L & I drive to York Saturday morning, I-495 to I-95 to I-695 to I-83 across the Mason-Dixon Line to PA-124 east to PA-24, to pick up rescue kittens, Spidey certainly, Nugget maybe, L's friend, the cat rescuer, is crazy about Nugget, if she wants him she gets him, and then we get to see which other rescue kitten chooses us, I want this scenario, please please please. You may not know this, believe this, but I *don't* broil and baste in anger 24-7, as much as I adore broiling and basting in my anger. Did you know there's a new Swans live album?
Me neither, the fuck, I say, but not in anger. My anger. I'm not angry you're not as angry as me, I'm not asking you to be as angry as me, please don't be as angry as me unless you can't help being as angry as me. There. Are. Four. Lights.
My goddamn free blogging platform's blogroll feed is fucked up off and on again and again, I'm impotently furious (but not furious enough to consider shuttering this angry goddamn blog, fuck me)
Anger trumps despair, rimshot. In all seriousness, anger is holy with silly. Phew, in the ten seconds after bingeing on Swans and Lambchop the last two evenings I gave three seconds thought of giving my sillyass deserted island five game a fresh start and confirmed Swans and Lambchop would be permanent members then quit before I started thinking of who once were permanent members who wouldn't be now, it wouldn't've made me angry but would've felt excoriatingly disloyal, I broil and baste in my anger as long as it's not aimed at me, fine metaphors abound
Way too frequent reminder that when my daughter is my age it will be 2060, the Earth will still be here, will the world? Way too frequent reminder that this and all posts are poems, including and especially the grids
Kurt Wagner writes about the upcoming new Lambchop release *Demoed*
⬇
I never knew what Herman Melville looked like until I was in high school. I just saw a picture in lit class and that was about it, nice beard. Prior to that what Herman looked like was really not essential to my understanding or enjoyment of Moby Dick. It was distracting at best. I thought the work was the important thing. I mean, I still don’t know what Renoir looked like but I bet he had a great beard. Great painter.
I used to fantasize that lambchop would continue as an idea well beyond my participation. Over time we’ve had at least two generations represented. A third now is beginning. And this is important to me, having the unique perspective and contributions from younger artists steering in the work we make. So i thought it would be nice, someday, that i might even step aside to watch and advise from the wings. Having a beard was never considered, but here we are.
This is to say that my idea of moving forward — aging with dignity — involves my disappearing from the notion of being the “dude,” the ego, entity, personality, figurehead, selfie guy, brand image. Who I am physically and how I appear becomes irrelevant. Allowing the concept and work to be the focus. My participation isn’t really necessary in the final presentation. Song writing, “the song” implicitly allows for such a thing, or at least it did before pop culture insisted that it be part of the package. I mean, I get it, why that is and the way things are, but I've always felt it doesn’t have to be so and there’s centuries of precedents to back this up.
Exhibit D: Andrew came up with the idea for a supplement to the new record. To ask artists we admired as both artist people and with unique voices to sing along to the initial guitar demos replacing me, thereby putting emphasis on their voices and the songs rather than my persona’s participation. A remix but backwards. Let’s admit it: Neil Sedaka was kinda goofy, but he sure could write a tune. I’m no Neil Sedaka but I sure can be goofy.
We made a list of people to ask and sent them the demos along with the finished Punching the Clown album. We asked them to keep it simple and not over think it, to keep it in the spirit of what a demo might be. Like a sketch for a painting, a demo. Sometimes they added other elements furthering their artistic involvement. It was their choice, their reaction to the premise and the tune.
Looking at it now, it does seem like one of those tribute records that happen after an artist dies or needs to raise funds for an operation or medical treatment. But I assure you, I am very much alive and all over what you hear here. Unlike cover versions of our songs, these are songs we made — I’m just not the singer. Jake, Haley, Alan, Channy, Dan, Lauren, Jenn, and Mari are.
First released cut⬇Wagner's music permanent seat in MSADI5G, derelict I am w stupidass game
ZOMBIE DANDELIONS
Regan Good
In the Green Associates lot,
horrid buttermilk tubes
loll through the iron gates,
like vein casings for vodka sausages,
wan and white.
These dandies are more monstrous than burdock or hollyhock.
Bigger than the furred buttons found in the lion’s jaw.
The whole lot: a zombie nation of twisted extroverts.
Some wound up like crazy straws or LED lightbulbs.
Once the sun shone through their tubes,
a buttery light from 1974 came on inside each stem.
The light both weakened and fed the dandy as it grew
I doom scroll and document the clusterfuck to help me focus my nourishing fury through futile action but understand those who reasonably don't doom scroll don't want to and won't click the links in my grids, I said to a friend who tells me he no longer can. My daughter can't, won't, my wife, who concedes that while I'm angry I'm not mad, can't, won't. I have a another friend who can't, won't, who tells me she just wants the midterms to be over, thinks a resounding repudiation of Trump and magamericans will slow rather than, like I think, dramatically accelerate infuriated shitlords into enacting and brutally enforcing the United States of Assholes into the fascist shithole Shitlords desire, and tells me she doesn't want to hear what I think will happen if voters deliver a resounding repudiation of Trump and magamericans on November 3 because I'm fucking nuts and too often right Making these headshots disperses my soothing seething fury far more effectively than the grids but people want to see them even less than the grids and I have stats to prove it and reassure me. I said to a chaired professor renowned as a leading historian on American shitliberalism who still believes a revival of New Deal and Great Society in Shitlordistan is possible, you *don't?* believe that shitlords are weaponizing Trump's descent into madness as the trigger for kabooming what remains of America's false democracy forever? you actually believe that after corruptly gaining all this power they will peacefully relinquish it in a world they are willfully and profitably destroying in their efforts to subsidize their survival of their own deliberate wreckage? He would never look at this blog but he did say I'm fucking nuts. Julian Cope turned 69 yesterday, if this is not one of this shitty blog's theme songs, only a few of which I can remember now, it's certainly one of mine
"Why have homelessness when we have the land and the resources to house everyone? Why have food poverty when we could cultivate everything we need sustainably? Beyond the moral consideration, it was, frankly, illogical. Our advancement as a species can’t happen if we artificially create poverty"
L, formerly known here as Earthgirl (that's new Shakey), asked me to again go to No Kings with her tomorrow and of course I said yes. Unlike the previous two, the nearest one won't be on the Strathmore Music Hall campus - they refused to allow it - No Kings is from 11am to 1pm - since the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is performing a treacly motherfucking Tchaikovsky (today in redundancy) symphony at 8pm, the fuck? Tchaikovsky? Kill me. Will be at the White Flint metro station - locals know the anger embedded in that naming. The fuck is this dope posting on a Friday afternoon, he asks himself. Hey, remember when Bardo Pond covered Brian Eno? I did this morning out of nowhere
Home from Michigan. In the drive-around sampling, I saw 16 Al-Sayed yard signs, the majority in Washtenaw County, 13 Rogers yards signs, the majority in Jackson and Ingham counties, both as expected. Did not see a single bumper-sticker for any candidate. Voters of both parties, I was told by my son-in-law's father at the family dinner I am required to attend every trip, are united in wanting the election over and all hate their party just less than they hate their shitty candidate's opponent. Nothing has changed. Hey, there was a rare Airborne Event this past Tuesday evening, Dan played this from one of my trinity of musical Richards:
I did see plenty of signage offering, for example, Train Like a Navy Seal businesses. A local, Justin, I disc with when I'm in Michigan who is certainly not maga tells me local militias are recruiting and thriving and preparing for both election day at the polls and for the days after. He told me to listen late at night for a sudden explosion of squeal-outs and speeding as local white male pick-up truck Americans practice deployment and encirclement, and last Saturday around one in the morning yes, with gun shots. I said, too many people think if the midterms are the bloodbath for Trump and magamerica in the voters booth some are predicting then everything will be rebooted and crackers and christers (and Trump, his henchman, his shitlords) will passively accept and respect the results. People, Justin said, better get ready, which put Eva Cassidy's cover of the Curtis Mayfield song in my head where it's been to this moment, L & I were at this show at Blues Alley in Georgetown
The above and below were added before Trump canceled the live stream, he didn't do it for moral but for electoral reasons of course. The cancelation does not lessen the evil motives of those who wanted the killing streamed
I can't take a photo of it this moment because I am in Michigan, but my copy of *Nox* is (a brilliant work of poetry) one of my cherished objects, it's, simply as an object to hold, gorgeous
☟
Here's another one or my trinity of musical Richards, he's the flutist and singer
☟
Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin
Anne Carson
Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.
What is strength?
Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.
I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.
Glancing
at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf
she said
I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and
something exposed itself in her voice,
a Babel
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe—
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t
mean them to.
Well it’s his name I said and put the book away. That was the first night
(I was fifteen)
I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him
in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals
of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid
before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.
God
or some blessed royal personage. Napoleon. Hirohito. You know
how novelist Ōe
describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke
as a mortal man. “The adults sat around the radio
and cried.
Children gathered in the dusty road and whispered bewilderment.
Astonished
and disappointed that their emperor had spoken in a voice.
Looked at one another in silence. How to believe God had
become human
on a designated summer day?” Less than a year after our marriage
my husband
began to receive calls from [a woman] late at night.
If I answered [she]
hung up. My ears grew hoarse.
How are you.
—
No.
—
Maybe. Eight. Can you.
—
The white oh yes.
—
Yes.
What is so ecstatic unknowable cutthroat glad as the walls
of the flesh
of the voice of betrayal —yet all the while lapped in talk more dull
than the tick of a clock.
A puppy
learns to listen this way. Sting in the silver.
Ōe says
many children were told and some believed that when the war was over
9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones. 16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness. 8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off. 1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats. 11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays. 10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye. 9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore. 12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out. 2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows. 4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed. 4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it. 1.1. The boats had up to fifty oars and small attachments at the bow for lamps. Tuna was fished at night. 16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring. 3.3. A final theory is that you could fill the pan with water and use it as a mirror. 2.1. It was no use. They’d lost the knack. Sleep was a stranger. 14.1. There it was plunging up and down in its shallow holes. 6.1. The handbag, that artefact which freed human beings from having to eat food wherever they found it. 3.0. While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan. 11.0. Three times a day she put the boat on autopilot and went down below to the cool silent pantry. 7.1. Abstention from grain is helpful. 9.3. Their eyes fell out. 11.3. The food was tastier that way. 11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt. 11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm. 4.1. To uncontrive. 6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag, 3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by archaeologists. The frying pans are small. No one was very hungry at night. 9.1. Did I mention the marble pillows, I think I did. 2.3. This became a Cycladic proverb. 5.2. Proust liked a good jolt. 7.2. Abstention from grain is the same for men and women. You put your lungs in an extraordinary state of clear coolness. 13.0. One night there was a snowfall, solitary, absurd. 6.3. And after dinner, harps. 1.2. The Cycladic was an entirely insomniac culture. 2.2. Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb. 4.2. My point of view is admittedly faulty. My nose is always breathing. I am worn out with breathing. I suspect you have days when you choose not to breathe at all. 14.0. That was the night she looked to her soul. 3.2. Or they may have been prestige frying pans. 9.2. They painted wonderful widow’s peaks on themselves or extra breasts. 5.1. Possibly because of his blanket refusal to listen to another person’s dreams at the breakfast table, for Proust dismissed this type of recollection as ‘mere anamnesia’. 16.1. There it lay, the foredeck in the moonlight, more silver than the sea. 9.5. Perhaps now they were glad after all that they did not sleep. 5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity. 15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence. 16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes. 8.1. They worried about this and kept their arms close to the body, clasping the torso right arm below left, like a cummerbund. 11.6. She thought it a good idea to silence mental conversation. 12.0. Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents. So do rocky reefs. 10.2. Her inner eye grew sharp enough to slaughter goats. 15.0. She’d been a pretty good harpist before the die-off. 6.2. So began the dinner parties. 10.0. Eventually the Cycladic people died out all except one, a ferryboat captain. 8.2. Left arm below right was considered uncouth. 7.0. To play a stringless harp requires only the thumbs. 5.0. The Cycladic people were very fond of Proust. 4.3. Is it because you don’t want the impact. 11.2. In the pantry she sat at the counter and ate with her hands. 16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.
