 2010
29 posts
On Writing Poems
Is it always an embarrassing business? I’m reading Adorno and Eisler’s Composing for the Films and also Richard Brody’s Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, not necessarily simultaneously, and I’ve eaten a bowl of Cap ‘n’ Crunch cereal, and I’m not feeling so hot but these gentleman are so cool. “Just please, please show up at...
Longer Meditation on Failure
If you lie about tonight that’s fine.
The truth holds hands with coping
And they wear kid gloves
And sing songs
No one remembers.
•
Angels sweep on harps o’er head
Where the new crescendo passes
In weight of luxurious breathing.
Breath like badminton,
Breath of mutton,
Soft like kittens,
Of sweet and sour chicken—
The angels eat take-out
And drop bean curd o’er your life.
You...
It's My Party
A teenager was driving home through the woods when he saw a very tall mechanical creature in the rearview mirror.
From Brenda Coultas’ The marvelous bones of time
—
I’m 25 today. Happy Birthday. I’m two payments behind until the next payments, but my credit rating remains stable because of grace periods. When I am bleeding, sweating, cringing, swatting—I am in an extended stay...
A long time ago, I drove around a gold Dodge...
My oldest brother asks:
The Camry v. The Golden Chariot
Which one wins fellas?
Second oldest brother weighs in:
God! I’m not sure this question can actually be answered. The list of pros and well pros for both are essentially endless. Duck Beater ran over a stop sign at the end of the road in the Chariot then reversed back off it and drove away as if the stop sign had it coming, owed him...
Strategies for Realizing Hell →
My thoughts on Scorsese’s Gangs of New York are up at a Bright Wall in a Dark Room. In case anyone needed clarification, I’m a proud owner of a Toyota Camry. It has lasted 10 years. I inherited it from my mother and father. I shared it with my twin brother but now he shares a car with his wife. One time he drove the Camry over a large rock; this resulted in a large dent in the...
Bad Influences, Bad Personalities →
Inception succeeds in convincing us for two and a half hours that somehow our dreams and lives are exactly like all the bad action movies we have ever seen. The film has none of the vivid unpredictable banality of dreams or life. Instead it has the kind of banality found in Speed 2—it puts dreamers on cruise control, lays them out on gurneys, runs them up and down elevators. I can’t recount...
Camron’s repression and the G.O.P →
From The Dische Reaction
The phrase soon became his trademark. He found that it afforded him hitherto unimaginable wriggle room. He encouraged rival performers to “suck a dick” and then neutralized that statement with a casual “no homo”. When his right hand man Jim Jones unwillingly dropped a veritable gay bomb in a freestyle, Camron defused it thusly:
.
I mean, it isn’t about being gay...
The Precisionist: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom... →
However similar Franzen’s novels might look from a distance, there’s always one key distinction: They’re populated by different people. Few modern novelists rival Franzen in that primal skill of creating life, of tricking us into believing that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and...
Tao Lin Will Have the Scallops →
The editor walked away, and The Observer thought, “Tao named the couple in Richard Yates after Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning. The book is really about Tao and a 16-year-old he met over the Internet when he was 22. It’s full of their emails and Gchats, their fights with her mother, her binge-eating and her bulimia. It’s like what Robert Lowell did with his wife’s...
Adorable Presages Horrible
This morning I hit my head on a ladder while rescuing one of my kittens from the lower barn. The kitten wasn’t very grateful. She cried for hours there in the dark, perhaps all night, and then I turned up a savior. Her calico fur was cinched tight by yards and yards of cobwebs. While the kitten hissed and plotted, I untied the woolen carapace, plucked the dead moths clean away, and broke...
Also: Older Brother Trying to Get Job in Sales in...
Not in panic, but in a joyful fuck-me-this-is-the-bottom, Todd—whom recently flew from Indiana to pursue romance—has an interview today with an “affordable” Keys art collective, looking to hire for a “sales” position.
My advice:
Concentrate on four things:
1) You are representing art as status commodity and kitchen hardwood floor enhancer, so whatever it is, will it...
3 tags
Sunday Times Book Review: Arthouse Wedding Edition
What can be said about the service? The high-ritual German Lutheran rites presaged the disparity of translating every-other thought into a slightly more accessible French undertow, although the frogs—the ladies wore extravagantly floppy hats—were Catholic and possibly remained confused or offended by the number of English hymns and the many verses sung in full. For his part, this United Methodist...
From the Inbox of Chi-Chi, Friend of the Dead →
Jeff Parker helps n+1 pull off a Friday the 13th. It’s short and sad and spooky.
I pick Cody up from the airport in an hour. We’re going to a wedding tomorrow. An old college friend is marrying a lovely Frenchman. The dancing should be outrageous but the logistics of airports and hotels and driving up the ass-crack that is the Indiana/Ohio border makes me feel hairy and fat.
But...
The First Nine Minutes
The subterranean refuge and leather-wear of the film’s opening puts me in mind of the late-Seventies club dungeons, with leather daddies spitting on each others boots, and also that Chris Marker film, La Jetée. Or the Terry Gilliam remake 12 Monkeys. John C. Reilly is a very ugly, goofy actor. The amount of music in this film makes me think of the cinema of that other great unquenchable...
But it's tits.
For your birthday you pay your bills on time. Your reward is silence. Golden silence. Worth nothing. Your delight is heavy breathing. A birthday breath above the candles, you tell the lady from the collection agency I am coming. • What are you wearing? she asks. Do you have picture messaging? Aw shucks, not ever. I am wearing my sunburn in the car and I am wearing my debit card plastered to my...
Free Translator →
“Machines are dumb, but sometimes they do brilliant things because they can’t help themselves. They don’t talk themselves out of anything, and so they just go for it. No judgement whatsoever. Taking advantage of machines in these moments is a great way to overcome the self-consciousness problem that Drew brought up in London (see post of July 21).
“I think part of what we’re...
5 tags
Teach for America: A Survey of Recent Outstanding...
Many of my UK and Asian/Pacific Islander readers will remember that my boyfriend is a second-year member of Teach for America in Mississippi, an ugly, hot state, a state folk-singer Phil Ochs once saluted by proclaiming:
Here’s to the schools of Mississippi Where they’re teaching all the children that they don’t have to care All of rudiments of hatred are present everywhere And...
