In the middle of the devil’s curse
Is the sky falling down?
A horse runs through the basement and the world has become dark
The number of dead
The number of missing people is increasing only
At that time the sky will fall off
To eerie smoke
To the ghost body of radiation
Wu peach space earth pupil pupil blink
Then countless boats jump in, they jump in
Without 3.11, I would have never seen a lonely cross section
And up
The world robs the world
I wonder what “absolutely” is
Absolutely there is absolutely no thing that there is never absolutely no
thing that there is never absolutely nothing absolutely never that
there is never absolutely that there is never ...
The earth is a big river Ocean Omnism
What?
Let’s ship the ship and paddle the poem
Let’s live a new poem to live a new poem
Short but intense
History of the earthquake
Many tears
Stalls of the earthquake
Angry sorrow
Darkness light
At the bottom of the dark night valley
Let’s hear the leaves of the leaves
What did you see with this earthquake?
Awesome radioactivity
Did you see the crying cow crying person who cries?
His moment of crying and crying for a cow he raised
The man crying and nestling his cheek on his cherished cow
Did you stare at the sandbox without anyone to play with?
He caught crying for a cow, cried him, cried him, the wind and the
earth he was friendly to
Whether it can be regained, four queen poet, five poet poet, six
sentence poet ...
To rain the rainbow
So that the earth is becoming round
And an infinite number of boots will come flying in
And pulling up the roots, the world steals the world
Negated by the certainty that ... negated by the certainty that ... negated
by the certainty that ... negated by the certainty that ...
negated by the certainty that ...
What?
The spirit mutators words
Halfway across, the dolphin science teachers
Felt the original drone had lost weight. Somehow
There was a mistake back there in the first click
Moth them like helicopters on fire and go dappling down
Doink is frabba jabba, but in a decayed state of HEIGH HO!
Foinked by Life?
I’m twilighted cared for, yes, and it’s <doink> — <doink> — <doink>
foinky and <doink> state regulated
After five billion years of trawling for possible life forms in the supra-dimensional “realities,” she falls asleep (“asleep”? yes!). This being the indispensable bonding moment with which all discernible organic matter can take form. Midway thru this cosmic doze, she wakes up unable to go back to sleep. She punches out an enormous black hole next to two quasars and teases out a small dark energy vacuum filled with fresh nothingness. She takes a couple of deep hits. Once she feels it (the fresh nothingness) coming on, she transports her oldest, original light to the edge of the expansion horizon, and from the inner core of a lone, red giant collapsing star, gathers all its deuterium. She transports it (or, rather quantum entangles it) to a spacious quadrant that’s rich in anti-matter, and for five one-millionths of a second, indulges in bright matter recombinatory excess, erm, how to inform you that your fetus is into providing weapons to other fetuses at select places around the world. It picked up the taste for this trade two months ago while you were all on vacation in Florida. That “nice fetus from Oregon” who taught your fetus how to properly synthesize proteins in macrophage cell membranes, remember? By the fourth day they were filling invoices for M1A2 Abrams tanks. So try to figure out what it is like to plode. This new music, spun out of the general matter-of-fact disaster, is new social logic: jbu jbu ... jbu jbu: EXPLOSION ROCKS SPRINGFIELD. While the initial infection vector is unclear, Petya likely attempts to spread to other hosts using the SMB protocol by exploiting the ETERNALBLUE vulnerability (CVE-2017-0144) on Microsoft Windows systems. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed by the Shadow Brokers group in April 2017. Once a successful infection has occurred, the malware encrypts users’ systems and prompts demand a $300 payment to return access. For detailed analysis on the Petya attack playbook, please see our blog from the Unit 42 threat research team. I mean, it rained for 48 hours straight in New York this week and, stuck inside with two kids and no childcare, we watched the movie Paddington approximately 108 times. There is nothing I can’t tell you about this film, from the fact that the first exterior shot of Paddington station is, clearly, Marylebone, to the insanity of its timeline. (Briefly: the film is set in present-day London, but Paddington’s aunt and uncle were discovered in Peru by an Edwardian explorer, whose 10-year-old daughter grows up to be Paddington’s arch-enemy. By rights, she should be about 117, but is instead played by Nicole Kidman as a sexy evil lady of not even 50.) Why does no one have mobile phones? Why does the Trellick Tower loom so large in the landscape? At A-level, we were made to read King Lear on a continuous loop for two years until the two funniest lines became: “out, vile jelly!” and “Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.” I can say with some confidence that the two funniest lines in Paddington are, “Your call is moderately important to us” and “It’s more a set of guidelines than a binding ethos.” This is why Sloterdijk is at pains to show us the need for imaginative participation from the start, on the threshold of the first volume (BUBBLES) with his meditation on the apocryphal image of the invocation “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here” inscribed, according to tradition, over the entrance to Plato’s Academy, and his replacement of this requirement with the less élitist maxim:
let no one enter who is unwilling to praise transference and to refute solitude.
And this is why I started working on an LP to explore these ideas, approaching the process like field recording — not suppressing any “extraneous” sounds, whether involuntary vocalizations I might make while I played or the noise coming in from the street outside my Mission District apartment — just letting things happen. I was inspired by Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing, Derek Bailey's “domestic” home-recorded CDs, certain Folkways releases, and the recordings of Alan Lomax, the intensity and obsessiveness of Cecil Taylor and Charlemagne Palestine, the solo guitar music of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Carlos Montoya, the writing of Christopher Knowles and Gertrude Stein, and especially videos by a small community of neurodivergent YouTubers self-documenting the way they experienced and interacted with the world.
[...]
Thanks, folks! This week, we look at Minimalism.
How about that fuckin’ Minimalism, huh? [...]
I mean ... take a look at the Goddam exquisite
placement of limbs, by Kazuo Ohno
in his prime — you know ...Japanese Dance Of
Death! Fuckin’ delicate balance of
negative and positive space [...]
Or the noise in Van Gogh’s earless sunflowers — ca
tchin the breeze like a Jersey trucker layin’ out
on the I91.
Flat out subtle as shit. Now lookit
that guy who cuts up cows and [...]
Just thinkin’ about it gives me hope! Like a little
daisy poppin’ thru dirt rectifying the millennium stench. O
r a kitty kat in the
sun, an entire civilization of
modern communication, right there! [...]
qqqq the sound of Pig crying along with a crow perched on its head
qqqq
Furthermore, the rat and the railing in the subway tunnel rhyme with the rat and the railing in the house where Laura is held (and is not held) a prisoner. The house, or its fictional image, rhymes with the blown-up picture of that house on a huge advertisement — on which the representation of a door turns out to be a real door through which people walk and through whose keyhole the locksmith peeks. And so on. Then there is a gap, a blank space, a pause of indeterminate length during which nothing happens, not even the anticipation of what will come next. And suddenly the action resumes, without warning, and the same scene occurs again ... But which scene? I am closing the door behind me, a heavy wooden door with a tiny oblong window near the top, its pane protected by a cast-iron grille (clumsily imitating wrought iron) which almost entirely covers it. The interlacing spirals, thickened by successive layers of black paint, are so close together, and there is so little light from the other side of the door, that nothing can be seen of what might or might not be inside. And now there has just appeared a “cat” somewhere in the sentence: a deaf man and a cat. The deaf man, I’m convinced, is the trumpet player at “Old Joe’s.”
What is need?
What is comfort?
What does perdepistatiplode [“to simultaneously implode and explode (barest
act of plode”] achieve, precisely?
It is fun to type with eyes dilated.
A YouTube video can devastate the psyche; you can eat a whole stick of butter without realizing; carefully curated collage material can be mistaken for an envelope of trash. Like, I just stood in my room, smelling the cat piss carpet, pulling at my hair absentmindedly, probably just having a seizure while eating a stick of butter.
What is “doink”, precisely?
Croink. Wherefrom Foink?
Why doink in croinky foinkiness?
How goes PSHSHSHSHSHSHSH in there?
A twitter running down the spine of ...
Oh God, it can’t be. (Insert song of mourning.)
God and time, spine of the world — yawn, blah, blah, schma ...
What I meant to say is
are you sure yr a person
you look more like an artichoke
xe had me weigh platinum in my palm
I was like got weed
xanadu politico frijolillo myn eye
(trolly lolly)
as one eagle scout to another
-------------------------------
here are plans for a Transparency Grenade, a Device for The Emancipation of the Landscape and an Improvised Empathetic Device, which I got from a manual subtitled “how to punch Nazis in the face, minus the punching.” Then we were all given the same premise: Flight ANA0008 en route to San Francisco passes through a timespace distortion over the Pacific Ocean and ends up in 2037. As you can see by this imaginary illustration, they’re not exactly skimping on the production values (although one might wonder why the flight crew wouldn’t just steer around any giant cosmic bagel that reared up in their path ...). Once again, I asked Kathryn if she had perhaps mixed me up with someone else. She insisted that I had an appropriate sense of humor for the job. I said “well, if weaponised Ebola” ... “Wait a second. Everyone had a brain interface when the flare hit? On the whole planet?” “Well, no,” Tami admits. “Lots of people didn’t.” “But none were Americans,” George says. It takes Malika a moment to process this. “So you’re saying every single American had a brain interface in 2032.” A moment’s silence. “It was kind of a law,” Tami says at last. “War on Terror,” George adds. “You remember.” “Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.” “Saves a lot of time.” “Plus, you know. Pedophiles.” “Think of the children.” They trail off ... Did I tell you I was diagnosed with ptosis?
Nobody else knows I’m a super hero.
The rest all think I’m crazy
but at night I fly
even though I’m
still bad at it
and crash into the sidewalk.
By day
I wash the cars
that carry today’s kings.
After dark
I don’t know who
flicks the switch
on my electric roses.
But after Kenneth Goldsmith chose to play with Mike Brown’s corpse’s junk and heard about it and heard about it and we all heard about it, why did Derek Beaulieu choose to erase the voice of Ondine? That’s what’s known as an almost-rhetorical question. Almost. Did I tell you I was also diagnosed with hyperopia? Which is to say that as much as there is appetite for lyrics about the state of affairs in Chez Knowles-Carter, there’s music to be considered as well. Sonically, 4:44 is a conservative affair, No ID opting for recognisable samples (Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sister Nancy’s much-used Bam Bam).
Bam bam, ey, what a bam bam
Bam bam dilla, bam bam
Bam bam dilla, bam bam
‘ey what a bam bam, seh what a bam bam
Scarborough, a former Florida Republican congressman, said: “We got a call: ‘Hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys, and Donald is friends with … the president is friends with the guy that runs National Enquirer.’ And they said: ‘If you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story.’” He added: “I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me. The calls kept coming, and kept coming, and they were like: ‘Come on, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.’” Scarborough said he declined to do so, and the story ran. Brzezinski also alleged that as part of the National Enquirer’s reporting, her teenage daughters were harassed with frequent phone calls. In a tweet on Friday morning, Trump fired back, and alleged that Scarborough had called him about the negative article. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” wrote the president of the United States. Isn’t this as much as to say, with Rosa Alcalá and Joe Brainard,
I never had use
in Spanish for the word
barn
and then
“I woke up and a horse
was staring at me”???
But in the end, what remains mindblowing on the nth listen is the Wright keyboard work about 2/3 of the way through “Dogs.” That piercing solo intermixed with the word “stone” vocoding into the muffled groan of the post-Hadean slime, while dogs bark as if rippling in water on either side of the stereo image. Which is geographically, psychologically and aesthetically pretty accurate as far as it goes. I grew up where prehistoric ferns grew among railway tracks surmounted by arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night. A couple of miles, give or take, from Battersea Power Station. But answer me this: what was the name of the pig?
Bloom, Pig!
Fly, Pig!
Boars come and tear into the pigs
A flock of eagles comes and tears into the pigs
Night of internal organs raining down from the sky!
Night of flashing decapitated pigs!
Fearful night, unable to discard Pig even if I die and die again!
Night filled with pig squeals from all over!
Night of screams, I’m Pig! Pig!
Night when pigs bloom dangling-dangling from the pig-tree
[Inside the grave, stomachs fill with broth, broth and gas]
What good is a nature poem anyway?
“It seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty
which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given
human agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about
colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny.”
Which is why, at his trial Chen Yunfei said: “I’ve been tormented for two years now, to the point that I’ve started to feel like the Monkey King trapped in the searing flames of Lao Zi’s crucible — exceedingly comfortable. The persecution, the beatings, the shackling, have all turned into mathematical problems for me to solve. The harder they get, the more interesting it is, the more meaningful it feels to unravel them.” Like
“Whoever writes the code creates the value.”
“That isn’t even close to true.”
“Yes it is. Value resides in life, and life is coded, like with DNA.”
“So bacteria have values?”
“Sure. All life wants things and goes after them. Viruses, bacteria, all the way up to us.”
“Which by the way it’s your turn to clean the toilet.”
“I know. Life means death.”
“So, today?”
“Some today. Back to my point. We write code. And without our code, there’s no computers, no finance, no banks, no money, no exchange value, no value.”
“All but that last, I see what you mean. But so what?”
“Did you read the news today?”
“Of course not.”
“You should. It’s bad. We’re getting eaten.”
“That’s always true. It’s like what you said, life means death.”
“But more than ever. It’s getting too much. They’re down to the bone.”
“This I know. It’s why we live in a tent on a roof.”
“Right, and now people are even worried about food.”
“As they should. That’s the real value, food in your belly. Because you can’t eat money.”
“That’s what I’m saying!”
“I thought you said the real value was code. Something a coder would say, may I point out.”
“Mutt, hang with me. Follow what I’m saying. We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.”
“Okay, I get that. We’re broke and I get that.”
“So good, keep hanging with me. We live by buying things with money, in a market that sets all the prices.”
“The invisible hand.”
“Right. Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It’s crowdsourced, it’s democratic, it’s capitalism, it’s the market.”
“It’s the way of the world.”
“Right. And it’s always, always wrong.”
“What do you mean wrong?”
“The prices are always too low, and so the world is fucked. We’re in a mass extinction event, sea level rise, climate change, food panics, everything you’re not reading in the news.”
“All because of the market.”
“Exactly! It’s not just that there are market failures. It’s that the market is a failure.”
“How so?”
“Things are sold for less than it costs to make them.”
“That sounds like the road to bankruptcy.”
“Yes, and lots of businesses do go bankrupt. But the ones that don’t haven’t actually sold their thing for more than it cost to make. They’ve just ignored some of their costs. They’re under huge pressure to sell as low as they can, because every buyer buys the cheapest version of whatever it is. So they shove some of their production costs off their books.”
“Can’t they just pay their labor less?”
“They already did that! That was easy. That’s why we’re all broke except the plutocrats.”
“I always see the Disney dog when you say that.”
“They’ve squeezed us till we’re bleeding from the eyes. I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Blood from a stone. Sir Plutocrat, chewing on a bone.”
“Chewing on my head! But now we’re chewed up. We’re squoze dry. We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.”
“But they got a cheap TV out of it.”
“Right, so they can watch something interesting as they sit there broke.”
“Except there’s nothing interesting on.”
“Well, but this is the least of their problems! I mean actually you can usually find something interesting.”
“Please, I beg to differ. We’ve seen everything a million times.”
“Everyone has. I’m just saying the boredom of bad TV is not the biggest of our worries. Mass extinction, hunger, wrecking kids’ lives, these are bigger worries. And it just keeps getting worse. People are suffering more and more. My head is going to explode the way things are going, I swear to God.”
“You’re just upset because we got evicted and are living in a tent on a roof.”
“That’s just part of it! A little part of a big thing.”
“Okay, granted. So what?”
“So look, the problem is capitalism. We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. That’s what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws.”
“Say I grant that too, which maybe I do. So what can we do?”
“It’s a set of laws! And it’s global! It extends all over the Earth, there’s no escaping it, we’re all in it, and no matter what you do, the system rules!”
“I’m not seeing the what‑we‑can‑do part.”
“Think about it! The laws are codes! And they exist in computers and in the cloud. There are sixteen laws running the whole world!”
“To me that seems too few. Too few or too many.”
“No. They’re articulated, of course, but it comes down to sixteen basic laws. I’ve done the analysis.”
“As always. But it’s still too many. You never hear about sixteen of anything. There are the eight noble truths, the two evil stepsisters. Maybe twelve at most, like recovery steps, or apostles, but usually it’s single digits.”
“Quit that. It’s sixteen laws, distributed between the World Trade Organization and the G20. Financial transactions, currency exchange, trade law, corporate law, tax law. Everywhere the same.”
“I’m still thinking that sixteen is either too few or too many.”
“Sixteen I’m telling you, and they’re encoded, and each can be changed by changing the codes. Look what I’m saying: you change those sixteen, you’re like turning a key in a big lock. The key turns, and the system goes from bad to good. It helps people, it requires the cleanest techs, it restores landscapes, the extinctions stop. It’s global, so defectors can’t get outside it. Bad money gets turned to dust, bad actions likewise. No one could cheat. It would make people be good.”
“Please Jeff? You’re sounding scary.”
“I’m just saying! Besides, what’s scarier than right now?”
“Change? I don’t know.”
“Why should change be scary? You can’t even read the news, right? Because it’s too fucking scary?”
“Well, and I don’t have the time.”
Jeff laughs till he puts his forehead on the table. Mutt laughs too, to see his friend so amused. But the mirth is very localized. They are partners, they amuse each other, they work long hours writing code for high-frequency trading computers uptown. Now some reversals have them on this night living in a hotello on the open-walled farm floor of the old Met Life tower, from which vantage point lower Manhattan lies flooded below them like a super-Venice, majestic, watery, superb. Their town.
Jeff says, “So look, we know how to get into these systems, we know how to write code, we are the best coders in the world.”
“Or at least in this building.”
“No come on, the world! And I’ve already gotten us in to where we need to go.”
“Say what?”
“Check it out. I built us some covert channels during that gig we did for my cousin. We’re in there, and I’ve got the replacement codes ready. Sixteen revisions to those financial laws, plus a kicker for my cousin’s ass. Let the SEC know what he’s up to, and also fund the SEC to investigate that shit. I’ve got a subliminal shunt set up that will tap some alpha and move it right to the SEC’s account.”
“Now you really are scaring me.”
“Well sure, but look, check it out. See what you think.”
Mutt moves his lips when he reads. He’s not saying the words silently to himself, he’s doing a kind of Nero Wolfe stimulation of his brain. It’s his favorite neurobics exercise, of which he has many. Now he begins to massage his lips with his fingers as he reads, indicating deep worry.
“Well, yeah,” he says after about ten minutes of reading. “I see what you’ve got here. I like it, I guess. Most of it. That old Ken Thompson Trojan horse always works, doesn’t it. Like a law of logic. So, could be fun. Almost sure to be amusing.”
Jeff nods. He taps the return key. His new set of codes goes out into the world.
They leave their hotello and stand at the railing of their building’s farm, looking south over the drowned city, taking in the whitmanwonder of it. O Mannahatta! Lights squiggle off the black water everywhere below them. Downtown a few lit skyscrapers illuminate darker towers, giving them a geological sheen. It’s weird, beautiful, spooky.
There’s a ping from inside their hotello, and they push through the flap into the big square tent. Jeff reads his computer screen.
“Ah shit,” he says. “They spotted us.”
They regard the screen.
“Shit indeed,” Mutt says. “How could they have?”
“I don’t know, but it means I was right!”
“Is that good?”
“It might even have worked!”
“You think?”
“No.” Jeff frowns. “I don’t know.”
“They can always recode what you did, that’s the thing. Once they see it.”
“So do you think we should run for it?”
“To where?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s like you said before,” Mutt points out. “It’s a global system.”
“Yeah but this is a big city! Lots of nooks and crannies, lots of dark pools, the underwater economy and all. We could dive in and disappear.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know. We could try.”
Then the farm floor’s big service elevator door opens. Mutt and Jeff regard each other. Jeff thumbs toward the staircases. Mutt nods. They slip out under the tent wall. I do not weigh 577lb anymore. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that. There was a boy. I loved him. His name was Christopher. That’s not really his name. I was 12 when I was raped by Christopher and several of his friends in an abandoned cabin in the woods where no one but those boys could hear me scream. I don’t remember their names. They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men. I remember their smells, the squareness of their faces, the weight of their bodies, the tangy smell of their sweat, the surprising strength in their limbs. I remember that they laughed a lot. I remember that they had nothing but disdain for me. When it was all over, I pushed my bike home and I pretended to be the daughter my parents knew, the straight-A student. My memories of the after are scattered, but I remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body could become so big it would never be broken again. But now I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. When it’s hot, I sweat profusely. My shirt gets damp. There are things I want to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot keep up, so ...
Bam bam, ey, what a bam bam
Bam bam dilla, bam bam
Bam bam dilla, bam bam
‘ey what a bam bam, seh what a bam bam
And at the bottom of the ocean, a GIANT BRAIN, built with several bowed metal rulers, spring reverbs, a few long metal rods, and other attachments that allow two people with covered lanterns to stand on the brow of adjacent foothills. Watch them walking forward from folklore carrying tilted umbrellas. Faint whispers. Galaxy clusters. Telescopes also need to be tilted a little. Calendar songs, family trees, broken branches, love songs, songs of captives, songs of robbers, songs around the campfire. Chocorua is the highest mountain peak in New Hampshire. When Chief Chocorua leapt from its rocky summit to his death on the rocks below, war was in his heart. He put a curse on the land. “Last night at the end of night his starry head, / Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness.” “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” is one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems. Let’s face things exactly as they are. He led a double life as a successful Surety and Fidelity Claims lawyer. Speaking of the practice of law in relation to writing and second sight, Peter Rugg, the Missing Man is the first of “two tall tales” written by William Austin (1778–1841), a Massachusetts attorney. Austin presents its source as an old New England legend. An absent husband responsible for his own mysterious ruin is condemned to wander with his small daughter in a one-horse chair perpetually searching for Boston. In one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lesser stories, “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” Rugg crops up with Peter Schlemihl’s lost shadow and a famed New Hampshire gemstone. The precious jewel, said to sparkle (like a meteor) called for another Hawthorne story, “The Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains,” this time inspired by an Amerindian fable from Saco, Maine: a manic Ruggian seeker wanders among mountains searching for the marvelous stone until forever. In the fall of 1889, then, Leonora Piper, the famous Boston medium, spent a week with William James and his wife at their house at Chocorua for discussions concerning various aspects of trance-phenomena including her trance-talk with “Phinuit” “a former native of this world.” One afternoon they took a break from work and went fishing. Mrs. Piper caught the largest bass ever recorded in the lake. There. Messages flow through clear lake water and yes, gravity pulls matter together to form a cosmic web. Even if this looks like the end of my Picnic at Lake Armington story, the three of us are strung together like beads on a necklace. My fingers are too arthritic to work the little clasp. Do you think Socrates and Ondine are, in some sense, the same person? Our fathermother, who art in heaven, ended up spending a quarter of his monthly salary on an electronic dictionary, we buried our fathermother too many times, each time we went deeper, hir face went colder, and the signal weaker. Our motherfather, who art in heaven, ended up spending a quarter of hir life covering her black skull, burned legs and scars — so now I cook ramen through the ocean,
I dream of my babies becoming Marco Rubio and Obamacare
I spent two weeks in the Borneo rainforest
I spent a week with the family in Prague
At Pt Lobos, trying to get a better view of a starfish, I fell on the rocks
In 1998 I had a great idea: franchise a band
Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were — Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore — and perform the material — and they would be the band. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance — surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band — and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on. Similarly, it may be interesting to watch films that Whedon acted as screenwriter for, many of which are not very good, to try to discern his ‘stamp.’ In Alien: Resurrection (1997), for example, one immediately has the sense that there is a sense of team similar to that in all of Whedon’s productions. AR, for instance, features a group trying to escape the aliens together, whereas in previous installments of the series the escapes tended not to be so team oriented. Though a few of the characters in AR are picked-off, most are not. In Toy Story, which Whedon co-wrote, I wonder if the cyborg (or mutant? I’m not sure what to call them) toys, who help Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear escape from their sadistic, adolescent captor, were his contribution. The cyborg toys present a kind of shadow team, in contrast to the toys of the house next door, who have not had their body parts recombined into novel arrangements. That the mutant toys signify non-normative genders through their body parts, such as the fishing rod with Barbie doll legs, also seems to me a possible sign of his touch. As for Much Ado About Nothing, one slowly realizes that most of the cast had worked with Whedon before; Acker and Denisof on Angel; Denisof, Lenk and Lindhome on Buffy; Fillion and Maher on Firefly; Acker, Denisof, Diamond, Kranz and Johnson on Dollhouse; Gregg, Denisof, Rosemont and Johnson in The Avengers. You also start to think about what it means for a director to make a film in their home (the film was shot over a period of twelve days in Whedon’s family’s house in Santa Monica, California). This is his team, then, and the drama that they enact, as in all comedies, is about how to bring certain people into a happier or more productive [there’s got to be a better word] relation. So yes, the earth in Volcano is damp, soft, porous, built as it is on old lava fields. One side of the old steam house had started to sink. It’s crumbly ground, composed of dead ferns, o’hia leaves, koa and o’hia trees, and other organic matter, with a layer of moss on stones and tree trunks. The land is incredibly fragile. For a couple days I heard, through the screen of rain and bird song, a loud mechanical noise from about half a mile away. I walked to it, finding a large bulldozer clearing a lot of all vegetation, leaving only the dark brown mud. A couple lots further down the road, another lot was clear, except for chopped off trees standing like the warriors of Xian. Downtown Volcano, if there is one, features a huge new strip mall, with Thai restaurant, hardware store, and a “lodge” ... which I imagine is a fancy name for motel. Speaking of Albert Saijo, his group reading in Honolulu with Gary Snyder and Nanao Sakaki was an unrepeated event. There’s a grainy video of his trip to Los Angeles to meet with a class and discourse to the birds in Echo Park. The more people who do it, the better it works. Although putting a mask on in public on a regular basis is impractical, physically anonymizing yourself in public spaces should become commonsense for navigating contentious political events. So we’ve culled the faces from 130 executives at leading biometric corporations around the world and transformed them into masks for you to print out and wear. Since they’ve chosen to profit by face-snatching the rest of us, we figured that we would resist by doing the same in reverse. This isn’t to say that donning one of these masks isn’t without risk. Aiding the growing use of biometric technology is the increasing criminalization of disguise at political demonstrations: Prosecutors in the cases against inauguration day protesters in Washington, DC, are using the alleged facts that people wore masks and matching black clothing as evidence of criminal intent. Several states either have or are actively attempting to pass laws against masks. Which is to say [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money. Which is to say, “Pieces of eight — pieces of eight, um who’s shoulder am I sitting on?”
[Note: Sources: Ryoichi Wago, “Horizon Over the Sea, Horizon Over the Land” (trs. Google, Koichiro Yamauchi and Steve Redford), at Versoteque, 2017; Ian Heames, Sonnets (May 017); Rodrigo Toscano, “So you’re saying”, “Are you doubly sure you want to perdipstatiplode?”, in Explosion Rocks Springfield; Rodrigo Toscano, “La Creadora”, in Deck of Deeds; JBR; Rodrigo Toscano, “El Commerciante”, in Deck of Deeds; JBR; Fred Moten, back cover blurb for Rodrigo Toscano, Explosion Rocks Springfield; JBR; Fred Moten, back cover blurb for Rodrigo Toscano, Explosion Rocks Springfield; Scott Simkin, “Palo Alto Networks Protections for Petya Ransomware”, at Palo Alto Networks, 27 Jun 017; JBR; Emma Brockes, “I’ve seen the light – Paddington Bear as the one true way”, at The Guardian, 1 Dec 016; JBR; Terence Blake, “IMAGINE SPHERES: Sloterdijk’s refutation of solitude”, at Agent Swarm, 28 Jun 017; JBR; Bill Orcutt, “Field Recording”, at BOMB, 27 Jun 017; Edwin Torres, “‘What the Fuck Was That?’ A Look at Contemporary Culture with Dom Rizzo”, in The Popedology of an Ambient Language; Kim Hyesoon, “Pig Pigs Out” (tr. Don Mee Choi), in Currently & Emotion: Translations (ed. Sophie Collins); anon, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, A Project for a Revolution in New York (tr. Richard Howard), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Alain Robbe-Grillet Project for a Revolution in New York (1970)”, at DC’s, 26 Jun 017; Rodigo Toscano, “The Saturday Morning Gas Explosion in Manhattan”, in Explosion Rocks Springfield; JBR; blurb for Tati Luboviski-Acosta, PDF, at Solar Luxuriance; Tati Luboviski-Acosta, PDF, at Solar Luxuriance; Rodrigo Toscano, “What is leveling to s bit of stability?”, in Explosion Rocks Springfield; Ana Božičević, “God is President, She’s the Rose of the World”, at Poetry Foundation; Julian Talamantez Brolaski, “rules for bones”, “a bee’s feather”, in Of Mongrelitude, at SPD; Jussi Parikka, “On Disobedient Electronics”, at Machinology (a kind of shout-out for “Garnet Hertz’s new critical design zine Disobedient Electronics”); JBR; Peter Watts, “Promises, Promises”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 29 Jun 017; JBR; Javier Taboada, “Juanito” (tr. Jack Little), quoted in “From Mexico | Apothecary Poems & Interview: Javier Taboada — Dylan Brennan”, at Numéro Cinq, vol.VII no.1; JBR (re Beaulieu’s erasure of Andy Warhol, a, A Novel, just published by Jean Boîte Éditions); Andrew Emery, “Jay-Z: 4:44 review – a bracingly honest but conservative confessional”, at The Guardian, 30 Jun 017; Sister Nancy, “Bam Bam”; Ben Jacobs, “Morning Joe co-hosts accuse White House of blackmail over tabloid story”, at The Guardian, 30 Jun 017; JBR; Rosa Alcalá, “Heritage Speaker”, at Boston Review, 22 Apr 015; Tim Morton, “I Just Submitted This Review of Pink Floyd’s Animals to iTunes”, at Ecology without Nature, 30 Jun 017; JBR (Algie was the name of the balloon pig on the cover of Animals); Kim Hyesoon, “Bloom, Pig!” (tr. Don Mee Choi), in “from ‘I’m OK, I’m Pig!’ in SORROWTOOTH MIRRORCREAM”, at ActionYes 18; Patrick Abatiell, and Tommy Pico, Nature Poem, quoted in “ON OUR NIGHTSTANDS: JUNE 2017”, at Public Books, 30 Jun 017; JBR; “July Featured Case: Chen Yunfei”, at PEN America, 30 Jun 017; JBR; Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140, at Orbit Books; Roxane Gay, “Roxane Gay: ‘My body is a cage of my own making’”, at The Guardian, 1 Jul 017; JBR; Sister Nancy, “Bam Bam”; JBR; Brandon Shimoda, blurb for Jackie Wang, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming, quoted in Jackie Wang, “blurbs to dream by”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 30 Jun 017; Kate Sierzputowski, “The Apprehension Engine: An Instrument Designed to Play the Music of Nightmares”, at Colossal, 26 Jun 017; Susan Howe, “From the Foreword to Debths”, at The Paris Review, 27 Jun 017; JBR; Chia Lun-Chang, “We’re Your Parents”, quoted in PEN America, “PEN Poetry Series: ‘We’re Your Parents’ by Chia Lun-Chang”, email rec’d 2 Jul 017, approx. 7:01am PDT;John Armstrong, email rec’d 2 Jul 017, approx. 3:05am PDT; Alan Baker, various emails; JBR; Paul Grimstad, “In Stargoon’s Car”, at The Paris Review, 29 Jun 017; Thom Donovan, “from Buffy’s Two Bodies” (deleted post); JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Toward a talk on Albert Saijo”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 21 Jun 017; “You Can Encrypt Your Face”, at The New Inquiry, 21 Jun 017; JBR; M John Harrison, “transcript of an interview”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 17 Jul 017; JBR; Mike Shanahan, comment appended to M John Harrison, “transcript of an interview”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 17 Jul 017]