COPYLEFT -- 17Nov2008
-about-
He put down the turnip, awestruck.
"Is that it? Is that
the camera," he intoned,
awestruck, "the camera
through which
has been passed,
camel-through-needle-eye-like,
so much history??
Your famous images
have trounced many
a eyeball
worldwide!
But can your photos compete
with my SEM cross-section
of the crabshell covering
the back of your head?"
Perhaps they couldn't.
Every thing that one sees may be
a thought that one's eye has,
but only because that sight defeats
competing sub-thoughts & tussling
half-formed images lurking just below
that surface, just under the
inner skin of the refractory dewdrop, RIGHT?
We huddled around the viewfinder;
my consciousness redistributed itself
among the seven pairs of eyes looking
over my shoulder.
Profusions of grazing birds
and grazing mammals
herded together
de facto;
Chemical spill networks
given the daisy-chain treatment
recommended by the relevant
cleanup agencies;
Hawksbill turtle shells
in sharp relief against
a blurry background
of protesters;
Drifts of golf tees
higher than a man's head
downwind of a string of
destroyed factories;
Microscopic ruptures
in the peritoneum with
what looked like a man-made
ordering principle;
Deafening clamor of stadium
full of microwave ovens,
doors open and interruptor
switches disabled,
stable plasma created in
the air the center;
I honestly couldn't remember ever
taking photos so badly.
The photos looked like a piece of gristle
was lodged in the lens threads.
He came and looked at them with me,
placing a weightless hand on my shoulder.
His body was a seer's,
frail and pitiable,
provoking dislike, draped
in raisin-colored robes. He spake:
"The anguish in your face findeth fountain
and source overflowing from the cracks
remaining from th'event, hard whatsoever
it were that sundered man and media thus,
that slipped a space, some air, between your finger
and shutter's trigger, camera's release;
but oft enough has damaged leg been splinted;
so shall your wound accept, bind with, your Coolpix.
O, may it be that all thou need'st to erase
or, erasement looming impracticable, then to ease
the separation 'twixt camera, aye, and thou,
be the thought, the blessed, Zen-sent thought,
that every thing that the camera's eye sees
is a thought had only by it." Why, here was a loon!
A regular looney-tune, this one! The master
banished him: my eye thought of him being banished.
"O cruel master,
what hideous monster,
what monstrous villain
shall I be presented with next;
who next shall hollow out my waking days;
who force the bilious upsurge, heaving strong,
of the night-terror's half-digested corpse
to wreak dread havoc from within?
Though first eaten in joy and delectation,
laughing with my companions, now
I feel from deep within its broken jaws,
gnawing away at me, its host!
O horrid meal! O wretched aristocrat
at whose table my spirit dines
to its detriment, whose fatal tablecloth
soils my soul, as I it, with the lip-wipings
of th' infernal meal thy parade of
gene-spliced horrors is to my eyes
and mind. Cursed be! And yet,
bring on the final abomination;
hasten the respite my soul so craves;
end this, my nightmare." So saying
I, waving and gesticulating to accentuate the stressed syllables,
I noted no sign of emotion
in the face of my captor,
no sign of having heard me,
for if he was not without ears,
he heeded them not. He snapped his fingers.
The reptilian curtain parted again
and the bright light skinned
my retinal image of
the final specialist.
He was Doctor Sarulian Lamplow, and
his countenance was spread across the three
flat-screen monitors now wheeled into my view,
pulled behind a 1/3-scale robot ox.
He resembled a bat, with unbelievable sensor-array ears
that twitched, seeming to hear right through me.
His eyes were empty volcanic glass. "I study the sound
of trees filling their fruits with liquid.
Outside the line,
the rhyme
is the inside
skin of the lime.
Inside the line
it's too dark to read."
Yes, I thought as the sounds slipped away,
what I want to view the sound of is safe, still, from him:
Madlib's new album submerged & surfaced
like Baroque Variations by Lukas Foss:
the past may be prologue; everything
under the colon may be just sediment:
Where'd
that post-Appalachian stomp
stomp off to,
between stations?
That third song
almost
makes my Asperger's
act up.
This feeling is going nowhere
This feeling is literally going nowhere
It gives you a sense of nowhereness
It's a map on top of nowhere
Maybe we ought to weight
the average in favor
of the American Southwest.
Get along you little dogies, etc.
Maybe what we hear internally as a song
repeating itself over and over again
just travels back in time from its end,
skipping the final falls and starting over
upstream of the narrow canyon
to see the sun illuminating
both uncomprehending walls simultaneously
only moments per day once more.
Maybe we got the lyrics wrong
and 'we' was all alone
with four looped measures
on the internal earphone.
We holed up
a big diamond
in the center
of the sky.
We spent the ether government's ether money.
Anyway the big questions were expensive.
We got all geared up
to tackle a roughshod mindset.
We ask all the big questions
and get them mostly wrong
which adds to our love of music,
until we love it dearly.
We groom ourselves.
We cap massive
groudswells
ourselves.
We who break our red
flame, flame, very forked
like double grass, we
inspire ourselves, while
after early morning
we repeat ourselves
while we tare
ourselves, separately
You're on your own, gab
up to
percent back.
Pac-Man
ugh.
I guess the
silo
nah. But what circumstances
What is
hair to?
Keep finger
re-pulsed, so the
itch balances.
I finally saw
the present never
too sawtoothed.
Regardless it
doesn't matter that
much; billboards
here & there
like a, oh Loard
it's so lonesome down this dusty road. Do
you ever hear
those percussive
salespersons'
apron string
whip game
surrogates,
I never heard
of such a
THING.
Temptation
Causes mis-reads,
Extra toenails.
Warped rubbery
Gym equipment
Dragged down
To Hades
Weather
Pending.
Summon
Hand to withdraw from
Alligator-mouthed
Efreet
High in
Calcium
Vitamin D
Added
Winning Slogan
Rights Ship
Says Wall Street.
Everybody
walking with their legs,
dressed up in their little outfits,
falling, falling, God
or is this just a falling sensation.
Hire me to
gigglingly rig
up with zip ties &
some indifferent splices some
non-narrative elements for the audience to figure out
for itself. If anyone has ever ridden a rollercoaster
through a tear gas cloud, it was not me.
I was a famous rollercoaster designer.
Hire me to program new imaginary coordinates,
waypoints for the camera to swing through,
because it's cinema as you've never seen it,
every duel plays out in passing,
and the wrong person
still stood
in the end, no smoke
had to clear.
"Never fight fair." Some exemplary moment
of enlightenment (true love, say, or the most recent Joker)
in its entirety and in every particular
is an affront, "pure performance,"
a challenge to prove
its resolute hollowness
wrong. But it not wrong;
it what brain do.
Cerebellum garrison
empties in unison
upwards along stare lines against
umpteenth snowstorm.
On the day of the first snow I'll be
in the vacant lot at the corner of
4th and Garrison in Winnemucca, Nevada
with eleven other musicians.
It's the hollowness
that makes so much sound.
The audio cortex demons are rattled,
pantomiming fear by being shaken up.
Just put your head down,
all of you. Cymbals, bass drums,
bagpipes, whistles, sirens,
firecrackers, gongs.
We stand in the weather, dissonances ray out
without consequences. Your attention creates
the sound your listening makes, the rattling
must rattle the minds' little joys,
the whole group of us, harsh noise
to muffle the snowfall. There's this fear
of feeling of attachment, & attendant fantasy
of having thoughts only mediated through
music forever, never mind hearing.
Without it, madness descends, the
variables part around your hand
as you reach out to grab them,
chopped up into consequent particulates
or hung in larger taped-together
axiomatic bundles from the yoke ends,
carried & set down at intervals.
Into this hand
all the words left
AND the right words
into the other. (peerless enemyless counterpartless)
Was it I
the illusion of a choice?
leg chain / allegiance
but the illusion wasn't present.
You teach the dog its own
human language before you
talk to it, you learn
to give the trout water a read.
Straight instructions sprout fat mushrooms
on the forest surface; wild pigs rut.
Electromagnetic force lines net
big rhythmic storybook fish.
Radio waves turn loose.
Illness heals; UV light
sterilizes. (!?) My body and its thoughts
uncloak as galactic back-eddies.
There was all this stuff
I was going to tell you
Johnny Cash was on the radio being
pretty mediocre all things considered
Thousands of people in the Gaza strip
have lost their hearing due to
recurrent fighter plane sonic booms.
My imagination is a fraud,
sandpaper sandpaper
is brain on
weariness or
happiness or chorus.
The unexpected became reality
entering the fourth hour of
Senate appropriation hearings,
when the original Gary
mentioned almost in passing that
the ghost Gary
said the other
Gary had given cause
to dip cadence w/
suspicious pause
knee-joint deep
in horse anger
just because your dumb
face calls Gary grab
torquoise feather jig job
on bob water
trout cap if'n
happen tepid bib dip
bung. I so
tire of your
guitar band.
I give two stars,
and scold your butt-ass
song structure year.
The year creaks
open to stop
the gap, frond-heads
spool idiotically,
not to knock here in
soon-to-be glowing fall
spring's un-ethereal
snowdrop
or whatever, i.e.
eggs over easy where
ether = egg.
The Ether Bunny, ugh.
Basically I think the ether is tired.
The ether is where the gods live
who gave rise and birth to the outerspace spiders
who in turn begat some spaceships.
Isn't ether pretty indifferent?
Can't you put your hand in it
and lend it some
abject structure?
And way off in the ether to your left,
mired in that calloused-over pudding
that prehistory's measured pace so impresses us
by having broken through the surface of,
a concealed USB port
is waiting to accept
the sloughed off desires
of failing to adapt:
Persian inscription,
B.C.E., gruesome
warning: "Off with your
head, Joanna Newsom"
Dark Ages prototype
Creak claw pigeon
Body cavity gears
Drop the jawbridge &
Blood in a river
in .swf format
calling your visual
cortex 'doormat'
However intuitive,
downloadable railroad
gold spike teeth hide
bite-profile payload
In facial concealment
a terrible truth:
expressions preprogrammed
to hide their own wrath
Double-grin golem
doggerel algorithm
Squawkbox guffaw
text-to-speech prism
A cyborg/lutist
superimposition
DNA kink
Learning-curve omission
Sort by Modified
Fold spindle & tabulate
Data mine vulture
Air-burial combobulate
Boneheaded chromium
robot embarrassment
Essence is software
and body embellishment
Dignity hangs
like a Congo computer
Garden of Eden
first-person shooter
Flop your body
like a dying bird
Play Japanese music
I've never heard
Smash your guitar
seems kind of dopey
Arcade Fire
hyptertropey
built; ceremony
balances; instructions
One of three terms is missing
Anyway who are you being
by being the first last person
to give "utterly" and "utterance"
a close reading. My thoughts
and yours shared tanginess and tangibility.
Flavored
bagpipe filters
give grape
notes life.
It's an 8-minute meditation, opposing melody, dancing with it. (?)
Memory gives melody life, melody gives memory time.
It's a non-melody I have memorized and I can barely believe
it's also the song "Hamburger Train" by the band Primus.
Like
hair,
ear
gives life.
One of your
crops
has failed.
A functionary is sent to survey the damage.
One of your
airline pilots
has fallen asleep.
Your imagination redirects.
One of your
guards
has wandered away.
What do you do? >
So you input the
proper commands to send
your character
on his/her way,
pausing in circular, rabbit-blessed
fields, ipod full
of Alvin Curran,
Dwight Yoakam,
you listen to
both kinds.
Nice songs are nice
but not everything
because music built outside
of metrical and tonal whatever
tells you what planet to be from.
Centipedes are
from the rings of saturn.
Rabbits have come
an intergalactic distance
and their hearing is excellent.
Music at
its most distracting
requires the strictest
attention.
Either you
are in the center
of the concentric rings,
measuring thresholds of replying densities,
or you have airplanes
doing much the same
on their flyovers, say
over oil-well fires.
The smoke blows
the nerves
into the pattern of a diagram.
Many sentences can say the same thing.
What does meteorology do?
It is a stinkbug
with shirt and tie aspirations.
winds from the southwest at 25 mph
nearly triple digits today
hot and humid provoking
visions of pink pinkwheels
they accept energy, no they supply it!
I'm supposed to know how it feels
if the song is built to be cranked,
turned by the handle again & again,
I suppose I do know how that feels.
A well-known performer sits at the piano, not playing.
"I'm always disappointed," and the story ends. I know
how he feels. I listened to the music I claim I require most
(fast, kind of euphoric) 18 times according to itunes.
Pinched syntax sits
layered per turned page
of the anatomy textbook
the knuckles wrap,
because intact
anatomy makes no
three-dimensional
sense.
I've tried to hold you, the rabbits,
to compensate you for the predation
I hold up as though before my face. What feeling
of mine is presupposed at seeing you snatched?
Behind a veil of
mountains, a green, touching
climactic scene.
I wonder where have you gone to?
Thanks for sending the pictures
It was nice to see you all again
Your inner lives must be weird
I went for a 10-mile run
Domesticated rabbits
Careful crawfish
Timid titmice
Drowsy caterpillars
without knowing what the point of
the seminar was, and seeing that
over half of his power point presentation
had been erased in the flood
without subconscious memories
locked in a bank vault that
got carried over from a string
of previous bunny lifetimes
This time the bunny will be
better, will be faster and
smarter, this time the bunny
will be everywhere.
Hey bunny! It's a bunny
Look at the bunny
There's a bunny
Look over there there's a little bunny
Stay underground
Stay underground stay underground
Little rabbit little rabbit
Stay underground
From inside the hole
the red spot on the weather map
is only a loud sound
with a lot of other sounds mixed in.
Nine
tenths
of planning is
execution.
You play a noiseless ninja
who slices people in half.
Your speed and agility
help him slice people in half.
You play
a level 20
jackrabbit.
Your speed
is 55 and increases by 2 every level.
With every 10 minutes of
night's onset, you gain
a +5% chance of invisibility.
In addition, you get a +2 bonus to perception
during the hours of dew condensation.
Your speed and agility scale upwards exponentially
as proximity to heard dangers decreases.
You play as a kind of cat
your ideas & kinaesthetic sense
fit into. You didn't come up
with any of it; is this okay? (y/n)
You play as Roy Orbison
in a game whose boundary detection
channels sound away like runoff,
hard kernel inner ear.
Nothing is pressing
in, nothing
impinges, so the
character you picked proceeds
in a straight line,
hydroplanes
over a brick street
made of pixels.
The true thing I want most
"the music I most want to hear"
is blocked at the mouth
because its number of connector pins
doesn't match
in the mirror
when you make your warrior/cannibal face,
it means increase
the voltage,
"The hole I show you
engulfs and jaw chomps"
and out sound sprays.
Was it pope
or ape
jaw open
in the Bacon?
Sight hinges
below the board,
joystick twirls it, the true
gorilla mandible matching game I wrote.
Instead of a genius baby
I had
animations of
the ordinary ninja or the
alien mummy with sonic knives,
but some people like
kind of a boring guy
in a blue uniform.
The baby drives a
green robot suit
that does
wrestling moves.
The boring guy's electricity attack
is undesired because
of the known bug
it causes.
You'll be unable
to press right-right
and run past
the spike guards
and pick up
the sentient prosthetic
flamethrower arm
that last boss dropped.
I was up
until five
waving a
little
ninja around
at the end of
a joy
stick.
Roundhouse Kicks! Linguistic torque!
Unlock bonus phonemes!
Earn extra points!
Deal maximum destruction!
Subordinate clauses chain
& gain power multipliers
when you play as Thomas DeQuincey e.g.,
dealing +25% damage against
claustrophic notions of what a musical instrument can't be:
mindset follows earpiece
across absolutely any border, falls
within.
That beloved sentence formation
comes to you in the middle of the night
as a long lost power-up. This state...
every enemy encounter expected... who
aces videogames
counts as visionary?
The heart, the
longed-for combo...
I've been asked
to compose loops
of music for a
Street Fighter style game.
You put in your quarters,
pick your character, and
throughout the fight maintain
detachment and academic curiosity.
The stiff bow,
the crisp liturgy of movement
and pause
as though creating and filling
by rote
slots for
fancy metaphors
(the small bones
in the hand are
like little worlds, something something).
Rigid stances,
chesslike.
Still
they're building
something
skeletal.
"And finally tonight, one heroic lop-eared rabbit
corrects his owner's thousand-dollar accounting mistakes.
His name is Rumble, and he's a real 'money bunny.'"
The News Center 5 Team breaks the story,
a tower at the foot of my bed blasting
information lasers of almost immeasurable sharpness
back into the skull of the sleeping city
in a painting I remember seeing.
Who did it?
Enough bad guys
isn't
interesting enough for
the problem,
music with a point
pointy,
"here the music gets serious" [about]
recyclying one's own
earlier musical material
to mimic coming to
the simultaneous revelation,
eventually, of whose it was
("when I'm falling asleep
I hear music and music,
I hear how they fit together"), whose nose in
the surgical supply catalogs
to get
the right razor back
but sharp means sharper.
It was you with the amount of
stretchy soft-surrealist autobiography
in the styrofoam cup, spun
by the Breton worm.
Cut it up
into segments,
the way imagination is
isn't that intimate.
The sea cucumber's oxygen exchange organ
is suitably shaped only for generating
dreams, which bewilder him,
until he dies and I'm cut off.
One day
I'll be too
shamed to keep
exaggerating.
It began like
fingernails
being clipped
and continued down the line.
In a city
I couldn't make out
there was a reptilian man
who leveled at my gaze
an average and predictable bazooka-full
of textbook manifesto tradition:
it's unacceptable this,
it's unacceptable that.
The public opinion polls
fall all around.
The master sage uses
his opponent's center of
gravity against him.
The great martial arts traditions
come to the big screen
in a time of great peril
to save that
which matters most
from surging from within
to infest the people.
All the body parts
break
along partisan
lines.
The femur
is a
marrow
stairway?
"The soul is one voice
in the polyphony of"
something illegible.
The brain is a construction worker,
pulling harder and harder myriad
of course light-sized cords
attached at the back of the eye to
threaten to pull down
a piled-high wall of pretty things.
The iris exerts
a calming,
fixative force.
The gut is the famous design
of a team of BOSE engineers,
to allow the sound to fall out.
The elbow joint is a bow-marking
The palm transmits the buzz
of the clutched earphone.
The fingers unfurl, fuse
with part of the eyebrow.
It only takes a moment
It lasts 30 seconds or so
Its events cover a time period of one week
It is less than one pixel wide,
as punctual as perforation and
encapsulation in a cavity of the head,
minus of course the extended duration
this involution incorrectly implies.
Sinuses
spur the hyperextent
of
the gesundheit. An event
built (though that verb might mislead)
on cheap sampler button-presses didn't used
to result in the news. Which is why
you exactly never can have it back again.
I fell asleep at
Bruce Springsteen's
concert / lecture tour
"The Well-Tempered Teleprompter: Intersubjectivity of Mainstream News Outlets"
Someone reads
the news
to the dreamer.
I wake up to remember it.
President and
VP end
charity evening by
biting beaks.
Every night for weeks
it was headlines
with homemade backing tracks
pre-recorded?
Colorful new
species
of Amazon parrot
ripped from the headlines.
CEO accused
of remastering own
voice in company-wide
redistricting.
Distant drum
chorus in
furor,
dozens feared dead.
400 petabytes of
bird flu research
lost annually due to
bridge collapses.
Cheerleader
elected mayor in
rural drag race
gone awry.
Kenny Chesney,
de Chirico
popular with troops:
Petraeus.
More teens
pushing gas pedals
with hands
study finds.
Congress approves
sonic engine signatures
on hand
in annual report.
Spam robots
cause
massive alligator die-off
in arid email climates.
Six minutes before waking me up,
Bruce Springsteen smashed two
flower-vases together over my head.
Prone, I
Am slow to know
When immersed
Or falling asleep
The Two-part Inventions.
That Edith Piaf "means something."
That somebody's doctoral dissertation is
some big philosophical ocean-liner engine-part
hanging from a few moments of Kid Koala.
That one phrase of all the copious
Alvin Curran liner notes ("endless fascination with
the interaction of tone and duration," something)
would be cause for...?
The great thinkers take stands against such a domino effect.
"Moments are for chumps," as Sartre said.
"Ze musique, she is bad," as Breton said.
They took & unhid
each source striation (tradition)
non-separately, back and forth
sung a ditty
along, and walked
over to this
one separate player
hidden, flat box
and along the
track over along
the striation one of them
separately did to
this one hidden track
This one 80-year-old
mind
composed most
musical moments
Barely or only intermittently hearing things
is SAD because of the slapstick of it,
lost up one end of the cochlear spiral
& (hello?) the other end of a phone call
Joke relighting candle,
stuck in
reverse, beeping
like a truck, why why
Why
does a given sound
come from what, when?
It's a dumb problem
Me (particle) standing in the projected tornado path,
a time-shaped cone tipped over onto the map,
in response to having trimmed (but why?) my instincts back
to this single man's idea of
creation and innovation being two competing frequencies.
He used the example of those
youtube videos of old 78s playing,
one long take, indifferent sound,
handheld camera.
He doesn't mind terribly
such a clean uncoiling
but would
rather each misery bone bag
bleeds into the one
standing next. Clustered affinities
waiting to cross the street.
I sat down with him
on a Saturday
to sort all
this through.
It's not the craft of songwriting/composition or "deft melodicism,"
but his aforementioned "Experience Crumple-Zone Theory"
under which for example "labyrinth" is interchangeable with
"microcosm," or as he'd specify: "Now then that specific passage
was now passageway now passage
I'll tell of all the heartbreak I've seen
Lord raise me up, Oh Lordy Lord
come raise up me, redeem me,
Give Me An Art Idea: a stake in an arid plateau far away,
a swiveling head on top of it,
whatever gears to make its nods extra-intricate,
then put a video of it on the internet over someone else's music
The aural (and other) memes, even in a single-author document or song,
spread, certainly, across a community, as we know, and
must also have come from somewhere, through an implacable narrowing-down to the
point of emergence. But try tracing a path backwards up the funnel cloud.
It makes my arms elongate
& jungle spines grow down the back of my neck,
& my nostrils the size of coin purses.
That's redeeming value?" Why that, specifically? I mean,
He's one of the world's most underrated songwriters;
I stole everything I know from him and carried it off
in my mouth like a panther cub and studied it. Why
cosmic explosion yields someday dark digestive pathways, eg?
Hidden there far enough away from everything else
An energy baffle made of condensed, twisted up energy
The size of the whole underside of an island
Draws over its own passageway map constantly but
It's not all going anywhere now that it's finished
You can't get into it and you can't get out
But the creature standing on the X in the center
Is vibration clumped around two main frequencies
Oh well hey
Feed a real minotaur
a bucket of turnips, only $20
I have that much
So where are you in the center of, now?
Someone will datamine the geospatial coordinates
and drop a hypercompetent corporate pop album on them
and milk'll pour out like a swirl of notes
Hot cream poured
into the molds so
the resulting per-person in-ear stage monitor
lactates
A thick swirl of notes trapped in the strata
offers rich information about the where & when,
a set of distribution data of trees and timber
in the ancient world. A fanatical redrawing of boundaries
A swirl of notes definitely doesn't make sense
Some would have to end before they started
But okay, let it all in, let it clump or not
A typical vortex either buttonholes your friends unkindly or
Gives them access to all the accumulated information
Outer space scrapes itself
But from here it's easy, looking up and
Offering foolishisms & wishes,
Depending on how exposed we feel, to the sky above us
Empty or full. Turn the human knowledge banks loose,
I said, give the people the information they need
la gente, o povo filtered through microscope glass
Blurry jpegs of pollen magnified 100x
I think ideas & words don't clump together like that
To find out, stay tuned for our next episode
Violence Is Never The Anther
or, I Think I'm Pollen In Love With You
violent little bursts or
ideological nodes of interest to
an explosion of identical visual art
Who can be the best copyist?
And who is the crappiest? Find a zoom level
thinking happens at and draw 60,000 little territories there
And then the wind changes so start doing something else
Music unplays back, coiled up in the warm part of the chest
where no organs are, Ravel's Sonatine and
Super Rad! by the Aquabats unfortunately is fun
and everyone in history changes 200 years ago all at once
I could kick some music in the stomach!
Everyone's consciousness before the change
200 years ago was seated in the center
of the chest, then wham
but I don't know what to call it that
much is absolutely the case.
Outwardly, and with daily things and
holding still & pretendly enjoying play profundities.
Into the cold half-light
The duke's gray stag popped
With antler-ideas stolen from, bristling
With security cameras and insect microphones
((Movie Music)) so we'll hold still for a while
you who I love and
let the sound effects get
laced in up to and
until the flashes of laser guns and the holding of
hands becomes part of the musical composition,
until there will be no named theories for
what happens audibly alone or in groups and
this money is worthless! out of circulation music
highly derivative, music based on star charts
dog thrashing a stuffed buffalo, dog-toy music
clink clink, silverware music
I could do this all day
I can't get over how empty it is (could be --
How would I know? And
why the irrational worry over it?
What do I care? I don't even "work here"...)
squeaky clean cabbage leaves, soup music soup
buckle music, will buckle music, will have buckled music
music that violates copyright, Cheers theme fugue, yawn.
space dust fluttering down, a music of dust
merry-go-round, a remusicalization of the calliope
hinge-point/knuckle, right angle music
crawl across the floor shots fired, PTSD music
"We reject any work
which does not piercingly
strike molten and inhumane
depths, which skitters around on the surface."
All those manifestoes and everything
It's hard taking that stuff seriously etc.
"New Common Practice"/"Totalist Composition" or just
walking around with epidermis microphonacea
than which was then thin
king fish slip thin mem
brane through/of water
ruin desert vice versa
BOBAGEM | MEGABOB
"Infidels trot in the meadow
Genociders trample a tree
Throw the fish back in the ocean
They ain't what they used to be
Rising, snapping the rafters
Then sweeping back out to sea
People I've seen while dreaming
Ain't what they used to be"
A darkened door
led into a long dark hallway
at gunpoint
In those days the opening of every new option
led deeper into all the others. Which is why
notebook crazy intuition always, long-distance
running bank robbery dreams. Nowadays,
I set the ipod to repeat "When Big
Joan Sets Up" and snap my fingers along
like I'm trying to change the music
"from wooden boy to real boy,"
to ripple liquid & let
smooth over
energy in energy out
Snap Snap. Snap Snap
"When Big Joan Sets Up"
forever forever
The harder you snap your fingers on the 2 and 4
to draw it forcefully out into the external
like perpetual leech through pinhole
pinhole through paper over
whole big real never
deal other anything.
The trills and other ornaments (Bach, Feist, JZ et al)
are so unacceptable one must force oneself to redirect
one's attention to them, evidence of liberating energy
stored to draw blood from the leech.
Nebula not built
to refocus red
energy out but in,
it vanishes in a sense.
"There is void" lacks sense.
There is only vibration, and matter through which it moves
Which is why the music can be so fleeting. "Haunting"
"The ripple effect" outwards from inside quotes, counterflow
In a river mouth city
Speech is a mouth
Beware, the dieback is set to begin
in a river mouth city
Rigor mortis spreads up river
but at some point jumps the tracks
You must get your moisture directly from the clouds
and keep yourself directly facing the sun
"This Bud's for you" ha ha
I look at everything as a problem
but: with unflagging optimism:
No flaggings allowed!
No negative thoughts allowed either ha ha.
I'm going to solve this country's problems
by talking through the music I think
I most want to be listening to (goddammit) but:
The average shark
never stops with territory.
First there is one shark,
then two, then four;
they refuse to recognize you.
And maybe you've had it with veneration.
All that's left now is, mark out
a little territory somewhere farther away.
More of
tacit fake mind gait
jostled by distant thud bombings
into view, mollusk mantle underwear
Out on the low arctic tundra of Greenland
Fortifications straight out of Robinson Crusoe
Sharp stakes set in a circle
Where nothing will grow
Flags planted on the arid plateaus of New Mexico;
flags left in the Bolivian high pampas.
Mongolian dune slowly reabsorbing
its sandcastle crown.
The wind whistles over the rocks
and among the grasses of the Alpine steppes.
There is no J.S. Bach to a bunny.
I could learn to be a bunny.
You, rabbit, your live body wire
supplies input
for a dream of outrunning
dream ability
Sunlight directed
like whisper
through
a rabbit's supernatural translucent ear
If only there was someone of conscience around
to remind me to think of what each instance of
incremental, detail-oriented attention
might have to do where it's all heading.
I expect again today I might not really hear what I
most want to hear. The Japanese can hear Roy Orbison.
A raccoon took the lid off a container of thrown-away apricots.
A buffalo didn't want to eat a mouse that was near his face.
A pet iguana was given a special treat of
apples mixed with leftover cilantro leaves.
A crab was pecked to bits and when we found his shell
the top part of it was upside-down and full of sand.
An osprey tore the guts and ripe red meat
from a fish that was still slightly moving.
The Magnetic Fields is an okay band,
if you like music to get bored to.
A soft-looking caterpillar ate
part of a daisy-type flower,
approximately half of it, then
got distracted and wandered the other direction
A dormouse who lives in a coconut
wasn't fat enough to hibernate so
they fed him ivy pollen and blueberries,
I saw it somewhere
A cluster of extinctions, pollution
Poisoned rivers. There is a number of
millions of new acres of desert
created every year.
This was ten years ago. The situation
in Africa already impossible. I have a wall
of books. Marcel Duchamp vs. Philip Guston.
In either case you're memorizing intervals without trying.
The clouds race past, overhead
But it's only apparent movement
Red and white twisting around a candy cane
The environment: global climate change,
Much louder, and much slower in both ears
all of a sudden. Keep track of things
coming up. Don't let yourself
get overwhelmed.
Make a list of the numbers and kinds of music you want to hear
Switch the terms around, "dappled" surface, your "life's work"
I just want to eat some nice green leaves
and go to sleep for a long, long time.
Some kinds of music are dead; some ideas are dead.
Things are going to get much, much worse in coming decades.
One week from today, J.S. Bach for thirty minutes a day
caused enhanced growth and recovery in plants and people.
Give me a slow beat (~1/4=56) and I'll spill out
spitfire thirtysecond-notes. Armchair revolutionary
weighs in on moment states and directionality in Bach
and skull suture movement ("give") in human adults.
Lucretius has it that the universe must consist of
atoms and void: matter, and space through which it moves.
He's not even the one who thought of it originally.
The matter/void admixture results in sunflowers blowing in the breeze:
not "to be happy," or even to witness only happy occurrences,
but to free the cold external from regrets and loneliness.
This should be easier than it is. Why?
But I am in no way shielded from the tedium of other people's art.
Any thing but to be tame permanently,
which includes everybody's "first facts" and
what we're here for, where it's going -- I don't know you,
a sunflower never meets another sunflower down there
From the air, it's a wide yellow field, the financial markets
were jittery today, made pockets and the plane buckt
(It's the Sunflower State, for hundreds of miles
it's nothing but sunflowers and intersections
The piece was built on a looping structure
The police was built on a looping sunflower
You alone, you are the little wire
Alone you form the little wire sculpture
Were we hearing the same thing? Sunflower, sunflower,
sunflower sunflower sunflower) (You've backed me
into a corner here -- ) I drew you a conceptual picture
about the concert we were at, and I want you to see it.
It's a field, constructed of the correspondence
(by inversion of appearance, and by mutual movement)
between sunflower and sun: a conical,
highly charged region of interest.
Stories of large fields of sunflowers
turning their heads in unison
to listen to the sound of the sun
fail to consider whether it is behavior or not.
Imagine you're the sunflower but you don't know it.
The sun rises and you writhe heedlessly, arbitrarily
pointing your receptors; the sun sets and you're exhausted...
the unfamiliar music you hear, maybe try to follow, at that point...
How miraculous that sonic after-image (or why not, before-image) is!
(Because honestly it can slip into something you've
listened to a million times and back out again.
...Back out, into what? And before you know it you're asleep.)
My opinion is that you need to listen as hard as you can,
every time, without ever stopping, which makes you
exhausted, but as tired as you are you have to work
to keep it from resolving into a recording you know well.
I figure out what's the crucial aspect
and make a whole extended silence out of it.
Then suddenly I find we're holding on, to each other,
& I'm glad you're here, listen to this.
It starts out with Bach and moves into different territory.
What does the concept of Auto-Save have to do with Bach?
A Bach French Suite and then some Lightning Bolt.
The music of The Shins lacks all imagination, like white mold.
No, like Wittgenstein, I'd rather stop listening when I choose.
It wouldn't sound like anything if you weren't here
to hear it with me. "Get cleaner, whiter teeth with"
Take advantage of every opportunity to really listen.
Just hear, hear, the motivic specificity here:
"Get cleaner, whiter teeth with"
"Get cleaner, whiter teeth with"
Slow down, and hear, each one of the sounds.
It's not numerology, or Zen, this Alone, as though with
headphones, writing down. It's not anything
even though the motif has 5 notes in sequence
so I thought I would invite 4 other people
It was a nice lunch. 5 is the perfect size for a table of people.
The pleasure of hearing a new opinion from someone I'm
beginning to know...as we leave, we all head in different directions...
two halves of a shell close around me and how thoroughly can it be notated?
That it's perfectly audible, that snap closure mechanism
As you leave them and are alone, or the music starts and you're alone,
That you hear the notation as well as what you hear
Within a span of several seconds, isn't that good?
But, none of it's as good as it's supposed to be;
none of it lives up to the potential of the medium.
Ad infinitum they try for the biggest chain reaction they can get
but fail through lack of commitment or overattention to
Matters of craft: pitting 4-measure cycles against 6- and
10-measure cycles, overlapping them, each stepping
into each other's space a little too soon. To speed them up,
vary them, shift the surface only, hollow, to mystify, would be pointless.
It doesn’t make sense to feel both responsible
for the spiritual and material conditions
the human world lives in and through every day
and simultaneously disconnected from that world,
but what other formulation of loneliness finds
such refuge in sound, made sound, intentional sound?
Expose the perfected fallacy inherent here. Attention to resonance
is resonance (connection and hard work as well), or, buoying
the listener’s consciousness on itself, the sound level rises
and spills over the edge, the first big edge, but into what?
It’s not much of a drop, really, and once you make it
you find level footing, & a kind of basic horizon. But, you think,
Safe from the flimsy protections of "the industry"? And
at the same time wondering "is what I have in mind a good approximation
of where this is heading? Or is it just shifting surface,
Steve Reich, Busta Rhymes, Lucretius, 'art screams' like the guy said, etc etc"
It's been hounding me for months, that one set
of sounds, occurring when and where it occurred, half
it seems by accident -- how time opened up and
accepted it -- an evening of music, that was all it was.
I have this ambition, which I woke up with this morning,
to figure out the problems presented by the performance,
in spite of also waking up this morning feeling like
a number of knots had come untied while I slept.
The people that say the most difficult things to me
about form (musical form, don't let yourself be confused
or if confused don't mistake it for a made sound)
are generous with ideas I may never really deal with --
not "music is x, y, and z," but "x, y, and z, though unrelated,
are musical" -- a horde of crabs in my likeness,
with pinchers right where my arms would be,
scuttling everywhere in search of another way of reframing the music,
just scrabbling around across a surface of coordinates
without really cutting too far into that
hard, heavy sphere left by the ancestors. Is it
of value, the sphere, or a problem too perfect to "get"?
The music's
Wealthy, maybe, but known to have lost some former mastery.
I was so much wiser before; I could form opinions
quickly and easily, whereas now it's a long process
which usually ends in further loneliness & prohibition.
It would be easiest to copy down previous thoughts;
that is to say, how circular is listening? And to what?
Whether it's call/response music, drone, noise, or
just in a digital format you can listen to over and over?
A metaphor is useful here; the insistence of the music
softens the hard shell of time and preoccupation --
before very long, the listener is able to slip out of her shell
like a molting crab, briefly unprotected but at least not confined.
After the opening of the piece, which is chaotic,
a set of rules seems to take over
and the accompanying comfortable rhythms too --
like "software libraries," i.e., givens, fit for use.
Imagine your expression as you dimly wonder
what all this musical back and forth has to do
with politics... then you think, as I do, that it must be
something to do with people's actual lives... but whose? Etc.
And there are long periods of seeming inactivity,
in which, through repetition, the notes might seem to be about
to crust over with callouses, but the opposite is true, until
time begins to return, to re-encase the body, causing constriction, low blood flow.
You can feel it when the music's about to end.
How can that be the case?
Then it ends and you sit there keenly
aware of all the knuckles in your hands.
To play it with true sanity, sobriety,
that would be something remarkable.
But when applause comes to an end,
it's as though it has never been.
There are advance warnings, of course, smaller
outlying disturbances
And then the big vibrations really begin to hit
"VIBRATIONS..." known, yes, before the climax arrives.
Which is why it would be embarrassing
if one's quest for achievement, or
adrenaline if you prefer, ended up
at kind of a middle-brow, empty-grocery-store place.
Your world is so perfect to me in its loneliness.
I hear the hisses & pops, the whistles, the crumple-ups,
I press myself against the pane, to hear them. Not
the kind to organize it, though-- you got started too late
Their claim is it's easiest to achieve a plateau
by citing Balinese music as an example.
It's easy to cite Balinese music as an example
and we must not always do the easiest thing.
I haven't kept up with what's going on in their world.
Of course they are the hope for our future -- Like Orwell said
about the proletariat? Ebert gives the world only 100 years
I've been listening to a lot of Jay-Z lately
I haven't listened to it yet but I expect it to be good.
They had lots of good things to say about it on NPR.
You know what that usually means.
I was at the DMV for 2 hours today...2 hours....
Taken one moment at a time, in celebration
of a... I don't know what it was, exactly.
An arctic wind blows in & lifts you
halfway off the foundation, and is gone...
I've been here before....I've seen
that particular tree before.
It may have been from the other side
or in another particular kind of light
What have you been listening to lately?
I thought there were seagulls swirling as
I came down off the Williamsburg bridge
You can't get people always down off the bridges
So that they turned to war as a way to bring
a more efficient musical production into their lives.
I have seen the videos
of 500 lb bombs, of them waiting for the arrival
What is there to say about the flow of meaning
in and through the music? Is it a movement of
connection? Do they still call to you
Do they name you
But the music is always renewing itself;
it captures and channels the intensity of its instruments,
of the social conditions it was made in.
Music is the real story of the human race.
Prove as fallacious any necessary connection
between musical form and anything whatsoever,
as in such sentences as
"You like all the songs. You like them"
Prove as fallacy the "musical equivalent" of:
-- caped or masked individual being lowered into liquid
-- gearbox, flywheel, angle bracket, lowered into viscous liquid
-- tree lowered into viscous liquid
Accumulations of sediment, plastic
carbon, round-wound strings snapped,
clamor, best practices, etc. What's
at stake here in what I'm listening to;
in order to keep it from all evaporating
it must be pressurized from the outside, eyesight
curves through the added atmospheres
warping even the most eventual result.
The musical weirdness (...?) must be put in the service of something--
keep in mind it's all pop music --
So we vacillate (as listeners, or until listening) between a
rote humanism and a rote anti-humanism
The foment of the decrepit
Calcarious pre-remnant fissure issue
Come on by and reassure me about the issues
Heave Train Cream Reave Crave
Me tried to tell me me knew where me was all going
Sadie called up, then, put the phone down
The other phone, (@#$!*)
It's important to eat broccoli, for broccolic acid
Today was a good day. I spent money
I clipped my fingernails.
I worked out a systematic analysis of
the semiotics of games on film (sub-films)
The small man (I mean the smallest of the three)
had never learned to whistle
arm hair, goat meat
ten hands braided on film
The unusual, steady rate of their appearance
as of the changing of the guard
they slept in several low, round structures
and disappeared in the morning
Press state cancel renew homonym
dripp
Steady drip you come out
out of it. GRRRRRRRRRRR
Run and photogravure
Rest hotly debated side of the road commercialism
Commerce number crunch
Oh baby come here come give me a hug
Three adjectives tied together
Three adjectives tied together permanently
It was an awful day today
I don't know how solve problem stop communicating
To view the superhero figure in isolation
or to bring the figurine in for a perfect landing
or to bring it all in under budget.
They motion you together, for a snapshot
It was a day filled with pride.
I leaned back in my chair
and supported my head in an unnatural way.
There were gouges all across the ceiling.