My Bloody Valentine--Live @ ICA in London 6.13.08.

THUNDER MUD!

Son House--Forever on my Mind

Bukka White--Mama Don't Allow

Rev Gary Davis--If I had my way

Poem for Mind Readers

He disrespected me
in his mind
then there was
the matter of
reading his mind
he didn't know that
I knew how
which made conversation
irrelevant but tricky
to not show anticipation
to acknowledge everything
he said as new
this felt confining
artificial theatrical
so I pretended
not to hear him
carried a radio
with me lived near
the highway
and just sort of stared
blankly when he spoke
it's worked so far.

Sonic Youth -- Schizophrenia (Live)

Global Positioning Devices

1) Pindar's Ninth Olympian Ode
2) Fragments of Heraclitus
"Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed." (Wheelwright translation)
3) Sophocles, Antigone (the first chorus 332-375)
4) Plato, Parmenides (always makes me nervous)

Martin Heidegger

"The notion of obligation in ought"
-Martin Heidegger

Red Hook

The Flaming Lips -- She Don't Use Jelly

Top Three for Saturday

1) Riding my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn.
2) An oatmeal cookie -- with dried cherries and white chocolate chips in it -- from Baked.
3) Walking around Red Hook.

Weekend

I got a seizure from a rusty lid of sardines. The highway makes me work up a good sweat. The industriousness is really profound but I feel vulnerable once again chopping stuff down because it is extremely rewarding. I find men and women young and old and I share my hands I lend them that in the spirit of savoring flung at them. A one-mile wide arm is a dream but I can't take a rental car into a lot of silt--but that's why they are so fertile. You may have heard of this break dancing or thumbing a ride to Hannibal, Missouri. I want to relieve the pressure of a workweek so I get a rental car and I drive to the end of a road and I just sit there and the car pops as it cools down. I can get a bird's eye view from the top of the car a house is crushed or some animals are glowing and that fucks with my mind. I'm fortunate but safe. These unbelievable clothes are wrapping west into a room with water up to my waist I hold a camera and the rental car is floating and the rain has stopped. Weekends I pack the rental car and stamp bags it's little help I chop wood and fill the bags with sand because I am in the woods and the news is flickering in the windows of some home somewhere huddled around watching what I do because I'm down with it. With them. I might not ever come back.

Please Help Flooded Artists in Iowa (click here)

CSPS/Legion Arts, a wonderful decades-old art institution that provides bold and innovative arts programming for most of Iowa, has recently suffered from the catastrophic floods that have plagued central Iowa. The facility is still mostly underwater and their future is in jeopardy. CSPS/Legion Arts is run by F. John Herbert and Mel Andringa -- who happened to have been professors, collaborators -- and downstairs neighbors of mine while I was at the University of Iowa. They are good people keeping the arts alive in Iowa and they need your help. Click the link embedded in the title above and make a donation -- it's so easy to do, it's secure and tax-deductible, and will provide genuine relief to artists who will very much need it. No amount is too small. It's for such a good cause. You'll feel good about it too.

It Hurts

Black Mountain

Today is

a good day for cake

A Small Wonder

It seems there is something
starving so as to ask to be let go
or reeled in this spiked heart
all the vinyl shredded
it might mean something
really getting big
but getting lighter more
as the day progresses
enough anger to shear
the face from the features
that make it a form
a ball now featureless
starving to be told what
to do in the event
of an emergency pull
the goddamn handle and bark
make sounds a guitar
would make in your room
in an emergency
break the glass and and scream
your fucking head off
that means move along
inside the world is starving
too old to get along
just a bunch of stuff
and then more stuff
you could call it a retail world
but the grains of it
each particular part of it
is counter
to the part before it
nothing is continuous
a small wonder we
started the day off at all
and found our way here.

Groove is in the Heart

The song I had going through my head today while I rode 75 miles on my bike...

Ezra Pound

"A little light, like a rushlight
to lead back to splendor."

-Ezra Pound, Canto CXVI

A monument for the people

A monument was erected for the people. The people were supercharged with their desire to see things go through the cycle of being. The cycle of being is defined by the talented people whose job is to define things for the people to think about while they are working to make the talented people feel comfortable about what they are defining. The people wanted to witness rot so with their maps of places of rot they would visit towns they'd like to tear down and then simply start over in another town with new monuments. You can start over in another town with new monuments -- provided you have the cash money -- and that takes work, people. To make room for the burning furniture and pillows -- you know, things like that -- they would spark. The people would settle down in the evening with thin papery thrush around the corners of their mouths because some of the people have talent and having talent means you can chill out while the other people work. The temptation of the people to burn everything in sight was one that was easily resolved with the illumination of the consequences of not having anything left to burn. In the summer heat things like fire are easy to explain explained one of the talented people who was still one of the people. It's a determined look that makes the talented people think you're working hard to be determined not to look like you're loafing around in front of the monument. There are so many sayings that can be said to help the people live better lives and distract them from what you're doing in your free time. For instance: If the architecture is bothering you then you can just take a seat and wait for the stuff to crumble because it will -- did you bring a good book? May I suggest a leave of absence?

Do what you can for the people

Don't let the people know what you are doing when you observe them -- there is hurt in the people -- they carry lunches to work in the world -- there are pieces of balsa that you can use to build a glider for the people -- they bring their lunches to work and accept the idea that everything will be ending so much sooner than they thought -- so why not spend some time at work doing the job that others can no longer be bothered to do? That it's happening -- that most people are no longer 12 but an aging people -- a restless aging people sitting on the dock with water lapping -- the people can smell skunk in the water -- how do you explain skunk in the water? The sun over the McDonald's is listless where the people are shouting and the cars are revving up in the heat. It's all a chrome balm -- a light knife that slices panic into calm for the people. And still the people need to get it on -- get to the Ikea and sample the the stiff stuff that the workers made for the people -- and the food is good -- the heads of hair are bountiful and rapturous -- the pillows hold the heads and the heads are dreaming beefy things with brains that make a meal of the day well into night even when it stops meaning anything you can explain why it stopped meaning anything to the people. So you get the people to accept that and live with that and hold on to that. You do what you can for the people.

Summer Poem

To say
swelter in the
line of looping
heat over fist
light up the area
with candor
and bliss
all the eager
monkey gunk
like nothing
before the after
a sudden shift
and we get
what we deserve
a blanket in summer
a dollar bill
hanging from
a torn lip.

Friday Top 5

1) You can't have what's never been made.
2) When all is said, it's done.
3) It's a fact: When you leave your dog -- with it's high-pitched nerve jangling incessant barking in your apartment all day while you're at work -- your neighbors -- at least the ones with the day off -- will start to hate your guts.
4) Kafka was also unreasonably sensitive to noise.
5) I'm gonna go all punk on your ass.

Three for Friday

Lewis in the position:

Books next to the bed:

The machine I'll be racing on this weekend:

Wednesday Top 5

1) "The Ister" by Friedrich Holderlin
2) John Donne, Body and Soul by Ramie Targoff
3) George Schneeman's "Study for Ted Berrigan's Collected Poems" (It's hanging on our wall!).
4) That fucking dog barking incessantly in our building -- where oh where?
5) A Zipp 808 in the back and a Zipp 404 in the front.

Three for Monday

Robert Creeley, On a Sunday Night

"Was there ever
such foolishness more
than what thinks it knows
and cannot see, was there ever

more? Was the truth
behind us, or before?
Was it one
or two, and who was I?"

From "For Love" by Robert Creeley

Self Experimentation/Click Here