gina myers is impatiently waiting for a biography of james schuyler. me too. jimmy s. is simply one of my favorite poets.

for me poetry and life are coequals, therefore the life of the poet matters a great deal. other poet biographies i'm waiting for are as follows:

thom gunn

james wright

richard hugo

d.a. levy

a decent robert creeley (the previous one was simply too nasty; i stopped reading it midway thru)

john weiners

hannah weiner

john forbes

ted berrigan

a list right off the top of my head. particularly levy and berrigan who are long overdue, and thom gunn who is another all-time favorite of mine.

random sampling of 10 horror movies for trick-or-treats

10) suspiria dir. by dario argento

9) the beyond dir. by lucio fulci

8) texas chainsaw massacre dir. by tobe hooper

7) cannibal holocaust dir. by ruggero deodato

6) night of the living dead dir. by george a. romero

5) 2000 maniacs dir. by h.g. lewis

4) last house on the left dir. by wes craven

3) carnival of souls dir. by herk harvey

2) ringu dir. by hideo nakata

1) halloween dir. by john carpenter


there you have it, 10 toe-curling, gut-munching, blood-gurgling films to see you thru to the bottom of yr plastic jack-o'lantern filled with candy.

happy halloween!

celebrations for halloween are so short-lived. already the stores have set up christmas paraphenalia and shunted aside halloween geegaws in the back or gone altogether. what the hell, i say, since i've become addicted to helloweek on direct tv, which has been showing the same drivel every night since last weekend. these are films either bought or produced by troma, crap pieces such as toxic avenger and attack of the killer tomatoes (a feature which briefly utilizes the talents of samuel l. jackson, def by temptation, is playing as i type).

these movies are hard viewing, believe me. try sitting thru one and you'll see what i mean. for heaven's sake, don't eat much or drink more than 20 beers while watching any of these films, or you run the risk of theater-sickness, a condition very similar to motion sickness, but for the images played on the screen or tv. in other words, you can get sick!

okay, i'm a sucker for a painted face. and one of the two hosts for helloweek is thee goth, one seriously goofy and funny dude. his voice, his make-up, his gestures conjures up the silly, deliriously adrenalized antics of horror movie hosts of yesteryear.

oh what the hell, i'm getting another beer and sitting thru, again, attack of the killer tomatoes.

taking 2 weeks vacation to do a couple of daytrips and a few small home projects. just yesterday, after buying some supplies for said home projects, we had lunch at a local taqueria and then went home to nap. i woke up with that delicious sensation of forgetting where i am. the sun had set leaving the room in shadow. i drifted in a hypnogogic state where titles and lines of poems intermingles with scenes from films. certainly i should write them down. but i did not. instead i was content to find my dreamtexts write themselves into the ether.

did it, finally. the modem should arrive middle of next week, then i'll be surfing the net at 3.0 mbps and ditching the dial-up. after hemming and hawing about it for years. a friend told me she'd kick my ass if i asked her about her high-speed connection one more time. she said, the price is low enough so fucking do it!

okay, i did. one wrinkle tho. the connection works on windows 2000 or higher. my desktop has windows me, so i gotta use my laptop, which operates on windows xp until we can upgrade the operating system or get a new desktop. i'm pretty much all thumbs when it comes to tech stuff. anyone know if it is difficult to upgrade the operating system? my desktop is a dell dimension l800r bought about 7 years ago.

in other news, been thinking about mortality, the brevity of life. that one may live in fear, fear of failure for example, till the end. i have a motto, two actually:

life is too
short to be in such a hurry

and

carpefuckingdiem

i got the last one from horace i believe who frequently used it in his odes. anyway, just caught a few minutes of the old 1970s tv show charley's angels. this broadcast was in 1977, nearly 30 years ago. doesn't seem so long to me, even tho i was 9. but if you were in yr 40s back then do the math. you'd be at the end of the line now.

there is never time enough.

but how you spend it is critical. odi et amo, said catullus. i feel the same way too. we try to live it at the first intensity.

we have faith in the poison. we know how to give of ourselves everyday, said rimbe. he meant it. and i do too.

so i pick up a book of poems by one of my favorite love poets and read this poem by thom gunn who also had faith in the poison.

Blues for a New Year, 1997

My dealer left town
(sounds like a song).

Had a date with
a certain man, but
he got pneumonia.
I guess it's off.

Storm after storm
bowls in
off the Pacific.

Pale and sleepy on
his Tenderloin mattress.
He has different-
colored eyes and nothing
about him quite matches.
A challenge.

Oh, it just New
Year's. I'm
not superstitious:
the year may turn out
very rewarding. Anyway
I'm sixty-seven,
and have high blood pressure,
and probably shouldn't
be doing speed at all.

Let's reschedule!

[Boss Cupid; FSG 2000]

i love the chattiness of this text, the humor and no-nonsense clarity. it is like a cold, clear drink of water after a long hike in the desert.

so then i cannot escape the obviously biographical nature in my writing even when there was a period not too long ago that i tried to void the self and work purely in grammar. but language is a collection of agreements over time, and we are those that do the agreeing. ontology squares off with teleology. the alpha and the omega butting heads again.

but the personal in poetry, of every kind, is what attracts me in the first place. i'm looking for a grounding of selves thru the experience/experiments of words. when i read the blogs of fellow poets i want poems but also journal entries, mini-essays, random notes and thoughts.

alright. after a long lovely weekend, where the weather couldn't get any nicer, fall is here for sure, and i dig fall, jim mccrary's chap arrived today. bad-ass poetry from the master. and i quote jm himself:

[T]o Toozer or Collins or Lehman who might consider this 'crap' -- fuck off. It is my only language and I love it to death and mangle/handle it with loving abuse.

afuckingmen!

and late last week tom beckett's selected hit my mailbox and lit up my eyes and ears. okay, so i'm a sucker for zombies and sex. tom nails these like a stud on a date -- with everyone! and i quote:

If you

give suck

to zombie

tongue it

will become

ashes in

your mouth.

lesson learned. if you need further proof that one must practice safe sex with the zombie of yr choice then scroll down to the 3rd picture at the bottom. there you'll find that this book comes with an extra-size condom attached to a bookmark.

take heed and gather these books to yr hearts and minds.

 

 

 

that's it. every time i opened the damn file i fucked with the texts even more. so i put the final dot on my loops chap and sent it off so it can learn to walk on its own. now i can sit back and start to fuss over my wood sonnets, and a new collection that hasn't been written yet but is beginning to stir and want to take expression. and i'm addicted to a collaboration project that i'm currently working on with a poet-friend. we are on our 7th poem so far and i literally feel like a junky who can't wait for the next fix as we send emails back and forth during the day. oh, oh and i got a few reviews to do.

well, dookie. and but so, one of my favorite poets is william wantling, who was active in the small-press scene during the 1960s and early 1970s. he died in 1974 from i think a drug overdose. all his books are out of print. i have one and photocopied 2 from sac state's library. i also have a commemorative chapbook, a selection of wantling's poems, published in 1994 and edited by kevin jones, a local teacher/writer, who penned his phd dissertation on wantling.

there is more now of wantling on the net. u.k. poet ian seed's new zine shadowtrain published a whole issue devoted to the late poet, which includes an article by jones. i'm glad to see a good poet get the attention his work long deserved.

and speaking of seed, i became aware of him a couple of years ago from martin stannard's old blog, which is again now active here thru seed's poems, esp. his prose poems, and reviews. he's a poet who appears to be bridging the divide between highly experimental work and the more earthy language of small-press writing. a practice that i can't quite articulate why it so appeals to me but had me at go.

yeah, i know, it's just wrong, but it's freaking fun just the same. p. sent me this quiz today. i can't judge a bowling ball from a baseball. i got most of them wrong. c'est la vie, as they say. take it and see how well you do.

you know how i dig halloween. and horror movies. goes hand in hand, yeah. so p. burns me a copy of horror movie soundtracks which i've been listening to obsessively in my cube at work. there are 12 compositions without titles and i've managed to identify only a few of those, such as the themes from poltergeist, the omen, the exorcist, psycho and what i think is really scary theme music, penned by none other than john carpenter whose experiments with synthesizers created a simple haunting melody drenched in menace for his great film halloween.

well, so, okay, after working on my loops chap i was dicking around last night surfing genre movie websites and i ran across this blog that specializes in exploitation and horror movie soundtracks 7 black notes. and i send the link to a couple of poet-friends who i think would get a kick out it as much as i do. the blog reminded me so much of when i was a kid. i would take my little 1970s era tape recorder to the tv, or to the drive-in, and hold it up to the speaker to record movie music. i must've recorded hundreds of hrs of shit that sounded like canned musak because the quality was so bad. but as the old mellencamp song goes, it hurt so good. the equipment i have has improved a bit, which helps because that obsessive idiot kid in love with everything about film inhabits me still.

lord help me.

that venerable, once world-wide, music, movie and bookstore, tower records is no more. this morning's paper announced in large type that the music retailer, in its 2nd bankruptcy in 4 years, was sold off yesterday and is now in the process of liquidation. in a few weeks the stores will probably be shuttered and gone forever. it couldn't keep apace with discount chains and online sales.

started in the 1960s here in sacramento tower was the place when i was growing up to find alternative and imported records and books. it kept its counter-culture vibe by allowing its employees to dress and behave how they wanted. the retailer's ethic of deep-catalogue inventories and its knowledgeable staff, individuals who loved, loved, loved music, kept the place humming in the pre-internet era. everybody who wanted the latest black flag album, or thrasher magazine, shopped there. when i was a kid the stores had a vast array of punk music, and if i couldn't afford an album 1 week, i'd stash it in the stacks of say jazz where it would hide for at least a couple of weeks until i could scrape up enough change.

it's easy to become nostalgic over tower's passing. but the world changes and moves in directions we cannot control. i still love passing thru its doors and seeing what's to be had on its shelves. i buy most of my movies that way, and a good portion of trade books. i stopped by the stores at least a couple times a months.

today, i took nicholas with me to wash the car then go to tower. the place as you can imagine was packed. i bought a book and dvd, 2 terrific finds that i'll try to write about later, and stood in a long line and waited. the wait seemed to go like greased lightning. i was tickling nicholas and digging the vibe of the store, knowing full well that when the store is gone it can never be replaced.

wow. it seems nicholas cage is set to star in the film adaptation of my 2nd favorite superhero - the 1st is ol' peter parker - ghost rider. finally, hollywood has come around to it. to say i was obsessed with johnny blaze is an understatement. there was something sinister in blaze, unholy, that was thrilling, that sharpened the senses. an antihero, like clint eastwood's harry callahan, a bad guy who worked for good. i responded to blaze's desire for loneliness, his keening mission. that sort of thing was rather metaphysical, even, dare i say it [i can hear cleavon little whisper, dare! dare!] mystical, crazy as it sounds. i was one fucked up kid who loved comic books. even tho my favorite superhero was, and is, spiderman [because parker was ordinary, because he had to use his intellect - such as building a webshooter - because he had such a fine girlfriend] blaze was that other part of the human psyche: aloof, lonely as it covets loneliness, rapacious, with a touch of evil. if superheroes were poets parker would be dr. williams, blaze would be rimbaud.

now to the film itself. i've seen the teaser trailer some months ago. i don't know what to think, since the teaser was neither good nor bad. that it got my pulse racing was because the reality of seeing ghost rider on the screen in the flesh - or cgi - or whatever, seemed miraculous. nicholas cage is a good, charismatic lead. he's picked some turkeys to star in, esp. the recent, godawful national treasure, but for the most part, even in crap he, to this viewer, shines. now that hollywood is trawling thru the the back catalogs of the great publisher marvel comics is another lonely soul the silver surfer too far off.

funny thing about television today. the audience has so splintered that everyone watches different programming. the talk around the watercooler at work might be about the latest reality show, but there is such an abundance of programming now that we can specialize in our viewing. a good thing, i think, and a huge change from 14 years ago when everyone was watching friends or seinfeld, or even 20 years ago when the biggest show in the u.s. was the cosby show. everybody watched that one.

well now, after what seemed like forever my favorite tv show is back on the air. in its 4th season wire in the blood made its premiere last night. a bit of a letdown for me, since it introduced a new character [tony's platonic love interest and lead detective, carol, has been inexplicably replaced] while dr. tony hill stumbled about trying to recover from brain surgery that removed a benign tumor. not at the height of his powers but brilliant nonetheless, hill manages to lead the new detective - reluctant to take his help - and the police, to the lair of a husband and wife team of serial killers. lacking were the jolts, the suspense and the downright kinkiness of previous episodes. small potatoes really compared to the dreadful fare that passes for crime drama in the u.s. yet robson green's dr. hill is such a compelling character, and the show on the whole so smartly written that i can't wait for the next installment.