Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1371

All that being quite so, we pass black walls. “What do you figure will happen to us tomorrow?” A monstrous and eternal mannequin follows us with two perfect eyeballs free of sorrow. He is looking for food. Leftovers of smell which are rope. In this way, the Eighteenth Flesh fuses with the Twelfth Flesh and is brought into parallel with the Eleventh Flesh and the Fifteenth Flesh, while the Twenty-first Flesh and the Seventeenth Flesh reach a point of torsion, entering a relationship of “eat or be eaten” with the Thirteenth Flesh and the Nineteenth Flesh. By the sixth or seventh shoot, they were not acting anymore, aggression-induced saliva was frothing from their mouths, their noses were dripping blood, their fingers were smeared with blood, saliva, and tears. The darkness of the small castle chapel echoed with the sounds of face cheeks snapping and teeth splattering against the mold-coated, stone walls, hey, I’ll tickle you to death until you kick the bucket, I’ll take revenge for all who suffers under the moon – ‘cause I have such looong fingers, fucking long and delicate fingers! from this MIRROR of COMmerce I WILL give yoU  EveryThing  PIECes of THE Ocean Of PIE from MY tongue  a graph of my HEART as reviewed IN the Book OF THE Living the PLUMS I have seven eyes. Anyway, back to Channing. Last night, I went to the first possible showing of White House Down, a movie I have been anticipating for many weeks. I laughed and laughed and laughed – happiest I’ve been in a long time. The movie also stars Jamie Foxx as the president of the United States. He loves Abraham Lincoln, like a lot, and as we know, Abraham Lincoln loves a good shawl. So, Channing is Cale, John Cale (LOL), and he is a Capitol police officer who has dreams of joining the Secret Service because his daughter, Emily, is super-obsessed with the White House and presidency, etc. His ex-wife is that lady who was in the first Twilight movie but not the next ones – Rachel Lefevre. I don’t even know why I know this. Cale is a vet, did three tours, and is not known for finishing things. As the movie opens, he is escorting the Speaker of the House (Richard Jenkins) and as he waits for Jenkins, he engages in witty banter with some squirrels, using his square, muscular voice. I was tingling EVERYWHERE. He was straight up talking to squirrels. Later, he goes to pick up his daughter who is mad because he missed her flag twirling performance at her talent show. Stick a pin in this detail, the flag twirling business, because it comes back in about two hours. He wants to be father of the year, so he takes the kid with him to the White House where he interviews with Carol Finnerty, who is a secret service agent (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Thus begins the fakest secret service interview possible. They did not even TRY to approximate what an interview for the protection detail of the leader of the free world might be like. It was hilarious and I couldn’t stop giggling. First of all, the interview would not take place at the White House, right? Wouldn’t it take place at the Treasury Department? I TOOK CIVICS! Turns out Cale and Finnerty know each other. They went to college together at GW though Cale only finished a year. He went to night school after the war but still … follow through, man, get you some. Finnerty doesn’t fuck around and is all, “No chance, buddy.” Dejected, he tries to put on a good face for Emily, and she coaxes him into taking a tour of the White House. Look, whatever it takes to put the child in danger and the hero in the White House. The White House tour guide is an appropriately nerdy fellow who is “Donnie the Guide.” He knows everything about the White House but so does Emily so there’s a bit of rivalry there. At one point, the President shows up and Emily asks him a question for her YouTube channel. Before and during this, there are some lame dialogue moments regarding the relevance of blogs and other Internet terminologies like it’s 1997 or something. A seedy looking redhead, straight out of “White Supremacist Bad Guy” central casting, pushes a janitor cart into the rotunda of the capitol building and walks away. Seconds later, there’s a big explosion. Oh snap! Chaos ensues. It’s the end of the world!!! What do we do? James Woods plays Walker, the head of the president’s security detail. He is sad and bitter because his son died during a covert military incursion into Iran or some such. It’s his last week on the job. Anyway, long story short, Walker betrays his country and position and helps a band of mercenaries, lead by a guy named Stenz (Jason Clark) take over the White House with astonishing ease. It’s a bit of a relief that this movie sidesteps plausibility. You can reserve your common sense for other mental tasks, is what I’m saying. One of the mercenaries is, as you might expect, heavily tattooed and crazy because only crazy psychopaths have tattoos. I should know. As the mercenaries take over the White House, they kill everyone in sight. They are clearly working from the first person shooter school of thought. Use all the bullets! All of them! Also with the mercenaries is a hacker, Tyler, who gets access to the secret presidential bunker beneath the White House and says, “This is my Graceland.” So great. Emily, that rascally gal, had left the tour to use the bathroom, and she gets some video clips of the mercenaries being mercenary on her iPhone. Channing must find his daughter though and he sets out to do this because, of course. Along the way he finds the president and they become besties. Action things happen as the mercenaries secure the premises. They lug a bunch of missiles to the roof. They install a video camera in the basement. Let’s just fast forward here. In the end, it turns out that while the mercenaries are in it for $400 million from the Federal Reserve, Walker is in it to aim all of the nuclear weapons at various targets in the Middle East. He is encouraged by his wife who says to him on the phone, “You do what you have to do to make them pay for what they did to our boy.” RIDE OR DIE, MOFOS. The daughter posts the video of the mercenaries to her YouTube channel and it goes viral and everyone knows who the masterminds of the plot are (mostly). There’s a twist involving another inside man. Channing saves the day and gets to join the Secret Service. The End. Like I said, SO GREAT.

[Note: Sources: Boris Ryzhy, “In Memoriam: Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001)” (tr. Philip Nikolayev), at Big Bridge 17; Zazil Alaíde Collins, “End of the Rope” (tr. Pilar Rodriguez Aranda), at Big Bridge 17; Kiwao Nomura, “Parade 4” (tr. Eric Selland), at Big Bridge 17; Rodrigo Toscano, “Las Globalistas”, at Big Bridge 17; Alexander Kabanov, “They say …” (tr. Andrey Gritsman), at Big Bridge 17; Mary Kasimor, “Old Fire Plums”, at Big Bridge 17; Aura Sabina, “Aura Mantis” (tr. Pilar Rodriguez Aranda), at Big Bridge 17; Roxane Gay, “You Can Reserve Your Common Sense For Other Mental Tasks (But still, Channing)”, at I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection, 28 Jun 013; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman UPDATE

This was going to be a work in 2012 sections. The "Mayan" thing seems irrelevant now. So instead of 2012 sections, I'm going for exactly 1000000 words. About 425K to go.

In the House of the Hangman 1370

Yep, a memorial service for the dearly departed Wilsonville bees and ladybugs —pollinators all, all 50,000 of ‘em — is in the works. It will be held this coming Sunday at the Wilsonville Target where they were found dead in the parking lot, confirmed victims of a “super-systemic” neonicotinoid-class pesticide, illegal in the EU but perfectly OK in the US. Gah. Walter Benjamin's essay on Hölderlin is a bit difficult, innit. “A preview of this post could not be fetched.” “Something went wrong. Try again.” RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW I am the dog head with my head in the dog RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW this is how we know ourselves & this is how we know ourselves & this is how. It was well-known that the shaykh enjoyed / a specific type of “kraft” cheese / sell the orphan an accumulator / dig a hole through the photocopier / map ‘the blank spots in the data’:

 

[Note: Sources: Matt Hickman, “Memorial service to be held for slain Oregon bees in Target parking lot”, at Mother Nature Network, 26 Jun 013 (Now, I’d be the last person to suggest that the EPA’s been paid off …); Sophie Robinson, “Total LOL”, at Return to Default, 22 Apr 013; Tom Raworth, “Rivers of Bling”, at INVISIBLY TIGHT INSTITUTIONAL OUTER FLANKS DUB(VERB)GLORIOUS NATIONAL HI-VIOLENCE RESPONSE DREAM; Arlo Quint, “sell the orphan an accumulator”, at INVISIBLY TIGHT INSTITUTIONAL OUTER FLANKS DUB(VERB)GLORIOUS NATIONAL HI-VIOLENCE RESPONSE DREAM; Derek Gregory, “dead streaming”, at Geographical Imaginations, 27 Jun 013 (re Josh Begley’s Dronestream project); image: Allison Meier, “Disrupt NSA Surveillance With This Typeface”, at Hyperallergic, 27 Jun 013 (the typeface, which will probably bother the NSA etc for about 5 minutes, is one mode of ZXX)]

In the House of the Hangman 1369

OK. During the 2013 presidential election, #KenyaDecides was the hashtag used on twitter to describe the choice on the ballot between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, the two major candidates. The lines were long but people voted, and a winner was crowned. Journalists hoping for violent spectacle were disappointed; international observers praying for order and peace were rewarded. Uhuru Kenyatta became president and William Ruto became his deputy president. Everyone went back to what they had been doing before. Three and a half months later, the final vote counts, by each race, have not been released. And there are discrepancies, almost a million of them.

            Everybody knows that the war is over
            Everybody knows the good guys lost

Former anticorruption czar John Githongo quoted a commissioner of the electoral board saying “We are having sleepless nights reconciling the presidential results and those of the other positions. Over a million votes must be ‘reconciled.’” Reconciled is a nice gloss for “we can’t tell where the votes came from.” As Wycliffe Muga, the weekend editor for the Nairobi Star put it, “Nobody can seriously expect Kenyans to believe that about a million citizens walked into the voting booth; tossed aside all the ballots for county representative, MP, governor and senator; and then voted only for the president of their choice.” Kenyans are being called on to unsee what they saw, to ignore what they know, both before the election and at the National Tallying Center. But as Shailja puts it, in her blistering essay, “The Politics Of Contempt”, contempt is when it doesn’t matter what Kenyans know, but only that they won’t say anything about it, won’t do anything about it. Chagua amani, they’re told; choose peace. “Wait. Sing. Dance. Pray. Be patient. Stay calm. Pray. Wait.” Context becomes the E.R. Like a race of giants, we are made up of pieces of one another in other names. If I’ve waded out above my welcome, which was special, if I’m in some experimental state of forgery, or if this was the night or another night after the super moon — “I’m a poet,” Kenneth Goldsmith’s Printing Out the Internet project states, “and I feel that the internet — comprised completely of text-based alphanumeric language — is the afterlife.” In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. And a thousand years in a voting booth, knowing your vote doesn’t mean a thing. OK. “This is the kind of thing I think I [do not] want. / Impersonality in person, sent / in free parabolas, / the pale or faint / glitter of phosphor is a lonely tint / delighting lovelessly in all that can’t / confine or even know it. / Goodbye from now to being in the right, / farewell to lofty projects. Literature / became repulsive to me long before / I died / Can it be you don’t hear this? It’s not the return but how to go on, less the appeal but the fear which is hard: ‘Can it be you don’t hear this?’ Anyway, here in 1917 / here at Kronstadt / we’re having a right laugh / love’s solar boat is slashed / we have 4 years left. For some reason, it was 1649 again. Maybe it was 2003, or something, / I don’t remember, my favourite laws / were just a system of false brains / I recognise that / - cough - / as / anyway, here in the multiplex / in our plastercasts / in in / in our membranes, like, inside / the police computer, that thing / ok …” last time something like this went down the bark beetles ate the piñon trees leaving brown carcasses everywhere and all the clubs closed down and the suburbanites moved in from wherever, that's when I left for L.A. No one counts the years spent in L.A. I don’t know how long I was there. But Kiki Smith sent me color Xeroxes of a completed sequence, forty-three drawings, which she’d titled, Women Being Eaten by Animals. As in a dream of similar actions or a dream of a single, timeless action, the girl flecked with blood while being unaltered by the animal’s touch, there is no representation of motion except stillness of the figures floating in space of page. Is this not precisely clanged?

[Note: Sources: JBR; Shailja Patel and Aaron Bady, “Introduction” to #Kenyarefuses, at The New Inquiry, June 013; Jack Kimball, “To save a life …”, “When It Comes to Half-dog Leitmotifs”, at Pantaloons, 24 & 25 Jun 013; JBR; Garrett Caples, “Poetry and Accountability”, at Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here, 25 Jun 013; JBR; David Eagleman, Sum, as quoted in Sean Lovelace, “28 points: Sum by David Eagleman”, at HTMLGIANT, 25 Jun 013; JBR; The Commons, Set 3”, in Simon Jarvis / Sean Bonney / 18th June 2010 / Cambridge Reading Series / Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio / Faculty of English / University of Cambridge, at Plantarchy; JBR; Bett, “last time something like this …”, at Bett’s Blog, 25 Jun 013; JBR; Leslie Scalapino, as quoted in “Compline Reissues Leslie Scalapino/Kiki Smith Collaborative Animal”, at Harriet, 25 Jun 013; Timothy Thornton, “Playing Boreads”, in Sara Crangle / Timothy Thornton / The Cambridge Reading Series / Friday 22 October 2010 / Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio / Faculty of English / University of Cambridge, at Plantarchy]

In the House of the Hangman 1368

Which fuckheadedness reminds me of one of Legs McNeil’s stories, which I picked up from Vice: “I was sitting in the Nuremberg Hotel bar with all the other drunks when Ozzy Osbourne made his first grand entrance. He was dressed in some extravagant bright suit with scarves, gloves, top hat, and other weird shit. It looked like he was about to take the stage in front of thousands of people. ... There was no one there to impress except for the seven or eight of us lowly rock ’n’ roll drunken functionaries, shaking off last night’s hangover. When Ozzy didn’t get the reaction he desired, he disappeared back into the lobby and reappeared about ten minutes later, having changed into an even more elaborate costume. ... Ozzy disappeared again, only to reappear another ten minutes later, having changed his clothes again. ... Ozzy made about six or seven entrances into the bar for our amusement, before he finally ran out of gas. ... Maybe it was his preshow warm-up, or maybe did it out of sheer boredom, but I wasn’t expecting much from him that night at the show knowing how wasted he’d been that afternoon. It wasn’t until I arrived at the Zeppelinfeld, where the concert was being held, that I’d realized I’d seen the place in hundreds of documentaries on World War II. It’s the famous stadium that Albert Speer had built for Hitler — the one with the giant, concrete swastika on top of it — that always explodes in that dramatic film footage that starts every Nazi documentary. ... "When Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment,” William Shirer wrote in Berlin Diary of the Nuremberg rally, “[The people] reminded me of the crazed expressions I once saw in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers ... they looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.” I sat watching the Monsters of Rock Concert from Hitler’s box seat, right in the middle of the stadium. The giant steps where Hitler and all the high Nazi functionaries stood during the rally had become the bleachers for the concert — everything had been reversed. And I was reminded of the Shirer quote, as the fans looked equally insane, possessed, and inhuman. Maybe it was all that cheap wine, bad dope, glue fumes, black leather, and denim, but the most disturbing thing about them was that a lot of them had the Confederate flag stitched, stapled, or painted on their jackets as an homage to American rock ’n’ roll. This was pretty much the most evil symbol the fans could have used since the swastika was banned in Germany at the end of WWII. I’d never seen it used so unironically. Just as the crowd was building to testosterone frenzy, Ozzy took to the stage. Somehow the Blizzard of Oz, the craziest fucker in rock ’n’ roll, the man who’d been doing bizarre costume changes just a few hours ago, faced this savage beast of a crowd and began to sing. And not just any song, but the most appropriate song ever to be played in this fucking cesspool of evil: “War Pigs.” Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses / Evil minds that plot destruction / Sorcerers of death's construction / In the fields the bodies burning / As the war machine keeps turning / Death and hatred to mankind …”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Legs McNeil, “Among the War Pigs”, at Vice, 24 Jun 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1367

It’s like Marks plays like he’s identified a hundred possible rhythmic responses. Rather than choose one, he plays all of them silently in the air over the drums. Except for those few moves that do touch metal and skin. Obermayer starts a crunching gliss upward. A split-second in, Casswell jumps on it, bows the guitar behind the bridge, pressing hard to get that flat, unmediated partway between a disheveled animal and a pitch-shifted thing. They both follow each other along the same upward arc for about two seconds, Casswell reaching the end of his bow at the exact moment Obermayer reaches the top of his pitch-wheel, then Marks hits the bell of the crash cymbal, or drops a metal bowl onto the snare, I forget, exactly, but he puts down a place-marker that closes the phrase, and forces a new one. Marks, having trouble with his kick-pedal, unscrews and re-screws the mechanism as quickly as he can. You can't withdraw from this music; it moves too fast. I think of shaved cats that look like small pigs. I think of shaved human heads that look like starved pigs. I think of thin kisses followed by thick kisses. I think of the parts of us that spew. There are so many parts of us capable of spewing. Maybe there will be more parts soon. Next to Lalak is Mardak, inhabited by cypresses. Here is a list of the varieties: Nagiri, who have oblong eyes; to whom all objects appear oblong. Naquire, whose eyes are square. Palampi, who have very small eyes. Jaraku, with two eyes, which are turned in opposite directions. Mehanki, with three eyes. Panasuki, with four eyes. Harramba, whose eyes occupy the whole forehead; and finally, Skodolki, who have a single eye in the neck. You don’t have to google the names above to smell the money on them — but if you do, you’ll quickly find ;Vanity Fair’s “Fortune’s Children,” a series of 32 photographs of saddeningly gorgeous heirs and heiresses. “What’s it like being young and beautiful, with a 24-karat pedigree and inherited wealth, in populist, economically perilous 2009?” (I hear Keston Sutherland’s reply, which I’ve just mangled: “Coke through a funnel into my ass.”) As theory lags behind you could say it’s time to pay up the bill’s come due the situation that requires it, the party’s over the song’s arrested the sorrow’s hit the back of the stage and slopped over a pervasive atmospherics of precarity into the queen’s next of kin takes hold through the mundane repetitions salvaging little but the bark -- turgid, intermittent -- of doom you will say she’s at wit’s end of commodity purchase, disposal, and replacement. In contrast to the increasingly standardized processing of disaster-events the dark she longed to script against the beat of her wildest and public dreaming through digital now wrapped round templates of crisis news and humanitarian response, her sloped shoulders knitted shawls of stumbling shame hurried pen and no taste for sense longing longing for what was and will not be what cannot remember the slow catastrophe of repetitious wasting, of ordinary time itself wearing thin and human and non-human worlds bearing depleted signs of exhaustion what cannot have what broke my [     ] what stalled my [    ] what seized this leverage to forge over and over in the dullest seems to have not yet found a language for expression, much less public reckoning, repetition of nonsense an old, buried, rambled, wounded, enervated, sorrowing, laggard, happenstance like a mountain: the top can’t be seen from the bottom, the base disappears from the summit, the whole escapes the climber as the pilot misses the point, it stands as metaphor for something that exists metonymically, exists as a surplus of the Real with an excess of the Symbolic, is both of the moment and continuously monumental, typically involve hundreds to thousands of pieces, including pure gridded repetitions, dumb reiterations, and things both readymade and perversely and purely idiosyncratic, always in the present tense. Typing in the dark I was surprised by a large spider that dropped briefly before the screen before pulling itself back up. I let it go without comment. The Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act.

[Note: Sources: JBR; THF Drenching, “THF Drenching: That Irregular Galvanic Twitch: A review of Bark! live at St Margaret's Church, Manchester, Saturday 15-vi-2013”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 24 Jun 013; James Pate, “Pig Radio”, as quoted in Johannes Göransson, “Book of the Year: James Pate’s The Fassbinder Diaries”, at Montevidayo, 24 Jun 013; Baron Ludvig Holberg, Niels Klim’s journey under the ground being a narrative of his wonderful descent to the subterranean lands; together with an account of the sensible animals and trees (tr. John Gierlow), at Project Gutenberg, via Erik H Rzepka, FB post, 24 Jun 013; David Gorin, as quoted in “David Gorin Finds the Family for Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life”, at Harriet, 24 Jun 013; Jackie Orr, “a possible history of oblivion”, at Social Text, 17 Jun 013; Vanessa Place, “Hanne Darboven”, at x-tra 14.1; Geof Huth, FB comment, 24 Jun 013; JBR]

For the Supreme Court of the United States (May they go the way of the SA)

Reblogged from Vice:

It’s amazing to me how many real-life Spinal Tap moments I’ve had. This always leads me to ask myself, “Did that really happen, or was I so fucked up that I just imagined it?” You know, tramping around a backstage construction area with INXS, searching for the stage door for an hour before giving up. Watching a groupie’s face melt after finding out the opening band she’d just gangbanged wasn’t Danzig, the headliner. And my favorite, watching the Ramones demand that me and the staff at Punk magazine cross out, by hand, all reference to them as a punk band in their cover story. They just didn’t think the term was “accurate.”

This month, Black Sabbath released their new record 13, and it shot to number one in the UK after its first week of sales. Now remember, that’s 43 years since “Paranoid” went number one in 1970.

I’m also reminded that some of the dumbest metal moments—some of those Spinal Tap flashes—have landed among the most profound experiences of my life. I had one of those bizarrely significant experiences with Ozzy Osbourne in Nuremberg, Germany, in the same stadium where Leni Riefenstahl made her epic Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.

I was traveling with Scorpions, a huge heavy metal phenomenon of the 1980s. They were so internationally famous that I had to wonder if the whole world had gone batshit crazy. Not that Scorpions sucked. Far from it—they were a decent band with some great songs, and they put on a fantastic show. It was the ratio of fame to talent that was a bit disproportionate, if not utterly ridiculous.

Still, Scorpions were good guys, even if one time they had their roadies strip my clothes off and strap me into a harness, sending me sailing high above the band—naked—in front of 50,000 commie kids in Budapest, Hungary. Maybe I deserved it. Here’s what happened, and then I’ll get to Ozzy.

It was in the last years of my drinking, when my life was an utter train wreck. The chaos followed me to Eastern Europe, on tour with Scorpions. First, I caused the press junket to miss our flight because I was having too much fun in the airport bar. Then I offended everyone at the reception at the German embassy in Budapest. And then I called a girl back in New York City who I was having an affair with and passed out on the phone, leaving me with a $700 phone bill in the morning. The next night I caused a real barroom brawl—complete with Russian soldiers battling it out with Hungarian draftees—smashing everything in the joint, from the big barroom mirror to the tables and chairs, then I hid under the bar, giggling madly.

That was a lot of fun, actually. It was almost like being in a cowboy movie when the local ranchers meet up with the cattle rustlers and kick the shit out of each other—except that two KGB agents found me, dragged me out, stuck me in a little car, and drove me to what I thought was going to be prison. Since I was so fucked up, and already living in one movie, I just switched the channel to some spy movie and growled, “You goddamn commie bastards, you’ll never get anything out of me except my name, my New York City library-card number, and my blood-alcohol level!” 

But instead of a place of torture, they dropped me off at some Roman ruins that’d been transformed into a swanky tourist spa and restaurant. There was a meet-and-greet dinner with Scorpions going on. I was more horrified than if they’d taken me to jail, thinking, Fucking Disneyland? Lenin’s dream of a workers’ state now holds all the charm of a waterslide? Is the entire world turning into fucking Cheese Whiz?

Since the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine had just melted down in April of 1986, which was only 800 miles from Budapest, and clouds of Cesium 137 were wafting over the Hungarian countryside, I thought it best if I did not order the lamb, beef, or chicken. I ordered the frogs’ legs. When my order arrived, it looked like the frogs had been cut in half, their little hips were still attached—so alcohol told my brain to shove a frog in my nose. Scorpions thought it was mildly amusing, except for the drummer’s girlfriend, who began vomiting at the sight of half a critter protruding from my face.

The party broke up pretty quickly after that, and that’s why they strung me up naked over the stage the next night.  I was swung bare-assed over the band. It was humiliating. But even after all of that, as I watched the rest of the Scorpions’ show from the side of the stage, I couldn’t help thinking that Communism wouldn’t stand a chance against the power of rock ’n’ roll.

On the short flight from Budapest back to the West, I was feeling a bit like the boy who gets caught whacking off while watching a fat-lady porn—disgraced. Everyone on the plane was giggling at me. Thank God we were getting out from behind the Iron Curtain, where Scorpions were rejoining the 1986 “Monsters of Rock Tour.” Our first date back was in the charming little city of Nuremberg, Germany. I quickly joined the roadies and guitar techs in the hotel bar to resume drinking and restore my confidence, since I’d realized that the way to maintain my alcoholism was just not to stop. I knew that if I paused for a second in my drinking, I was in for some horrible withdrawal symptoms. The obvious conclusion was to just keep going, and forget about Budapest.      

I was sitting in the Nuremberg Hotel bar with all the other drunks when Ozzy Osborne made his first grand entrance. He was dressed in some extravagant bright suit with scarves, gloves, top hat, and other weird shit. It looked like he was about to take the stage in front of thousands of people. We all just laughed, since their were no women in the bar or record company people. There was no one there to impress except for the seven or eight of us lowly rock ’n’ roll drunken functionaries, shaking off last night’s hangover.

When Ozzy didn’t get the reaction he desired, he disappeared back into the lobby and reappeared about ten minutes later, having changed into an even more elaborate costume. What the fuck was he doing? We just laughed even harder and went back to our drinking. It was pretty pathetic really: Ozzy desperate attempt to get a reaction from a bunch of losers like us, and us laughing at such a gross display of drug-induced insanity. We got into it as Ozzy disappeared again, only to reappear another ten minutes later, having changed his clothes again.

It was ugly. Ozzie made about six or seven entrances into the bar for our amusement, before he finally ran out of gas. The whole time we were screaming at him, asking him how many dicks he had to suck to get his shoes or whether or not he could stuff a bit more down the front to draw more attention to his crotch. Maybe it was his preshow warm-up, or maybe did it out of sheer boredom, but I wasn’t expecting much from Ozzy that night at the show knowing how wasted he’d been that afternoon.

It wasn’t until I arrived at the Zeppelinfeld, where the concert was being held, that I’d realized I’d seen the place in hundreds of documentaries on World War II. It’s the famous stadium that Albert Speer had built for Hitler—the one with the giant, concrete swastika on top of it—that always explodes in that dramatic film footage that starts every Nazi documentary.

I was a bit shocked that I was so familiar with this place, since I’d never been there or even knew we were going. None of the road crew had any interest in history, and to them it was just another venue. But I knew what this place was and what it stood for—Hitler's rise to power.

Without Ernst Rohm’s million-man army of National Socialists called the SA, Hitler wouldn’t have had the base of support essential to his early successes and probably would’ve become just another angry guy shaking his fist at the sky, muttering about the “injustices” of the world. Instead, Rohm carried Hitler into power when he became the Reich chancellor in 1935, and then disbanded the German Republic and transformed it into a fascist dictatorship. Once securely in power, Hitler no longer needed his old pal Rohm, and on the week of June 30 to July 2, 1934, had Rohm murdered along with thousands of other SA members in what became known as “The Night of the Long Knives.

In order to unify any hurt feelings because of his liquidation of Ernst Rohm and the SA, Hitler held a rally at the next Nazi Congress in the Nuremburg Zeplinfeild, where 700,000 Nazis’ swore their personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The film of this event was titled The Triumph of the Will, and became the most stunning piece of propaganda ever produced.

"When Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment,” William Shirer wrote in Berlin Diary of the Nuremberg rally, “[The people] reminded me of the crazed expressions I once saw in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers... they looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman."

I sat watching the Monsters of Rock Concert from Hitler’s box seat, right in the middle of the stadium. The giant steps where Hitler and all the high Nazi functionaries stood during the rally had become the bleachers for the concert—everything had been reversed. And I was reminded of the Shirer quote, as the fans looked equally insane, possessed, and inhuman. Maybe it was all that cheap wine, bad dope, glue fumes, black leather, and denim, but the most disturbing thing about them was that a lot of them had the Confederate flag stitched, stapled, or painted on their jackets as an homage to American rock ’n’ roll. This was pretty much the most evil symbol the fans could have used since the swastika was banned in Germany at the end of WWII. I’d never seen it used so unironically.

Just as the crowd was building to testosterone frenzy, Ozzy took to the stage. Somehow the Blizzard of Oz, the craziest fucker in rock ’n’ roll, the man who’d been doing bizarre costume changes just a few hours ago, faced this savage beast of a crowd and began to sing. And not just any heavy metal song, but the most appropriate song ever to be played in this fucking cesspool of evil: “War Pigs.”

And then everyone in the audience began to sing along with him:

“Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses / Evil minds that plot destruction / Sorcerers of death's construction / In the fields the bodies burning / As the war machine keeps turning / Death and hatred to mankind / Poisoning their brainwashed minds—OH LORD YEAH!”

Never had I been so moved by a metal song or so grateful for Ozzy’s fucking brass balls as I’d been that night, sitting in Hitler’s box seat, dazed by this confluence of history and pop culture. God bless Ozzy!

Maybe someday Sabbath will play a cut off 13 in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In the House of the Hangman 1366

And tho you may not believe in magic your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. Palms turn violet & blue, smoother than Chinese silk, which has windows as the skin has numbers, & the sun flashing on the sidewalk blinds the little customers who bathe in it. Crates pile up. Windows break. Death makes the mind turn white. Make it pliable like wax & let it drip over the zeroes and ones. They can have all the beer too, and everyone can be run by bees, bees can run everyone, I’m going to repopulate my state with talking prairie dogs and plants that do maths. It’s a dry rain. One’s own brown thorax. What difference do mountains make? What’s the relation to its existing (at the same time)? Though lacking the advantage of gas-powered mulchers in his rural English retreat, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria nonetheless foreshadowed contemporary mulching theory in its fundamental theoretical division between the aesomplastic and desynonymous aesthetic modes. The latter involves redeploying quasi recognizable pieces of experiences in the service of new (     )holes. Now someone has uttered the word “Boltanski” … is this the form our grief has taken? Ultimately, Horwitz attempts to show that rather than heading towards heat death, existence itself will find its own apotheosis at the Omega Point. However, that final glorification is only possible given that all of reality is compressible into the divine name itself. If you’re laughing, you can stop laughing now. Remember “Don’t taze me, bro”? Try getting that out of an autistic girl walking by the side of the road. I’m just saying that if *I* were a Wal-Mart cashier and someone came up to *me* sneezing, coughing, and purchasing only wet cat food and a PC mouse, I’d *assume* they were trying to seduce me. And I’m the one with no soul? If this is to be a narrative, characters must do things. – “He’s building himself of burst foam momently.” Mercury cursor trying to get away from itself. It’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it. White walls, red lights, a horse being encouraged with tidbits, blue lights, tarpaulin, a book of poems, an epistle of St Paul, degradation of the gene pool, black box, plastic, metal / helping hand severed at the wrist / “we do it better” from a neon sign / a small being which casts no shadow / an alley between two main roads. “One day, the worker will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organization of labour; he will have to overthrow the old policy which supports the old institutions if he wants to escape the fate of the early Christians who, neglecting and despising politics, never saw their kingdom on earth.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, as quoted by Amy King, in Donna Fleischer, “Writers on Craft: Amy King / The Fictionaut Blog”, at Word Pond, 23 Jun 013; Jerome Rothenberg, “A VARIATION ON THE HELL OF MEASURES (2012)”, as quoted in Rothenberg’s “Jerome Rothenberg: from ‘The Seven Hells of the Jigoku Zoshi,’ Poem & Variation”, at Jacket2, 23 Jun 013; JBR; Nina Power, FB comments, 23 Jun 13; MS Word grammar checker suggestion; JBR; Leslie Scalapino, “Resting lightning that’s night”, as quoted in her “Eco-logic in Writing”, in The Eco Language Reader (ed. Brenda Iijima); Jack Collom, “Preface to SECOND NATURE: Poetry of Strained Relationality”, in Iijima (it’s “wholes” in the original, changed by me in recognition of Reza Negerastanis “(      )hole theory”); Erín Moure, “14 Descriptions of Trees”, in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (eds. Joshua Corey and G C Waldrep); punctum books blurb for Noah Horwitz, Divine Name Verification: An Essay on Anti-Darwinism, Intelligent Design, and the Computational Nature of Reality; JBR; JBR, but see Nicole Flatow, “Oregon Police Tase Autistic 11-Year-Old Walking Along The Highway”, at Think Progress, 21 Jun 013; Unlikely Stories, FB post, 23 Jun 013; Catherine Wagner, “from ‘Mercury Vectors: A Romance’”, in Corey and Waldrep; Andrei Tarkovsky, “in [a] 1983 interview with Hervé Guibert”, as quoted in Michelle Aldredge, “the polaroids of andrei tarkovsky : the mystery of everyday life”, at Gwarlingo, 9 May 013; Lawrence Upton, “Collage in a rolled medium”, at experiential-experimental-literature, 23 Jun 013; Karl Marx, as quoted in David Adam, “Marx, Bakunin, and the question of authoritarianism”, at libcom, 12 Sept 010, via Aindriu MacFehin, FB post, 24 Jun 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1365

Now, I understand that this little fable might leave you, the reader, feeling a bit unsettled, in part because this is, after all, set up as a butcher’s story and not a cabinet maker’s. But so it goes; the missing young man is never mentioned again. But his mail will probably be forwarded, tho, as quietly as this pink fluff or a question or morphine or impatience or a mistake or the infinite method established by the creamy ovoids flaming in the air-conditioned xanax car. Only the ‘preparations’ are complete; the result is empty spurious leverage / are you waiting for the translation? / animals with voice amplifiers / what’s that bird? I’m not from around here. I haven’t cut my nails since we arrived here. I wondered if I should cut my nails when we arrived here. But in the subsequent month they’ve hardly grown. “Something in the water, perhaps,” F suggests when I tell her. She looks down at her own nails. I looked at my nails the day after we arrived here and wondered if I should cut them. A month later, they’ve hardly grown. “Something in the water,” F suggests when I tell her. She shrugs. She won’t let me look at her nails, but later I catch her examining them carefully. I remember looking at my nails the day after we arrived and asking F if she thought I should cut them. A month later they’ve hardly grown. F shrugs. “Something in the water,” she suggests. She won’t let me look at her nails, but later I catch her at the bathroom sink, washing her hands, spreading her fingers, washing again. “What’s the matter?” The day after we arrived, I remember, I asked F if she thought I should cut my nails. A month later they’ve hardly grown. F shrugs. “Something in the water,” she suggests. She won’t let me look at her nails–though I am always up for inspection, F never is. But later, passing the bathroom door, I catch her at the sink, washing her hands, spreading her fingers hands held flat above the water, washing again. “What’s the matter?” I ask. “Nothing,” she says, smiling and closing the door. “Nothing’s the matter.” Then, from inside: “Nothing, nothing, nothing’s the matter.”

This is a badly decorated crisis.
I find myself floating face down in the sea.
Time to migrate to the next condo.
Any more blustering and I
Collapse as deciduous replenishment.
You don’t. You just push off into
The mirror of excessive drift
The ensuing catastrophe, unequal
In a gorgeous relativity
To itself. Only a gag reflex escapes.
To be primitive is to eat fur while living in a hole –
Happens as premonition and anamnesis:
It is beautiful to be an “and”.
No surprise I think I smell a fugue –
Weight of forelegs and hooves under water –
Coming on. Do you think rivers
Were ever here, I ask?

Nicola sez: “You: a maze, one way out, not taken.” Me: “Do you actually believe there is a way out?” Jozsef: “Compare this to dialethia (true contradiction) and analethia (not true, but not false, assertable). This is either one of those. In any case, we want to assert and we want to assert there is a way out, whether or not there literally actually is one.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Karin Gottshall, “The Beautiful is Negative: Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems”, at Drunken Boat 15; Mary Ruefle, “Mimosa”, at Poets.org; Bruce Andrews, “Earth 5”, in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology Second Edition (ed. Paul Hoover); < M John Harrison, “something in the water”, at the m john harrison blog, 22 Jun 013; Maged Zaher, “12”, Lawrence Giffin, “Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious”, Aaron McCullough, Underlight, Tomaž Šalamun, On The Tracks Of Wild Game (tr. Sonja Kravanja), in Ugly Ducking Presse 2012 Catalog; Elizabeth Robinson, “Stained Syllogism”, Charles Bernstein, “Virtual Reality”, Will Alexander “Thought as Philosophical Torment”, Gilian Conoley, “This Land Is My Land”, Linh Dinh, “Body Eats”, Maxine Chernoff, “Scenes from Ordinary Life”, Myung Mi Kim, “From Penury”, in Hoover; Nicola sez: JBR, but see next; Nicola Masciandaro, FB post, 22 May 013; JBR, FB comment, 22 Jun 013, appended to previous; JBR, but see next; Jozsef J Kele, FB comment, in response to mine, 23 Jun 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1364

Here is a small neck collection: I went in but didn’t go under water. I am up to my neck in crocodiles. He / she really stuck their neck out for you. Neckface. I’m not going to break my neck to do this. Off with your head. Turtles are shy. Neck and neck. What’s in a neck? A throat. What happens when there is a disconnect between your head and the rest of your body? What does it mean to be neckless? You lose the vagus nerve. There are plenty of places where turtles are not “shy” when they have their heads on straight. Yeezus is still fresh. A lot of people are listening to it and talking about it, including Roxane Gay. Here is what she says: “There’s this bridge where Kanye raps, ‘You see it’s leaders and it’s followers / But I’d rather be a dick than a swallower.’ I am really fixated on these lyrics. Must be nice to have a choice between one and the other. But I particularly do not care for the denigration of swallowing, which is a fine and mighty thing. And if this is what Yeezus believes, he doesn’t think much of anyone who might swallow, so that’s probably awkward for his romantic relationships. I’m over thinking these lyrics, but one thing I know for sure — respect the swallower, you asshole, or the throat will close up.” Each time I pass the garage of a certain yellow house, I am greeted with barking. The first time this occurred, an instinctive fear seemed to run through me. I have never been attacked. Yet I firmly believed that if I opened the door I should confront a dog. Arendt says, I had read the fairy tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying, but I am your child, I am your Hannah – that is what it was like today between me and my 2 pound lump of electrical problems. Flageolets of fire he says there will be for my sadly misfiring pump. It’s all automatic, spooking the flowers. Are you asleep? The sleeper has two left sides. It wants no straps. Its dreams are light glowing up from under flowing water. We’ll finish the story later with the words at hand. Keep a top eye out for visions. Considering the worldwide trend towards mass deportation, how long will it be, do you think, before the nations of the world turn the plastic trash swirl in the Pacific into the new Devil’s Island? Do you hope for, look toward, seek out beauty in other aspects of your life? I was contemplating this question the other day as I was walking in the Art Gallery of Ontario, my nine-month old son sleeping on my chest in a cloth carrier. I do not always experience beauty in art museums, but on this day, I did: first, in the moody, dark-cased photographs of the Czech photographer Josef Sudek; and then in the studied part-singing of the American chamber choir Lionheart, which was performing in an adjoining room. Drawn from the photo exhibition by those harmonizing voices, I followed them, and stood for a long time in the cloisters of the atrium, listening. The music was from a hymnbook 700 years old; 200 years ago, that book was disassembled, its leaves scattered among collectors. What we, in that art-museum audience, were witnessing was a secular resurrection: Donne’s library in which ‘all our scattered leaves’ are bound up again, Dionysus put back together after his dismemberment, Wolverine reassembled from the score of his backbone … this sequence of hymns reassembled, transcribed, and brought to voice, for the first time in 200 years.

[Note: Sources: Michele Christle, “neck collection”, at Michele Christle, 19 Jun 013; Ron Silliman, “FROM The Chinese Notebook”, in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology Second Edition (ed. Paul Hoover); JBR, but see next; Maxine Chernoff, “Scenes from Ordinary Life”, in Hoover; JBR, with a bit cut in and mangled from Ed Dorn, Gunslinger, Book 1; Larry Fagin, “No Real Than You Are”, at The The, 16 Jun 011; JBR, FB post, 23 Jun 013; Sue Sinclair, and Amanda Jernigan, as quoted in Sinclair’s “Amanda Jernigan on Beauty”, at Lemon Hound, 22 Jun 013]