Something the internet can do is make a person feel cynical and out of touch like everything else, faster. I don’t know what to do with myself or my hands here in the internet of June 2008. If by the internet I mean you. More and more I just hang out with bad information on food and fuel and flooding. And fires, and studies on death by pollution. Sometimes there is a lot of YouTube video I wake up and don’t know how I got there, Angelina Jolie. That is all. And then in the middle of the information I will get a longing or a pang for my own private internet of 2003, which felt small and private. There were like 7 of you I thought of when I was here. And the same is true now. But now, in addition, I can’t feel my limbs. I feel like … a polar bear… a worm … a cotton ball. Spreading. Detached. Before, I was hiding in a very specific sort of place and after a while I ran out into the street to say hello. I (thought I) knew roughly where I was. Hiding and who I wanted to encounter.

Now I feel like a glob.

Maybe it’s good for me? (in the sense of valuing confusion/bewilderment)

1. Ironman last weekend. The hero as ipod, or the most awesome PDA ever. Dream of total containment. Dream of absolute freedom of movement.

2. Third installment of the Berlin Alexanderplatz tonight. I missed last week, which meant renting episodes 4-7 and catching up at home. Moment where I was sure it would be unavailable at the video room on piedmont ave. because everyone else in the bay area must be obsessively following along, too. Then had a really difficult time stopping myself at episode 7, but managed. Somewhere in the environs and links around the conversation going on at Open Space, someone mentioned the 1931, 88 minute version as in “why watch all 15 hours when you can…” (I could be wrong about this, I can’t remember who said it or where.) I point towards what I can’t find to say how struck I was during episodes 4-7 by the necessity of seriality and length to Fassbinder’s project. The serial and sheer size fits (performs, in a dreadful, perfect way) Biberkopf’s dogged cycle of beginning over again and again. Also the religious/moral tone of those re-beginnings - he is, again, a ‘new man’ (or a bird, or…) and then he is himself, and then it is another episode. (binge, retreat, beginning, violent encounter.) My inordinate (and mildly distressing) affection for Franz only increased while watching these episodes, but I feel a little let off the hook by Brecht Andersch’s great post - perhaps it’s the actor I’m fond of, not the character. It is often difficult for me to extricate actors from their roles. Everything onscreen makes me so nervous. I was a real wreck during Ironman. I can’t believe this is only the halfway mark of Alexanderplatz. Or a little beyond halfway. Feels like we’ve lived a long time already in the beerhall alone.

The scene where he has a conversation with his three beers and one schnapps!

Seriously!

June 19, 2008 * 3:44 pm

Hi!

Hi.

Chris Chen, Cynthia Sailers and I have posted some notes in response to the SPT aggression conference. They’re over on the conference blog.

Also I have a Summer Cold, with a fever and everything.

Andrew Kenower has started posting audio from the conference over at A Voice Box: Bay Area Recordings of the Recent Past. I have been wanting to point to A Voice Box for a long while! It is a really terrific and growing archive.

You know what else I’ve been meaning to point to for a long time is this, “Send us your vertical answers”, a project Amber DiPietra is putting together on the Kelsey Street Blog, of poets who have responded and will hopefully respond to the questions (titles) in Bhanu’s book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.

Also and, we’re planning a public post-conference session for the weekend of June 21/22, time and location to be announced soon as possible. Check back here and/or at the conference blog for more info soon.

June 11, 2008 * 7:53 pm

A little late, but in the spirit of, let’s say, er, the content - let’s say you live in the bay area but won’t be able for whatever reason to attend any of the panels this coming saturday as part of the AGGRESSION conference, or let’s say you live on the east coast of the united states, or let’s say you live in oxford, or let’s say you live in buenos aires, or let’s say you do plan on attending the conference but the Q&A is always a hard space to speak into, and let’s say you’ve read some of the materials that Jasper Bernes, csperez and Erika Staiti will be talking about at saturday’s panel on the internet, and then let’s go further and say there is a question you might want to ask the panelists from wherever you are? If any of the above is the case, may I present the comment box? Please send such questions along if you have them, and I will ask these questions of our panelists on Saturday morning.

May 29, 2008 * 11:56 pm

“Through the hush of debts / and the roar of engines / we’ll struggle to recall / this is how it ended / this is how it ends”

(Christine Fellows, “Vertebrae)

May 26, 2008 * 1:58 pm

It always feels wrong, why is that, lots of reasons, to post something here when there are so many emails and lists to write, but I am out of town and mostly away from the away of here, and so but while I am, didn’t want to wait another day to say:

I hope you many will be in town and able to attend some or all of the upcoming SPT conference (next weekend! May 30/31) on aggression: political antagonism and contemporary poetics. I think there will be a lot to think and talk about.

Check the conference blog (link above) for advanced reading, exhibits, the full schedule, panel descriptions, etc.

May 22, 2008 * 10:21 am

and, again, department of:

anniversaries, death, birth, colorado, sleep deprivation.

watching the death toll(s) rise.

May 22, 2008 * 10:04 am

Then suddenly I *love* facebook, unfolder of information such as fallen fruit which I’d never heard of before receiving a facebook invite to this week’s nocturnal fruit forage in LA. It seems like local chapters are encouraged, though? Yes? Bay area anyone?

This won’t come mid-narrative for some of you, dear some of you all who deserve my sincerest apologies for talking about nothing else for a month now, that is, the RATS and the OPOSSUMS. Some kinds of rats really love avocados. A nocturnal fruit forage seems like a good step in my rat and opossum self-directed training. Isn’t that what the rats and opossums do? Nocturnal public fruit foraging?

This post is a public update that the opossum catcher came to the house yesterday and set some traps (the catch and release kind). The bait is STRAWBERRY NEWTONS. Most cats I guess don’t like strawberry newtons. 24 hours later there’s nothing in the traps yet. But when the opossum catcher showed up yesterday, he did have an opossum in the back of his truck, trapped at another location. A grown-up, cat-sized one. And so, my first.. sighting? viewing? (Suzanne and I googled “possum” a few weeks ago at my obsessive urging, and wow when that first picture came up it really did us in. Different, but related, I think, to what may or may not be living in the ceiling. I still have a lot to learn obviously.) This story is going backwards or something but I should say somewhere very clearly that I have not been having the easiest time ever with the sounds in my walls and ceiling, my ceiling and walls and ceiling and especially not with the sounds in the wall right behind my bed. At first I thought there were some overactive cats upstairs who only played at night. With many, many rolling balls. Then, when one of these denial-cats fell down into the wall one early morning, I employed, somewhat shakily, a fantasy concerning a glossy disney character who simply wanted the opportunity to make soup at a fancy restaurant. So I have been of course! It goes without saying! Googling opossum, oh, several times a day, ever since it was introduced as a marsupial alternative maker of THE SOUNDS. Opossum + loud noise + wall + babies + mating season + geography. I’m getting there. (to a search string a little wider than myself)

And moving ever closer to an embodied opossum: last week Samantha told me about seeing one at Sulphur Creek and I’m hoping to visit with her and Jonas in May. Yesterday’s opossum was understandably depressed, laying on a bunch of crushed strawberry fig newtons, in full daylight, tired and wishing for a dark corner to nap in. Mary my upstairs neighbor saw him first, unexpectedly, through the tailgate of the truck, and screamed. I forced myself to look but all I could see was the dinosaur-esque tail, so big! and coiled! And viewed through a crack. I almost looked away but didn’t. And then, the opossum ears, so intricate. The tired eyes. And hands.

I learned yesterday that rats and opossums can cohabitate in the same space, raccoons are more aggressive, and the interior wall sounds I’m hearing sound, to the opossum catcher, more like rodents than opossums. I know, information from an opossum catcher could be considered suspect, or something, but this one repeated several times that we must call immediately if we spot an opossum in the trap, as the traps are placed in full sunlight, and sunlight really stresses them out and it’s dangerous if they aren’t retrieved in a few hours. What I didn’t find out yesterday: the release location. So I have no idea where yesterday’s was relocated to. And he or she has not left my mind since, her or his face, so tired, with such big eyes, and a really weird mouth. Also, what happens after relocation? What’s the opossum’s relation to the group? Was it a he or a she? Did it have any babies?

April 27, 2008 * 5:19 pm

I am doing that dumb thing I often get trapped in, where I wait to say something I really want to say, until I have time to really say it in a special articulate (but not precious if that’s what you’re thinking) kind of way. Like this, and like that. I wait until I have enough time to say all around it in a circle, in a diagram, in a connective tissue-text of nested links and breathing all around the thing I am saying. I like to think I try.

But then I get trapped because while I’m waiting I don’t say anything! About the thing, which isn’t in this case a thing.

What it is, and where it’s going, is of supreme interest and obsession all week and weeks. I am getting tired of typing in the url by hand, it’s like that. (forcing me to update the link list soon.)

Because it is on the move, it is making itself and I am pretty sure we’re all invited. I am totally sure, in fact. What I’m trying to say is:

OPEN SPACE.

Most times it is better to let something say for itself.

Also, thank you to Manjula for the chocolate but especially for pointing to the nest cam. Leave it up, like she said, on your desktop. At first the mom wasn’t there. When I looked again, she was.

April 25, 2008 * 3:44 pm

There is a bag of, what else can I call them but rusty, chocolate chips in the kitchen on the third floor and everyone appears to be eating them. I hardly see any actual everyone, ever since the fire inspection decreed all doors must be kept shut for some building code reason having to do with a fire corridor, but the chocolate chips do disappear. When I have seen people I am not exaggerating at least three of them have quoted to each other or me: “April is the cruelest month.”

April 22, 2008 * 12:14 pm

Not doing anything here for a long time and then doing something here felt like a reverse equivalent of the I Am Ending My Blog post.

I always have to talk about it.

Basically I am avoiding work. I had forgotten that luxury’s contour.

Received:
“Hello from LifeLock” “End Identity” (theft)

March 25, 2008 * 9:59 am

An interpretrive constellation, or rubric, or image-object-cultural-product-citizen’s mailbox-exhibit-net I’ve been caught in this week:

the scene of neighborhood cash handouts for votes in Brillante Mendoza’s Slingshot

Ben Metcalf’s satire “Why I Pay My Taxes” in the April 08 issue of Harper’s

the Economic Stimulus Payment Notice that arrived by mail, under which qualifying individuals including possibly me could receive one time payments of up to $600 for doing nothing more than filing a 2007 tax return

*

Everything heard from inside the near-constant backdrop of Britney’s “Piece of Me” and 50 Cent’s “I Get Money”, the two on a repeat loop the last few months. I’m with Jclo, “Piece of Me” is the song of the year (admittedly I listen to only ten songs every year + whatever’s on KMEL, these are overlapping categories)

I keep thinking about “Piece of Me” as some version of claiming/being married to the game. But to agree with Jane again, in a song with lyrics “entirely designed to confuse the question of who is speaking” it’s equally unclear who is married to whom. How does the autoerotic life of money circulate in matrimonial form? I mean, as ever, but also, how much is that dowry in the mirror? Or she’s the game she’s married to and also the product that game revolves around. In the string of tabloid (is tabloid still a term?) titles claimed in the song’s chorus, only a few are specifically meaningful: “Mrs. oh my god that Britney’s shameless” yes, but “Mrs. she’s too big, now she’s too thin”? When was the last time anyone said Britney was too thin? It’s not about her, it’s about the forms she played child bride to. The too fat/too thin line sounds a lot like wish-fulfillment, or idle fantasy: “well, I could have done it like the Olsen twins” which would be to do it exactly the same way. No getting outside of. Mrs. = Mrs. = Mrs. Finally the who’s married to whom question doesn’t really matter- it’s a bad marriage, she’s stuck in it, enthralled, and so are we, which is part of why it feels so recognizable.

It’s not her ass we want a piece of, exactly, it’s the revenue or at least the disposable income. Internet says her monthly pull is $737,000 - not sure if that’s before or after taxes - and she has no savings. (Britney’s version of 50’s track might be: “I spend money.” But I don’t even know where to begin on the compare and contrast of these two songs.)

The kinky part is how Britney seems co-committed, devoted even, to driving up the market value of her image via seemingly self-destructive acts. Every act against the frame she’s committed to generates more money for others, whether it’s the head-shaving moment credited with a definitive shift towards iconic pop-freak status, or beating a paparazzi’s SUVwith her umbrella. (The SUV, post-attack, was immediately put up for sale on ebay and then pulled off after bids reached $30,000 - maybe to accrue? The ‘victim’ of the attack estimates he made $400,000 for video and photograph sales of the incident.) Every act a gesture, re-absorbed and distributed as cash.

A fairy tale: you go to punch someone in the face, in your dream, and instead of making contact, coins and shoes and flowers and face cream and designer samples and starbuck’s drinks and cars come pouring out of your hands. Your skin is very bad, someone says in an online forum, about the photo taken of this event.

That Atlantic Monthly feature on the paparazzi who work Britney with their digitals (linked above) is semi-super interesting. This idea of the old paparazzi v. new, or that Britney often re-stages photos which went badly the first time around. The “Piece of Me” video might be the most extreme example of this re-staging: the crotch shot as power move–in heels, stepping over the photographer–the reproduction of doubles in beret, spy-style, eluding the press, as if she could, suggesting there’s a delineation between the backstage and performance/image-making area, and that she’s in control of the moving border between the two.

I was going to point towards a video of the song remixed over many ‘actual’ Britney image moments, umbrella-attack wearing no panties shaved head baby in lap and all, but it’s been taken down.

March 24, 2008 * 10:03 am