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PAPER: When did you first start writing about music?
Jessica Hopper: When I was 15 or 16 years old is when I started getting my first checks for my rock criticism, and that came from when I would read the local papers in Minneapolis. I would call and say, ' you got this whole article wrong, and you guys don't understand this band like I do.' I really felt like I was living in a time in Minneapolis where bands like Babes In Toyland -- who were the sort of band I was seeing every week -- were being labeled by men as being 'caustic,' or 'hysterical,' rather than 'canonical.' Whereas I thought Babes In Toyland was the greatest band that had ever existed. Because it spoke to me so loud and clear.
P: What made you go from feeling like a band you loved was misunderstood to becoming a critic?
JH: I knew my perspective mattered, so I was pretty assertive about putting it out there. We see that a lot today -- that there's a lot more value being placed on a multitude of perspectives in music media, and I feel like that was a long time coming. I think there was so long where we defaulted, and in some places we still do default to a macho ideal of good; a white ideal of good; and when I first started writing about music I was, like, in 10th grade and I wholly did not subscribe to the ideals that were being put on me.
P: You were very involved with politics as a very young teenager, how did you transition to writing about music?
JH: I had a lot of interest in my own independence as a woman, and I saw a lot of the truth of the way women were treated in the world because I was paying an inordinate amount of attention. I loved music and I got burnt out on a lot of that political stuff...I was speaking at pro-choice rallies and stuff. I took myself very seriously -- and then I found punk rock. Shortly after getting into punk rock was the first Bikini Kill tour in the US and I was working in a record store and the people I was working with were like, 'we have this Bikini Kill tape and this seems like your kinda thing.' And through that I found a place in the world that was everything I was interested in, underscored a lot of my beliefs, and gave that feeling a name, and that was radical feminism and punk rock. All of those things, I believed in quite altruistically.
P: Writing about music can still feel like a political act -- there is still that feeling that you have to prove your worth in order to have a voice, you have to prove your credentials, while the canon of male critics gets to write whatever they want. Do you feel like, as a mentor, girls still have to prove themselves.
JH: Part of the reason I gave the book the title I did is because I feel like there are days when it just confounds me that some of these wonderful young writers who are light-years past where everyone is at 21 and 22, have to endure the same stupidity that I had to when I was coming up 19 years ago. I was lucky that when I was their age, people had to be angry enough to confront me in person, or people had to write me a letter. You have to be really angry to write a letter, as opposed to firing off some irate tweet and hoping it scalds the other person, the person you're looking to undermine. I think now young female writers, or young writers who aren't straight white dudes, have to have another layer or resilience in order to have a strong opinion.
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Jessica Hopper The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
Featherproof Books
'With this premiere volume, spanning from her punk fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly's past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why the New York Times has called Hopper's work "influential." Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper's most engaging, thoughtful and humorous writing, this book serves as a document of the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music, the ideas in songs and albums, how fantasies of artists become complicated by real life, and just what happens when you follow that obsession into muddy festival fields, dank basements, corporate offices or court records.'-- Featherproof Books
Excerpt
How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock
It’s 2 p.m., the Friday before Christmas 2012, on the 21st floor of the Leo Burnett building in downtown Chicago. Young executives, creatives, admins, and interns are all packed into a large meeting room, giddy and restless; today is special. Canadian sister folk-pop duo Tegan and Sara step onto a foot-high stage and play three songs — including the first two singles from their seventh album, Heartthrob, which they will release the following month. The fluorescent lights stay on, the city’s skyline splayed out behind them. Afterward, nearly all of the 200-odd employees in attendance will stand in line, phone at the ready, to pose for pictures with the band, just like fans after any concert.
And Tegan and Sara, who eventually cracked the Top 20 with Heartthrob’s “Closer,” need to win over this audience just as they would at any concert. A track in the right commercial could bring about the kind of attention that magazine covers and radio play alone can no longer garner. Commercial placement, or a sync, has evidenced itself as the last unimpeded pathway to our ears — what was once considered to be the lowest form of selling out, of betraying fans and compromising principles, is now regarded as a crucial cornerstone of success. And as ads have become a lifeline for bands in recent years, the stigma of doing them has all but eroded. But with desperate bands flooding the market, the money at stake has dropped precipitously. Even the life raft has a hole in it.
“A tiny sliver of bands are doing well,” says the duo’s Sara Quin. “The rest of us are just middle class, looking for a way to break through that glass ceiling. The second ‘Closer’ got Top 40 radio play, we were involved in meetings with radio and marketing people who said, ‘The next step is getting a commercial.’ I can see why some bands might find that grotesque, but it’s part of the business now.”
Fifteen years ago, the music industry was still a high-functioning behemoth pulling in $38 billion a year at its peak, able to ignore the digital revolution that was about to denude it entirely. Starting in 1999, sales of recorded music fell an average of 8% a year; 2012 was the first time since then that sales went up — 0.3%. Last year, it reported $16.5 billion in global revenue. America accounted for $4.43 billion of that — approximately the same amount spent by AT&T, Chevy, McDonald’s, and Geico on ad buys in the U.S. alone.
Back in the early ’90s, when the music industry was thriving, commercials weren’t a way indie bands got ahead — the punitive value outweighed the relatively small financial gains bands made for licensing a song to a commercial campaign. Band manager Howard Greynolds, who looks after the careers of Iron and Wine and Swell Season, was an employee at indie label Thrill Jockey when two of its flagship bands, Tortoise and Freakwater, licensed a song for a 1995 CK One campaign.
“I remember people calling us saying, ‘I can’t fucking believe they did that, I can’t support this band anymore!’” says Greynolds. “We were overly transparent then, we told people, ‘Listen, this $5,000 bought them a van — fuck off.’” A few years later, another Thrill Jockey band, Trans Am, were outspoken about turning down a rumored $100,000 deal to license a song for a Hummer commercial. A generation ago, refusing these kinds of offers was a way for bands to telegraph where they stood, the sort of thing that showed their allegiance to the underground and their community.
It’s been nearly 30 years since Lou Reed hawked Honda scooters with “Walk on the Wild Side” and 26 since Nike used (and was summarily sued for using) the Beatles’ “Revolution” to sell sneakers, but the diminishing of this notion’s ability to outrage has sped up over the last decade. Volkswagen used Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” and a half-dozen Wilco songs, Apple placements are gold medals rather than albatrosses for relative newcomers like Feist and rock royalty like U2 alike, and no less an anticommercialism scold than Pearl Jam got in bed with Target in 2009. Such moves are barely even press-cycle talking points by now.
Greynolds says what expedited this change wasn’t just the huge drop in record sales, but as layoffs swept through the record industry, contacts from labels and distributors went to marketing, advertising, and brands. “All of the sudden those were the people at music houses,” says Greynolds. “People from your world. They might be feeding you a line of shit, but there was trust. They were different.”
These new players within the advertising industry proved to be capable navigators of both the ad world as well and the music underground. They could help forge lucrative connections between brands and cash-strapped bands — and their fan bases. Decades of posturing and sanctimony were rendered moot once artists realized that corporate gigs were the only paying gigs in town, a (very) necessary evil.
(cont.)
St Vincent with Jessica Hopper discussing David Bowie
If This Is How the New Journalism Is, Count Us Out!: Jessica Hopper
LIVE! @ your library: Jessica Hopper
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'Wildlives is concerned with both literal and figurative explorations of space, and which metaphors we choose to ignore or flood with attention, particularly when the two coalesce in heightened moments of intimacy between people. “The Edge-Parts of Different Places” begins with the lines “It is hard for one human / to fit inside another human”–describing a moment with a partner as a locus of both physical and emotional contradiction. As the poem goes on, its language becomes increasingly surreal, closing with the image of a Woman made out of bats.
'This image depicts that creation of a kind of creepy, closely-knit darkness that provides comfort, claustrophobia, and even escape. Alexander conjures intimacy with a kind of haunting, low-grade psychic violence–I am reminded of Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbirds at some moments. (Though Alexander’s poetics is complex, unusual and uniquely her own, I feel also compelled to bring up Tomaž Šalamun, Cassandra Gillig, and Melissa Broder–who aptly, blurbed the book.) Invocations of the surreal are echoed and answered on the next page, as the piece “Humid Air and Three Blankets” closes with its speaker uttering the phrase: “I am here to remind you / that this is happening”–a kind of choral remark that speaks to not only these pieces, but Alexander’s poetics more generally.
'Though Wildlives is full of relatable, confessional poetic moments, it is not an egocentric collection: the author displaces her sensations onto dead stars, unwieldy mountains, bodies become forage, and mosquitos transported across state lines. Alexander’s announcements of amorphous longing take on refreshing physicality that isn’t amorphous at all. “The biggest stars in the universe are called red supergiants,” she announces, reflecting simply that: “I shouldn’t have let you become mine.”
'Though I don’t know if there is a word for it, I want to say that Sarah Jean Alexander’s poems are the opposite form of the Whitmanesque expansive impulse–instead of making herself larger, the author manipulates language to make herself and the objects of her fascination so incredibly small they seem racked with detail–as if nothing else exists.
'“I am tiny next to you,” begins the poem “695,800 kilometers.” The next moment, lovers have swapped appendages. Like my favorite of Alexander’s poems, this begins somewhere safe and lyric but quickly becomes an arrangement of tiny, eerie memento moris–a still life the author moves through, shifting seamlessly from light to solemn, play to lament, dreaming to waking, yet always herself manages to emerge intact, guiding us out in some new, direction we could never have dreamed up ourselves.'-- Lucy Tiven, Fanzine
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Sarah Jean Alexander Wildlives
Big Lucks
'Wildlives is a scrapbook of poems and of short stories, of nightmares and of daydreams, of love letters and of prayer cards. In her debut collection, Sarah Jean Alexander asks (and answers) the hardest questions about love and loneliness and 21st century human survival. Wildlives excavates the depths of heartbreak, hope, and helplessness that can exist between two people in a small, human world.'-- Big Lucks
'I've only met Sarah Jean Alexander once, but it was intense time and a wild time. I think that's how you have to define Sarah Jean, and I think that's how we have to define the work we find on these pages: free and brutal and savage and, yes, wild. I'm reading this author and it feels as if she really knows truth. It feels as if she is my best friend. It feels as if her heart and her fears are exactly the same as mine. For these reasons, it doesn't matter that I've only met Sarah Jean Alexander once: thanks to the strength of this book and the weight of these letters, I am convinced that we will always be together.'-- Luna Miguel
Excerpt
from The Quietus
WAYS IN WHICH IT IS TRUE
You are the reason people still search
for new people to kiss
Similarly to the way that you are the gateway chip to,
“Yes, I have eaten the whole bag”
I have never been satisfied and known it
In other words, I have simply never tried
It’s true that I run faster than I give myself credit for
just in case someone is going to try to race me for fun
when I am already too tired
and don’t want to have any fun
It’s true that while wearing sunglasses in public
a person becomes imperceptible
Not in the way that
no one can see you
or tell that you are walking in front of them on the sidewalk
But imperceptible in every other way
My stomach rarely flushes with embarrassment
but does especially when my hands
are holding the two of your cheeks
like they are going to melt away
And your cheeks are being held
like they are considering becoming more heavy
As if a body can expand and shrink on command
in a way that is more dangerous
than breathing
And what about breathing, anyway
What if it’s not that we need to breathe in order to stay alive
but it’s our breaths that are the owners of our soul
and it’s the soul that needs this body to keep on going
What's life for if not taking everything
spoken to me as a sign to move in closer
What's life for if not using another body
as a placeholder for your fear
You are big moves in the morning
when I am wanting to be there too
but instead I am many miles away and still asleep
You are hard work in the night
when I am texting you good bye
and the messages are green and not going through
because one of us is underground
and neither of us are being easy
together
Sometimes I become so frightened
that a person I knew will become a person I know, again
and that I will have to follow through
on an infinite amount of dormant promises
that seemed nice to make at the time
It’s true that being in love
is the only way I know how to pay for gratitude
without feeling like I am going to run out of something else
It’s true that every time I open my eyes
I am bewildered that so far,
my body has not completely failed
me in a new and exciting final way
I am unconvinced that inside all of us
an at times dull, at times screamingly apparent pain
isn’t making a home
But maybe I am just cold outside in the air
and you are outside in a cold air with me
In the cold air it is difficult for anything to make a home
even if it tries very hard
Fold with me into ourselves like baby paper cranes
who don’t know how to exist without sinking
Hold onto my cheeks similarly to the way
I held onto yours
Learn how to melt away
and then do it
Sarah Jean Alexander reads some of her poems
sarah jean alexander & theo thimo reading SJTB at $ young money poetry $
v erotic
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'If we put three people in a room together and asked them to define loyalty or honor or respect, we’d get different answers from each one of them. Some of the answers might overlap and some of the answers might come out angry or defeated or even terrified of being seen.
'We are living in the age of hyper-connectivity, but nobody is connecting.
******
'I’ve been having panic attacks again. They keep starting in weird places inside of my body. Sometimes they start in the soles of my feet and feel like electric eels climbing up my Achilles and into my calves and then they explode like arcing light through my thighs and into my torso. Other times they start in my colon—a twitch or a gurgle that isn’t anticipated will happen and then everything inside of me goes dayglow and slithery—which isn’t a spot I am used to them beginning.
'I am all out of my anxiety medication and I feel like that is a good thing. I feel like not relying on the pill as an act of desperation is a better option than me taking a pill and going fetal wherever I am until it kicks in and does the smoothing out thing. I want to feel it all right now. I want to sweat and convulse a little. I want to taste the pennies in my mouth and I want to feel the current in my limbs.
'Ride your fucking ride.
******
'I almost got married when I was nineteen years old. It was such a quick and wild thing, this sudden aloneness turning into impending marriage and all that. Everything was a blur. I remember telling my Senior Chief on the ship that I was flying to Arizona to get married and he looked at me like I was crazy and said “You have a girl? Had no clue.” My mother was stoked, because she really loved the girl. I loved the girl. My sister loved the girl. The girl, well, she fell in love with someone else before I could get back there and do the marrying thing.
******
I' always enjoy how on a holiday meant to remember the dead, Americans of all shapes/sizes/ages will use it as an excuse to drink too much alcohol, scorch dead animals on grills, and ramble their rambles about those who have
served.
'Don’t even get an old fuck like me started on the honor part.'-- Sean H. Doyle
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Sean H. Doyle This Must Be the Place
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'Doyle lays himself bare […] without eliciting pity or scorn. In others’ hands, similar material — drug abuse, desperate sex, violence, suicidal thoughts — have often resulted in wallowing or descriptions of depravity for depravity’s sake. It is a testament to Doyle’s clear examination and probing of his past that when he drops us into one charged situation after another we neither sink nor are incredulous at the messes he finds himself in. His spare words rescue us from despair, while still communicating the profound pain of just being alive with pinprick precision.' -- The Chicago Tribune
'This Must Be the Place is the book of an orphan in the wake of his delirium struggling to make sense of the loss that caused it. Sean H. Doyle is a walker of fire and slayer of ghouls whose numberless prolonged trials have stripped him of human dross and discrimination alike. Absence is a mentor, in his world, anguish a mold, compassion the reward. If after reading Doyle’s story you don’t fancy him caressing the brow of Despair itself, it won’t be because he’s failed to tell it well. It broke me, this book, then it took my hand and kissed me. I am changed, now, and so much the better, too.' -- D Foy
'Reading This Must Be The Place is like getting mugged, and then once the mugger takes your wallet, they push you on the ground. And then once you’re on the ground, they kick you in the stomach, over and over and over again. And then when you think they’ve finally decided to leave you alone, they kick you once more in the teeth. The only difference is that when Sean H. Doyle is mugging you, the experience is cleansing, invigorating, something that tests your heart but also makes it glow, an experience you don’t want to ever stop. Otherwise, they’re basically identical.'-- Juliet Escoria
Excerpt
from Everyday Genius
The Willow House, 3rd Ave and McDowell Road, Phoenix, June, 1994—
I come here after my shift at the record store and sit around at picnic tables outside, scribbling into notebooks while drinking shitty coffee and waiting for my girlfriend, Velvet, to get off work so we can go get high. The crowd here is varied: AA people alongside art people and punks alongside dirty Deadheads and downtown casualties. There are many open mic poetry events, usually outdoors at dusk. One night I decide to read. I go to the mic and drop weapons. I go to the mic and read about Kuwait City and southern Iraq. I go to the mic and read about prostitutes and hashish and drinking homemade wine made out of grape juice in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I go to the mic and curse over and over again. Nobody claps. Nobody moves. I am not asked to read again.
Desert Sky Pavilion, West Phoenix, October 18th, 1995—
I am loaded on a belly full of pills and Sarah is gyrating wild-like in front of me, dancing like the world is ending and she is the only one who knows it is ending. We are surrounded by thousands and thousands of people at a Nine Inch Nails/David Bowie concert. The concert is outdoors, so I have packed the tips of a few cigarettes with weed. Sarah is still dancing like someone who has been injected with methamphetamine. I light one of the loaded cigs and Nine Inch Nails launch into “Closer” and Sarah runs her hands back to the front of my jeans and starts playing with me while I get high. There are mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts surrounding us. Sarah is still dancing and she pulls my zipper down and starts to rub me. Someone from behind us makes a comment about the weed smell but I do not care because my cock is getting harder and Sarah is getting faster as the song builds. Someone from the side of us throws a beer at us and Sarah keeps gyrating and rubbing and I lean my head all the way back and look up at the sky and the noise is beautiful and I don’t fucking care.
AZP Skatepark, Flagstaff, AZ, December 1995—
Grass has come up to Flagstaff to play a show with Julia—an incredible screamo band from San Diego—and Primitive Tribes—a local Flagstaff band made up of peace punks and crusties. The show is inside of a skate park and the skate park has no heat and it is thirteen degrees. As always, our second guitar player, Reid, couldn’t make the show. This has happened three or four times now. I am very close to quitting the band, but I love playing with Brian and Anthony, so I put up with Shawn’s weird mope shit and persevere, for the rock action. A band of hessians show up at the skate park and beg to get put on the bill. They’re on tour from the Midwest and just want to play a show. They’re called Ritual Device and seem like nice enough dudes. We let them go on before us. They destroy everything and everyone in the place with a solid and guttural Jesus Lizard-like sludge and stomp. I wish I was in that band and on that tour. We play our set and every animal comes out of my body and there is steam rising from my hands on the fretboard and I run halfway up the halfpipe and slide down on my knees while playing and Shawn is mewling and Brian is thumping and Anthony is pounding and I leave my body with the animals and never notice the blood from my frozen fingers until after, when I can feel every sting.
Scripps Memorial Hospital, 9888 Genesee Ave, La Jolla, CA, April, 1996—
My mother is in a coma because the radiation treatment weakened her colon so much that a portion of it burst and went septic. The doctors found some strange bacteria in her body and because of this anyone who goes into the room to be with her has to scrub up and wear medical scrubs. I have just returned from my mother’s dentist after getting a broken tooth pulled and my mouth is full of bloodied gauze and I do not say anything to my mother’s nurse about it because I am not going to let some bacteria get in the way of me spending time with my mother while machines are breathing for her and she is dreaming of another life. I pull out the bloodied gauze and put it into a trashcan next to the bed and sit down and hold my mother’s hand and tell her about my life, about how at night I go to the strip club near the Sports Arena because none of the women there will ask me how I feel or what I feel or anything of the sort and I can be alone there at a table in a darkened corner and the music is loud and the cokes are ice cold and I can disappear.
Trailer: This Must Be the Place
Sean H. Doyle at the February 2014 NYC Sunday Salon
Sean H. Doyle reads 'The Huffer'
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'Ron Padgett is a writer with a consummate sense of the fantastical as it intersects the quotidian. A prominent second-generation New York School poet, Padgett’s publication history is impressively varied; a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2012, Padgett, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, has produced distinguished translations from the French of work by Apollinaire and Reverdy, among others.
'Reading Padgett’s disarming poems is always a delight, and Alone and Not Alone certainly does not disappoint.
'Notwithstanding this poet’s famously seductive wit, the poems in Alone and Not Alone are often accompanied by a tinge of metaphysical melancholy bordering on bemused fatalism.
'“Reality,” he writes in the poem by that name, “has a transparent veneer/that looks exactly like the reality beneath it,” a veneer that will sometimes “. . . flicker and vanish,/though it is still there./You must wait a day or two/before attempting to see it again.” When Padgett reminds us that “Sometimes the veneer becomes detached/and moves slightly away from reality,” he is moving us (with his characteristic lightness of touch) smack dab into the middle of epistemology.
'And isn’t epistemology—the nature of a more generalized knowing—arguably the natural habitat of poetry? In the poem, “Face Value,” Padgett writes, “The Wall of Forgetting” is “. . . not a wall it’s a mirror/that picks your face up off the floor/and whirls it onto a head/that has gone on without you.”
'Padgett’s head is filled with serendipitous metaphor and seemingly wacky, though at the same time eminently sane, aphorisms. “Everyone is warm enough/to be alive,” he writes in “The Plank and the Screw”. In the poem, It All Depends, he comments on the 19th century during which “Cottages go by/and music piles up/like excited dead people.”
'No one writes like this, but Ron Padgett is definitely somebody, and he writes like this.'-- New York Journal of Books
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Ron Padgett Alone and Not Alone
Coffee House Press
'The latest from Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett, Alone and Not Alone follows 2013′s triumphant Collected Poems (winner of the LA Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) with new poems that demonstrate how vital Padgett’s skills as a poet remain, continuously reminding us that the world may be seen in a clearer and more generous light.'-- Coffee Hoise Press
Excerpts
Survivor Guilt
It’s very easy to get.
Just keep living and you’ll find yourself
getting more and more of it.
You can keep it or pass it on,
but it’s a good idea to keep a small portion
for those nights when you’re feeling so good
you forget you’re human. Then drudge it up
and float down from the ceiling
that is covered with stars that glow in the dark
for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,
and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—
I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,
its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.
If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!
But your arms are just there and you are kaput.
It’s all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—
the kind word you thought of saying but didn’t,
the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,
thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,
your stupid idea that you would live forever—
all tua culpa. John Phillip Sousa
invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.
Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.
But when you wake up your body
seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,
and you don’t look too bad in the mirror.
Hi there, feller! Old feller, young feller, who cares?
Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,
to hell with him. That was then.
The Way You Wear Your Hat
Boing, boing, boing
is the sound the exclamation point makes
when it leaps around the page alone
like Fred Astaire in a tux at night
when he thinks that Ginger Rogers
is mad at him and only his toes
will lighten the glumness. Oh!
what a beautiful way to start a dance,
just a slow slide of the toe
along glittering black marble.
And in her hotel boudoir, Ginger
in a white satin gown, arms
crossed and lips pursed —
hey, she is mad. And no wonder:
they are in different films
being shown at different theaters!
And they will never, ever meet again,
for they have tricked each other
out of existence.
This for That
What will I have for breakfast?
I wish I had some plums
like the ones in Williams’s poem.
He apologized to his wife
for eating them
but what he did not
do was apologize to those
who would read his poem
and also not be able to eat them.
That is why I like his poem
when I am not hungry.
Right now I do not like him
or his poem. This is just
to say that.
Bargain Hunt
for Tessie
Suppose you found a bargain so incredible
you stood there stunned for a moment
unable to believe that this thing could be
for sale at such a low price: that is what happens
when you are born, and as the years go by
the price goes up and up until, near the end
of your life, it is so high that you lie there
stunned forever.
Ron Padgett reading 'Nothing in That Drawer'
Ron Padgett: Reading and Writing Long Poems
Ron Padgett: Poetic Beginnings
*
p.s. Hey. ** Nicola, Hi. Oh, gosh, blessings back to you. We're making a swarm of blessings. It's cool. Love, me. ** Bill, So you're still doing Berlin in a lag, or did you escape time's evil change? Sounds fun, in any case. That link was of interest, you can betcha. Man, that guac bowl looks greasy in a genius way. Wow, I'll be flying to Halle on the very day you're flying out of Berlin. May our jet trails draw a big X in the sky or something. Anyway, tell me all the German pooh. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. How weird, or weird to me or something, that Carol Channing and Christopher Lee were/are the same age. I think of Carol Channing as being someone from the immense past, and CL ... well, he recorded a Black Metal album three years ago. Age, so curious, so relative. ** Steevee, Hi. I saw a thing for 'The Wolfpack,' and I didn't know what it was, and, based on the poster or whatever that I saw, I thought it might be about the Emo sub-sect of 'wolves', but I guess it isn't. Looking forward to the read! Everyone. Mr. Steve Erickson aka Steevee has interviewed director Crystal Moselle about her new documentary film 'The Wolfpack', which 'opens with six long-haired teenage brothers reenacting a scene from Reservoir Dogs, complete with guns made from duct tape', which is enough to make me see it, at least. In the meantime, hear what she tells Ste(e)ve(e) here on Studio Daily. Funny story/mental image about the Tyler appearance Anthology Film Archives. It almost sounds like a scene out of Justin Bieber at his fame's height holding court from his Paris hotel room window vis-a-vis hundreds of adoring French teens in the street below, which I stumbled by/upon a few years ago. Weird juxtaposition, in other words. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, great painting, for sure. Huh, I know the name Max Stirner, and strongly suspect I've read his writings, and, in fact, I'm sure I have, but I think only in pieces. Interesting. I'll see what's what with that book, Thanks a lot, man! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Yeah I saw you did a Pat O'Neill gig. Awesome about the turn out! I'm a really big fan of his work. His visual art is excellent as well. His LA gallery Cherry + Martin mounted a great show of his stuff here at the Art Fair last year. I did try to make a post about his films maybe six months ago, but there weren't enough film clips online to make it work. I'm going to try again. I do feature one of his films in an upcoming Los Angeles experimental film post that I'm putting together. Terrible news re: your novel ... fuck, man, I hope not too terrible. Please relay what's going on in that regard whenever you're ready. I don't know that translation. I know of the book, but I haven't read it. I've only read Rimbaud's letters in a piece-meal fashion usually when they're inserted into collections of his poems. I'll check it out. Thanks, pal. ** Rewritedept Hi, Chris. Thanks a bunch again! There wasn't an embedded player in the post you sent me. I would have alerted you if it had been there and didn't work. Enjoy the actual bed. I'm good. Everything's good. A picture, cool, I'll go tiptoe into FB and check it out. Thank you. And send you my address, yeah, sorry, I spaced, as usual. Fantasy stuff is cool. Why wouldn't it be? It's like the jazz of genres or something maybe. ** Armando, Man, that's a very complicated-to-impossible comment to respond to. I'm going to be pragmatic with you, because I am. To make an announcement like that to someone (me, for instance), who only knows you in the limited way that conversing once in a while on a blog with someone allows, and who is very far away physically and psychically, does nothing but induce a feeling of helplessness and worrying that can not be resolved. You're in a lot of pain, and I know you need to make people know that, but the effect, unintended, feels aggressive because, like I said, and as you must know, there is nothing I can do and, not knowing you very well or your situation at all, nothing productive that I can say other than to say I hope you find something or someone in your immediate life that will avert you from the blackness and into enjoying yourself and your life because, from what little I know of you, you seem very smart and interesting. I really hope you find that turnaround. ** H, Hi! I'm very interested to read your thoughts on Mike's book! Everyone, great d.l. H has written on writer extraordinaire and d.l. M Kitchell's book 'Forest Wound' over on goodreads, and this is a meeting of excellent minds if there ever was such a thing, and, so, I encourage you to click this and read/get the spoils. I'm good. Thanks for your progressing thoughts on the wind chime. Just the thoughts re: it on my end are a great pleasure. ** Cal Graves, Hey, Cal. Long and great are definitely not mutually exclusive. It sounds like you are re: them like I am re: disaster movies. Poet people are pretty intensely into poetry. Back when I was a poet -- well, I still am, but I mean back when I was primarily a poet -- and was heavily in the poetry scene in LA, it was like being in the literary scene equivalent of an orgy or something in a way. Ooh, the poster for Mirrormask is exciting. I'll see if I can rent that or something. Yeah, that looks yum. My favorite Zelda game is 'Majorca's Mask'. That must mean something. Coolness. Do you have a fun bordering on maybe even amazing weekend plan(s)? Amaze-balls-ly, Dennis. ** Keaton, Vampire! On Titus! ** Right. This weekend I present you with four more books that I think would be very worth your time, if you have both the time and the means to acquire then read said books. Give it a thought. See you on Monday.
PAPER: When did you first start writing about music?
Jessica Hopper: When I was 15 or 16 years old is when I started getting my first checks for my rock criticism, and that came from when I would read the local papers in Minneapolis. I would call and say, ' you got this whole article wrong, and you guys don't understand this band like I do.' I really felt like I was living in a time in Minneapolis where bands like Babes In Toyland -- who were the sort of band I was seeing every week -- were being labeled by men as being 'caustic,' or 'hysterical,' rather than 'canonical.' Whereas I thought Babes In Toyland was the greatest band that had ever existed. Because it spoke to me so loud and clear.
P: What made you go from feeling like a band you loved was misunderstood to becoming a critic?
JH: I knew my perspective mattered, so I was pretty assertive about putting it out there. We see that a lot today -- that there's a lot more value being placed on a multitude of perspectives in music media, and I feel like that was a long time coming. I think there was so long where we defaulted, and in some places we still do default to a macho ideal of good; a white ideal of good; and when I first started writing about music I was, like, in 10th grade and I wholly did not subscribe to the ideals that were being put on me.
P: You were very involved with politics as a very young teenager, how did you transition to writing about music?
JH: I had a lot of interest in my own independence as a woman, and I saw a lot of the truth of the way women were treated in the world because I was paying an inordinate amount of attention. I loved music and I got burnt out on a lot of that political stuff...I was speaking at pro-choice rallies and stuff. I took myself very seriously -- and then I found punk rock. Shortly after getting into punk rock was the first Bikini Kill tour in the US and I was working in a record store and the people I was working with were like, 'we have this Bikini Kill tape and this seems like your kinda thing.' And through that I found a place in the world that was everything I was interested in, underscored a lot of my beliefs, and gave that feeling a name, and that was radical feminism and punk rock. All of those things, I believed in quite altruistically.
P: Writing about music can still feel like a political act -- there is still that feeling that you have to prove your worth in order to have a voice, you have to prove your credentials, while the canon of male critics gets to write whatever they want. Do you feel like, as a mentor, girls still have to prove themselves.
JH: Part of the reason I gave the book the title I did is because I feel like there are days when it just confounds me that some of these wonderful young writers who are light-years past where everyone is at 21 and 22, have to endure the same stupidity that I had to when I was coming up 19 years ago. I was lucky that when I was their age, people had to be angry enough to confront me in person, or people had to write me a letter. You have to be really angry to write a letter, as opposed to firing off some irate tweet and hoping it scalds the other person, the person you're looking to undermine. I think now young female writers, or young writers who aren't straight white dudes, have to have another layer or resilience in order to have a strong opinion.
Featherproof Books
'With this premiere volume, spanning from her punk fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly's past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why the New York Times has called Hopper's work "influential." Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper's most engaging, thoughtful and humorous writing, this book serves as a document of the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music, the ideas in songs and albums, how fantasies of artists become complicated by real life, and just what happens when you follow that obsession into muddy festival fields, dank basements, corporate offices or court records.'-- Featherproof Books
Excerpt
How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock
It’s 2 p.m., the Friday before Christmas 2012, on the 21st floor of the Leo Burnett building in downtown Chicago. Young executives, creatives, admins, and interns are all packed into a large meeting room, giddy and restless; today is special. Canadian sister folk-pop duo Tegan and Sara step onto a foot-high stage and play three songs — including the first two singles from their seventh album, Heartthrob, which they will release the following month. The fluorescent lights stay on, the city’s skyline splayed out behind them. Afterward, nearly all of the 200-odd employees in attendance will stand in line, phone at the ready, to pose for pictures with the band, just like fans after any concert.
And Tegan and Sara, who eventually cracked the Top 20 with Heartthrob’s “Closer,” need to win over this audience just as they would at any concert. A track in the right commercial could bring about the kind of attention that magazine covers and radio play alone can no longer garner. Commercial placement, or a sync, has evidenced itself as the last unimpeded pathway to our ears — what was once considered to be the lowest form of selling out, of betraying fans and compromising principles, is now regarded as a crucial cornerstone of success. And as ads have become a lifeline for bands in recent years, the stigma of doing them has all but eroded. But with desperate bands flooding the market, the money at stake has dropped precipitously. Even the life raft has a hole in it.
“A tiny sliver of bands are doing well,” says the duo’s Sara Quin. “The rest of us are just middle class, looking for a way to break through that glass ceiling. The second ‘Closer’ got Top 40 radio play, we were involved in meetings with radio and marketing people who said, ‘The next step is getting a commercial.’ I can see why some bands might find that grotesque, but it’s part of the business now.”
Fifteen years ago, the music industry was still a high-functioning behemoth pulling in $38 billion a year at its peak, able to ignore the digital revolution that was about to denude it entirely. Starting in 1999, sales of recorded music fell an average of 8% a year; 2012 was the first time since then that sales went up — 0.3%. Last year, it reported $16.5 billion in global revenue. America accounted for $4.43 billion of that — approximately the same amount spent by AT&T, Chevy, McDonald’s, and Geico on ad buys in the U.S. alone.
Back in the early ’90s, when the music industry was thriving, commercials weren’t a way indie bands got ahead — the punitive value outweighed the relatively small financial gains bands made for licensing a song to a commercial campaign. Band manager Howard Greynolds, who looks after the careers of Iron and Wine and Swell Season, was an employee at indie label Thrill Jockey when two of its flagship bands, Tortoise and Freakwater, licensed a song for a 1995 CK One campaign.
“I remember people calling us saying, ‘I can’t fucking believe they did that, I can’t support this band anymore!’” says Greynolds. “We were overly transparent then, we told people, ‘Listen, this $5,000 bought them a van — fuck off.’” A few years later, another Thrill Jockey band, Trans Am, were outspoken about turning down a rumored $100,000 deal to license a song for a Hummer commercial. A generation ago, refusing these kinds of offers was a way for bands to telegraph where they stood, the sort of thing that showed their allegiance to the underground and their community.
It’s been nearly 30 years since Lou Reed hawked Honda scooters with “Walk on the Wild Side” and 26 since Nike used (and was summarily sued for using) the Beatles’ “Revolution” to sell sneakers, but the diminishing of this notion’s ability to outrage has sped up over the last decade. Volkswagen used Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” and a half-dozen Wilco songs, Apple placements are gold medals rather than albatrosses for relative newcomers like Feist and rock royalty like U2 alike, and no less an anticommercialism scold than Pearl Jam got in bed with Target in 2009. Such moves are barely even press-cycle talking points by now.
Greynolds says what expedited this change wasn’t just the huge drop in record sales, but as layoffs swept through the record industry, contacts from labels and distributors went to marketing, advertising, and brands. “All of the sudden those were the people at music houses,” says Greynolds. “People from your world. They might be feeding you a line of shit, but there was trust. They were different.”
These new players within the advertising industry proved to be capable navigators of both the ad world as well and the music underground. They could help forge lucrative connections between brands and cash-strapped bands — and their fan bases. Decades of posturing and sanctimony were rendered moot once artists realized that corporate gigs were the only paying gigs in town, a (very) necessary evil.
(cont.)
St Vincent with Jessica Hopper discussing David Bowie
If This Is How the New Journalism Is, Count Us Out!: Jessica Hopper
LIVE! @ your library: Jessica Hopper
______________
'Wildlives is concerned with both literal and figurative explorations of space, and which metaphors we choose to ignore or flood with attention, particularly when the two coalesce in heightened moments of intimacy between people. “The Edge-Parts of Different Places” begins with the lines “It is hard for one human / to fit inside another human”–describing a moment with a partner as a locus of both physical and emotional contradiction. As the poem goes on, its language becomes increasingly surreal, closing with the image of a Woman made out of bats.
'This image depicts that creation of a kind of creepy, closely-knit darkness that provides comfort, claustrophobia, and even escape. Alexander conjures intimacy with a kind of haunting, low-grade psychic violence–I am reminded of Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbirds at some moments. (Though Alexander’s poetics is complex, unusual and uniquely her own, I feel also compelled to bring up Tomaž Šalamun, Cassandra Gillig, and Melissa Broder–who aptly, blurbed the book.) Invocations of the surreal are echoed and answered on the next page, as the piece “Humid Air and Three Blankets” closes with its speaker uttering the phrase: “I am here to remind you / that this is happening”–a kind of choral remark that speaks to not only these pieces, but Alexander’s poetics more generally.
'Though Wildlives is full of relatable, confessional poetic moments, it is not an egocentric collection: the author displaces her sensations onto dead stars, unwieldy mountains, bodies become forage, and mosquitos transported across state lines. Alexander’s announcements of amorphous longing take on refreshing physicality that isn’t amorphous at all. “The biggest stars in the universe are called red supergiants,” she announces, reflecting simply that: “I shouldn’t have let you become mine.”
'Though I don’t know if there is a word for it, I want to say that Sarah Jean Alexander’s poems are the opposite form of the Whitmanesque expansive impulse–instead of making herself larger, the author manipulates language to make herself and the objects of her fascination so incredibly small they seem racked with detail–as if nothing else exists.
'“I am tiny next to you,” begins the poem “695,800 kilometers.” The next moment, lovers have swapped appendages. Like my favorite of Alexander’s poems, this begins somewhere safe and lyric but quickly becomes an arrangement of tiny, eerie memento moris–a still life the author moves through, shifting seamlessly from light to solemn, play to lament, dreaming to waking, yet always herself manages to emerge intact, guiding us out in some new, direction we could never have dreamed up ourselves.'-- Lucy Tiven, Fanzine
Big Lucks
'Wildlives is a scrapbook of poems and of short stories, of nightmares and of daydreams, of love letters and of prayer cards. In her debut collection, Sarah Jean Alexander asks (and answers) the hardest questions about love and loneliness and 21st century human survival. Wildlives excavates the depths of heartbreak, hope, and helplessness that can exist between two people in a small, human world.'-- Big Lucks
'I've only met Sarah Jean Alexander once, but it was intense time and a wild time. I think that's how you have to define Sarah Jean, and I think that's how we have to define the work we find on these pages: free and brutal and savage and, yes, wild. I'm reading this author and it feels as if she really knows truth. It feels as if she is my best friend. It feels as if her heart and her fears are exactly the same as mine. For these reasons, it doesn't matter that I've only met Sarah Jean Alexander once: thanks to the strength of this book and the weight of these letters, I am convinced that we will always be together.'-- Luna Miguel
Excerpt
from The Quietus
WAYS IN WHICH IT IS TRUE
You are the reason people still search
for new people to kiss
Similarly to the way that you are the gateway chip to,
“Yes, I have eaten the whole bag”
I have never been satisfied and known it
In other words, I have simply never tried
It’s true that I run faster than I give myself credit for
just in case someone is going to try to race me for fun
when I am already too tired
and don’t want to have any fun
It’s true that while wearing sunglasses in public
a person becomes imperceptible
Not in the way that
no one can see you
or tell that you are walking in front of them on the sidewalk
But imperceptible in every other way
My stomach rarely flushes with embarrassment
but does especially when my hands
are holding the two of your cheeks
like they are going to melt away
And your cheeks are being held
like they are considering becoming more heavy
As if a body can expand and shrink on command
in a way that is more dangerous
than breathing
And what about breathing, anyway
What if it’s not that we need to breathe in order to stay alive
but it’s our breaths that are the owners of our soul
and it’s the soul that needs this body to keep on going
What's life for if not taking everything
spoken to me as a sign to move in closer
What's life for if not using another body
as a placeholder for your fear
You are big moves in the morning
when I am wanting to be there too
but instead I am many miles away and still asleep
You are hard work in the night
when I am texting you good bye
and the messages are green and not going through
because one of us is underground
and neither of us are being easy
together
Sometimes I become so frightened
that a person I knew will become a person I know, again
and that I will have to follow through
on an infinite amount of dormant promises
that seemed nice to make at the time
It’s true that being in love
is the only way I know how to pay for gratitude
without feeling like I am going to run out of something else
It’s true that every time I open my eyes
I am bewildered that so far,
my body has not completely failed
me in a new and exciting final way
I am unconvinced that inside all of us
an at times dull, at times screamingly apparent pain
isn’t making a home
But maybe I am just cold outside in the air
and you are outside in a cold air with me
In the cold air it is difficult for anything to make a home
even if it tries very hard
Fold with me into ourselves like baby paper cranes
who don’t know how to exist without sinking
Hold onto my cheeks similarly to the way
I held onto yours
Learn how to melt away
and then do it
Sarah Jean Alexander reads some of her poems
sarah jean alexander & theo thimo reading SJTB at $ young money poetry $
v erotic
_______________
'If we put three people in a room together and asked them to define loyalty or honor or respect, we’d get different answers from each one of them. Some of the answers might overlap and some of the answers might come out angry or defeated or even terrified of being seen.
'We are living in the age of hyper-connectivity, but nobody is connecting.
******
'I’ve been having panic attacks again. They keep starting in weird places inside of my body. Sometimes they start in the soles of my feet and feel like electric eels climbing up my Achilles and into my calves and then they explode like arcing light through my thighs and into my torso. Other times they start in my colon—a twitch or a gurgle that isn’t anticipated will happen and then everything inside of me goes dayglow and slithery—which isn’t a spot I am used to them beginning.
'I am all out of my anxiety medication and I feel like that is a good thing. I feel like not relying on the pill as an act of desperation is a better option than me taking a pill and going fetal wherever I am until it kicks in and does the smoothing out thing. I want to feel it all right now. I want to sweat and convulse a little. I want to taste the pennies in my mouth and I want to feel the current in my limbs.
'Ride your fucking ride.
******
'I almost got married when I was nineteen years old. It was such a quick and wild thing, this sudden aloneness turning into impending marriage and all that. Everything was a blur. I remember telling my Senior Chief on the ship that I was flying to Arizona to get married and he looked at me like I was crazy and said “You have a girl? Had no clue.” My mother was stoked, because she really loved the girl. I loved the girl. My sister loved the girl. The girl, well, she fell in love with someone else before I could get back there and do the marrying thing.
******
I' always enjoy how on a holiday meant to remember the dead, Americans of all shapes/sizes/ages will use it as an excuse to drink too much alcohol, scorch dead animals on grills, and ramble their rambles about those who have
served.
'Don’t even get an old fuck like me started on the honor part.'-- Sean H. Doyle
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'Doyle lays himself bare […] without eliciting pity or scorn. In others’ hands, similar material — drug abuse, desperate sex, violence, suicidal thoughts — have often resulted in wallowing or descriptions of depravity for depravity’s sake. It is a testament to Doyle’s clear examination and probing of his past that when he drops us into one charged situation after another we neither sink nor are incredulous at the messes he finds himself in. His spare words rescue us from despair, while still communicating the profound pain of just being alive with pinprick precision.' -- The Chicago Tribune
'This Must Be the Place is the book of an orphan in the wake of his delirium struggling to make sense of the loss that caused it. Sean H. Doyle is a walker of fire and slayer of ghouls whose numberless prolonged trials have stripped him of human dross and discrimination alike. Absence is a mentor, in his world, anguish a mold, compassion the reward. If after reading Doyle’s story you don’t fancy him caressing the brow of Despair itself, it won’t be because he’s failed to tell it well. It broke me, this book, then it took my hand and kissed me. I am changed, now, and so much the better, too.' -- D Foy
'Reading This Must Be The Place is like getting mugged, and then once the mugger takes your wallet, they push you on the ground. And then once you’re on the ground, they kick you in the stomach, over and over and over again. And then when you think they’ve finally decided to leave you alone, they kick you once more in the teeth. The only difference is that when Sean H. Doyle is mugging you, the experience is cleansing, invigorating, something that tests your heart but also makes it glow, an experience you don’t want to ever stop. Otherwise, they’re basically identical.'-- Juliet Escoria
Excerpt
from Everyday Genius
The Willow House, 3rd Ave and McDowell Road, Phoenix, June, 1994—
I come here after my shift at the record store and sit around at picnic tables outside, scribbling into notebooks while drinking shitty coffee and waiting for my girlfriend, Velvet, to get off work so we can go get high. The crowd here is varied: AA people alongside art people and punks alongside dirty Deadheads and downtown casualties. There are many open mic poetry events, usually outdoors at dusk. One night I decide to read. I go to the mic and drop weapons. I go to the mic and read about Kuwait City and southern Iraq. I go to the mic and read about prostitutes and hashish and drinking homemade wine made out of grape juice in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I go to the mic and curse over and over again. Nobody claps. Nobody moves. I am not asked to read again.
Desert Sky Pavilion, West Phoenix, October 18th, 1995—
I am loaded on a belly full of pills and Sarah is gyrating wild-like in front of me, dancing like the world is ending and she is the only one who knows it is ending. We are surrounded by thousands and thousands of people at a Nine Inch Nails/David Bowie concert. The concert is outdoors, so I have packed the tips of a few cigarettes with weed. Sarah is still dancing like someone who has been injected with methamphetamine. I light one of the loaded cigs and Nine Inch Nails launch into “Closer” and Sarah runs her hands back to the front of my jeans and starts playing with me while I get high. There are mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts surrounding us. Sarah is still dancing and she pulls my zipper down and starts to rub me. Someone from behind us makes a comment about the weed smell but I do not care because my cock is getting harder and Sarah is getting faster as the song builds. Someone from the side of us throws a beer at us and Sarah keeps gyrating and rubbing and I lean my head all the way back and look up at the sky and the noise is beautiful and I don’t fucking care.
AZP Skatepark, Flagstaff, AZ, December 1995—
Grass has come up to Flagstaff to play a show with Julia—an incredible screamo band from San Diego—and Primitive Tribes—a local Flagstaff band made up of peace punks and crusties. The show is inside of a skate park and the skate park has no heat and it is thirteen degrees. As always, our second guitar player, Reid, couldn’t make the show. This has happened three or four times now. I am very close to quitting the band, but I love playing with Brian and Anthony, so I put up with Shawn’s weird mope shit and persevere, for the rock action. A band of hessians show up at the skate park and beg to get put on the bill. They’re on tour from the Midwest and just want to play a show. They’re called Ritual Device and seem like nice enough dudes. We let them go on before us. They destroy everything and everyone in the place with a solid and guttural Jesus Lizard-like sludge and stomp. I wish I was in that band and on that tour. We play our set and every animal comes out of my body and there is steam rising from my hands on the fretboard and I run halfway up the halfpipe and slide down on my knees while playing and Shawn is mewling and Brian is thumping and Anthony is pounding and I leave my body with the animals and never notice the blood from my frozen fingers until after, when I can feel every sting.
Scripps Memorial Hospital, 9888 Genesee Ave, La Jolla, CA, April, 1996—
My mother is in a coma because the radiation treatment weakened her colon so much that a portion of it burst and went septic. The doctors found some strange bacteria in her body and because of this anyone who goes into the room to be with her has to scrub up and wear medical scrubs. I have just returned from my mother’s dentist after getting a broken tooth pulled and my mouth is full of bloodied gauze and I do not say anything to my mother’s nurse about it because I am not going to let some bacteria get in the way of me spending time with my mother while machines are breathing for her and she is dreaming of another life. I pull out the bloodied gauze and put it into a trashcan next to the bed and sit down and hold my mother’s hand and tell her about my life, about how at night I go to the strip club near the Sports Arena because none of the women there will ask me how I feel or what I feel or anything of the sort and I can be alone there at a table in a darkened corner and the music is loud and the cokes are ice cold and I can disappear.
Trailer: This Must Be the Place
Sean H. Doyle at the February 2014 NYC Sunday Salon
Sean H. Doyle reads 'The Huffer'
_______________
'Ron Padgett is a writer with a consummate sense of the fantastical as it intersects the quotidian. A prominent second-generation New York School poet, Padgett’s publication history is impressively varied; a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2012, Padgett, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, has produced distinguished translations from the French of work by Apollinaire and Reverdy, among others.
'Reading Padgett’s disarming poems is always a delight, and Alone and Not Alone certainly does not disappoint.
'Notwithstanding this poet’s famously seductive wit, the poems in Alone and Not Alone are often accompanied by a tinge of metaphysical melancholy bordering on bemused fatalism.
'“Reality,” he writes in the poem by that name, “has a transparent veneer/that looks exactly like the reality beneath it,” a veneer that will sometimes “. . . flicker and vanish,/though it is still there./You must wait a day or two/before attempting to see it again.” When Padgett reminds us that “Sometimes the veneer becomes detached/and moves slightly away from reality,” he is moving us (with his characteristic lightness of touch) smack dab into the middle of epistemology.
'And isn’t epistemology—the nature of a more generalized knowing—arguably the natural habitat of poetry? In the poem, “Face Value,” Padgett writes, “The Wall of Forgetting” is “. . . not a wall it’s a mirror/that picks your face up off the floor/and whirls it onto a head/that has gone on without you.”
'Padgett’s head is filled with serendipitous metaphor and seemingly wacky, though at the same time eminently sane, aphorisms. “Everyone is warm enough/to be alive,” he writes in “The Plank and the Screw”. In the poem, It All Depends, he comments on the 19th century during which “Cottages go by/and music piles up/like excited dead people.”
'No one writes like this, but Ron Padgett is definitely somebody, and he writes like this.'-- New York Journal of Books
Coffee House Press
'The latest from Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett, Alone and Not Alone follows 2013′s triumphant Collected Poems (winner of the LA Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) with new poems that demonstrate how vital Padgett’s skills as a poet remain, continuously reminding us that the world may be seen in a clearer and more generous light.'-- Coffee Hoise Press
Excerpts
Survivor Guilt
It’s very easy to get.
Just keep living and you’ll find yourself
getting more and more of it.
You can keep it or pass it on,
but it’s a good idea to keep a small portion
for those nights when you’re feeling so good
you forget you’re human. Then drudge it up
and float down from the ceiling
that is covered with stars that glow in the dark
for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,
and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—
I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,
its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.
If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!
But your arms are just there and you are kaput.
It’s all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—
the kind word you thought of saying but didn’t,
the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,
thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,
your stupid idea that you would live forever—
all tua culpa. John Phillip Sousa
invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.
Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.
But when you wake up your body
seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,
and you don’t look too bad in the mirror.
Hi there, feller! Old feller, young feller, who cares?
Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,
to hell with him. That was then.
The Way You Wear Your Hat
Boing, boing, boing
is the sound the exclamation point makes
when it leaps around the page alone
like Fred Astaire in a tux at night
when he thinks that Ginger Rogers
is mad at him and only his toes
will lighten the glumness. Oh!
what a beautiful way to start a dance,
just a slow slide of the toe
along glittering black marble.
And in her hotel boudoir, Ginger
in a white satin gown, arms
crossed and lips pursed —
hey, she is mad. And no wonder:
they are in different films
being shown at different theaters!
And they will never, ever meet again,
for they have tricked each other
out of existence.
This for That
What will I have for breakfast?
I wish I had some plums
like the ones in Williams’s poem.
He apologized to his wife
for eating them
but what he did not
do was apologize to those
who would read his poem
and also not be able to eat them.
That is why I like his poem
when I am not hungry.
Right now I do not like him
or his poem. This is just
to say that.
Bargain Hunt
for Tessie
Suppose you found a bargain so incredible
you stood there stunned for a moment
unable to believe that this thing could be
for sale at such a low price: that is what happens
when you are born, and as the years go by
the price goes up and up until, near the end
of your life, it is so high that you lie there
stunned forever.
Ron Padgett reading 'Nothing in That Drawer'
Ron Padgett: Reading and Writing Long Poems
Ron Padgett: Poetic Beginnings
*
p.s. Hey. ** Nicola, Hi. Oh, gosh, blessings back to you. We're making a swarm of blessings. It's cool. Love, me. ** Bill, So you're still doing Berlin in a lag, or did you escape time's evil change? Sounds fun, in any case. That link was of interest, you can betcha. Man, that guac bowl looks greasy in a genius way. Wow, I'll be flying to Halle on the very day you're flying out of Berlin. May our jet trails draw a big X in the sky or something. Anyway, tell me all the German pooh. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. How weird, or weird to me or something, that Carol Channing and Christopher Lee were/are the same age. I think of Carol Channing as being someone from the immense past, and CL ... well, he recorded a Black Metal album three years ago. Age, so curious, so relative. ** Steevee, Hi. I saw a thing for 'The Wolfpack,' and I didn't know what it was, and, based on the poster or whatever that I saw, I thought it might be about the Emo sub-sect of 'wolves', but I guess it isn't. Looking forward to the read! Everyone. Mr. Steve Erickson aka Steevee has interviewed director Crystal Moselle about her new documentary film 'The Wolfpack', which 'opens with six long-haired teenage brothers reenacting a scene from Reservoir Dogs, complete with guns made from duct tape', which is enough to make me see it, at least. In the meantime, hear what she tells Ste(e)ve(e) here on Studio Daily. Funny story/mental image about the Tyler appearance Anthology Film Archives. It almost sounds like a scene out of Justin Bieber at his fame's height holding court from his Paris hotel room window vis-a-vis hundreds of adoring French teens in the street below, which I stumbled by/upon a few years ago. Weird juxtaposition, in other words. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, great painting, for sure. Huh, I know the name Max Stirner, and strongly suspect I've read his writings, and, in fact, I'm sure I have, but I think only in pieces. Interesting. I'll see what's what with that book, Thanks a lot, man! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Yeah I saw you did a Pat O'Neill gig. Awesome about the turn out! I'm a really big fan of his work. His visual art is excellent as well. His LA gallery Cherry + Martin mounted a great show of his stuff here at the Art Fair last year. I did try to make a post about his films maybe six months ago, but there weren't enough film clips online to make it work. I'm going to try again. I do feature one of his films in an upcoming Los Angeles experimental film post that I'm putting together. Terrible news re: your novel ... fuck, man, I hope not too terrible. Please relay what's going on in that regard whenever you're ready. I don't know that translation. I know of the book, but I haven't read it. I've only read Rimbaud's letters in a piece-meal fashion usually when they're inserted into collections of his poems. I'll check it out. Thanks, pal. ** Rewritedept Hi, Chris. Thanks a bunch again! There wasn't an embedded player in the post you sent me. I would have alerted you if it had been there and didn't work. Enjoy the actual bed. I'm good. Everything's good. A picture, cool, I'll go tiptoe into FB and check it out. Thank you. And send you my address, yeah, sorry, I spaced, as usual. Fantasy stuff is cool. Why wouldn't it be? It's like the jazz of genres or something maybe. ** Armando, Man, that's a very complicated-to-impossible comment to respond to. I'm going to be pragmatic with you, because I am. To make an announcement like that to someone (me, for instance), who only knows you in the limited way that conversing once in a while on a blog with someone allows, and who is very far away physically and psychically, does nothing but induce a feeling of helplessness and worrying that can not be resolved. You're in a lot of pain, and I know you need to make people know that, but the effect, unintended, feels aggressive because, like I said, and as you must know, there is nothing I can do and, not knowing you very well or your situation at all, nothing productive that I can say other than to say I hope you find something or someone in your immediate life that will avert you from the blackness and into enjoying yourself and your life because, from what little I know of you, you seem very smart and interesting. I really hope you find that turnaround. ** H, Hi! I'm very interested to read your thoughts on Mike's book! Everyone, great d.l. H has written on writer extraordinaire and d.l. M Kitchell's book 'Forest Wound' over on goodreads, and this is a meeting of excellent minds if there ever was such a thing, and, so, I encourage you to click this and read/get the spoils. I'm good. Thanks for your progressing thoughts on the wind chime. Just the thoughts re: it on my end are a great pleasure. ** Cal Graves, Hey, Cal. Long and great are definitely not mutually exclusive. It sounds like you are re: them like I am re: disaster movies. Poet people are pretty intensely into poetry. Back when I was a poet -- well, I still am, but I mean back when I was primarily a poet -- and was heavily in the poetry scene in LA, it was like being in the literary scene equivalent of an orgy or something in a way. Ooh, the poster for Mirrormask is exciting. I'll see if I can rent that or something. Yeah, that looks yum. My favorite Zelda game is 'Majorca's Mask'. That must mean something. Coolness. Do you have a fun bordering on maybe even amazing weekend plan(s)? Amaze-balls-ly, Dennis. ** Keaton, Vampire! On Titus! ** Right. This weekend I present you with four more books that I think would be very worth your time, if you have both the time and the means to acquire then read said books. Give it a thought. See you on Monday.