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Friday, June 27, 2008

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:04:54 GMT

today, after work, the fiance and i went and saw 'The Happening', featuring a bird-faced Zooey Deschanel and a constantly out-of-breath Mark Wahlberg. it was almost like Marky Mark was doing a parody of himself. and despite the title, very little actually happened, the suspense was fleeting and almost entirely of the "will-he-or-won't-he-die" sort, and contrary to Shyamalan expectations there were no dramatic turns or surprises. it was just a straightforward horror flick where plants were the enemy, and that's.... well, boring.

as we were leaving the theater, the 'Love Guru' movie was starting directly across the hall. it was early in the afternoon and employees and moviegoers both were sparse, so we snuck in and made it a double-feature. is that wrong? am i stealing with my eyeballs when i sneak into a theater? having bought one ticket, as well as drinks and snacks, i don't feel the least bit bad. also, both movies were terrible. i don't know what logic must be used to make that a justifiable part of the equation, but that's how i feel, dammit.

it was the first time the fiance had ever snuck into a movie.

how about it, best beloved: ever sneak into flicks?

this specimen is allergic

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:37:54 GMT

an insipid briefing on international affairs
that drags on for sixty stanzas: she has a violent,
tremulous reaction that sends soy lattes skittering
out the door. they watch with their noses pressed
against the conference room's glass walls, their too-
long ties brushing the carpet. their lids prevent
you from burning your lips. at night, they carouse with
cosmopolitans sloshing over the lips of their narrow-
stemmed glasses. but today they just watch her
spasm on the boardroom table, her hair whipping
about. one steaming drink full of sweet, sweet cream
is frantically mashing buttons on its cell phone but
can't figure out who to call, wants to send a text
message to every ambulance in twenty miles, wants
to spray himself all over the glass, milky brown
sliding down and obscuring her thrashing, mouth-
foaming form from all of their guilty gazes. one
of them mutters "what if it's contagious?" and our
creamy cup grits his styrofoam and thinks to himself
i hope it is, i hope it is, i hope it is.

farewell

Wed, 28 May 2008 12:36:42 GMT

because there is no stage 5.

asthmatic disc

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:09:58 GMT

desert hands build an obsolete machine,
elitist drones drain lubricants into inhabited
chambers, flood the market, how bizarre.

not wings or propellers but something else entirely
tugs a gludge of gears up into the ether, that
stuff you huffed off your Schwinn chamois.

it's difficult to watch discarded diagnostics, asthmatic
discs sort themselves into descending orders, an
electronic caste so snaggle-toothed and waddling.

he watches a spectacled girl on the internet
dissecting the automaton friend he hasn't yet built
using a wrench he hasn't yet bought,

placing a diode on her tongue like an alkaline gumdrop,
clenching it between her finicky fillings while
she unscrews the breaker panel, looking for lights.

species

Tue, 20 May 2008 02:24:21 GMT

the crushed bodies of ticks and termites
and frenetic oxpeckers screaming,
starving, the sightless maunderings
and the guilty relief of mud
in every crevasse, mud in every orifice,
the lines on the hide like cracks
in the floors of the arid deserts,
cracks puttied shut with mud.
a bull long gone from the crash.
eyes like peppercorns, a bland
wedge of muscle, meat, jaw snapping
off branches and leaving angular
stumps oozing lime lubricant and white
pus. a drunken charge, a weary
waddle through underbrush and bracken
and in the end, the ears picking up
a whisper as fearful as ever, a quiet
admonishment and a curious rustle,
a lowering of that bony phallus affixed
to the snout and a solemn, ominous charge.

prayer

Mon, 19 May 2008 11:52:55 GMT

one of the first things i do when i lay down at night is say a prayer. not being a particularly religious fellow, this probably surprises most who know me. i'm not sure exactly who i'm praying to; more than anything i just kind've mentally repeat a phrase over and over. in a way, i suppose this is more of a mantra than a prayer, but i like the word 'prayer' because it carries a connotation of communication directly with god (at least, it does for me) and i like to think of my mantras before bed as my final communication with whatever powers that be in this universe before i drift off.

this is the prayer i almost always say:

"for as long as space exists
and sentient beings endure
may i too remain
to dispel the misery of this world"
-Shantideva

what i like about this prayer is that it seems very sincere. it avoids the contrived altruism of prayers like "please, jesus, grant us world peace," or "lord, feed all the starving children in ethiopa," which are more sentiment than conviction and requests that god is pretty obviously not answering. but the Shatideva prayer also avoids being the sort of short-sighted selfishness that often infects our prayers during moments of crisis: "please, god, help me pass my calculus test," or "please don't let my wife find out i'm banging her sister," or whatever. what the Shantideva prayer is saying to me is "the world is a messed up place, but i want to be here in it, i'm grateful for the opportunity to live, and i want to try to make things better while i'm here." that's the kind of thought i can get behind.

i know most of the people who read this blog are pantheists, atheists, heathens, agnostics, or spiritually indifferent, but if anyone has any prayers they find particularly poignant i'd be interested to hear them. i've been saying that Shantideva prayer for several years, now, and i'd like to add something else to the nightly routine.

oh. and. i'm not sure if the prayer works or not come the next morning, but it almost always helps me fall asleep.

A Sort of Victory (Coherency)

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:51:59 GMT

the belief that one word is as good as another.
a rage i have yet to give into,
a reaction nobody sees.
going back and removing myself from everything
in an absurd attempt to appease my ego.
deciding against doing something, anything.
leaving a small mound of powder
on somebody else's countertop.
mumbling something witty into a sandwich.
hefting any weight at all,
walking another lap around the mall,
making a small child sit in the corner
for a length of time while you
watch music videos.
writing a poem which no one reads
and everyone understands.
reciting someone else's poem to a
room full of deaf grandmothers
and receiving a thunderous applause.

saying something someone else writes down.

refusing to sleep when she's waiting, and warm.

anonymous

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:33:33 GMT

envy wears a bulky coat and hangs out in hallways.
this is my third or fourth time coming here
and it's all hypothetic pedophiles and surprise,
disgust, anguish, a fly etched into the cermaic
of the urinal. just like luigi, i'm still here.

"we don't stop here" reviewed

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:14:09 GMT

there's something i (and many others, of course) find resonant and haunting in the films of David Lynch, and so you can imagine my pleasure at hearing that editor Ivy Alvarez was putting out a collection of poems concerning Lynch's Oscar-nominated film Mulholland Dr. through independent publishing house The Private Press. of course, living up to the artistic and aesthetic standards set by the eccentric and solitary Lynch is a daunting task.

many viewers of Mulholland Dr., especially those who are not fond of Lynch's films or are unfamiliar with his work, find the movie to be byzantine, confusing, and largely incomprehensible (even though some of his other works are decidedly more abstract and contorted) which makes for a less-then-pleasing moviewatching experience. those sort can rest assured that there is no such difficulty in the poems found in the small chapbook we don't stop here, the title being derived from a line occurring early in the film. the six poems that comprise the collection are largely accessible and straightforward, and derivative of the film in a very direct way.

before delving too much into the innards, something must be said about the charming little sheaf itself, with a lustrous little metallic blue cover, well-chosen fonts, and a size that fits nicely in the palm even though it sometimes neuters poems at unfortunate places.

the first offering, by Atlanta author Collin Kelley, is a poem that reads quick and hard (thanks to lots of short words with stops at the end) and falls into the familiar confessional first-person style. it's written from the perspective of the film's main character and features a few nice lines ("all it takes is one twist, tell me" and "[...] you are the dream that i made real,/[...] when no one else would listen,/ I told every little star") but is oddly punctuated, cluttered up with commas that seem redundant at the end of lines and devoid of periods even when they would help signal shifts that are crucial to the poem.

the second poem, Karen Head's Amnesia, isn't written from within the film as in Kelley's poem. instead, Head writes (again in the first person) about the experience of seeing the movie "at the Starship theatre" and the reaction of the elderly women at the film. Head's commentary about the stereotypical reaction of the women is wry and amusing, but falls prey itself to stereotyping by referring to the women as "grayhairs" (twice!) and thus removing any connection we could have to them as real human beings and instead rendering them as caricatures of 'batty old biddies' or something of that nature, foolish to be offended by the lesbian sex scenes of Mulholland Dr. That being said, this poem is one of the stronger pieces in the book.

No Hay Banda. There Is No Band is the third piece of the collection and features wordplay that evoke the Lynchian sensibility better than the two preceding poems, but is also replete with unfortunate filler that marr the impact of otherwise adroit and adept lines. two gems like "The carpet in the room is too still." and "she can count out her/ real name in hundred dollar bills." have a weak cliche like "Betty is as sweet as a peach." nestled between them, and the line comes across as impossibly fake as the character of Betty (Diane Selwyn's idealized dream-self) does in the film. this is also one of the longer poems in the collection, so it could perhaps loan some of the unnecessary lines...

...to Daniel Lloyd, who provides six lines and no title. The lines capture both the exuberant melodrama of the characters which dominate the majority of the film and the snide commentary about how canned Hollywood can be, but couldn't possibly be more lacking in the heady atmospherics of a Lynch film. if Nabisco made a Mulholland Dr. brand cookie, Lloyd's poem would be written inside of a neon sticker on the package.

Lloyd's contribution gives way to Lip Synching by Juliet Cook, an author who has visited Lynch's film as a subject before. it shows. the same haunting imagery and mysterious symbolism which shrouded her chapbook The Laura Poems, based on Lynch's Twin Peaks, is evident here in the form of phallic keys and and domestic detritus that seems to be falling apart around the poem's inhabitants, which are vague sketches of the movie's characters. her limbs are "splintered", her bathrobe is "unraveling", and "shape-shifting". Cook employs a lyrical technique oddly reminiscent of Ginsburg, in which certain words appear again and again to keep the beat: "with", "blue", "off"; she also repeats certain phones in ways both end-rhyming and word-initial to much the same effect. another odd twist is that Cook blows her load early, with the most dramatic line kicking off the poem, echoing its importance in Lynch's film: "This is the girl.", offset as it's own stanza, turns a bland line into something powerful by drawing on the film's emphasis, something every poem in we don't stop here should do so well.

the chapbook concludes with Esther Johnson's Untitled, five three-line stanzas that are simple and yet evocative of many of the more haunting scenes in the film. "You believed her name was Rita/The jungle of your heart" is a great final pair of lines not only to this poem, but to the collection as a whole.

there's a lot to like about we don't stop here: it will look great on your coffee table and the fact that it can contain poems as different as Juliet Cook's and Karen Head's makes it impressively dynamic for such a short volume of poetry, and for those who are film geeks and cinephiles, or those who have small shrines built to worship David Lynch in their homes, this is a must-have item. the most glaring flaws are the aforementioned size of the chapbook (it's almost hard to believe a book with only six poems warranted a printing) and the necessity for a reader to have seen the film to truly appreciate most of the poems in the collection. nevertheless, i'm glad i managed to acquire a copy during the first print run before it sold out and would still advise picking up a copy of the second printing when it drops.

visit The Private Press website for more info.

she'd always laughed

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:55:41 GMT

at that long-standing comedic cliche,
that carchase crescendo when a runaway
bus or garbage truck careened through
a city market or spontaneous parade
and plowed through fruit stands, sending
shopkeepers and window-shoppers scattering
in the wake of cinematic spectacles, until
at last the offending vehicle, with the break-
line cut or a bomb bound to the undercarriage,
was bearing down on a woman pushing a baby
buggy. of course, some bystander always saved
both more than child, or the driver (quite sensibly)
swerved, or the stroller turned out to be full
of groceries rather than a cooing infant.

now, dripping with the pulp of oranges and with
bits of the hot asphalt buried into bleeding flesh
on her knees and the palms of her hands, with
a banged-up armored car's front end buried into
the wall of the salon on the corner, with a lurid
blood smear two feet from her nose and bile rising
in the back of her throat, she thought
it wasn't really that funny, after all.