lyrics can be good

"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

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

Happy May Day.

Exercise 1

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

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

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!

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