Ideational Continent

Occupying My Armchair

2011-10-26T20:01:00.001-07:00

Just want to say a few things from the comfort of my home which won't make any sense shouted in the streets. I think two forces are at work in bringing the insane brutality perpetrated by the OPD and surrounding agencies last night. Look at the national news reports and you hear, verbatim, the "sanitation and threat of violence" excuse popping up all over the place: Georgia, San Francisco, New York... This rhetoric, and the tactic it purports, are being perpetuated, and likely created, from deep behind the scenes. Mayor Quan just admitted that she had little to do with the planning of these actions, and was only informed of them after they had been decided.

But that dynamic, where (soon to be ex-) Mayor Quan can't even participate in decision-making about a police action of this scale (assuming we can even believe this latest garbage statement out of her office) is a uniquely Oakland predicament. One the one hand, the protest of police brutality going back to the late 60's has institutionalized itself to a power base which Quan knows she cannot ignore. They essentially choreographed her isolation of former Chief Batts (can I just say, though I'm no fan of the guy, I can't imagine him conducting the OPD as poorly as his recent successor has. For whatever that's worth). On the other hand, Quan's gutting of several local programs merely to put another dozen cops on the streets, proves that she is desperately seeking the ascent of the OPD to her current young administration. Thus, with neither credibility nor authority, she was forced to let a deputy "make the call", which essentially meant giving OPD carte blanch to turn this into their fantasy of urban warfare. They even managed to shoot a soldier in the head- too bad it was a former US soldier.

So much for "the police are part of the 99%". The police would shoot the officer next to them if they smelled blood.

Post-30 Post

2011-05-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends are in far away countries. Some are in different states. Some have jobs. Some have mysterious income sources. Some are musicians not playing gigs. Some are musicians playing jive ass gigs. Some are musicians making good music. Some are poets not writing books. Some are poets writing jive ass blog posts. Some are poets writing good books. I don't have any friends in fiction. All my friends are in fact friends, unless you count the ones who I just kind of know, and I don't know what they say about me behind my back. I don't want to know what my actual or former friends say about me behind my back.

Some of my friends have babies. Some of my friends are expecting to have babies. Some of my friends' wives or husbands or others' are expecting to have babies only to find out their counterpart is not. Some of the babies are expecting to be picked up and held when they cry. Some of my friends have dogs. I ignore the fact that some of my friends have cats (and I don't visit them).

Some of my friends rent in the area. Some of my friends move away because of the rent. Some of my friends have bought houses during the bust. Some are still looking for a busted house to buy. Some of my friends are embarking on careers. Some are in the middle of switching jobs for the nth time. Some of my friends are doing what they set out to do. Some don't remember what that was. Some of my friends take the drugs they took in college when they get together with their college friends. Some hang out until 9pm and then slink off to go to bed. Some of my friends lead enviable lives from the outside. Some of them lead lives that are impenetrable. Some of my friends lead lives that seem unsustainable for years and now decades. Thankfully, none of my friends has died.

Some summers I would curse my blue collar fate for the want of all the laziness and carousing I was missing, but I can't really trade in what I have now because some days past I hung out with some group of people and we all became each other at different times and here we are as the trace of whatever wasn't transient about those forms.

3 Photos

2011-03-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

on having a kid for real

2011-03-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

Not a narrative about our baby's birth:

-At 7:53 the night of March 9th, 2011, Reginald Carter Westbrook emerged into the world. He weighed 8 pounds, 14 ounces, was 21.5 inches in length and his head had a circumference of 14 inches. These facts proved difficult for his mother, Corinne Humphrey Belew (Cori), but she was extraordinarily herself throughout.
-He was born one day before his Uncle, my brother, Lucas Francis Westbrook. (aka Uncle Luke).
- A family friend, Charles Ragen, my Father and their Chinese business associates came up with a transliteration of "Reginald" in written Chinese: Thunder Child, or Thunder Bean, depending on how literal one wants to read.
-25 hours and fifty-three minutes after Reginald's birth, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake struck the east coast of Honshu Japan. As I write this, millions of people are struggling with the aftermath of the quake, the aftershocks, and the tsunamis which followed. These facts are beyond our comprehension.
-We have seen 13 nurses at Alta-Bates Summit Hospital in Berkeley, California where Reggie was born. The vast majority of them have been extraordinarily caring and skilled. It's hard to express the feeling of being so indebted to, and intimately involved with, people you've never met.
-Reggie seems to like movement, jazz standards, Sam Cooke and his mother. He seems to dislike sudden change, having his diaper changed and whatever he sees every time he opens his eyes.
-Merconium is a phenomenon. Our nurse dooped me into changing his first diaper. That was some shit, yo!
-This is as close as I'll get to a horoscope reading for young Reggie:

On the date of his birth in the Gregorian Calendar, the following also occurred:
-Ornette Coleman was born.
-Samuel Barber was born.
-Chingy was born.
-C-Murder was born.

-Charles Bukowski died.
-George Burns died.
-Stan Brakhage died.
-Robert Mapplethorpe died.
-Bobby Fischer died.
-Notoriou B.I.G. was murdered.
-David Rizzio (Queen Mary of Scots' Italian Secretary) was murdered.

-Emperor Wu of Han assumed the throne.
- Teacher's Day (Eid Al Maolim) in Lebanon is celebrated.
- The U.S. Supreme Court rules the case of the revolt on the slave ship Amistad in the favor of the captive Africans.

-On the actual day of his birth, Hugh Martin the composer of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", died in -Encinitas, Ca., which is the next town over to one of Cori's childhood homes.
-On the actual day of his birth, the space shuttle Discovery made its final landing.

- On the date of Cori's birth Philipino poet Vincente Sotto was born, Albert Einstien died, and Paul Revere rode through the streets of Boston.
- On the date of Dillon's birth Duke Ellington was born, Ludwig Wittgenstein died and Roger Clemens set the single game strikeout record at 20.

-Some babies are small. Some babies are large. Some babies are squat. Some babies are long. Some babies are large headed. Some babies are small headed. Some pelvises are Gynecoid. Some pelvises are Anthropoid. Some pelvises are Android. Some pelvises are Platypoid. These facts, in the way they become actual, will determine how your labor progresses. These facts cannot be known ahead of time (despite what anyone may tell you to the contrary).
-As you make decisions upon the assumption of these facts, you are deciding in the dark. Every decision you make will give birth to counter-factuals which will haunt you like ghosts. We are lucky in that all our ghosts are worse than those facts which attained reality. Our hearts go out to those whose ghosts are better.

on having a kid

2011-03-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Maybe this will post will both explain and end the drought of posts here. This is the only piece of writing I've done in 8-12 months. I wrote this in response to a query from Sean Manzano. I don't think he's going to publish it after all, so I'm finally putting it up here. You can tell from the Ecuador reference that this is old news- the question now is what is about to go down in Libya, when el Presidente Estados Unidos is calling for ouster (notice this is the only nation so far for which he's said that). Also, as of this morning, still no baby, for those keeping track...

I had stated repeatedly and for years that I would never have children, to family, to friends and to the woman who would become my wife. That woman merely rolled her eyes or ignored me, because she knew that she would have children and, after some time, she knew that she wanted those children to be mine. The first of them, a son, is due as of this writing in late February of 2011, a little over 10 years from the inauguration of George W. Bush, the election of Ariel Sharon and the creation of Wikipedia, my source for much of what follows.

When I taught briefly in 2006/2007 at the University of California Santa Cruz, a class of freshmen, I had the chilling realization that my students were in middle school, were not yet adults, when the West Wing of the Pentagon, the two towers of the World Trade Center, four airplanes, a swath of grass in Skanksville Pennsylvania and 2,996 human lives were destroyed. Which is to say they have not had a moment of their adult lives when they didn’t live in a country that was openly engaged in a perpetual war. The elementary school kids my wife began teaching around the same time were toddlers on that infamous date, and her latest classes had not yet been born. Some 40 million children have been born since 9/11/01 in the U.S. alone. This disproves one of my initial arguments, that ‘you can’t have American babies in the post-9/11 world’. In fact, you can, millions have and so soon will we.

The counter-argument I heard often, that ‘you, Dillon Westbrook, an educated, left-leaning, rational and moral person in a world of jingoism, profiteering and war-mongering must have babies, if only to counter-act the direction this country, the center of power in the world, is headed’- that argument is disproven I think as well by all these births, for the simple reason that a baby is not an argument for or against perpetual war. Neither babies nor wars are rational, and arguments are. Arguments are what we would be having if we, meaning the royal We of nations as singular agents, were rational- wars and babies are what we have instead.

Not only the core premise of the counter-argument is disproven, but the details as well. An educated, left-leaning, rational and moral person took the presidency of the U.S. in January of 2009, and he is bombing civilians in Pakistan from drone airplanes. In the interim, the U.S. ceased to be the center of power in the world. Now there is no center of power, or the center of power is in flux, in part because China had so many more babies, i.e. produced so much more capital, even when they tried rational schemes to limit those babies. The OPEC nations used to be our friendly petro-dealers, thanks in large part to George the Senior, and now they are a mass of feuding cousins whose allegiances we can’t predict or understand. Africa used to be a continent we could either ignore or stifle with charity, and now China is trying to turn Africa into its own petrol-and-mineral-dealer. Not surprisingly, neither China nor Africa wants to hear from an aging pimp like Uncle Sam: ‘just shut up and enjoy your iPad, grandpa- leave the economic expansion to us.’

But this too could shift, because wars and babies are what we have now instead of centers of power. Maybe that’s all we ever had. I’ve read that 1 in 200 men share a nearly identical Y chromosome, likely brought on by their sharing a direct, though distant, male progenitor- Genghis Khan. Khan was known to roll into town, line up all the men and execute them, then line up all the women and rape them. Now, some 800 years later, the babies are all that survived the war. The war is all that survived the historical record. Who knows what was going on in those towns before Genghis Khan showed up. They could have been educated, left-leaning, rational and moral people- lot of good it did them. If you read too much history, which I don’t, you can start to see why folks get caught up in starting another war- it becomes synonymous with all human activity, and people want to be known for doing something.

On the daily, though, what we do is hump economic hod up the scaffold. It keeps us distracted, because it doesn’t look anything like the war out there, in a mass of fueled-up vehicles pulsing towards destinations, Retail, Tech, Construction, Customer Service. You can tell from the statistics that the war never distracted us much from baby-making, 2007 had a surge in Iraq and on the homefront, with a record 4.3 million U.S. births. But a little dip in the road economically and we fall off by 2% in 2008 and beyond. If the lady and I had bought our house, married and conceived in 2005/2006, the grimmest years of the war, instead of 2009/2010, the grimmest years in the U.S. economy, friends and family would have applauded our timing, instead of questioning our sanity. Back then I was arguing about how another U.S. consumer was tantamount to a civilian death, or maybe ten civilian deaths, in Iraq or Afghanistan. But that’s not a rational argument. The unstable housing and job markets are “reasons” to hold off on the baby front. Wait another year until things pick up before committing to the $100,000+ liability that is a middle class U.S. baby. The two wars, or is it one war or is it 10,000, and their decades of destruction- no rational person would hold off giving birth awaiting their end. That argument actually persuades me, however, in the most cynical way- I don’t expect the wars to end before my wife passes child-bearing age. The two named wars we are in now may officially end, in the same sense they officially started, but that will hardly end the war.

“But wait!”, I hear you say, “Wars sure as shit are rational enterprises; they are instrumental to economic domination of one nation over others”. I am sympathetic to this argument to a point. It’s not hard to line up all the military interventions in the Persian Gulf and draw a line in the shape of an oil pipeline straight up to Afghanistan- mystery solved. But rationality requires that both means and ends are rational and are lined up through sound induction. From where we sit now, deposing the democratically elected Mohhamed Mossadegh in favor of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a bad move, because it fermented the Iranian Revolution and its government and they don’t like to play baseball with no Americans. Aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein as a counterfoil to the Iranian Revolutionary Government seemed like a winner at the time, but low and behold, he no liked-a baseball either. In fact, I’ll bet you Reggie Jackson’s signed #9 uniform that you can’t name one of these interventions that swung the way we wanted it 10 years down the line. Yet, we’re still at it, most recently with President Aristide of Haiti, and what the fuck is about to go down in Ecuador right now, anyways?

Nevertheless, we keep at it, and while that might look like dogged American determination, it’s also a text-book fit for the clinical definition of insanity- doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. And what about the results- are they rational ends? Sure, we all enjoy and agree upon super-sized cheese burgers and iPads. And, as Fox news will point out several times daily, hundreds-of-thousands of people annually try to bust in, legally or otherwise, to the land of super-sized cheese burgers and iPads. China is building its own, much larger land of cheese-burgers and iPads, and they don’t even have to import the iPads. But the Greeks took pains to show us that everyone and their mother agreeing on something doesn’t make it true or right. Ultimately, consumption to the point of engorgement is a losing strategy and one that we no doubt will pursue to our ecological, and cardiovascular, demise. If it is even rational to live, and there is plenty ground to argue inside that question, it is not clear that it is thereby rational to prosper. It may turn out that we would be better off struggling and starving a bit in the long run, and though it is certainly horrible to be the war-torn; the burned, the murdered, the raped and the beaten, it is by no means inversely grand to be the warrior. As of this writing there are more U.S. military deaths this year attributed to suicide than to combat action in either theater of the war.

The politics of birth in this country are all defined around Choice, and I doubt whether any other country talks about it in terms quite so stark. Certainly I’m the first to say that I know damn-well how the biology works. If my wife has a bun in the oven I’m fully culpable. It’s a “choice” I won’t live down or, I hope, outlive. But the metaphysics are complicated in a way the political debate never seems to capture. If the choice is between a world that contains a new agency, the baby, and one that does not, in which of those possible worlds does that agency itself have any say about its own existence? If the agent is never-to-be and I or my wife exercise any of the various options my Catholic forebearers would disdain, did baby’s agency decide not to be or did that agency simply never exist? If we do nothing but what biology dictates, did baby agency ascent, or is it possible for the agency to decide post-facto that it would rather not have been? To put it another way, is it so obvious that every baby that is born wanted to exist?

What choice would my future son have made if I had explained the full circumstance to him- the depleted environment, over-population of the human species, the hegemony of private agri-business over food production, economic and social injustice, war, rape and famine, the A’s moving to San Jose? Would he say, ‘fuck that shit, I’m out’ and reabsorb into his mother’s blood stream? Or would he say this: “You’re barely 30 years old, Dad, and I know you think you’re a smart guy and you got it all figured out, but by the time I’m your age the entire game will have changed in ways you can’t predict now, no matter what statistical or historical analysis you invent. Don’t ask whether I should want to be a future agent, but ask what you, old man, are going to do to prepare the future for my agency, to make it possible for me to even make meaningful choices, whose possible outcomes outstrip your imagination at this moment when my mother is pregnant, the house I will come home to from the hospital is half-built, and you don’t even know whether you’ll have a job in the next six months.” Then baby would giggle at me and put my smart phone in his mouth and chew on it. Because babies, like wars, don’t give a fuck about you and your mental anguish- they’re coming whether you’re ready or not.

Let's Go Texas

2010-10-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

yeah, I said it. If I've got any horse in this race, it's Tejas all the way.

Am I Doing Something Profound Right Now?

2010-10-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

It's hard to say.

lyrics can be good

2010-07-27T20:46:00.001-07:00

"even though you're smarter than me
I'll write your autobiography

I'm using all the words up
got my grammar at the five-and-dime
I'm looking all the words up
now I know the words are mine"

(David Bryne- from "Wanted for Life", off Everything That Happens Will Happen Today)

The beat also kinda slaps on this one, to the point where you want to throw a hand up and sing along. This guy still kills me, Brain Eno too. Funky middle aged white men.

Makin' me wanna' go back to writing songs.

Here's a recent lyric:

left alone
I would die
gladly I, would die

stately home
you and I
lately lost, you and I

left a note, left of hope
for you and I
lately I, wonder why

left alone
I do cry
rest assured, I cry

(lyrics can be good, but I'm not sure these are. Ask me to sing the tune though, if you see me)

Poetry Disconnect

2010-05-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

I'm sure everyone's got their version of this, but I'm starting to feel like my utter lack of production in the literary world is making me a de facto pariah there. Whether it's self-imposed or not, the fact that I'm neither reading my cohorts books or flooding them with manuscripts of my own leaves me feeling like I'm undeserving of their company or something. It's a weird feeling, and I think I'm stating it publicly to see if it's a real phenomenon or not.

Didn't Do Dhit Today

2010-05-01T21:44:00.001-07:00

Happy May Day.

Exercise 1

2010-04-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

It will take a sound to start
saying this twice
it will take a sound start at
saying this

rest

starts a sound from
the back of the throat
mind how you start each
sound from the mind

more

to blend sound minds
without one
who minds this sound
of mine

move

make room in the mind
feel like I’m
making field minds
of felt mice

less

more A’s in Oakland
less in its suburbs
a stay in Oakland is
a lesson blurred

resist

sense a talk with
meritocracy furrowed brow
from whence a tall
ferret breeds.

I Can't Hack It In the Digital World

2010-03-16T20:32:00.001-07:00

I think I'm getting old 'yal. I canceled my Facebook account tonight. I haven't hit up the old blog in a month. I was reading a book the other day. The pages were soft and they didn't hurt my eyes. I can't hack it in the digital world.

An example of 1:1 relation of text:music

2010-02-04T17:43:00.000-08:00

Thanks to John Sakkis for pointing readers to this project from Demosthenes Agrafiotis and Michail Palaiologou. Apparently Morse Code served as part of the basis and compositional method. Would like to know more, but certainly seems to avoid any of the pedantry you might expect from close coupling of a semantically arbitrary aspect of language like alphabetic characters to musical values. Equally impressive that so much drama comes from a score that seems, on first listen anyways, to rely exclusively on one note, in octaves, between two strings.

Raj-A!

2010-01-19T15:06:00.000-08:00

Billy Beane narrowly avoided me coming to his house and kicking his fucking ass today.

to be an aging rockstar

2010-01-17T14:22:00.000-08:00

You start out playing shitty club gigs and you get high because you want to feel good after being stuck in the back seat of a packed van, and you are a little nervous and you want to feel as bad ass as your stage act says you're supposed to be. And you know it's a persona but the only fun you have is believing the persona for a few hours, and the combination of all these things makes you an addict by the time anyone gives fuck who you are. But the wife or the money or the management figures out how to clean you up before you die and just in time to lock in some earnings from your one chart hit and book you on Letterman once in a while and you show up and your rider requests a sober wet bar and you're standing there under halogen lights talking to their handler and knowing you're supposed to pretend that you're the persona and that the persona thinks all this is really cool and the persona likes a sober wet bar in an undecorated green room under halogen lights, and if you happen to have a brain after all of the years on the road this has to be fucking hell.

Happy 20-teens

2009-12-31T18:25:00.001-08:00

Amongst other momentous things, 2009 became the year in which I would write something like a year-encapsulating letter/blog post. The only thing that can follow that up next year would be a family newsletter. What can you do. Really, what can you do when to resist when you live in a culture that co-opts all resistance, besides buy in unabashedly. Buy a house. Get married. Get a dog. Guilty, guilty and, sooner rather than later, guilty again. I could of course point towards irony and say, "but I at least know what I'm doing". What good is that? The year-encapsulating blog post will flow from your fingers like the 16-digit credit card number flows through the Amazon's secure server. There is no swimming against this tide.

Money dominated nearly every conversation this year, most noticeably those conversations in which it was conspicuously avoided. After years of fooling the toiling classes with dreams of jumping class by way of inflated home values, the market popped the bubble and ran off with every cent of capital said toiling class pumped into it. Now, we're supposed to be ashamed of losing everything in the first place (but not for the legitimate reason of being fooled, but for the blunt fact of wanting to believe we could climb in the first place), and thankful for whatever we can hang on to, most often mere subsistence. The latter part is supposed to be the moral of this year's story- be thankful for what you have. Fuck that. The moral of this year is be disgusted at what you hear out and enraged at what you see.

But of course I am thankful for what I have- I have a new house (built by idiots in 1920, remodeled by morons in 1950- currently under a strict re-education regime by a neanderthal), a new wife (built by geniuses in 1981, no need for remodeling), and a full time job. Like any poet, if I give thanks for my job, it has to be with irony. But like any American poet, I'm used to that irony being read over or ignored. What can you do to resist when you live in a culture that co-opts all resistance, but sign a mortgage and go Christmas shopping. Except I love Christmas, without irony. Merry Christmas, especially if you're not Christian or of any European cultural extraction and hate this holiday- I hope you had the merriest one imaginable, because participating in the absurd is the only gift America has for the world.

Oh, yeah, that and drone bombs- but what can you do to resist when you live in a culture that co-opts all resistance. Look at that genius we have in the White House. He was part of the resistance, if you recall, a pinko community organizer. Now he's drone-bombing Afghani (and Pakistani) villas, looking to make ghosts of the phantoms of faulty intelligence. This will continue, just as it was going to continue regardless of who got into his position a year ago. All those weeks of agonizing about a troop surge was agony over the numbers 20,000 or 30,000. All the options are bad. That's about the best we can say in our defense. Take a country that's been at war for the past 30 years, almost without rest, and ask that will happen if you pull the latest round of occupiers from the West or North. Civil war of course. Not really better or worse, just different war. That's what we voted in last year. Change=Different War. Different how, I don't know. War with feelings. War with reluctance. Heroic reluctance even. Just look at the Nobel speech, if you're able- I for one couldn't stomach listening to it, just like I avoided eight years of ever listening to Bush II. I still like the guy though, and would probably enjoy a drink with him if given the opportunity. I just wish he would give up on a second term and thus gain half a chance at actually leading us somewhere. Call bullshit on the entire Congress and their nonsensical health care economics arguments ("Keep your governments hands of my Medicare!"). Bring us some bankers' heads on a plate. I have to say, after a decade of three of the worst catastrophes to ever visit the American populace- 9/11, Katrina and the economic meltdown, the American people still don't have a single head on a plate. And since we've all forgotten who Khaled Sheikh Mohammed is, that little show trial won't hardly do the thing. How about Bin Laden, Bush II and Greenspan, apple firmly in mouth.

But of course it wasn't Greenspan that did even the worst damage, it was Bubba's deregulation. And so it goes, the friends of the working man are the worst enemies he ever had. But what are you going to do to resist when you live in a culture that co-opts all resistance. You could write books. I keep threatening to do that. Lots of my friends did it this year: Sarah Trott, Stephanie Young, Linh Dinh Others are rumored forthcoming. I try to read them all, and as I try to do that, and read the ones by the people I don't even know and then some of the dead people I'll never know, it occurs to me that there's a lot of books, possibly (duck for stone throwing) too many. Not sure we should add any more. Ditto with albums. A friend said to me that the sixties must have been a great time to be alive and buying records, easily the greatest. I replied that maybe it was just the last time it was possible to digest all the records of a decade and savor the best. In this decade, you have no chance of finding all the best records, and thus the ratio of shit to shinola seems so much less savory. It will remain impossible to determine even the quantity of good music, let alone the essential character of that good music from this decade, because you couldn't even write software able to listen to all the shit we are putting out. Honestly, it seems cruel to even add anything to the pile for people to sort out. This is not an endorsement of Kenny Goldsmith's position on art and literature, this is a matter of manners.

But what can you do to resist in a culture that co-opts all resistance. I recorded two records this year, one (The Gomorran's) which was released, the other which we are withholding until we (OUTHEAD) decide if we're still a band. I keep threatening with this book about music and text, the one which gave birth to this blog in the first place. We'll see what happens, but know, faithful reader, that a lack of blog posts on the subject does not equal a lack of thought. A scarcity for sure, but not a lack. When a dear family friend Lawrence Halperin died a month ago, I was taken aback by how frightening I found his life's output. Even in 93 years, two national monuments (U.S. and Israel), a national park and countless state and city parks is a little frightening. I got to work on two of those parks- I can point to the parts I played in these creations, but I have little to point to of my own creation. And these are like two poles for me this year- to create, in the intellectual sense, or to do. To keep your hands clean or to labor away with them without a moment to look up.

But I did turn this:

Into this:

And that's something. Many thanks to my wife and family and friends and co-workers who helped. And many thanks to you, gentle reader, for trekking through the ideational continent all year. I shall try to keep it populated in the new decade with ideas worth wading through.

drunk + whatever's going on= awesome

2009-12-17T19:56:00.001-08:00

Two new cocktails from the creative department at Belbrook estates:

The Toddler (aka The Kids Table):

2 parts sparkling apple juice
1 part whiskey

The Baron Maker:
1 part Barenjager (traditionally barenfang, a honely liquer)
1 part Maker's Mark bourbon
splash of soda
lemon twist

happy hollowdays!

Solidarity?

2009-12-17T19:52:00.001-08:00

In my lifetime, only thing SF has done for its larger, sunnier neighbor

The Return of Rock-Rap?

2009-08-30T18:12:00.001-07:00

Boots Riley, local hero, and Tom Morello are co-fronting The Street Sweepers Social Club, a well-rehearsed, if slightly pedestrian iteration of the venerable genre. Born when Aerosmith capitalized on Run-DMC's 1986 cover of "Walk This Way", originally recorded in 1975. The musical innovation was due entirely to Jam Master Jay, who snipped a beat from the prosaic drum and gitar line of 'Smiths, over which Run and DMC laced some seriously dirty lyrics. Aerosmith's sole innovation was to notice that younger fans might start paying attention to them if they appeared in Run-DMC's video. This formalized a relationship that was already in play between DJ's and their MC's and the late-70's rock cannon, much of which was perfectly succinct and overly-produced for sampling.

So why, in 2009, is the genre appearing again. The last significant airing it got was 2002's Bad Boy for Life, a mediocre P. Diddy joint with Dave Navarro as window dressing. The only interest in the track was the video that blithely portrayed P. Diddy as the talk of a suburban community, commenting no doubt on Rap-Rock, and consequnetly hip-hop's utter and complete domination of suburban youth culture for almost a decade. Before that, there was the soundtrack to 1993's Judegment Night, which featured some inspired and some insipid collaborations (Helmet and House of Pain on the track 'Just Another Victim' stands out in memory). To be completely discounted in this analysis is any further mention of rapcore or nu-metal, which are utterly appropriative subgenres. The necessary formula, MC+established rock artist must be adhered to.

The question is- why again in 2009. Let's look at the years in question to find a pattern: 1986. Height of Reagan Era insanity, unprecedented disparity between urban and rural poor and suburban rich incomes. 1993. Beginning of Clinton-era chickanery, first obvious signs that health care reform was going to be railroaded out of town, as well as the pulling off of the mask of Bubba's administration. 2002. The massive wave of jingo-oistic populism begins to give way to questions like: "Anybody heard from Bin Laden lately?" "Why are we supposed to go out and buy new cars to fuel our addiction to Middle Eastern oil imports?". 2009. AKA "the shortest honeymoon ever".

Disillusionment. Necessary irony. Somehow the genre of Rock-Rap serves these important purposes. I don't know: you be the judge.

... you're in the woods

2009-08-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

(Chris) you're in the woods...... It's getting plaid out..... You're wearing your father's golfing pants (the ones with the ancient featherie in the right pocket).... Strange sounds follow your steps something like humphff a mphmphmphmphfgery oasdioaof latmpmdpamdpasde caaspidofasdpitjasdfasdfalist coasdoijiojaosdfrpse stealajsdofiasdnoeing.... you're feeling peckish..... you wish you had some Yoohoo! and some Big League Chew to keep you occupied while you watch your legs decompose.... shhhhh- do you smell something?

Oakland/Detroit

2009-08-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

Shall I be the first to blog about the Oakland-Detroit series and the Bill Luoma baseball-writing workshop on Saturday? A brief scan of relevant blogs tells me I shall. First, a thing that occurs to me (the anthem of the ideational continent).

When you get obsessed with place-based poetry, something I was calling topoetics for a minute, the appearance of a place-name in the title of a poem or a collection becomes gilded in salience. Maybe so with any research project, that things possibly relevant to your query shimmer a little. Baseball games are all place-names, and when they are your place, they all shimmer. Another reason why a move to Fremont or San Jose for the A's would just kill me. It doesn't even matter if we hit like little leaguers half of the time. We's still our little leaguers.

But I bet you thought I was going to go on and say how every game is a poem, or how poetic the sport itself is. I think the Berrigan-Schiff book, Yo-Yo's With Money, that Bill put up on oakdish has it right: every baseball game is a potentially poetic conversation, while only some baseball games are themselves poetic (some are so bad, even heckling is beyond their due). Friday's game was like the latter, while Saturday's was mostly the former until the very last play, when Kennedy (possibly on 3rd base-coach Mike Gallego's advice) took off from second on a Suzuki line drive and never looked back until a mercenary slide took out Alexis Avilla at the plate. That was a for a 3-2 win, in a game where Oakland stranded more than 7 batters, four of them left at third plate. That's great baseball, and that's terrible baseball. But at this point in a three-season slump, I'm not sure how to even relate to great baseball. Sunday's game was a romp (9-4 Oakland, with two homers from Cust), but I wasn't even listening to the radio, as we had a party to celebrate our completed backyard (completed is a word I rarely get to use in conjunction with any project I'm involved, so it was worth a party).

There was great baseball conversation, which I'm afraid may have ruined the workshop for those who thought it was going to be quiet and observant or in any way scholarly or even much about writing. Gender roles at a baseball game are so easy to walk into, you can go a half-season or more without realizing you're acting like a Neanderthal. Maybe Alli or Samantha want to weigh in at some point on how the boys were behaving. The 1970's trivia was getting entirely too deep for me as well, between Douglas, Bill and Joshua (all of whom know admirably too much about baseball in general). I think if Walter Lew were there, this kind of inside-of-the-insider chatter could have elevated to the level of poetry, as he often remarks about the on-line fan boards of his Oriole's: there is a completely unique prosody that is waiting to be tapped for writing in the quieter dialogue of the analytic fan. On a cue from Bill's sheet of prompts, I had my head more in the macro-fan level of things shouted at the field or across the stands, which are really two completely different phenomenon. In the macro-world of baseball, every play is a complete and total surprise, a constant dumb-founding followed by occasional serendipity. In the micro-world of analysis, there are forms of strategy, in play for decades or even a century, which are being executed either brilliantly or badly, and appreciation of these events unfolding is closer to appreciation of gymnastics than a cock-fight. I was in a cock-fighting mood, part of the reason why I still have no vocal chords to speak of on Monday morning (which, thanks to the dysfunction of the construction project I'm on, is a surprise day off!):

we shout "Let's Go ______ "
we fill it in "Oooak-land." "Hairston." "Aaa-dam(Kenndey)."
or even "Ack-Mack"

we shout "come on, Blue!"
"Buuuullll-shiiiii(t). Buuuullll-shiiiii(t)."

we chant "M-A. M-A-R. M-A-R-K, Ellis!" (repeat).

digital cues interrupt us, instruct us in rhythms to ape, sentiments to embody.

At this volume, there is no room for dissent, subtlety or any recognition of the fact that your boys may not be entirely virtuous, or even talented. Though lately, in losing games, chants of "Geren sucks!" have echoed from the Left Field Bleachers. And then there is the dispute over the wave in the bleachers, with most of the season-ticket holders claiming it's imminent bad luck. How to have these disputes with drunken body language and shouting across rows of seats is a problem of comedy more than poetry. Attempts at macro-poetry were tried.

-I told Bill to send one of his baseball short poems via text message to the Gobotron (rejected from publication, no doubt by Verizon VP's of marketing).
- Douglas shouting to Leyland during batting practice: "Hey Leyland, I love what you did with Pittsburgh" (Leyland was not amused).
- There were covert across-the-park signaling attempts, first by Douglas, then by Buuck. They produced no runs.
- I think I made a "your mother" reference in the general direction of Raeburn (or was it Granderson?). I'm sure whoever it was heard me.
- Chevron sponsored the "Remembering Woodstock" fireworks extravaganza afterwards. Sometimes the fruit is hanging so low, it hurts your back to pick it.

I did not have the patience to do the score cards, with or without animal pseudonyms recommended by the syllabus, but then I never have. I should instead sharpen my memory to where I don't need to cards to recall a game. I think I would become an alcoholic in the process. Though on the wagon Saturday, I think I drank 8 oz of straight JD on Friday. The problem with bootlegging into a ballgame is you can't employ mixers (my wife tried that once and got caught- on my birthday!). I forgot any kind of sweater and it did get a little chilly down on the field, but then there was the exhilaration of walking on the bluegrass and seeing the crowds who remained in their seats. I'm like Charles Legere, who once commented to me that even after his thirtieth birthday, he still has fantasies of becoming a walk-on ringer at spring camps and pitching a major league game. I think the longer you can suspend idiocy like that, the greater your fidelity to the game:

i don't know what I need emotions for
when i've got statistics
the newspaper gives a .438 chance
i'm all in
for an irrational win!

2009-07-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

This made me and the wife almost cry for laughing the other night,

K-Mart now offers layaway.

this almost made me cry

2009-06-01T10:15:00.001-07:00

and I wasn't even a very good journalist when I was one.

Poet's Basketball Highlights

2009-06-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

Playing one-on-one with a complete stranger before our game got underway- and winning (he wasn't great)

12-year-old visiting ringer James to John Sakkis: "John, just stand under the basket!"

Not-even-12-year-old visiting ringer Tikada's two three-pointers.

Sakkis challenging the commissioner in abstentia (Horton, via video recording) to make a ruling on Dan Fisher's late-season walk-on.

Fisher showing up in a Toronto basketball jersey (... the fuck?)

Drinks with Stephanie, Clive, Charles Legere and Cori afterwards.

Winning: 51-47.

Chronic Illness in the Music Industry

2009-05-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

Maestro Chris Peck and his merry band have driven another nail into the coffin of the Music Industry: The Crymuscles dropped their new record fo' free. You should go pay free-ninety-free and download that shit.

The record imagines California through some French chicks scooter ride through Brazil. Or something like that. It's deathly ill, monsieur.

Laurie Anderson on the Economy

2009-04-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

I caught Laurie Anderson last Fall at Berkeley and, at the time, was honestly not blown away with her current touring piece, Homeland (though I love her in general, and steal from her liberally). Now though, I'm stuck by how prescient she was about Larry Geitner's current mess (click on "Homeland quotes and phrases" roll over "Only An Expert Can Deal With The Problem").

Another thing that struck me at that show was how, no matter what she's been doing artistically since, like, Life On A String, it's all situated in New York. There's almost always a little soliloquy about walking down 6th Ave. or even just a sonic thing that is so downtown late-80's that ultimately, if you're an audience that's not in New York listening to hear, you feel like you're just eavesdropping. Isn't this also true of every Bay Area poet re: the Bay Area?

Poetry.. again

2009-04-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

Starting to wake up to reading poetry again. Hard to describe what it's like to have let this attenuation slip over months and months and then rekindle it. Was starting to look at all these mutants, poets/friends of mine, and their constant engagement with this activity as arcane and a little disturbed.

Hard to say what it is about blue collar life that wants to make poetry so foreign. Was listening to Philip Levine interviewed on NPR's 'Marketplace' (you can just guess at the level of depth in this 2-minute conversation) and he mentioned exhaustion as the thing keeping the physical toiler from writing. Not sure that's it. I want to say that in labor, language has to stay a transparent medium and cannot become an opaque object, in the way language perhaps is in/for poetry. But this forgets the constant interrogation of language brought on by multiple-language conversations: I work with one native German-speaker, one native Italian-speaker, many, many native Spanish speakers (actually, most days I'm nowhere near a single native English-speaker, which didn't occur to me until just now). And in this country, labor has always looked like this, and will continue to. A poem showing the constant transactions of language trying to get at social goals, like erecting a wall or establishing who is joto or not, would be worth reading. That poem is better written by someone else, maybe Edwin Torres or Harriet Mullen or Mark Nowak. Maybe I could find a grant to have any of those three work on my crew for a week or a month and create this transaction on paper.

I still would have no idea what it is I'm trying to write right now. I think maybe it's going to be about Soul singers, though.

This Season's Rivalries

2009-04-18T11:11:00.001-07:00

Since I can't really hate the Angels this year.... I will hate Boston.

Back on the Continent

2009-04-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Ideational Content was never supposed to be about Dillon Westbrook, so only tangential comments will be made on the news that, since the last blog post, Dillon Westbrook bought a house and got married (actually, he had the house when the last post went up). There are ideas surrounding the house and the wedding, but only a few are fit for the Continent.

* As those who were there know, Dillon Westbrook and Cori Belew were not married by the state, or any church but by those who were there. You can see previous posts for the political and philosophical reasons for this, but what's really interesting now is the strange legal limbo they've created. Not only are they not married, they are also inillegible for domestic partnership status under California law, which is reserved for same sex couples. They are also not, as far as they can understand from reading a Nolo Press book on the subject, common law man and wife. As far as the laws of the State of California are concerned, they're perfect strangers, barely able to sign for a package for one another, much less make medical decisions, automatically inherit property and the rest of the privileges and responsibilities associated with state-sanctioned marrige. What it would require to change that would be several different legal contracts and powers of attorney, each of which entails at least a nominal fee and/or many hours of research and thinking. Just a proxy window into what gay and transgender couples have been dealing with forever.*

** The DYI wedding was a major success, went off without a hitch. Biggest problem, an organized way to deal with the copious amount of left-over and highly perishable food produced thereby. If you're planning one of these, think ahead, because I (yes, I reverted to first person already, send complaints to address on the sidebar) ended up driving around in a Ford 250 looking for anywhere to drop two tins of leftover steak, 10 lbs of salad greens and more cake than a 500-pound 5-year-old could consume. An embarassing amount of it wound up in the trash.**

*** Starting a new blog, Oakland Work Trade. Concept is kind of self-explanatory, but get the gist here, if you're not spammed by Dillon Westbrook first.***

**** Las Vegas is a ridiculous but strangely integral place. They are about exactly what they are about. I got the meanest looks and even a little verbal abuse when I asked for a mathematically foolish draw at a blackjack table, as if I'd just shat on the pho-marble bar. They really don't fuck around there. The purview of this comment stops at all family discounts and inticements- those are obscene and should not exist, and it turned my only puritanical streak to see anyone under 21 in that town (or anyone 18 without a passable fake id). I would go back there and spend more time, say another 15 minutes.****

***** Owning a house is really perfect situation for a traditional male asshole like me. I get to nest with my new wife and talk all kinds of cute domestic shit, then when I get bored I put on my overalls, go into the "under construction rooms" and tear shit apart. It's knuckle-dragging heaven.*****

Parkway Mothballed: 3/22/09-?

2009-03-24T10:23:00.001-07:00

For anyone who couldn't make it, I pirated a little bit of the parting message from Kyle and Catherine. It was a sad event, but also a good party. Carne Cruda, my alma mater band, played a lively set, dancing in the aisles, silly mexican wrestling pagentry. The upshot is, they're not closing because they're burned out or moving to Idaho, they're closing because they couldn't renegotiate with their landlord for reasonable, market-adjusted rent; and with their creditors for more than two week lines to get product into the theater. When that building goes vacant and turns to blight, a strong case could be made to the city to demand the owner get it rented. Since a place that size has no chance of renting at rates from four years ago (which is the normal life-cycle of a commercial lease), Kyle, Catherina and the gang might look like real good tenants again.

The other rumor is about development, but frankly, being in and around that industry, ain't no one developing shit right now. Keep your fingers crossed, Oakland. or better yet, make some noise:

Can't Conserve for the Life of Me

2009-03-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

I am so fucking American. That's my beef with beef lately. I understand that the economy is going through a massive contraction the likes of which my generation has never seen. I understand that we're at least fifty years past the point at which we can consume natural resources at the rates we are accustomed. Nevertheless, I am unable to save and unable to slow my consumption by any meaningful degree, because I'm caught up in a wholly American conundrum. I don't mean the simple addiction to spending and consumption that even the news media is now harping on, I mean the following: real conservation, of both money and resources, requires an attitudinal adjustment towards, well, conservatism. And while nothing could be more ideologically divorced from the Neo-Conservative agenda than driving less and growing your own food, I still rebel against any kind of conservatism at all. I want limitless blue skies of opportunity, the birth right promised me in grade school sing-alongs. I want purple mountains majesty, goddammit, an I don't want anyone spoiling my party tellling me they've all got their tops blown off for copper mines.

What I mean is, I want to throw big, lavish parties, I want to buy a house and pimp it out with hydronic heating and solar panels and a stainless steel water catchment cistern. I want to carve a 30-ft tall granite monument to Reggie Jackson outside a brand new A's Stadium in Jack London square, across from Yoshi's running a monthlong residency of Cecil Taylor (which would cost the club more than season tickets to the A's). I want gold benches in the Lake Merritt BART station.

And I don't want any hemming and hawing and bean-counting, and neither no EIP's from no EPA. I want an endless stream of irrationally optimistic action from every single American, and I want it to begin right now. Let the future be damned because it's already gone anyways.

Did I say Hell Yes, Already

2009-02-18T06:23:00.001-08:00

'cus Fremont says "Hell No"

6/6/1924-2/14/2009

2009-02-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

Louie Bellson

Can We Still Have Aesthtics at All

2009-02-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

My job has me thinking a lot about the groundswell of artists demanding their place in the new, collapsing, economy. There's this pull sheet floating around listing the economic impact of arts in the U.S. (a kind of GDP of the arts), that is supposed to be waved in front of your House Representative as they appropriate more loans from Beijing and Dubai for our economic future. It was obvious form the start that, at least this time around, there's going to be no piece of the pie for artists, when Congress can barely get a bill to answer to the front-falling boulders of the avalanche: unemployment, home foreclosures (which they haven't even done anything about yet), credit markets.

The timing of this crisis, either concomitant or merely coincidental, with the rising tide of environmental awakening forces parallel thoughts about what is necessity and what is excess. Here's where my question about building comes in. Make a crude comparison between, say, the typical shanty in the slums of New Delhi and a 5,000-square-foot luxury home in the U.S. If each houses the same size family, it's obvious which has the larger environmental impact. Without making any radical judgments about whether either human family can be sustained at all, given total population, we might ask how far beyond a kind of minimum structure for life they each occupy. Or, more charitably, we might find some generic structure either could live in that represents a humane level of comfort and not much more. Or, perhaps even more promising, we might extrapolate a kind of minimum impact from the minimum structure and allow one to design from that as a kind of limit.

Remember that the shanty is made of mostly reclaimed materials, constructed without electric powered tools, has no gas service, does not draw on municipal water supplies, does not draw from any nuclear, coal or natural gas power grid, etc. It's impact is almost zero. If we start adding incrementally to that structure amenities for temperature control, running water, perhaps some electricity, cooking and the like, we could surely still do a lot better than the U.S. luxury home. It would be fair to imagine this structure utilizing any of our current "Green" technologies, but not to dream up any we haven't yet realized. As there is no technological fix yet for unlimited expansion of human dominion on the earth, we shouldn't put one in our design concept at this stage.

Thinking of this structure, or any structure within the parameters of a minimum impact on the earth and minimum levels of comfort, my question is where or whether aesthetics can even enter into the thought experiment. To give an example, I helped install a 1,000 pound hearth stone for the gas-powered fireplace in the entertainment room of a luxury home in S.F. today. The stone was quarried by diesel heavy equipment, in Italy; trucked to the docks in a diesel rig; floated on a diesel container carrier to Oakland; trucked to Richmond by another diesel rig; trucked from Richmond to a slab cutter in Santa Rosa (leaving over 40% waste by the saw); trucked back to Richmond to be fabricated; loaded in Richmond for SF and installed by hand by 12 men. As a side note, this is the third time this fireplace has been remodeled, adding immensely to its overall environmental impact. The rub is, a 13-foot long hearth stone made of a single piece of 3"-thick Giallo Dorato limestone looks really fucking good. I wish I didn't like the way it looks, and that my environmentalist heart was so pure that I could visualize the crude oil stains on the stone (a bit of a pun if you know anything about the geology of limestone), but all I can see is the endless fascinating texture of this giant piece and the labor and planning it took to get it cut and laid in the hearth.

The total environmental impact of this one piece of stone, not to mention the other four it's going to take to finish the fireplace, could house several families in the New Delhi model, without question. In the confines of our thought experiment, about the only design elements that are justifiable are the firebox itself, whether it's gas or wood-burning or coffee-shell burning or whatever, the roof and the four walls. Given that this room is detached from the rest of the structure and thus the heat cannot be shared throughout, it really shouldn't have been built at all, within the constraints of our thought experiment.

I'm not saying it's impossible for there to be an aesthetics that emerges organically out of the minimum structure concept, that is in a way, what the natural building movement, as distinct from the Green building trade mark, is all about. But it's not aesthetics in the sense of this color or that, this texture or that, this material or that, this medium or that. It's got to be something so radically different that I don't believe, in any of the trades, forms or genres I deal with, I have the slightest clue what it is.

Winning the War of Attrition

2009-02-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

Hell yes!

Huey!

2009-02-12T09:07:00.001-08:00

This shit is so hip it's square

Inaugural Aesthetics

2009-02-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

I'm yet to read/hear the Elizabeth Alexander inaugural poem because I'm avoiding it on purpose. The mere thought that it could be as terrible as it is reported is too much for me to deal with. This is not even criticism- I cant believe how incredibly weak the cultural production around this inauguration is. Obama's speech was far form his best- far less inspiring than what he said in Oakland during a campaign visit more than a year ago. Aretha sounded good, but slightly tired. The Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman shtick was just that, shtick. What a fucking let down.

Later on that night, there was a Pepsi-presents-made-for-TV party featuring all the musicians TV executives could name. I caught Alicia Keys, Stevie Wonder and Sting before going to bed. Alicia Keys was so horrible singing a song I kind of like, "No One". She's part of an entire generation of 'singers' who can't perform without pitch-sync technology. She's also not at all comfortable in the size dress, way-too-small, her designer picked out for her. Exactly what about that gig was supposed to be sexy? She probably is a real musician, somewhere under that dress, but she has been distracted by everything but making music since her record dropped. I honestly feel bad for her, having been preened by the industry to be this plasticized yellow-skin pin-up and then having to all of sudden be an artist and play music at an important event and sounding like bad karaoke of her own album (cued in the background by a digital track, of course).

To his eternal credit, Stevie wrote a song for the event, not memorable enough for me to hum any of it right now, but a solid Stevie Wonder composition. He too sounded shaky to begin with, but he at least has the musicianship to work that shit out and find some way to groove with what looked like the fucking Airforce Jazz Band behind him. The distance between what he does and what Ms. Keys does makes the use of the word "musician" to describe both more than a little strange. I think that's actually what this post is about: how weird it is to be a musican in the last 10 years or so. The vast majority of what gets mass-marketed, and thus what stands in for shared or common culture, has nothing at all to do with what the vast majority of people whose job description is "musician" do. Yet there are people so ignorant as to think that the best-selling "musicians" of the day are actually excelling at what we all do every day, thus earning their accolades. As though Alicia Keys, at 27, is actually measurably better (measurable in market share) than your local choir soloist, who has to be in tune and hit all the notes without any pitch-syncing or live-mixing (the technology wherein the live signal coming from the singers microphone is blended with the pre-recorded track to mask pitch variation and cue the singer). Give me a fucking break. It's a shame that Obama had to become the first African American President at just the moment when we've lost our collective grip on the relation of celebrity to reality so thoroughly that we are unable to actually discern the bullshit we are being fed.

Our only hope is that economic depression wakes us so fed up with our corporate culture that, like the working-poor audiences Stevie cut his chops on, we throw tomoatoes or shoes at motherfuckers who aren't delivering the goods.

on policing the city

2009-01-08T16:40:00.000-08:00

... Just as they lead colts to noises and confusions and observe if they're fearful, so these men when they are young must be brought to terrors and then cast in turn unto pleasures, testing them far more than gold in fire. If a man appears hard to bewitch and graceful in everything, a good guardian of himself and the music he was learning, proving himself to possess rhythm and harmony on all these occasions- such a man would certainly be most useful to himself and the city. And the one who on each occasion, among the children and youths and among men, is tested and comes through untainted, must be appointed ruler of the city and guardian; and he must be given honors, both while living and in burial and the other memorials. And the man who's not of this sort must be rejected."

Plato's Republic (414e)

Race a Red Herring

2009-01-07T05:49:00.000-08:00

I vow to return to the economic discussion shortly, but this just in from the Tribune:

Race didn't decide the Prop 8 vote. I think I want to say this is good news.

Eudaimonia

2008-12-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve been economically obsessed lately- reading too much economic news, having too many conversations with people about economic life, scrutinizing too carefully my own finances. This year-long thrust to buy a house, which is getting more serious by the day, has got my brain so wrapped up in money that I don’t have much mental room for anything else.

Right at the point where your job is looking like it’s going to become a career, especially if that point coincides with your late twenties, everyone thinks it’s a prudent question to ask whether you’re happy about this. What a stupid question, as if happiness is an intrinsic part of employment, and you have to discover this intrinsic part if you want to have any of it. Jobs, especially wage jobs, are designed with one purpose in mind: to make money for your employers or share holders. That’s their sole purpose. Your happiness doesn’t matter one bit, except to the degree that you register enough of it to continue doing the job and to continue generating the profit for your employers or share holders.

Even if your job also accomplishes another goal, such as building a bridge or engineering a network or serving a meal to someone, that is always the least important part. If there was a way to generate the profit of the service without actually performing the service, most every employer would get rid of the service. The part of every job that is the worst is the part that is mostly closely related to making money. The part of every job that is enjoyable for the employee, or even for the boss or share holder, is only accidentally so, when viewed from its design purpose. Only if you are perverse enough to enjoy profit-making, the true functionality of what you do for a living, do you enjoy your job as such. If you enjoy anything else, you are enjoying a delusion.

Even jobs that appear to be the exception to this rule, that all jobs are for creating profits, obey the second rule: the worst part of every job is the part connected to making money. In public primary schools, the worst part is testing (any teacher will tell you this), which is the back door implementation of a market pressure on both students and teachers. The viability of a school is based on its test scores. If you replace “test scores” with “sales figures” or “quarterlies” in that sentence, the situation becomes clear. In college and university teaching, the worst part is constantly reapplying for your job every year or semester or quarter- this is a sales pitch wherein you justify your value in the market. As in primary schools, if the part you enjoy is the actual teaching, you will see nothing but structural impediments to ever doing this: advising, testing, grading, preparing for observations from department heads, getting published, etc. God help you if the part you enjoy is your research. Similarly, if the part of construction you enjoy is actually building things, you will find nothing but structural impediments to doing this: filling out daily reports, performing cost analysis, holding safety meetings, negotiating contracts, estimating, etc. In both cases, the more of these economic activities you engage in and the more adeptly you perform them, the more successful you will be- i.e. the less of the task of teaching or building you do, the better you are at your “job”, which has nothing at all to do with teaching any students or building any structures.

From now on, I will refuse to have any discussions with people about whether I’m happy doing my job unless they understand this fact.

the new old way for the 21st century

2008-12-06T11:40:00.000-08:00

Competition for the cheapest way to produce the next disposable consumer crap for the consumption of workers whose wages have been driven down or whose jobs have been eliminated by the same force and thus can't afford the crap is rapidly driving itself into extinction. This is good news.

Was talking to Michael Bondi, excellent metal-worker and artist based in Richmond, and he said the following about public commissions. Years ago there was a public building going up in the Bay Area that had plans for a large metal sculptural piece in some central location, a plaza or something. Instead of submitting a proposal for an eyesore, Bondi proposed to make the "piece" a set of ornate doors at all the major corridors- doors that would actually function and be touched and used by the public every day. This is in keeping with older traditions going as far back as Gothic churches, where the work of master artists and artisans were an everyday fixture for the public like spoons and bowls. Furthermore, Bondi argued, the cost of the installation could be shared with the cost of the doors and windows they had already budgeted, representing a net savings to the public over the sculpture installation. Of course, the idiots on the board went with the sculpture, and nobody in the conversation could even remember what the thing finally looked like in the end, because the vast majority of this "public art" in the museum model of dead objections for observation is totally forgettable and worthless.

There is nothing terribly ground-breaking in this criticism of public art, but the interesting thing about this conversation was the conviction of this master metal-worker and the master mason he was talking with, and me listening in and agreeing, that what the new administration and its new, bottom-up economy needs is not new ideas about public works and building, destined to be a large part of any economic revitalization plan (unless we launch another war and a draft) but very old ones: Have them built by artists, hundreds of thousands of them!

What does this notion mean for all the other artists, performative, literary, hybrid, et al. I think Chris Stroffolino has given this the most thought of anyone I know, and I wish he would send me the New WPA manifestos he was working on, because I've lost all digital trace of them.

Confessions

2008-11-15T18:34:00.000-08:00

I already broke down about Huey Lewis, but now I've got Sports on (recently acquired on vinyl, bitches, the jacket photos clearly showing Huey and the News singing the anthem center court at the coliseum over the Golden State Emblem) and I want to keep the tap flowing. The thing about Huey, and really a lot of records produced in the 80's, top 40 or otherwise- it's the envelope, as in the sound envelope. There's this great, clean space around every syllable, every horn stab, every riff. It's all palm-muted, noise-gated, wide digital reverb. It's the fucking sound of newness. I want everything I write to be like that (reason why I write so infrequently, I rarely think like that. I think like dribble into a blog).

Number 2: I cannot get into Bob Dylan. I feel like I'm stabbing so many people in the back by saying this, especially because of the unfortunate name thing, but I just haven't heard, seen, read anything that makes me fall in love with him. I only mention this because, consequently, I can't get into this discussion amongst poets, lots of them, that takes Dylan's genius as a given. Sorry.

I hacked up the bark of a real, live, century-plus redwood tree to attach little pieces of no-longe live redwood timbers to make a fence to keep deer from eating a precious little garden I'm building for someone. My job is impossibly fucked up sometimes.

I haven't read a book in months.

Follow Up No Follow Up

2008-11-14T16:48:00.001-08:00

There's nothing like feeling politically empowered and vindicated for all of ten seconds, and then feeling like you've rounded a false corner unto another brick wall. Thanks to everyone who read and reposted and e-mailed back and gave approbation (and in at least one case, disapprobation) to the open letter. It got sent to a couple newspaper editors and the Yes on 8 campaign itself as well. And there it sits. The law is still in the books (actually, I don't really know how that works- is it a "Law Elect" until January 20th? Does it have to go through these legal challenges first? Anyone in state government out there want to clue me in). People have still been disenfranchised. A moral minority has still had their way with democracy and spit her out the back alley.

I'm not smart enough or politically active enough or connected enough to know what to do next. I go to work . I sit in traffic. I come home and read a few newspapers online. I check campaign sites. I google stuff. I don't really know the status of these lawsuits on a day-to-day basis. I'm not really a good enough researcher to know how to find that out. Maybe if I had another day off (besides Wednesday, when I barely got caught up on e-mail and rehabilitating my sorry drum chops), I could learn that stuff. Maybe someone reading this is more closely connected to the cases (I understand there are several filings) and will chime in.

I keep thinking about how to take the law on, on its own terms. Maybe it's a lost cause to challenge with rights of same-sex couples, because that still fits too neatly into its world-view. What about a biological hermaphrodite and a post-op M2F tranny applying for two marriage licenses: one in which the hermaphrodite is the man and the tranny is the woman, and then vice-versa, and then try to take that all the way to the high court. Or maybe a boycott of marriage licenses by straight couples- at $50 a pop to the tune of hundreds of thousands of weddings annually, that would certainly impact the state budget. How 'bout it folks- join me and Cori in not getting "married" this year and next or until this wrong law is righted. You can still have the party, just don't sign the state's contract.

Maybe that's too facile as well. We're really struggling with this ourselves. Even if we turn down the privilege of getting married, it's still our privilege to turn down. We'd still be covered by common law in another few years. We could probably just flash our rings in a hospital and start barking shit at the nurses and they'd just assume we were married and not get up in our face. I guess the crux of what I'm trying to say is that if I don't think about this problem, it's stops being problematic for me, personally, at all. The inertia of hegemonic culture takes over, and I get sucked right in. But like everything in hegemony, if you do think about it, it's fucking maddening.

Open Letter to the Yes on 8 Campaign

2008-11-06T21:41:00.001-08:00

November 6, 2008

An Open Letter to the Yes on 8 Campaign:

I received sad news through my radio today, when the No on 8 campaign resigned themselves to the difference in votes tallied thus far and conceded defeat. In March of next year, my lover and I had planned to wed in this state, but now we are not so sure. Though we do fit the narrow ‘definition of marriage’ your proposition sought to enshrine in our state constitution, we are not so sure we want to enjoy a right that is now exclusive to us. We are not sure we want to participate in an institution which we might previously have believed to represent the right of two human beings, equal under the law, to share in the joys and pains of life together; but now we come to know it is the privilege of only some human beings, held separate and apart under the law. We are not sure we want to celebrate under the auspice of a state whose constitution is now disfigured by the worst kind of bigotry and perturbation of equality.

You may think you have done me a favor by securing me this exclusive privilege, but when 5 million people living in this state of 36 million decided for all current and future generations that only some of them were fit to be treated equally under the law, you did me a great disservice. You claim to have protected my family, but in fact you have discouraged me from even starting one, knowing that I would have to explain to my future children that, while they live in a constitutional democracy, founded on the highest ideals history has yet furnished, a small minority of people can still find a way to usurp the rights of others. You claim to have protected children, but what have you done to protect children who are gay or lesbian, who suffer inordinate violence, depression and suicide? In fact, you have reaffirmed the second-class status that makes gays and lesbians, and especially gay and lesbian youth, acceptable targets for violence and discrimination, as surely as the Dred Scott decision subjected African-Americans to continued race violence for decades to come.

I am letting you know all of this because it occurs to me that you may not know what you have done. In your rush to have your values and your politics affirmed by voters at the polls, you may not have realized that, standing beside the millions of voters who spoke up to say that do not want the rights of people to marry whom they choose usurped, there a millions who cannot speak at the polls, because they are too young, or not citizens, or incarcerated or perhaps unaware that a vocal minority can change the legal rights of all of us: to marry exactly who we choose, to share a life with that person and to know that no one can legally disparage that life, regardless of whether or not they understand it.

Fucking Blog World

2008-10-07T16:20:00.001-07:00

So that no one thinks I'm nonchalant about the blog-world due to my inactivity of late, rest assured that I do still read your blogs and think "wow, wouldn't it be nice to post as often as I have a thought, especially in clever and cryptically short sound-bites (or Silliman-length bulleted tomes)". Then I think, "fuck those people man, I bet every last one of them has a desk job or an academic job". There should be a different blog calendar for people in the trades, so that if you blog like twice in a month you're still a highly frequent blogger". Not to say desk jobs aren't work, certainly teaching comp to freshmen was no walk in the park for me, but there's considerably more access and incentive to dick around in blogosphere when you've got one of those. All right, enough kvetching, time to blog.Almost every artist I know seems to be dreaming up a grant, writing a grant or, in some lucky cases, spending a grant, right now. I have mixed feelings on this, given my one horrible experience actually being involved in a "successful" grant (good news is, you got the money, bad news is you have to figure out how to spend it). The best things they can do is green-light an existing project that maybe would have floundered or never found an audience without cash, or, more sublimely, get people to think on ridiculous scales of performance or broadcast that probably aren't realistic even with the grant but make for better concept anyways: Theater suspended from container cranes at the Oakland docks (do not fucking steal that idea just because its on a blog and blogs are cheap- that shit's fully gonna' happen), cognitive research proving that learning to recognize harmonic progressions will make you a better cook (I couldn't make this shit up, but my brother can), guerrilla silent opera on the streets of SF's financial district. This is all particularly funny to me because, unless your grant's in the bag already, you can pretty much give up, as all that money is in the process of disappearing as we speak.

Before forgodot hit, there was some good back and forth in the poetry blog and list-serve worlds about how the ongoing collapse of late-late-capitalism might be a good thing for poets (even non-Marxist ones). CA Conrad especially has inspiring things to say about this. I want to run with this notion, especially because any dollar-valuation of poetry is by now, and will henceforward remain , a bad joke. Now that all the money's fake anyways (just heard on NPR, as reliably bullshit a news source as any, that there's at least 4 times the dollar amount of the GDP written as insurance for bad debts that are now themselves turning into bad debts- WHAT THE FUCK!), we can give up tying our economic activities to our artistic ones completely, or at least start phasing out of this. We should also start working fewer hours because it's all just subsistence work anyways: there's no such thing as retirement, home ownership, job security or any of the other beacons of the middle class idyll. Let's just ask to be paid in sandwiches and wine and take the afternoon off and hang out in the park and write poetry. That notion is quickly becoming way less absurd than continuing in normal cycles of production, given how fucked capital is (and that statement is descriptive, not normative).

Of course, the real kicker is that both myself and my employer have way more contracts on the books right now than last year and I'm certainly going to be working 60-80 hrs. a week until Christmas, so who the fuck am I kidding about poetry in the park. And I'm sure I should be thankful about the economic fortune of having places to plug my labor into, and a body that can still labor, but somehow I don't quite feel all warm and fuzzy about that shit.

Regarding forgodot, I will make only one andendum to the comment I made to the buffalo list: that the computer poems are the preface and the real text is the commentary we're all producing (which, I believe, Erika Staiti is archiving as we write it). The computer might have created the 'poems' and falsely accredited them to you, but you are actually writing the comments about the poem, so you should think about that writing and ask yourself which of the two, falsely attributed poem or rightly attributed commentary, is more interesting, readable, poetic, etc. If the computer wins, it's your own damn fault, and there's no lawsuit gonna' fix that. Also, where is Brian Kim Stefans in all this?

I want to talk about baseball, but my team is long out and I don't care about any of the ones in the running (though secretly, perversely, I would enjoy an LA-vs-LA series, and I also like to see the Phillies doing something, if only because they're in one of the A's former towns and they're perennial underdogs). My wish list for the A's: Fremont declares bankruptcy, is designated a superfund site and succeeds from the State of California; more players with facial hair; more black players who can run- Rajai Davis was the most exciting guy to have on base the entire season, and he has a class attitude. I can do without these corn-fed honkies who spend half the season on the DL, year in and year out.

I genuinely like Huey Lewis and the News. This seemed like an aesthetic revelation to me, while I was doing a final clean-up-and-get-the-fuck-out of a kitchen remodel and singing "If This Is It" over and over again. He moved to my hometown after all the hits were done and would show up at benefit softball games and he could hit his ass off and even hustled around the bases. I also recorded a free-jazz record in the studio he vacated. I am historically, aesthetically and spiritually linked to Huey Lewis. Can you even wrap your mind around that shit, motherfucker?

The only A's Good News to be Had

2008-09-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

Fremont may fall through (ignore the part about moving out of state- that shit's not gonna' happen unless Wolff's credit rating gets upgraded).

Well, that and the fact that we have a shot at passing Texas for a distant AL West 2nd place (is 2nd place when you're below .500 still second place?).

Completely Unoriginal Thoughts

2008-07-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

Not sure these will elevate to that lofty title, but:

-Went to Seattle and then Portland, amongst more woodsy destinations, and while I didn't stay there long enough to really find anything out, I think I had one thing confirmed- Everywhere that's attractive to live as an artist, especially a performing artist, in terms of an educated populace with money to burn on art, is too expensive to live in for an artist, or on its way to being so. Not really groundbreaking, but a frustrating thing to have confirmed. All the interesting folks who I was going to try to meet and connect with in Oregon or Washington lived elsewhere than Portland or Seattle. Doesn't mean there aren't good or great artists in the big cities, as in Oakland or San Francisco, just that there are always good reasons for getting out. Good thing I'm a stone mason and not an artist, and thus am staying in Oakland and the Bay (where the rich are still building, and the builders are still milking them for all they can).

Second thing I'm stuck on is also a local concern that echoes (seemingly) everywhere. There's no money in poetry. This is not a news flash. Really, nothing you can do as a poet is to your advantage, except to the advantage of your immortal soul. Nevertheless, we all seem to constantly act like there's a market at work. We compete on calendars for attention to our events, compete for esteem amongst each other, and compete for the right to publish our work, which is really the ultimate comedy. We act as though there's a finite poetry dollar that we're all trying to get a piece of, except we all know damn well that there's no dollar. I'm sure anyone reading this is aware of this, but can we all also just cut this shit out already. It's embarrassing.

I'm at a post-performance lull in thinking on text and music, and thus haven't spent much time on the ideational continent lately, but I am back, sort of. I'm in Burney, California at the moment (google it, I dare you). I've attached a picture titled- how I spent my summer (non)vacation for your enjoyment.

Temporarily Parting Shots

2008-06-22T23:44:00.001-07:00

Ideational Content is about to go on vacation, but I wanted to blurb a few things before going:

Ariel Goldberg's West Oakland salon on Friday was packed, lots of fun and hot as fuck. Good reading by Erica Lewis and a short film by Jill Reiter, seemingly about coming of age and coming out and (wanting to be)ing Jewish(?), compellingly acted and attractively shot. Very glad to be invited- many thanks to Chad Lietz for relaunching his 13x13 to augment my little talk, and duly noted are David Harrison Horton and Erika Staiti.

Aimee Suzara has a chap out. I'm yet to get my copy, but she read brilliantly at Prosody Castle last year, so I expect good things. The publishing depends heavily on pre-sales, so drop in to fishing line and order a copy: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/2006newreleasesandforthcomingtitles.htm
Also, this message: "Save the date for the official East Bay book launch party on September 14, La Peña Cultural Center, Berkeley, CA! More details forthcoming and other locations TBA." (I'll update with news when I get it).

Finally, the A's are really fun to watch right now. Go out and see a game and keep them in Oakland, even if you have to firebomb Lew Wolfe's house and bulldoze Pier One in Jack London to get them a ball park in town.

Back in two weeks- enjoy my absence!

Rebel Reading Series this Friday (6/13)

2008-06-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

Aggregating Interest

2008-05-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Was listening to NPR, a habit I have to kick, and there was a featurette on a building trend in Germany towards recreating Prussian palaces. Apparently, many Germans are sick of modernism, and looking to reflect pre-20th-century cultural roots. Meriting brief mention were the masons who build these things, in much the same way they were built centuries ago, one stone on top of another (though the stone cutting is largely automated now). This is an extremely expensive way to build, and always has been, now mostly because of labour costs. When you see these palaces, whether in Germany or France or elsewhere, you are struck both by their "beauty", which is due entirely to their craftsmanship as their designs are fairly unimaginative, and their excess. They just stink of feudal tyranny. The landed class sucks up all the resources of the serfs and spits it back out as a stone edifice. The masons themselves often live in wattle and daub shanties, which would look inspiringly cool and rustic to us (all these "green building" rags now on the market, burning up paper pulp, would die for one of them), but likely served only as reminders of poverty to them. But the only lasting testament of these masons' existence is the palace which, once completed, they likely never set foot in.

I often think of these structures as a model for how we organize most everything in our society, historically and presently, in one of the few modes that has carried over through the advent of capital. A single focal point aggregates all the resources, through means fair or foul, and all the other actors participate relative to the dictates of that focal point. In this model, all the actors are made to pay a cost, but only the focal point is the ostensive beneficiary. Put like this, the model sounds completely insane, but we all participate in it every day. We all invest our energies in the "projects" of our various bosses, in the holidays of our culture, in the objects of our desire. A case in point is this wedding I'm planning in the distant future. A whole lot of people, starting with the lady and I, are going to be putting a whole lot of resources into a roughly 12 hour event, centered entirely upon two people. It sounds completely absurd on the face of it (actually, I think it more than "sounds absurd", but recognizing absurdity rarely delivers one from absurdity's grasp). It's also the only time that all the actors in the "wedding" will ever be brought together in one physical space and time. Likewise, in our current model, the only way an entire mountain will be stripped of its useful rock and transformed into a 500-year or millennium-strength building is by hundreds of craftsman signing on years of their lives to a draconian contract for the benefit of the rich. (As a footnote, which blogger doesn't seem to have, I will add that my favorite edifices I've ever been involved in building were the public ones in places like Yosemite Nat'l park and San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. They avoid half the problematic by being open for anyone to visit and being beneficial to no one individual. Invaribaly, however, they have the names of big money donors carved into them, because no municipality can seem to figure out how to aggregate enough public funds to do one of these- we have to let some enterprising capitalist bilk it out of our pockets first, then "gift" it back to us in the form of a subsidy for our own labor.)

My whole reason for writing this is that I really like stone edifices and big parties, but I can't seem to find a way out of the problems of inequity and exploitation implied in their undertaking.

we interrupt this intellectual discussion...

2008-04-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

for news break:

(antique ring to be resized for correct finger)

Text/Object

2008-04-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Talk with David Horton the other night got me thinking about another analogy/disanalogy case: art objects and text objects. If you take the first pressing of a book, any copy in that run is considered, for valuation purposes, to be identical. The difference between the first and second printings might be more salient, and the value of subsequent printings could only be augmented by a scholarly apparatus in the introduction or a discovery of some new bit of manuscript from the author. You might say similar things about woodcuts or lithographs or other fine art modes of reproduction, but the case of an oil painting (to pick an easy example) is not analogous- no prints are comparable in value to the original, singular painting. The only analogy to be made to painting could be to the author's manuscript, but these rarely reach the value of notable paintings.

You might say that all the dynamics of this situation were outlined by Benjamin in "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". But it seems one feature escaped that discussion, which is that, in each subsequent print edition, if it is in the same language and not otherwise altered, no one thinks the text itself changes- i.e. every print of On The Road is the same text, only the apparatus and the cover changes. The text itself is supposed to be some transcendent entity which, once fixed, maintains its identity through every material incarnation. I think it is this fact which prevents poets, even vispoets, from cracking into the world of plastic arts- they create texts (ostensibly), which have no object life because of this strange transcendent feature; whereas "artists" create objects (there's an obvious capitalist/materialist critique looming here that I won't belabor any). This is another part of what I mean by the portability of text/language.

Can the same be said about music? Kind of Blue is the kind of record that's been re-released dozens of times: as an analogue vinyl album, as an analogue cassette, as a digital cassette, as a digital CD, digitally remastered CD, digitally remastered with bonus tracks on CD, as an MP3 album, and on. The relationship between each of these is aesthetic (or partly historical)- you like each reproduction based on your taste in audio quality. It is an open argument whether there is anything at all that is identical across all these versions. While an argument could be made for the actual fidelity of one version over the other, no one thinks that the music itself exists on any of them. The music was an event on a Sunday afternoon in 1958, captured by (I think) two microphones and pressed onto an album. The event died when the instruments were packed away and only the record, transmuted into all these different forms, lives on. The record may be portable, but I'm not sure the "music" is.

Also, I'd realy like to hear where I might be wrong about any of this (O, blogosphere).

Text/Sound/Music

2008-04-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

I have to step out of this hypothetical genealogy of poetry and music in order to avoid a fallacy. I'm going to end up saying that poetry and music were these seminal activities which aided in the very development of the human species, but then I'm also going to want to ask when "poetry" and "music" developed and when they themselves speciated. That's nonsense. Want to avoid choosing either horn of a dilemma stated thusly: either you think that there were behaviors or full-blown practices of the human creature going way back (and we mean 200,000 years or more) that constitute what we now call "poetry" and "music", or, in the course of developing modes of communication, expression and entertainment, we developed a concept of artful language and concerted sound-making that became "poetry" and "music". That is, we have another version of the found-vs-made distinction which underlies almost all arguments about post-modernism. With a twist really, because one might argue that the first horn of the dilemma says that we make "poetry" and "music" out of our prehistory by naming its imagined practices such.

Dilemmas are rarely that helpful, but in this case I feel like cataloguing whatever I might be in danger of glossing over along the way, so if I end up in the wrong place I at least have a chance of finding why I got there. As I mentioned a long time ago, there are certainly musicians and theoreticians who would grab the first horn and say that music is found and not "made" in our prehistory, and what's more in the nonhuman world as well. As evidence, you might get handed the perfectly patterned light of star pulses, or the physics of sound, or song birds. With the first two examples, however, one would have to be made to agree that music consists in these things in the first place. And as for the song bird, wouldn't it be material to know if they think of their "songs" as "music".

What of a found-not-made theory of poetry? Or, to be more precise, what to make of a history that finds poetry happening before there is a conception of Poetry with a 'P'? Jeremy James Thompson brings up the tantalizing point that language (trying to avoid confusion with Language as code for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) might just as well be a subset of poetry when considering the development of the two. Certainly that suggestion could be found in the version sketched last post- language is the codification of some of the things tried out in early experiments of the human voice and body (and note that all the experiments probably left vestiges in the body too), whereas poetry may have been, and continues to be, the totality.

But we're so very used to maintaining the fight for poetry's valor by a kind of elitism about what constitutes poetry (whether we like to admit this or not), it might be hard to sign on for this sort of expansion. Few of us are ready to embrace a totality even the size of recognizable language, let alone what falls outside of it.

We can see here how much easier the second horn of the dilemma seems. But that puts us in the unenviable position of saying, or at least affirming, just what "Poetry" and "Music" mean or meant. Next time, some concrete explorations of practices that might illuminate that question. It will be a while...

Text/Sound/Music.8

2008-04-03T18:25:00.001-07:00

Desire could possibly be the whole thing. I think that's what I've got so far. If evolution is the system from which languages develop, desire is the only starting place. Nothing happens in evolution without desire. From this vantage point, when "music" and "language" have yet to disambiguate, the entire phenomenon seems essentially poetic, if our model for talking about poetry is epiphanic. There is a welling up inside of desire, and an invention of utterance to enact it socially. It's worth asking here, of course, what reason I have for pushing a model so focused on the expressions of individuals. I could just as easily be talking about collective forms arising in unique social relations, in the spirit of the Grand Piano experiment. I'm even told, though I can't trace this down to any source (as always, informed readers should chime in), that there is a trend in evolutionary biology to look at group as opposed to individual changes or mutations (I want to use the word 'co-evolution', but in fact that refers to concomitant changes in more than one species, whereas it is the incipience of language use and ability in our species that I want to explore).

Probably the picture is more complicated than either version. But I don't want to get trapped trying to armchair philoophize the dawn of language. What's interesting to my purposes is the hypothesis that the first utterances in the social and evolutionary process which got us to where we are were both musical, in the sense of relying on the response of the human being (or the being becoming human) to sound, and poetic, in the sense of uncovering desire. To get to the point where the three things diverge, we have to do some tricky taxonomy. Poetry, it is assumed, is a smaller subset of language, though just what defines the perimeters of this set is hard to say. Today we think it's obvious that music is a species apart from speech, but in the earliest example, it's not so clear. We could just as easily call speaking a subset of singing as singing a subset of speaking. We might imagine that we can say a bit of language or sing it, meaning that speech supervenes on singing: you can change whatever you like about the melody and it's still language, whereas you can omit the words entirely and it is still song. Tonal changes are significant in a great many languages (Mandarin, Yoruban, Thai, etc), and we can certainly imagine they were in the earliest languages, given the limited number of shapes of the tongue and throat physical anthropologists believe we had at our disposal. The idea that one could dispatch of either the melody or the words and leave one or the other intact likely comes from the advent of musical instruments. Can we really imagine, though, that these weren't invented to say something with as well?

Kenny G.2

2008-03-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

Noticing how everyone wants to comment on the Goldsmith post, while no one could be bothered with all this blather about text and music. Here's a foil for both.

Someone, maybe my brother, was remarking to me recently that, up until 100 years ago or so, the idea of a musician, especially a performing musician, who exclusively played his or her own compositions was utterly foreign. Now, this is the norm in pop music, reified in the "singer-songwriter", to where many of us put our noses up at the classical interpretor who has never written even a scrap of melody. Before this era, there was a recognized value in someone whose art consisted of making public the composition of another hand. One would still call this person a musician.

Would we still call a "poet" someone who limits himself to making public the textual works of others, whether it is the staff writers and editors of the New York Times or the novels of Laurence Sterne? If the answer is no, I think this points to a lasting difference in our notions of text and music, and what it means to perform each. Again, I'll have to find the occasion to ask Mr. G if it was his "intent" to lay this disparity bare.

Text/Sound/Music.7

2008-03-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

I was going to proceed next to making Roussean guesses at what first language might have been like. Then I took a trip to Cazadero over the weekend for a friend Jeremy Fisher's birthday. One of the guests was the 10 or 12 year old son of another of the guests, who has Down syndrome. I never got the young man's name or his parents', mostly because I'm not very social. Anyways, the guy is on the far end of the spectrum where he is not verbally communicative. What he does do is find audiences of people and go through elaborate gestural plays, some of them obviously symbolic, some of them not so obvious and very puzzling to watch. They all, however, have the feel of intentionality- they are all delivered in such a way as to make the audience feel that the gesturer has an intention he wants to express.

I'm going to stop short of drawing a straight line from this incidence to a notion of what first language would have been like. That would seem to rest on bogus theories of development directly mirroring evolutionary stages in ways that are too murky to sort out (if a development psychologist wants to chime in and start shoveling here, have at it). What I do think is instructive is the fact that, based on the responses of everyone watching this guy try to communicate something without recognizable language, we all still recognized that an intention was present. This says to me that natural language might not be necessary for intention, even if we think it is always sufficient.

I have often thought this about the composition process, either in poetry or music. When I feel like writing, it is rarely the case that I have any idea what it is I feel like writing. Occasionally, some chunk of melody or text will actually propel me over to an instrument, but more often I simply have the vague sensation of some nascent intention dwelling within, and I either go fit it to some language, or it gets lost. To me, it is far more interesting to imagine first language as developing out of these kinds of impulses than from ostensive gestures- gestures that point to the external world. So, as much as I tend towards empiricism in questions of epistemology, I want more to explore a movement from the inside out as opposed to a movement from the outside in. Because, after all, if you go looking for language in the world outside of humans, you aren't really going to find any (but is this true of music...)

Text/Sound/Music.6

2008-03-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

I think it's time to imagine first language and first music. You can get right at the heart of the controversy in this imagined moment. On one hand, you might think that music has always existed. The stars after all, have always vibrated, some physicists say in perfect rhythm. And language, if you are even slightly religious, has often begot the entire world. On the other hand, you might think that billions of years of sound preceded those first upright hominids, but only they began the sets of patterned, cognizant grunting that constitutes first language and first music alike. And it's no secret that the two arose concomitantly. Here's Merlin Donald, author of the excellent Origins of the Modern Mind, summarizing Darwin:

"He spoke of the refinement of the modern human vocal apparatus as a product of, rather than a precursor to, the earliest human vocalizations. This being the case, Darwin expected that the first use of the evolving new skill would have been in producing cadences, or modulations, that would have resembled singing more than speech. He pointed out that gibbons produced such modulations during courtship (38)."

The background is the evolutionary evidence that the human vocal apparatus was not developed enough for complex speech acts at the time our ancestors were distinguishing themselves from other hominids. Yet, at the same time, it is likely that speech and language were the chief evolutionary advantages that caused one group to separate into homo sapiens sapiens- we needed to embark upon language to become human, but we also needed to do so before we were quite there.

For our purposes, notice how the gap in the analogy of natural language and music narrows to zero here: "cadences... modulations", describe the precursor to both singing and talking. We would have gotten better at singing to get better at emoting, or intending, to get better at surviving, and the two skills would have reinforced one another. There was a lot of noise in philosophy a few years ago about natural selection as an intentional system. The idea (or at least the way I have it in my head) ran that, in an elaborate architecture that is looking for repeatability in traits that can sustain themselves past generations, there is a level of specificity that borders on a semantics. Out of all the infinite actions and gestures living beings could perform, only some are repeatable such as to show up in the tendencies of their offspring, and the system, natural selection, recognizes that in the way that a reader recognizes when a bit of patterned scratching on a tablet has achieved syntax or meaning. Indeed, it had to almost presuppose them in the instinctive framework of each being, or at the very least allow for them in the variations of beings that it was putting forth. Imagine how difficult it must have been to build first language before there was any guarantee that the next generation would be even as adept at vocal manipulation as the current one. It would be like trying to rehearse a band where new members showed up every time and half of them always forgot their instruments or how to play them. In other words, you would need both ontogeny and phylogeny working for you at every turn. In this light, it is actually possible to see why theories of divination are attractive, regardless of one's predisposition for or against them. What is more extraordinary, however, is to imagine the intentions of these first speakers, who were without that bedrock of reference we all rely on, truly or falsely, yet nevertheless had the seed of intention in them. Their utterances, their songs, would be desire's harmonic, resonating outwards in the hope only of becoming language in a future generation.

Text/Sound/Music.5

2008-03-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I actually think about anything else than this. Apparently not.

So, there's this self-contained notion of meaning, where it all cashes out in the same system as the symbols exist and there's no "reference" or problem of reference. Some people say this is what Wittgenstein earned for us in the Investigations. I still don't know where I stand on it, but here's a possibly related problem that starts to get at it:

Suppose you still believe in a real world that persists and changes independently of our way of talking or otherwise signing/singing about it. One of the features you might notice about this world is its endless variety. Instead of a finite number of symbols rolling about in changing combinations, you get an infinite number of distinct objects and phenomena (or, if you prefer, a single phenomenon that is constantly changing). There might be the appearance of patterning or family resemblance, but it's hard to hold up a pair of apples, one with a 2" diameter and a worm in it, and the other with a 4" diameter and a lovely blush color, and be convinced that they are as similar as the application of that noun "apple", equally to both, would suggest.

As I eluded to earlier, I think most of us take language to be portable- the same word uttered in different circumstances, different registers, different intonations, different typefaces, means the same or at least carries a stamp of sameness across all these cases. You might actually disagree with this, and think that there is no resemblance between my use of the word "apple" and yours (coming from your unique mouth or typewriter in your unique context, etc), and I wouldn't know what to say. But it would seem to be essential to its common utility that this property of "portability" apply to language. However unique the context of each utterance, we want the word to maintain an identity across all instances. Is this more or less illusory than the notion that we ourselves maintain an identity across every instance, when each molecule of our body will have been replaced seven years from now?

Do notes have an identity? There's "middle C", so named for its position on a piano, but playable, in theory, on just about any instrument. Play that middle C on a piano and compare it to an oboe, however, and you get a sound that is obviously different. Even more interesting, two oboe players, and two piano players if you're really listening, get completely different sounding C's. This is because the name "C' applies only to the fundamental, the frequency which is vibrating with the greatest amplitude (usually) in the spectrum of complex frequencies that make up a standing wave in an acoustic instrument (what we pick out when we use the word 'note'). Is this level of variation greater than what we might notice about individual word utterances (used here very broadly to include instances in print as well)? Is there more difference between, say, Mark Mothersbaugh and John Coltrane playing middle C than Gertrude Stein and Bob Grenier hand-writing the word 'fall' in their notebooks.

A while ago, we arrived at the problem of more signs in natural language than notes in a musical system. Here you could almost arrange a hierarchy: there is infinite variety of phenomena in the real world, finite signs in natural language, even fewer finite notes in musical language. Whatever relation shaky relation natural language has to manifold reality, music must be even worse off. But that hierarchy doesn't illuminate much, except for the fact that representation is itself a limiting framework in which to work with language.

Text/Sound/Music.4

2008-03-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

Definitions of words consist in other words. If you don't know what a given word means, you are likely to get pointed at other words, either in reference books or in conversation, to gain some clarity. If, on the other hand, you don't know what any words mean, you are shit out of luck. And if you want to know how words mean, you may not find that many clues in dictionaries (although one approach to this problem I haven't seen, and haven't taken up myself, is to do a social or behavioral psychology of dictionaries).

What do you consult if you want to know what a given note means? I think it is here where the analogy between words and notes seems most threadbare. But, if we are feeling generous, we might say, "you find out from the rest of the piece". Because certainly, if a note has any meaning, that meaning can only be found in the entirety of the piece of music in which it was sounded, and nowhere else. Poets might feel this way too about their usage of a word, that it can only be discovered throughout the whole poem- though in general we regard meaning, and language in general, to be portable.

Notice that in both cases, we appeal to the whole of the system, or at least large organizations of it, to explain the parts. We should like to disambiguate this word "system" here in order to check the analogy more closely, but I'm willing to query that we do similar things when we inquire into a poem or a piece of music at its individual moments. If we take this 'systems approach' (a term I'm borrowing from John Searle's critique of aritificial intelligence) to the semantics of music than it seems like it could be applied equally to poetry. The only problem being specifying just what it is one is doing when one determines "meaning" in this approach, and the meta-linguistic problem of defining a system (what "system" does that words definition then rest in).

But of course this approach misses out on a part of natural language that we often feel like defending or hanging on to- the ability of words to attach to object reality. When we say "Washington, D.C." we want, I think, to have a real place picked out in our saying. We want a kind of direct, unmediated touching of the real world with our talking about it, most especially in the case of nouns. There are, famously, many, many problems with this naive notion of reference, but nevertheless, we hold it to be the unique property of natural language, and the thing that makes the rest of what we call "languages" only analogously so. To put it in the common terms of the debate, the "systems approach" will offer you syntax (millenia worth) but no semantics.

But if you give up on reference, and satisfy yourself that all we are doing with words is putting them in relations with one another, as opposed to a real, objective world, than the disanalogy between musical language and natural language seems to break down. Indeed, the notion of an analogy starts being replaced with a notion of family resemblance. My question at this point becomes whether or not we can continue the investigation on those terms.

Kenny G(oldsmith)

2008-03-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

Thesurprising thing about Kenneth Goldsmith is what a good reader he is and, when he reads it, how aural his texts are. Before I break my no-lit-crit rule, let me get down to business. In the effluent Q&A that followed, he held uncreative writing (his own term for what he does and possibly the answer to Chris Stroffolino's question of what an non-poetry M.F.A . would be like) to be the only truly contemporary practice. As he argues, several hundred news papers, each of which could qualify as the greatest novel ever written, are printed daily, and that is probably now only a fraction of the text generated online- so much text that it is absolutely foolish to create anymore. We all are (or is he really saying we all ought to be) only "managing information".

Here's the question I was too polite to hound him with at the after-party: If I'm only managing information when I "write" and don't know it, and you're managing information when you "write" and do know it, what difference is there in the literature we produce? It's probably the case that a google search could find every word I used in this post printed in newspapers printed today, but that knowledge isn't part of my writing practice. Could the difference between what I do and what Kenneth does really consist only in that notion being in ,or not being in, either of our heads? If so, I think Kenny G alone has resurrected the importance of intentionality from the jaws of modernism (I really hope that sentence actually exists, verbatim, somewhere in today's papers).

Also, I'm writing this under the assumption that he has a good answer to this challenge, should it ever get presented to him.

Bright side to the recession...

2008-03-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

Fremont can't afford my baseball team anymore!

Who's goin' to the Bay Series? (call me)

Text/Sound/Music.3

2008-03-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

Can't seem to move fast enough to stay ahead of one Mr. Will Belew (see comments to last post).

If you have absolute, or "perfect", pitch you are likely to talk about individual pitches having colors, or characters, or qualities as distinct as color or surface texture or taste might be to someone else. Pitches in this case have both an identity and a quality, perhaps analogous to the way words have a denotation and a connotation. For poets, they probably have texture and taste and color as well (then you have the problem of figuring out whether the color or 'red' is, in fact, red). But, as Will pointed out, there are so very many more words, in any natural language, as there are notes in any traditional musical system. One could, of course, create an infinite number of notes by dividing up frequencies in the audible spectrum (or even the inaudible spectrum for that matter), but one has to assume that there are good historical reasons why the conventions of most traditional musics severely limit the number of notes in use.

1:1 relationships of notes to natural language units (whatever they may be) are unlikely to express the range of meaning in that language. As Will argues below, this relationship will also likely limit the meaningfulness of the musical system: "In western music, although there are accepted devices (antecedent and consequent phrasing, song forms, cadencing, etc) there is incredible range for meaning in that tonality only has meaning in aggregate, and then only very subjectively." Why keep pursuing it? My answer right now is that I think this approach might uncover two things: how poetry and music parted company (not necessarily historically, though we certainly need that information as well, but more how they came to be fundamentally different in so many practices); how the semantics of each might be understood by the others example. If we take Will's suggestion, you are not going to get to the meaning of a piece of music by reducing it to a symbol system (where notes are symbolic of something else) but only on its own terms. What might those terms be?

chap(ped) mail

2008-03-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

Nothing surprises me more than mail that is not bills or junk, as I never recall anyone even having my address. One J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden sends off the happy collection of Bucky Monkey (ed. Daniel Drew, featuring William Moor, Mr. Mitchell-Lumsden, Polis, Jeremy James Thompson, Lizzie Brock and Chad Lietz), (Hooray!) (Mitchell-Lumsden) the inaugural edition from Mr. Taft's Chaps, and BHER (Chad Lietz). So far, they are all in contending for "shortest chap/journal still requiring multiple reads for proper comprehension".

Qualified (partial) review can be found here.

Some mystery as to how to obtain a copy, but I'm happy to pass along the address from the masthead(s) to anyone who'd like it (omitted here to protect concerned parties from government surveillance for revolutionary literature).

Text/Sound/Music.2

2008-03-08T12:33:00.000-08:00

Want to keep expanding the scope of this before I nail down a direction. As I hinted at the end, we can talk about the "tonal" perspective on harmony, or the 12-tone perspective on harmony. Broadly (perhaps too much so), the former says the rules are written in the heavens, the latter says the rules are written by the composer (anew, each time they compose). Which of these do we think spoken language is like? It's likely that very few people think words or their respective significance obtain independently of our use of them (that words float around in space and we discover them and their meaning, as opposed to making them up when we need them), which is the strong claim of some traditional and contemporary tonal theorists. Maybe fewer think we can remake the rules of language anew each time we use them, which is one way to interpret the 12-tone system.

With these variables in play, the variables of conventional meaning opposed to absolute meaning, the functioning of the parts of either "language", tonal system or symbol system, get increasingly complex. Lots of ink has been spilled in the philosophy of language and ethics over the notion of conventional meaning (I'll drop into some specifics at a later date). Music theorists, not particularly concerned with a semantics of music, have focused more on whether a piece must have a tonal center. Suppose we refine our analogy to talk not about note names (C, D, E, etc) but about note functions (tonic, supertonic, median, etc). Then we might have a world wherein notes could stand in for morphemes, relative to whatever key we are in.

North Indian sargam, the syllables meant for the training of raga singers, have features something like this. What we call the fourth scale degree is called "Ma" in sargam in part because practicioners of that music agree that the fourth is feminine in some important respect. The fifth is called "Pa" for parallel reasons relating to its masculinity. I'm not sure it's accurate to say that there is semantic content attached to every syllable, but we might, as a thought experiment, imagine a melody sung in these syllables as at once a denotation of musical values and a significant, symbolic bit of language. How rich would this language be? Not very, if we detach the value of the note from our transcription. But if we take the actual sounding of the note to be part of the meaning, if the sound itself is significant, than the language is exactly as rich as the music (I'm almost tempted to say "as our experience of the music", but that feels dangerous).

What does this expansion do to our notion of meaning?

anoche en Oakland

2008-03-08T12:14:00.002-08:00

Heading up Broadway towards First Friday, a medium-sized pack of neighborhood kids on various trick bicycles with boom boxes attached- behind them a smaller band of art kids on not-trick bikes video-taping them. Telegraph was obscenely packed. Do I remeber a time when the Murmur was "about the art" (probably not)? Saw an SF friend in Mama Buzz and he kept exclaiming "Oakland's kind of cool and... relaxed". The band tried playing a short busking set, but RPS kept coming outside and telling us they'd get a ticket if we didn't stop. Apparently, OPD has the manpower to patrol rowdy art school dropouts on a Friday night now.

Playing Stork Club was fun, better than any date on the road. We did two encores, after the second one I took the mic and said: "We've been to Portland. We've been to Olympia. We've been to Seattle. They all fucking sucked. Oakland, motherfucker." Crowd went apeshit, and handed me a PBR tall can (uggh). Good thing I didn't tell them I meant Oakland, Or.

(just kidding)

Text/Sound/Music

2008-03-05T22:02:00.000-08:00

Apparently I've missed something interesting in my neighborhood. I recall this date, but failed to get the details in time... sheizer.

Resurrecting, in the hopes of giving a public airing to, the attempt to make an analogy between music and text (for lack of a better catch-all term). Instead of trying to describe the problem, I'll just jump in:

If one were to make an analogy between music and language, spoken or written, what would the specific analogies be. For instance, the musical note, taken as a kind of atom, could be analogous to a given word, or a given letter, or a given phoneme, or a given morpheme, or something else. How many features of the musical note could each of these be said, reasonably, to mirror. One feature of a note is that, if you are in a tonal context, the function, or "meaning", of the note changes relative to other notes surrounding it in time. "G" played direcly before "C" suggests about G that it is the dominant, or "5th", of "C". Played in similar temporal relationship to "E" might suggest it is the minor 3rd (although this relationship is probably more ambiguous without more context).

Can we find similar functions in language? Where is it the case that the temporal combination is significant and that significance, that meaning, can be altered by recombination? A morpheme might mean differently in combination, but not so drastically differently as to have a separate significance from one combination to the next. What about a phoneme- if we randomly assign note values to a set of phonemes in a language (preferably one with the same number of phonemes as distinct musical notes in our musical language), would the two behave at all similarly in composition?

Now try wrapping your head around how fucked all of this gets if your musical system is 12-tone instead of diatonic.

I'm going to bed

On the Road Again

2008-02-28T10:18:00.000-08:00

Traveling with six dudes and one woman up the Northwest is intense linguistically. We are forced to make, and then catch up to, a constant barrage of obscure language in order to defeat boredom and sense.

"That's lots tired"
"And by tired, I mean tight."
"'Hey... whatever'!"
"'Hey... whatever'!"
"Knock, knock"
"Who's there?"
"911."
"911, who?"
"Dude, I thought you said you'd never forget"

"Knock, knock"
"Who's there?"
"Whale 911."
"Whale 911 who?"
"hehehehehehehehe"
..........................................

You visit this language on unsuspecting audiences in the form of music, on streets or floors of clubs that smell like frier grease. The further out you get, the less the audience understands. It's much worse if you try to talk to them.

Gomorrans Northwestern Tour

2008-02-19T10:44:00.001-08:00

Won't list dates here, but if you're anywhere between Santa Cruz and Seattle and looking for something to do this week and next, check out tour dates from the only jug/punk band that's also a biblical neologism: The Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club.

Oaklanders can catch us on the flipside at March's first Friday (3/7) at the Stork Club

ShadoWord

2008-02-19T10:18:00.001-08:00

Around the end of January, Walter K Lew invited me to perform at the premier program of what hopes to be a sustained and expanding performance group, dubbed ShadoWord. The NY performances featured Paolo Javier, Mike Estabrook, Ernest Concepcion, dennis M. somera, Mark Nowak, Kate Ann Heidelbach, Wang Ping, Jeremy James Thompson, Linh Dinh and were, by all accounts, hugely successful.

I'm revisiting the same piece, Long_Life, tomorrow (2/20) at San Francisco's BlueSix space, 3043 24th St. @ Treat, in a series curated by my brother, Luke Westbrook. Luke will play a solo set on guitar and melodica, and Chris Peck , aka Peck the Town Crier, will do his thing.

Hope you can make it out to this and stay tuned for future performances from ShadoWord.

Announcing Oakland Simulpoem (a little late)

2008-02-18T20:42:00.000-08:00

A little late for the official "release date" of this e-chap, but want everyone to check out the Oakland Simulpoem, a very cool collaborative text written with Loretta Clodfelter, J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden, Lara Durback, David Harrison Horton, Chad Lietz, Chris Stroffolino and myself in intervals between 2006 and 2007. Basic concept of the piece is to have people in different locations of the city simultaneously composing poems of a more-or-less observational nature. Having the privilege to edit/organize the effort, I'm of course biased about the result- but I think it was a pretty damn cool experiment, with pretty damned cool results.

While you're checking out Simulpoem, cruise through the rest of the site- a dauntingly expansive and exhaustive, on-going effort from David Horton and Stephanie Young and their legion of contributors.

blogs are like new years resolutions

2008-02-17T17:24:00.001-08:00

uggh, I've started another one. And then, of course, there's the pressure to keep it up, as in up to date, uploaded, upstanding. It's not entirely clear from my track record whether or not I will do that. But, here's a post, posted today, so that's something.

I'm not going to introduce myself here. My assumption is that, if you navigated to this page, you know me, or have at least heard rumors, or I told you to go here in some other venue. This is going to serve as the repository (I just attempted to spell that with every possible vowel except an "i") of whatever part of my net identity doesn't make it into an imaginary venn-diagram composed of the overlap of the rest of my web presence, seen in the handy sidebar. I guess that's something like an essential identity in the year 2008. While I'm so very much invested in all the projects and undertakings represented over there on the right, there are still things I'm up to, things to which I would invite audience participation, which do not fall into any of those. Thus, a blog. I may also do some of that traditional blogging activity, "typing out loud", that makes so many other blogs so interesting to read (and so many of my other blogs so not).

I probably won't do much literary criticism. I have a weird relationship with literary criticism. I think it's great, and I think the people doing it well are great, and even better I think it's probably necessary for the maintenance and propagation of literature, and thus I'm indebted to it as I try to make literature. I also think, in almost every case that I read criticism of a particular text that I have read or subsequently read, that I would have been happier not having read the criticism and having read only the text. I don't know how to resolve those two sentiments, and honestly I've sort of given up. But I still have Adorno and Kristeva and Benjamin glaring at me from my bookcase, so I'm not unsympathetic to the undertaking. I'm just not going to start doing any any time soon.

I might occassionally do some philosophy here, and by the time you've gotten to the period at the end of this sentence, if you're a literature person, you're probably looking for a shoe to throw at me for writing the above and then for drawing the distinction "philosophy-v-literarycriticism". Here, let me duck. Ouch! Can't dodge shoes or bullets. Can maybe bight them. Philosophy is probably literary criticism of other philosophy, I think I actually believe that. But, there's the brand of philosophy that seems to ruin other philosophy, and that I dislike, and the brand that seems to not, sometimes by merely plagarizing other philosophy (because it's all been done/written/said before) and sometimes by being, or at least seeming (ouch! stop throwing shoes at me) like it is(ouch!) novel (thud!). There's also the brand of philosophy that ruins other philosophy and seems novel, and that brand is the copyrighted property of Nietzsche.

In keeping with the title of this blog, I'm going to call all the stuff I wish I had in my head and wished I were writing constantly "Ideational Content", and this is its impoverished home: "Ideational Continent". For today, I've little ideation to impart, except a few gems culled from copying and pasting texts from various note-taking programs I've mismanaged in my digital life. Could anyone tell me what the fuck any of this might mean:

Sense (as)of object- sense of (as)word:
essentially 'love' is like the second case, is in just that sense real

How the possibility of a metalanguae ruins every
theory.

I seriously don't know what I meant by these. Anyone want to take a crack?

Ideational Continent

Occupying My Armchair

Post-30 Post

3 Photos

on having a kid for real

on having a kid

Let's Go Texas

Am I Doing Something Profound Right Now?

lyrics can be good

Poetry Disconnect

Didn't Do Dhit Today

Exercise 1

I Can't Hack It In the Digital World

An example of 1:1 relation of text:music

Raj-A!

to be an aging rockstar

Happy 20-teens

drunk + whatever's going on= awesome

Solidarity?

The Return of Rock-Rap?

... you're in the woods

Oakland/Detroit

this almost made me cry

Poet's Basketball Highlights

Chronic Illness in the Music Industry

Laurie Anderson on the Economy

Poetry.. again

This Season's Rivalries

Back on the Continent

Parkway Mothballed: 3/22/09-?

Can't Conserve for the Life of Me

Did I say Hell Yes, Already

6/6/1924-2/14/2009

Can We Still Have Aesthtics at All

Winning the War of Attrition

Huey!

Inaugural Aesthetics

on policing the city

Race a Red Herring

Eudaimonia

the new old way for the 21st century

Confessions

Follow Up No Follow Up

Open Letter to the Yes on 8 Campaign

Fucking Blog World

The only A's Good News to be Had

More Unoriginal Content

Completely Unoriginal Thoughts

Temporarily Parting Shots

Rebel Reading Series this Friday (6/13)

Aggregating Interest

we interrupt this intellectual discussion...

Text/Object

Text/Sound/Music

Text/Sound/Music.8

Kenny G.2

Text/Sound/Music.7

Text/Sound/Music.6

Text/Sound/Music.5

Text/Sound/Music.4

Kenny G(oldsmith)

Bright side to the recession...

Text/Sound/Music.3

chap(ped) mail

Text/Sound/Music.2

anoche en Oakland

Text/Sound/Music

On the Road Again

Gomorrans Northwestern Tour

ShadoWord

Announcing Oakland Simulpoem (a little late)

blogs are like new years resolutions