dance motherfuckers, dance in your sorrow,
dance in your anger, dance in your passion

the world sure seems cockeyed at the moment.  nothing seems to make a lot of sense.  particularly in our culture and politics.  despair is an option.  but not a fruitful one.  what the fuck can i say.  i'm by nature cheerful, stupid and superficial.  & when i listen to music i am confirmed in my belief that art is the holy marker of our collective.  i don't mean by that that art is a map of the divine.  i don't spin that way.  but art is how we create sense, feeling, intellect & color out of chaos, & even for an old atheist like myself, it becomes transcendent.  i don't mean to pen a short apologia for art.  for art can, & does, take care of itself.  however, i am reminded of these two performances by the french electronica band, M83 [named after a spiral galaxy], of ABSOLUTE MUSIC. 

instead of despair i watch these two performances by M83.  i am a child of the late 20th century.  i love pop music in all its various guises.  & when i listen to vocalist morgan kibby in these two songs i am reminded of our human being.  we can do so much more than argue, maim & kill each other.  concerts are a proof that our collective being can bring together ourselves for the sheer pleasures of art & community. 

the first song, 'skin of the night,' blows me the fuck away.  i discovered this performance a couple of days ago.  kibby's vocals are like the voice of god if a god existed. 



the second song, 'we own the sky', is again sung by morgan kibby.  she punches me right in my emotional solar plexus.  i love how the audience becomes part of the performance particularly at the climax of the tune.



and but so, i don't know what hi art might be but i will confess that these two live performances, from 2012! [as if that was a long time ago!], are deeply moving works of art.  these songs are a proof that our veritable human being is capable of beauty.  so dance motherfuckers!  all the way to the very bitter end. 

ranking roger [r.i.p]

he died yesterday at the very very fucking early age of 56.  i didn't realize he was so young.  he was a critical member of the great ska/pop band The Beat, or as they were called here in the u.s., The English Beat.  the news knocked me on my ass.  i don't know what to say.  my heroes are dying.  but we have the music.  let us celebrate the world in song.  let us protest the state of the world in song too.  below is The Beat's song 'Stand Down Margaret'.  the year is 1982.  you can easily guess who they were singing about.

speaking of kick-ass guitarists here's link wray just because he is ice-cold cool

 

long live the king of surf guitar

i love surf music.  i've been listening to it for as long as i've been listening to punk rock.  indeed, i came to know the heavy reverb & rapid fire pickings of dick dale thru another band, agent orange who covered dale's version of 'miserlou' on their lp living in darkness.  but then again, i discovered the ventures by another skate punk band, jfa, who covered 'walk don't run' on an early lp.  so what the hell. . .

however, but so it was dick dale who created the sound of surf music.  his guitar playing is legendary.  now the king is dead at the relatively late age of 81.  that's a nice run of time.  i wish it was more.  in fact, mi brother in this life & art, jonathan hayes, told me that dale was slated to play in santa cruz in august.  dale was a prolific performer.  he seemed to be always on tour. 

i got to see dick dale perform once.  a few years ago, at the california state fair dale was playing his guitar solo before a crowd of about a 100 people.  i am surprised his guitar didn't catch fire from the friction of his pick.  i bought a signed cd of his greatest hits. 

below is dale performing 'swingin' and a-surfin' a relatively rare song with dale on vocals.  it's not the greatest tune by dick dale but i love it because it is in one of my favorite genres of drive-in movies: beach films.  the movie is beach party [1963].  beach movies & surf music are of course a natural pair.  they go together like peanut butter & jelly. 

dig

SPREAD THE WORD!!!

finally, at long last, John Bloomberg-Rissman, T.C. Marshall & i have unleashed on the world our double anthology, The End of the World Project.

published by moria books our project is filled with great texts & art by our brothers & sisters in this life & art that take on the question, how do you create art in our present dire age?

follow these links at moria books to download the free pdfs here & here.  or if you prefer old skool paper books you can buy copies there & there.

my many many many thanks to my brothers & sisters who have contributed so many amazing, astonishing pieces & texts.  my gratitude to my friends John & T.C.,  & nine bows to the publisher of moria books, william allegrezza, with great fortitude & patience allowed for us to embark on this wild adventure in art.

& most of all, thank you, everybody, for the support that art needs to stay alive & flourish.

read it, review it, discuss it, & Spread the Word.  there is a new anthology in town.

peace!


 

every
thing every god
damn thing
even the movies
is poetry

i hate daylight savings time
how we *lose* an hour
by turning our clocks ahead
what do you gain
but the loss of an hour's sleep
it is 11:38 PM
& i am wide awake
my internal clock says
it is early
while the clock clock
tells me to go to bed
what the fuck
society
+ last friday is the last
night, for many months,
i get to walk home from work
in the dark
when the city turns on its jewels
after the sun drops below
the western horizon
now, it is daylight all the way
home

it's murder

it's been a very wet, very chilly winter & when it gets cold the crows come to downtown at night to settle on the trees.  cities are, so i've read, heat islands partly because of their dense cores of asphalt & concrete.  the crows know this.  when it is cold they come in the thousands.

i'm afraid the pictures don't do them justice.  because today was cold.  tonight will be even colder.  well, cold for northern california.  i mean you won't get frostbite, or die of exposure to the elements, but if you ain't got something warm to wear like a heavy sweater &/or coat or jacket, you're gonna be uncomfortable.

biologists are just discovering that our animal kindred on this planet are more clever & complex than we had thought.  turns out crows are plenty smart.  they can recognize individual humans.  they can use tools to get their food.  & i think they have their own way of speaking.  they have their own crow language.  they sure as shit sound, to my ears, like they are talking to each other.

whatever they are saying they are shouting.  dusk in downtown in cold weather is furiously loud with the caws of crows.  tattoos of Ra RA Ra!  & they shellac the streets with their guano.  pray for the poor cars that park beneath their canopies.  their shit can peel the paint right off.

they even jealously guard their nests.  last spring i was dive-bombed by a crow protecting her nest.  smacked me hard upside my head.  she chased me for two fucking blocks!  just me.  no one else walking the street.  i thought it was a fluke so the next evening i took my usual route home from work & BLAM! she got me again.  just me.  no one else walking the street.  scared me to death.  i'm sure she recognized me, & didn't like what she saw.  what did i do?  i changed my route!

why did i change my route?  because it hurts getting hit upside the head by a crow & because we share the world with our animal cousins.  we may think we own the world.  but really we are just renting space.  the crows belong here too.  i love walking among them as they settle in for the night.  for it is murder out there. 

docu poetics

i've had the past couple days off work.  that allowed me to do some things around the house, and a little yard work in between rain storms.  & it is has been very stormy in northern california this year.  just as the climate models predicted: very dry years married to very wet years.  the normal is gone.  indeed, but i love cold stormy nights.  i have the windows open as i type this.  the air is chilly.  the wind is picking up.  & there is a soft, vegetal, smell of the soon-to-be-rain.

well, then anyway, i feel guilty.  i need to write my love & gratitude to a few friends who have sent me their work, their love & their support in this crazy endeavour of life & poetry.  so forgive.  i'll do what i can when i can.  as the poet james dickey wrote, 'my life is made of the world.  i will do what i can.'

but what is this 'docu poetics' i write about?  well, it turns out that i think that documentary poetry might just be my life's work.  let me briefly explain.  anna & i were in oakland for a concert last weekend.  we saw the wonderful band beirut [i paused writing this note to watch the live performance i've linked to.  anna & i fell in love with the singer's beautiful, deep, clear & melancholy tones, & i really dig how the band brings brass horns into the front of their sound] at the indelible fox theater on telegraph ave.  i love this venue.  once it was a grand movie palace that fell into neglect & disrepair in the early 1970s but it was loved back to health and reopened as a music venue in 2009.  anna & i saw the shins perform two months after the theater's grand opening.

we had a marvelous weekend.  we stayed at the marriott hotel on broadway which was a short walk to the fox.  but then so, i started thinking about oakland as a city of poets.  i know there are a number of artists & writers who moved to the city in the early 2000s when rents shot skyhigh in the city by the bay.  in the early days of digital poetics, i.e. blogs, a number of very good writers living in oakland were doing their bloggy thing.  so as i was walking the streets of downtown oakland on saturday night i began to think of oakland poets & poetries.

well and but so, yesterday i googled a poet who i lost track of.  the work, i mean.  & i came across my own blog in 2008.  i started reading my entries, now 11 years old.  & it hit me with all the blunt force trauma of a 2 x 4 across the bridge of my nose.  my life's poetics is a kind of documentary poetry.  i've been doing it all along.  i use my blog as my publishing tool.  well, duh, as i might say.  but that would make sense since many of the poets i admire, beginning with constantine cavafy to james schuyer to jim mccrary to nicanor parra have all been, at least some time in their life in poetry, self-publishers, journal poets, but whatever label i can stick to my heroes in the art, they are all poets who did their own thing regardless of fashion.

& if my list of heroes don't meet the regular standard of docu poets, so what.  it's my list.  i can define it as i wish.  my work as a poet is not to advance a career nor get prizes.  it is to record my amazement at being alive during the short time i have on earth.  & i mean the whole damn thing.  i'll want to still go the old fashioned route & publish a few more chaps, a book or two, before i shuffle off this mortal coil.  because i love paper & the printed word.  but poetry is larger than those things.  it always has been.  it can survive, nee thrive, in the digital screens too.

but what i want to keep doing is writing & publishing my notes, poems, rants, & reviews when i want at the time i want.  it is my own duchampian anti-poetry, the documents of my life.  & i hope, even if my life is boring as fuck, it is a life fully lived.

my goal is to be perennially unfashionable so that i will always be cool