“some invisible thing”

Between the puppets and masks, see a fresh 13-year-old girl bursting with energy, bluffin with her muffin; see a faded middle-aged woman numbed and thickened before her time. She yells like a carny, “I promise this, promise this.” The lights flash, the eyes are hidden by electronic words, steam rises from hell. You can’t see the look on anybody’s face. This is normal. This is fun. This is hell.

—Mary Gaitskill on Lady Gaga (via Quoinstone)

Dirtbikin’ Through the Times

two quotations from the nyt:

White excitedly showed sketches for his contribution to Meatpaper magazine’s party at Camino the following night: a pig’s head stuffed with a terrine of tongues. (“Blah Blah Beats the Nodes Out of the Snot-Rags,” p. A57)

In effect, anybody with money can circumvent the Legislature by putting something to a statewide plebiscite, something that has happened 71 times in the last decade, according to Mark Baldassare, the head of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research firm. (“Headline’s Mouthterpiece Theaterbones Makes Goodly One More Time,” headline page C16)

If you guessed why every article in the Sunday Times reminds me of my colleague “Plebiscite“, you;ve guessed correctly! what

I have a cold and cannot think straight. I just made a funky, “downtown” variation on this soup, it’s healing me I hope.

I cannot complain

************* [deeper inside the cavity]

Many more odes on this theme [of motorcycles] would follow, and they have been derided by some (the Language poet Ron Silliman has called Seidel a “rich boy formalist… principally known as a collector of expensive motorcycles”), but in his enthusiasm for these machines, Seidel is making good on Rimbaud’s dictum: “We must be absolutely modern.” Curiously, the more Seidel writes about Ducatis the more French he sounds. (Christian Lorentzen on F. Seidel in The National)

Rimbaud’s dictum made me think: Dumbo’s rectum? Dumbeaux’s rictum? Dalrymple’s dimpled cloud, reflected in a rictus? His poutered victim?—– What????

(via “the inimitable Justin Taylor” (quotation marks mine))

James Hannaham at Paper Cuts

I do love Cheever. That queen was fierce.

“little rips in the space-text continuum”

Camus, we learn, loved Ping-Pong and had a cat named Cigarette. He never locked his car. He wrote standing up. When he fell into a depression after winning the Nobel Prize (panic attacks, claustrophobia), he tried to break out of it with yoga. On his only trip to New York he visited the Central Park Zoo twenty times.

—Sam Anderson on Elizabeth Hawes (on Camus) in New York magazine, 7/2/09

son of slumra

NICK GAZIN: Do you see Slumra as a continuing strip or is the end of this story that people are buying really cool-looking tables with faces on them?

MATTHEW THURBER: I don’t know. It’s the end of Slumra because he gets decapitated by Ikea and they steal his ideas for designs on their products. I like using architects as characters because architecture is an art practice I find really preposterous and possibly harmful or inhuman so maybe I will come back to Slumra.

“The Glee of Contempt”

Must poetry that goes to extremes authenticate itself by going completely bonkers?

—Dan Chiasson on Frederick Seidel, NYRB, 7/16/09

Marm & Me

[The stage stands empty but for a cheap plaster peeing-Cupid fountain sculpture. A single light shines down on the sculpture, which stands in a kiddie pool. A Hawaiian lei hangs around Cupid's neck. Reflections from the water in the pool dance across the Cupid and the back wall of the stage. The dusty stage floor around the fountain is dimly lit with indirect "bump lights" (official theater term I just made up). I didn't get that much sleep last night, but I did just drink coffee for the first time in a week. The Cupid pees in a couple of spurts, then stops. After a pause, the Cupid pees continuously for about 5  seconds, then stops again. Now a few more spurts. Do you think this will make the audience laugh? I think it will.

After a few more stop-start Cupid-pee sessions, THE MARM enters stage right (why do I care which side she enters from? I am an artist, and it is my task to reveal mystic truths.

Maybe there can be a Nauman-style neon sign hanging somewhere on stage, too.)

THE MARM is tall, 30ish, not overweight, but she's definitely a hearty, teacherly lady: it's the rare morning that she misses her (homemade? sometimes.) milksoaked granola. Jaw-length chestnut hair tucked behind her ears. Simple, beaten-silver earrings. One of our nation's secular Quakers. By which I mean she dresses and sometimes talks and even acts like a pilgrim but doesn't really think or behave like one. What?? She's only very narrowly prim -- in reality there's some "nossty" stuff that goes on in her life and mind, in the seats-folded-down backbeds of Subaru Outbacks;  atop unzipped REI mummybags in the wilderness, fellow campers within earshot.

THE MARM walks onstage in a hurry, head down, gripping her shoulder bag, not seeming to notice the  fountain at all. Just as she passes it and appears to be exiting the stage, the Cupid begins peeing again. MARM stops suddenly, head still down. She's wearing a simple necklace of some kind, maybe pearls. Without turning around or lifting her head, she listens to the sound of the "pee" (it's just water, guys, that's obvious) hitting the water in the pool behind her. She takes a big, deep breath, her affectionate shoulders (???) rising and falling once in adorable stressed-out pulling-it-togetherness. Turns on the heels of her thick-soled loafers. Regards the fountain with a look she's previously reserved for saucy adolescents. Clutches her bag, which contains headache medicine, notebooks, pens, Pez, feminine items, half a Luna bar (sorry, sorry, I know, I don't know, I'm trying) and so on. THE MARM (who named her that?) and the fountain have a sort of face-off. The Cupid starts on/off spurting again, this time in a very even rhythm -- a dot-dash dot-dash dot-dash dot-dash of pee -- it's like he's telling her something (something saucy, no doubt) in morse code. The statue stops peeing again.  Another long pause, another deep breath, and MARM addresses the sculpture.

THE MARM: What's wrong with you?

[The Cupid responds in a little-boy voice, someone backstage speaking into a microphone. He sounds like, whatever, an American kid.]

CUPID: I’m sorry. I’m done.

[I should probably get back to work. To be continued. The audience goes out to the lobby to buy plastic pails filled with mini Reese's peanut butter cups]

“memedacookie”

PLEASE CLICK
(volume up!)

your shredly mouth

• maybe if plebiscite and I start mountain biking in marin every weekend we will run into kay ryan shredding the trails!?!

U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan shredding a shredly fibre of Marin singletrack, bro

• I have about 60 pages of Henry Green’s Loving to go before book club meets tonight. It’ll have to be a productive lunch-hour… I was having trouble with it at first — the language is unusual and it takes getting used to — but now that I’ve hit the halfway mark I’m beginning to not want it to end. Many of the sentences are remarkable — weird and beautiful and “perfect” seeming — but not weird in an intentionally bizarre overwrought “tra la la I’m a modernist” way, but weird because the world is weird and the sentence has to be, too, in order to properly describe the thing it’s describing.

  This is one of the more overwrought passages in the first half of the book, but it still made me perform a low whistle of appreciation. Kate and Edith waltzing together to a luxury phonograph in a shuttered ballroom:

They were wheeling wheeling in each other’s arms heedless at the far end where they had drawn up one of the white blinds. Above from a rather low ceiling five great chandeliers swept one after the other almost to the waxed parquet floor reflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single sparkle of distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.

local artists

sometimes does it seem to you that exhibitions in San Francisco come in only two varieties? Either they’re dumb and lithe and beautiful, like Michael Phelps, or they’re too darn hard to understand.

—Kevin Killian on “The Man Behind the Curtain“

also, some tracks and info on late-70s San Francisco “synthpunks” the Units, courtesy Mike Lupica