EXPLODING

MEN ARE DOING BAD THINGS AGAIN / MILD DECEMBER RAIN IN DC / GUNPOWDER SCENT KISSES THE FAR HORIZON / WORDS AREN'T WHAT THEY USED TO BE / PODIUMS TUMBLE INTO THE DRY GULCH / A MARKER-SIGNED MISSILE / WHISTLES INTO THE MIDDLE / OF 100 LIVES / LIKE A DREAD METALLIC EGG / HATCHING FEVERS & DEATH FUNGUS /PRESSURE IN THE OBLITERATING RAIN / WHAT ONCE WAS STARS AND DISTANT CLOUDS / SEEN AS IDEAS OVER THE BLUE MEDITERRANEAN / IS A SKY OF WHIRRING FIRE SOUNDS / CATS SCATTER BENEATH COLLAPSED AWNINGS / SKETCHBOOK PAGES PINNED UNDER STONES / THE OUTLINE OF AN APPLE / A SLICE OF BREAD / A TEACUP / TRACED IN PENCIL / UNFINISHED

Tucker Carlson on Jimmy Dore, 12/29/23

 

Pages Shot into the Night

 

December 8, 2023

The revolution won't be televised But the genocide will

And the Ecuador rep

Announcing the vote

Asks "¿En contra?"

"Against?" says the translator

A glassy half grin On the US rep's face

He can't believe he's on

The UN floor

The lives of thousands

Poised in the air -

Mothers and grandmothers

Children confused by the rumbles

And land shocks -

And raises his arm

The grimmest of missions

For the declining old man "En contra"

Let the buildings fall

The walls all burn down

And the mosques collapse

Mosaic tile streaked with dust

Blisters and buckles

Licked by flames

Let the libraries explode

The lines of poets

Refaat Al-Areer Mahmoud

Darwish Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

Shot into the Gaza night

Like birds rising from the ground

And flying moonward

Pages shadows verses

To read To weep To wail

Milwaukee Musings

Milwaukee is still a place where you can encounter guys on the street who look like secondary characters from a Fassbender film from the late 1970s - on Brady Street, on Locust. It speaks to a certain kind of wonderful freedom still present in the city.

WMSE 91.7FM is a formidable radio station. Randomly in the car at 91.7 over three days in the city, I heard: swamp rock psychedelia, gothic new wave maybe contemporary or maybe from 35 years ago, intoxicating slow jams on the Saturday afternoon Boogie Bang & Dewey's Sunday morning show featuring an audience-member recorded Benny Goodman concert from the 1930s and I recalled how Dewey's voice and his music curation defined my Sunday mornings for the decade of the 1990s. And the man persists, still conjuring wonder from stacks of vinyl scavenged from bins spanning the continent, I imagine.

FAUST DRUM CENTER, and its haunting allusions to the idea of selling one's soul in order to be able to play like John Bonham or Neil Pert, may be no more on Kinnickinnick Ave, but the street possesses a heady density of vintage clothing, furniture and record stores. Just walking by the vitrines, one feels less depressed... 

Poems Bombs Silence

AND WHEN THE VIETNAM WAR BEGAN SAN FRANCISCO STREET POET BOB KAUFMAN TOOK A VOW OF SILENCE TO PROTEST / ONE GUY NO MONEY NO WAY TO SPEAK TO STONE MEN DISTANT DECIDING / FOR 10 YEARS ORDERING COFFEE WITH NO WORDS / SAYING I LOVE YOU WITH HIS EYES / THE HILLS OF THE CITY GROW STEEPER AT TWILIGHT / GOLDEN GATE PARK LEADS DOWN TO THE SEA / THE PACIFIC STRETCHING TO GREEN VIETNAM COVERED IN SMOKE / WHAT WOULD BOB DO AS NIGHT FALLS ON GAZA NOW IN NOVEMBER / THE MADNESS OF THE LAST CENTURY PERSISTING / WOULD HE APPROACH STOPLIGHT CARS AND CREATE-SPEAK A POEM / POEMS PUT BOB INTO PRISON WHERE HE WROTE MORE POEMS / OR WOULD HE FALL SILENT IN THE MIST RISING OFF THE BAY / ALLEYS CORNERS SILENCES STORMS BOMBS LIKE GREAT HAILSTONES MADE FROM LEAD AND FIRE RAIN ONTO ROOFTOPS IN GAZA / NIGHT'S NOT FOR SLEEPING / IT IS FOR WEEPING / WOULD BOB SPEAK OR WOULD HE SCREAM OR FALL SILENT FOR 10 YEARS 100 YEARS 1000 YEARS 10,000 YEARS?

All reac

Stories from Many Realms

Cool art projects done by insufferable people

Indecipherable verse written by meticulous people

Bad song lyrics about opulence

Trance-inducing TV shows about cops, firemen, lawyers, doctors

Podcasts about podcasts about other podcasts done in

dim light with energy drinks, weed sometimes

Panicked dreams about inability, inaction

Losers

we lose jobs

we can't sleep

the moon expands and contracts

like a baseball hit by a bat

flying into the stands

then played in reverse

hurtling back toward the plate

medications quell mental storms

and produce new symptoms

weed is smoked or chewed

we feel anxious

a night caterpillar crawls on a branch

we see it beneath a flood light

calmly eating a leaf

water in the potholes

vaguely reflecting stars

Climate Summer 2023: Fans, Shit

 

Love in Late Capitalism

 

I love you unproductively

In sloth

In slack

For no reason

For no purpose

Loving you will not

Make us richer

Or more important

I love you the sun rises

Grasshoppers hop

Sea lions roar

(Do sea lions roar?)

The shadow of the clock

In the city square

Expands and recedes

Throughout the day

Not here

(I must picture a De Chirico painting

To see this)

We do not have

City squares or plazas

But lines of cars

That project no shadows

Only waves of heat & sound

As they move toward

Something distant

Painting by Anni Albers

Belly-Propelled

 

The revolution will be quiet & slow

Happens in decay & coalescing

A guitar string breaking

New instrument is formed

New songs are played

The revolution is slow & quiet

Beach waves breaking on the sand

People crying in the switchgrass

On the dunes among the lost creatures

The revolution is abandonment

Wildflowers overtaking

Derelict parking lots

The harvest moon seen through

The windmill blades On a mini-golf course

A baby snake swivels

Out of the tin cup hole

A crease on his belly Where it attached

To his mother

Inside her he was egg-held

He came out of her

Moving already, belly-propelled

Swiftly upon the fake grass

(for Patrick Farnsworth & Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue)

A Good Truck to Spit On

 

Donkey shit blue

Tinted windows

Size of a tug boat

Sticker on the back window -

Outline of the US

Written across the 48

FUCK OFF

WE'RE FULL

The saliva shone opaque

Across the hood

Like the nickel-colored eyes

Of a dying god

In the sun setting

Over Roosevelt Ave.

Some Things in Life Suck: A Long-term Guitar Injury

Likely, the worst event of my life was getting tendinitis so extreme in my right and left arms & hands that it is speculated the tendons are significantly scarred. The lamentable events occurred when I was 24 years old, 1991, but the pain still troubles me till today. It delivered my career as a musician stillborn - not able to practice, play shows or do any of it consistently. In '91, I was playing guitar obsessively, working in a print shop and as a cashier. Like 99% of artists in my position at that time, I had no health insurance and no sick leave. The tasks I was required to do at work aggravated the injuries significantly. (I would go on to become a security guard for 2 1/2 years: the only job in the world I could find where I didn't need to use my hands). And there was great ignorance on my part about these types of injuries.

The obsessive guitar playing was an avoidance technique for crushing and debilitating OCD thoughts (undiagnosed until the early 2000s) I was experiencing and was utterly unable to control. Only sinking into guitar playing could deliver me from the extreme torment. A repetitive stress injury developed – it went largely untreated for the reasons noted above. I took two years off from the instrument to rest the right hand, only to return too quickly, seeking to play at my previous level of duration and thereby permanently injured my left hand and arm.

I think of it today because, as I go through another bout of stiffness and aches in my left arm and hand, I'm scheduled to play guitar in a theater piece that opens in two weeks. I've gone through this set of feelings dozens of times over the last 30 years - tremendous hunger and longing to play the show, but simmering dread at aggravating the injury or being unable to do the gig. It's a wretched feeling - so excruciating that I try to give up give up on the idea of playing at all in order to avoid having to go through this set of feelings again.

Ultimately, I am grateful to have other creative pursuits I've been able to access – poetry, acting, dramatic writing, translating. But playing an instrument is its own world. A world so close, so far. I still dream of getting the proper therapy to get back to playing regularly for long stretches and without fear. I start a new round of therapy in a couple of weeks... 10/14/22

Update 8/4/23: The diagnosis I got from the hand specialist was tennis elbow. After a couple of rounds of physical therapy, the PT said I also have golfer's elbow. We completed 11 rounds of treatment over three months and there was no improvement. The PT believes my diagnosis is incomplete, especially given the chronic stiffness and weakness in my hand - symptoms that fall outside of the range of golfer's or tennis elbow. YouTube algorithms tumbled me a PT video about radial nerve entrapment and my lay person feeling is that it might be what I am dealing with. Now I go back to my general practitioner to report on all of this and hopefully get another appointment with the hand specialist MD to do further tests and update the diagnosis and finally return to therapy to address the actual injury.

NY Times Poems 7/26/23

 

William S. Burroughs believed that if the texts from media and mass culture could be cut up and rearranged, they would reveal deeper truths lying beneath the factual truths or lies or ambiguities in the original documents. I have found this to be true. Today, I bought a New York Times and extracted and arranged the following three poems from three separate articles. 100% of the text is from the articles published. As I suspected, the pieces seem to reveal something more -- stories & a mournful music subterranean to the original sources.

NEW YORK TIMES JULY 26, 2023

I - "and the sea between them"

Wildfires devour swaths

And the sea between them

Rescue efforts sixteen people

"I wish her home burned down but she were still alive"

Plumes of smoke rise

97 fires 13 remained

Trapped in a cycle of nightmarish waves

The heat set in

Rumors of arson

Quash the rising anger

Compensation for the victims

"With the abundance of mercy”

A densely forested region

Olive trees in dry coastal areas

Dangerously close

II - "weighing on growth"

Raised its forecast

Rosier in parts

"Hope is not a policy...

critical to avoid..."

It expects consumption

Intended to restrain

Weighing on growth

Slowed down, raised, forced down

Defied expectations, avoiding recession

Pushing up, growing concerned

Weak, tepid, reasons to worry

Tumbled, slumped, cut, running low

Restore confidence, target support

Strengthen consumption

Reasons for optimism

Not in the clear, pose a threat

Portend headwinds, could intensify

Food fuel fertilizer

Suspension concern warning

Further splintered

Additional volatility

III - "changes in the overturning"

Major slow down

Ocean currents

Deep cold

Human driven

Undergo a great weakening

Shut down a potential

Coming so soon

Atlantic circulation

Will decline

Pin down the timing

"It's now," she said

Could set off

Abrupt thawing

Loss of the Amazon

Collapse of the ice sheets

Harbingers of tipping-point-like

Meridional overturning

Bending toward Northern Europe

The water releases its heat

The sinking effect

Disrupting the balance

Creating a "cold blob"

Examining the magnitude

Could see faster

Could experience stormier

Would most likely get

Abrupt starts and stops in the deep past

How the currents might behave

Data and their proxy measure

Changes in the overturning

“An increase in these indicators”

Mathematical properties

Extrapolate from trends

Atmospheric concentration

Applauded the new analysis

Voiced some reservations

More work was still needed

A questionable proxy

The cold blob's development

Sensors slung across the Atlantic

Sent an urgent message

To keep collecting data

“If it weren't for us humans”

“It's very plausible that we...

I fear, honestly..."

All re

Smoke & Brood

smoke & brood on the front stoop

the phone glows

in the gloom

hunched over

the days fold

like bended spoons

the moon a joke

i'd rather forget

once there was

a kite that flew

a song to sing

now there's only

time to kill

within the house

or on the stoop

or in the car

6:00 AM can't come

soon enough

pack the pipe

with leaves of void

blow up the block

in the AM

with a scream

there'll be

time again

tomorrow night

to smoke and brood

and think

about the day

to come

Owl Búho Coruja

A Line by Baudelaire

I was captivated today by a line by Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen, “I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.” I loved everything about it - the audacious melancholy of claiming oneself as a cemetery, surpassing even Morrissey's "Cemetery Gates" for sadness; how still and stark and yet how evocative is the line. I especially loved how the adjective "unblessed" is situated after the noun "moon" -- a very uncommon syntax in English. Then, I thought -- Well, that is a bold choice by the English translator. Who is she or he? And what is the original phrase in French? Starting with the second question, it goes: "Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune." I am beginner level French, but know that "abhorré" is most commonly translated as "abhorred" or "loathed. "Unblessed" seems like quite a departure, and yet it delivers the overwhelming sensation of feeling bereft & abandoned by everything - even the moon - better than either of the more common options. And, of course, you get the bleak "eh" repetition echoing "cemetery." But the translator is inspired to go one step further to achieve the spell and, as indicated, places the adjective after the noun. "I am a cemetery unblessed by the moon" lacks the rhythm and cadence needed to successfully cast the spell. Voilà, now they got it: "I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed," and I read it in 2023 and feel simultaneously stricken by its eeriness and comforted by the fact that a phrase exists to describe how I have felt in my most abject states.

What about question #2? Who composed the translation? That I have not yet determined. Many signs point to Edgar Allan Poe, but it will take some digging to find out. Feel free to share your thoughts!

I See a Bad Moon Rising, 2023

the summer it hit the summer it rained

the summer it cooked

make a time machine

of abandoned tires, washing machine parts

& the juice of 1000 wildflowers

go back and distract henry ford

get him to pursue chess

smoke cigars with him, compliment his shoes

chess over industrial production, tell him

or bring jim morrison with you as you recede in time

to visit adam smith in glasgow

tell him music is his destiny

what a great scottish tenor he is!

sing songs with him and jim

drinking pints in a pub

verses & choruses over markets, tell him

fly back further on the winds

of the world whirring in reverse

and throw columbus off the ship

watch the swales with him, the spouting whales

the sun rising like a fiery iris in the east

read maps with him on the deck

then push him over the rails

12 Point Buck

I knew I would see him one day

the other one

the one who didn't go to the Village
and study Guthrie and Ginsberg
but remained in the Midwest
and painted houses
just a blue truck
ladders on top
can of chew on the front seat
and a color postcard
of a 12 pt. buck
dangling over the dash
on the side in faded black letters
Bob Zimmerman Painting (gascap) 462-9117

Succession & the West Now: Character Is Destiny

(Ceramic sculpture of the Greek Fate Clotho by Leslie Fry)

Character is destiny. We associate the idea with the Greek tragedies, where we long for the protagonist to escape a tragic fate, even as something internal and inescapable, it seems, drives them them toward this end. The relationship between character and destiny is portrayed poignantly in the show Succession, which had its series finale in June of this year. In it, Brian Cox portrays media tycoon Logan Roy in such a way that we see the brutish, leviathan will that defines his character as deeply embodied and animating the fibers of his being. Similarly, the character of each of his potential heirs is evident throughout the series in how they speak, how they relate to the world, in how they physically inhabit their bodies and in the decisions they make or fail to make.

Today, as smoke from Canadian wildfires inundates large swaths of the US and an unforgiving & anomalous "heat dome" grips parts of the southern US, we have to wonder if the concept of "character is destiny" may also apply to entire societies and even civilizations. What is it in the character of our Western civilization that is forging this grimmest and most destructive of fates for us and the rest of the planet?

What is fundamental and common to the characters of the Roy children is their inability to fully individuate from their father. Their full individuation and development into independent and dynamic selves operating not in relation to their father was the only thing that could have molded different destinies for them. The prevention of his children's development was largely the sadistic design of Logan Roy. It was his demented plan to stifle the development of his children into true individuals and, as of the show's conclusion, his plan succeeded. Had any of the children been able to exit the shadow of their father, their character and therefore their destiny, would have been other.

And so we must ask ourselves: What is Western civilization's version of character transformation that might alter the course of history and thus prevent the annihilation of the biota of the planet? This seems to me the fundamental question that we need to be asking ourselves. Humans are storytelling animals. Narrative may be our greatest strength and innovation as a species. We must learn to alter the narrative of our own tale or we will find ourselves composing and enacting the final tragedy.

Composers in You

(for Christine)

The Arvo Pärtness of your contemplation

The Ligeti cloud of your painting mind

The Bach river rapids of your night dreaming

The Mozart cathedral of your longing

The Henry Threadgill wishbone of your risks

The Debussy circumference of your fields of thought

The Thelonious Monk playground of your wonder

 

Decades of Christian Deconstruction: Understanding "JC Died for Your Sins"

If you grow up Christian and the religion is not a match for you, there is a good chance that you will spend decades of your life unmaking that which was constructed in you - so fibrous and complex are the thought clusters that make up the religion and so malleable was your mind when it encountered the faith. Indeed, as part of my lifelong project of Christian deconstruction, I've spent all of my cooking/cleaning/doing dishes & exercising time over the last several months listening to scholars of early Christianity and of the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament") as they critically analyze the formation of the religion and its founding texts. The work that is being done by scholars (both in the academy and without) in this field in recent decades is impressive and inspiring, as they take a multidisciplinary approach to the study of Christianity - relying not on theology but on the fields of history, archaeology, philosophy, philology and literary criticism to understand the religion.

As for many, the central stone forming the foundation of my Christian malaise is that seemingly eternally elusive concept of: "Christ died for your sins." Taken at face value (which is how a child or a desperate person so often takes things), how could you say no to that? It is, as they say, "the ultimate sacrifice." It is only in recent weeks that I have begun to understand the religious tradition out of which that apocryphal sacrifice arose, and it is the understanding of this background that is permitting me a dislodging of that central stone within me.

Blood sacrifice, of animals and sometimes of people, in order to appease a god or to feed a hungry god has been a religious practice of humans in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas going back at least 5000 years. It is a complex phenomenon, involving varied roots and motivations. In the Hebrew Bible, as in many sacred traditions, the deity is seen as a temperamental punisher, continuously exasperated with the shitty and sinful behavior of humans, and who ancient Jews felt required regular sacrifice at his central temple. More broadly, whether in the ancient Near East, India, ancient Greece or the Americas, one way to view rituals of blood sacrifice is to see them as a response to trauma. How to explain precarity, deprivation, extreme changes in weather, sieges due to warfare & natural disasters? One explanation is that they are expressions of the wrath of a god who is punishing us for our shitty and sinful behavior. Offering such a god a blood sacrifice is an attempt by humans to gain some agency in a realm within which they otherwise feel helpless.

The Second Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed in a war between the Romans in the Jews in A.D. 70. According to scholarly consensus, this precedes by a few years the writing of the first gospel, that of the anonymous "Mark." Options to animal sacrifice to Yahweh - long a complicated affair and now very difficult practice to pursue, lacking a central temple - were being considered throughout the Jewish faith. Jews of the Jesus movement, likely taking inspiration from both Hebrew Scriptures and from stories of dying and rising gods in neighboring religions, conceived of the idea of the final sacrifice: that of God's son, the sacrifice of both a human and a deity or a human deity. The sacrifice of both a God and a human at the same time is the ultimate sacrifice and one that would obviate any need for further blood sacrifice.

And so, this is where the somewhat puzzling, abstract and yet very coercive phrase, "Christ died for your sins" ultimately comes from. Understanding this background and understanding blood sacrifice as one response to the trauma of being alive as a human on Earth has demystified and defanged somewhat the grip that the iconic phrase has had up on me for lo these many decades. I believe none of it. I believe not in the wrathful Yahweh, nor in any of the stories about a guy named Jesus somehow being his son, getting sentenced to death by the Roman state and enduring this death as some kind of ultimate blood sacrifice obviating the need for any further blood sacrifice. I believe none of it. And yet. And yet, weakened though it may be, the psychological hold the story has on me remains. And that is not a good thing. It is debilitating and causes me, as it does so many, to feel inadequate and permanently stained.

2 Fash Pundits, 1 Fash Pol

Cruel, craven Ann Coulter Haunts the Earth

Like the gaunt, hungry ghost

Of a scavenger bird

***

Mendacious Matt Walsh

Believes in nothing

Tries to remember

When he last felt well

In a dream he draws doors on a wall

With white chalk

He tries to open them

And cannot

He wakes up

Spends another day

Acting, pretending, not remembering

When he last felt well

***

Hapless Josh Hawley speaks

Says little & speaks some more

He sees himself reflected in a shallow pool

And tries to think

But thoughts elude him

He speaks some more