On Capitalist Trauma

 

We were born into a system that rewards the most venal and odious among us with social status and wealth. Anthropologically speaking, then, we are a culture wired to self-destruct. Cultures that persist over time are those with minimal social hierarchy and those that reward wisdom and generosity. We will perhaps never understand the depth of the psychic damage that we've sustained simply by being born in this system that views the wicked as good and kindness as a form of naïveté.

We were born into a system that has performed an act of reverse magic by seeking to convert a world that is sacred into one devoid of all but a monetary value. It has given us a sadness we cannot name. We are left staggering and stumbling about, like a child who's been spun around blindfolded and directed to break the piñata, waving a stick at shadows.

2/23/2020

All re

Poems, Time II

 

Guy who writes poems about finding enough time to write poems.

Guy who read that Graham Greene used to finish his daily writing in two hours and then had to figure out how to spend the next 14 hours on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

Guy who crashes his car dictating poems into a phone on a commute to a job where they monitor against writing poems during work hours.

Guy whose friend quit being an engineer at Northrop Grumman to be a nightwatchman so he could "yell William Blake at a wall" during work hours.

Guy who remembers visionary saxophone player Pete who was a guard at the art museum which his friends called "Petey's Jail."

Guy who remembers Dano and his doomed project of writing 3000 literary limericks.

Guy who heard about a guy named Buddy Slaughter who drove his car into a wall in New Hampshire when he didn't become a famous folk singer.

Guy who knows two poets who managed not to work and then went insane.

(Guy who knows that if they had kept on working they may also have gone insane)

Poems, Time

 

I like poems because they don't take long to read

Like today I finished my soup and spinach with yogurt

And read one about a dog

Abandoned by Spanish conquistadors

And left to languish in solitude

Dizzy with the most profound betrayal

Which finally becomes great ferocity

Also a poem about a woman who waits in a plaza

From morning to sunset for her love

Who has crossed the border and gone north

Who does not return

And one about a dream the poet has

Where three women feed him

Some kind of feast of sacrifice

Including "enchiladas sauced in blood"

And potentially poems do not take

As long to write as novels for example

This is good because where does all the time go

Between working and making food and eating it

And stretching and cleaning

I barely have time to finish this one

If I am going to also get a walk

Before teaching

So that my heart

Does not block up and kill me

Before I can finish

All that I must

"THE BORDER CRISIS" II / "LA CRISIS DE LA FRONTERA" II

 

Money

Arms &

Armies

Cross borders

While people Can't

***

El dinero

Las armas

Y los ejércitos

Cruzan las fronteras

Mientras que la gente No lo puede

"THE BORDER CRISIS"

 

UWU EXOTICA​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​! by Eyelashes! album review

Baltimore is a difficult city to describe. Or maybe it's not a city, but a zone that hovers, lands, disappears and returns - crossing between dimensions. "Was it really here? Was I really there?" One's experiences in Baltimore vacillate between extremes of tragedy and bliss. It is an old place. By this I mean that the homogeneity and flattening of individual imagination so common within mass culture has not totally established itself there. Weirdness remains. Not weirdness™, but actual, un-characterizable weirdness because there is room in the city for the self to slow down and for the imagination to enter into a fermentation state, birthing individuals as we were meant to be: non-brand, not homo-econimus, but homo-journeyer.

All this I think as I listen to the new album,

UWU EXOTICA​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!, by the prolific Baltimore songwriter and ace arranger, Eyelashes! "Faintly, I'm Yours" she sings on the proto-hit, "Best Songwriter in the World" and the line is an invitation into the hazy glitter swamp (her phrase) where most things are possible, including things you have never thought of... a state of mind where "every day is fall" and where the songwriter is "prey to all beauty," for example.

Line after enchanting wordplay line is delivered with phasing like mind breaths and within a landscape of arrangements where a plastic sounding acoustic guitar may cross paths with synthetic panpipes and where the snare drum sound and groove are so direct and so real that it is more like a beckoning or a summoning than a declaration of its own importance, as the backbeat so often is in rock and pop.

What stands out on this album among the vast expanse of lilies, tree trunks and corrugated crocodile backs that comprise the other releases in the Eyelashes! glitter swamp are the melodic heights achieved in the songs, heights that are coupled with arrangements & harmonics that complement them, birthing shimmering sonic spires in the marsh.

Each song on UWU EXOTICA​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​! is dense with meaning and non-meaning or play, both lyrically and musically, and could merit its own individual review or reflection. I believe this richness is due to the fact that Eyelashes! has 46 medium-to-full length releases in her catalog, proceeded by 15 releases as Baggypantsrich, over the course of 16 years, and so has been developing her craft in an iconoclastic fashion, rooted in the journey of the self, for a long time. This review-of-sorts can only serve as a lamp in the doorway of the record, inviting you to enter the space...

-- DH 6/6/2024

#glam #baltimore #banjo #ringostarr

Non America (for Forrest Palmer)

 

Books before guns
Love before money

Plains before lawns
Stars before lights

Clouds before planes
Birds before bombs

Mules before cars
Bikes before tanks

Poems before ads
Prayers before sales

Joy before greed
Play before death

(April 2021)