Untitled Spring Poem

weed greens in lot
jumbled with naked black sticks
river runs high
puddles on pavement
adjust to more light
more light

and so it turns
the bully plants bustin' out
the complex grasses yawn and stretch
toward sun closer

it will be farther
but now it's closer
near, far,
round and round

black mud at edge of asphalt
broken rock
spangled wet leftover leaves
there'll still be cold rain
but we stretch, relax, grasp the warm
  to our cores
for the most part, it's here


March 2011

In Rotation: The Vinyl + Edition

I'm back to almost exclusively purchasing my music on vinyl these days.  I do it mainly because I like the objects involved: CDs were almost always inferior to vinyl records as objects, and the initial hype about the "superior sound quality" of digital media was quickly shown to be a lie.  I don't have the high end audio equipment necessary to tell a first-rate vinyl pressing from a well mastered CD*, but vinyl is so much cooler as a package that I will easily spend the extra bucks for it.

However, I tend to forget there are still advantages to CDs . . . remember how excited we were with all Coltrane reissues because songs no longer had to be sliced up to fit on LP sides?  Case in point: Tim Hecker's latest, Ravedeath, 1972.  Composed to be one continuous piece divided into "songs", the Kranky double LP annoyingly has to chop everything up.  The vinyl sounds great, but I'll be purchasing a download on this one.

In Rotation On Vinyl:

Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972
Softcheque: Misericord
Flipper: Public Flipper Ltd.
Verdi: Requiem Mass (Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Alain Lombard, conductor)
Earth: A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra Capsular Extraction
Sun City Girls: Funeral Mariachi
Valley of Ashes: Cavehill Hunter's Attrition
Sapat: Mortise and Tenon
The Phantom Family Halo: Monoliths and These Flowers Never Die
The Phantom Family Halo: Music From Italian TV
Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band
John Cage: Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Lukas Foss, conductor)
Crime: San Francisco's STILL Doomed
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band: It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper
John Cage: Cheap Imitation
Marion Brown: Afternoon of a Georgia Faun
Wipers: Over the Edge
Mark Stewart and the Mafia: s/t
Albert Ayler et.al.: New York Eye and Ear Control
Ennio Morricone: Film Music Volume 1
My Dad Is Dead: The Taller You Are, The Shorter You Get
Calexico: The Black Light
The Mothers of Invention: Burnt Weenie Sandwhich

and, in new-timey digital formats:
Wipers: Youth of America
Royal Trux: Cats and Dogs
Sick City Four: Complete MFT Recordings
Tim Hecker: Harmony in Ultraviolet
DJ Spooky: Creation Rebel
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy
Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for my Halo
Boris: Dronevil
Wire: Pink Flag
Tyvek: Nothing Fits
Earth: Earth 2
John Fahey: The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick

as well as custom playlists by:
Jimi Hendrix
Giant Sand 
David Bowie
Lou Reed
etc.

Next time, maybe I do another one of my mp3 players.  I thought that was kinda a good idea.  Kinda.
____________________
*  Besides, most everything recorded today is recorded digitally, and even though everyone talks about the warmth of analog recording, most recording engineers won't prioritize analog recorders in the process . . . or at least substitute tube technology (or "valve" tech, for all you Brits) for solid state in the signal chain to try to liven up the proceedings.  Digital media will reproduce digital recordings perfectly - that much we know.  For that reason, I think the idea of vinyl as a "warmer" medium is beside the point, especially since no one would dare exploit the analog character of vinyl in the mastering process.

To All My Angry Friends

Stand up and say, like the bastards ye are:

Hello Gomorrah, 
the euthanasia of my soul stops here.
I signed no dying will
that permits you to steal my pain
& makes me safe for the rest of you.
Pain may or may not be life,
but it is mine,
& I claim it.
I claim the right to fight,
I claim the right to feel outside your prescription,
I claim the right to be other.

You told me many things as if they're important,
but I no longer listen.
The din of your ecstasy
is repulsive to me.
I will not share in your need to define
that which does not concern me.
I will not enable your need for approval
from those whom you oppress.
I will not be at the table to split the tab
when the final check comes.

I will always fight
the shape of your hatred.

You can bury me under piles of rationale;
I will swim through.
You will choke me with a steady diet of lies and venom;
I will starve before I match your corpulence.
You can label me, shun me, even kill me . . . 

to me, death can come but once,

you will die always.

You are a salt pillar:
you spawn only desolation.
I am a rotting corpse:
my flowers are beyond your control.

from Spiel In the Face of Those Who Wish You Ill

written 1999

I Would Like to Humbly Point Out . . .

. . . that later today, the Butler Bulldogs will be playing for the national championship.  I came up with something I called the "Butler Theorem" a couple years ago, and I caught a little bit of flack for it back then.  Please allow me to gloat.

Second championship game in two years?  Maybe even a national championship?  Can I get a witness?

Untitled

from my hand
to your paper
as if that's all there is
your equivalences
are pale cold death,
shadows of value, not value

there are other ways to live
where the sun shines, and it is warm
and this warm is not the same as that warm
and this day is not the same as that day
and shadows fade instead of reduplicate
  forever in the coal gray dawn
  of greed and fear

you count this
one, two, three
as if that meaning is real
It isn't.
My one hits here, yours hits there
pale yellow instead of blue
It's not the same
It's not the same


March 2011

Okay, Fine, I'll Play Along

So apparently it's poetry month.  Wee-haw.

Suppose I'll post some verbiage, old and new.

To those who actually pay attention to my rantings, apologies in advance for the duplications.

The Duty of Civil Disobedience Part 2: Governance in the Larger Sense

Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience" in 1848 and 1849.  One of the main roots of Thoreau's discontent, America's invasion of Mexico, ran from 1846 to 1848.  The spoils of that war were most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

John Jacob Astor, the first American multi-millionaire, died March 29, 1848.  The first American transcontinental railroad was started in 1863, and finished in 1869.

Apropos Thoreau's other prime example of American governmental immorality, John Brown helped jump start the American Civil War with the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 and the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859.  In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a US military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.  Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.  Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

Thoreau himself died of tuberculosis in 1862.

Ireland's Great Famine, known here as the Irish Potato Famine, ran from 1845 to 1852.  This famine was probably the source of the biggest voluntary migration to the United States, though one hesitates to call escaping starvation and death completely voluntary.

In January 1848, the very same month Thoreau began delivering a series of lectures that would become the basis of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", Karl Marx finished the Communist Manifesto.

I don't have a blackboard, but there are some connections here.

*          *          *          *          *

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.  Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.  As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.  Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.  -- Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

With Marx and Thoreau, we have historic attacks on what can be called, at their most base and simplistic level (the level on which all public political discourse takes place in this country), both the public and the private sectors.  Following the logic of current political thought, these theories are diametrically opposed, but they do have one thing in common: both are interested in attacking the structures that control and subjugate populaces.

How Marx and Thoreau came up with these ostensibly opposing positions is clear.  Thoreau was living in a brand new country with seemingly limitless land, spaces, resources, and opportunities.  America at the time was certainly capitalist, but since virtually nothing was scarce in the country, the conditions that would later foment Communist revolution worldwide were not yet obvious.  There had been various recessions and depressions, but with the exception of the 1819 depression, most economic problems had been localized and diffuse.  And while there were certainly rich (relatively speaking) men around, there was yet no super rich class (folks along the lines of the Astors), no robber baron class, no obvious gulf between the rich and poor (since most everyone still participated directly in the production of goods).  No, the gods of capital had yet to wrest control of America; rather, it was the government that stood everyone in line and set the stone tablets of moral imperative for the country.  Thoreau, finding that morality lacking, had a clear target.  That target we call today, in our pre-digested and overly simplified way, the public sector.

Marx's target was older and more evolved, but just as clear.  The morality he opposed was indeed dictated by governments, but these governments themselves are controlled by money.  Monarchical and feudal privilege had by this time mostly disappeared and evolved into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.  Marx's Europe was fighting with all kinds of shortages, and in the production processes of the capitalist machine he located the dehumanization of its subjects.  Marx certainly had a beef with governments, but the source of the problem was not there, but in the people who pulled the government's strings . . . and those people were very private.  Or, as we say, the private sector.

And yet, does this public/private dichotomy even make sense?  The forces of control are all public to the degree that they delimit our public sphere; and private to the degree that they are constituted at a level different than the one they occupy (here in America, by the ballot if you are an optimist, and by the checkbook if you are a realist).  Think of governance in a larger sense: who runs your life?

In the end, the whole public/private debate is a red herring: we should think of governance as the monolithic structure that runs our lives.  This structure has its public and its private aspects, and these aspects do not necessarily code out the way we normally think they do.  There is, in this country, an absolute continuum between what we normally consider public and private*, and the struggle is between various ideas of morality, not between ways of executing this morality, which is all that "public" and "private" boil down to.  It is time to dispense, once and for all, the idea that "public" sector and "private" sector oppose each other.

It is not my job here to reconcile Marx and Thoreau; rather, I think that an understanding of each can inform us on governance in the larger sense.  Both Marx and Thoreau are concerned, at their very core, with dehumanization.  And, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how we fight against the dehumanizing forces we face: it just matters that we fight.

*          *          *          *          *

Sometimes, like I said, civil disobedience is a simple thing, if not an easy thing.  It is simple for Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians.  Simple, but certainly not easy.  On the other hand, it is easy for Americans, but extraordinarily complex.   Is there a store that you can buy from which does not, in some way, diminish the rights of citizens somewhere?  Is there a vote for a man or woman who is truly and always just?  Can I breathe, eat, and live without diminishing the earth?  Indeed, to paraphrase Thoreau, how can I make a living without standing on another man's shoulders?

The short answer: you can't.  Failure is the end result of any action we take.  And yet, (once again) from Beckett by way of Zizek, we can fail better.  We can improve.  We can always improve.

And that is the duty of civil disobedience.

____________________
*  Two parts of that continuum are capital (money) and the masses (people, or the efforts of the people).