I want you to be weary with me
of all that is already well done,
of all that ages us.
Of all that lies in wait
to wear out other people.
Let us be weary of what kills
and of what doesn’t want to die.Pablo Neruda, “A certain weariness”
(via litandbasketball)
YOU GUYS ARE IN FOR A TREAT!
Prose:
Poetry:
A 2 x 2 reading about states, countries, apartments, psychic spaces, cities, towns, mental states, neighborhoods, places of the HEART or whatever the hell the readers damn well please.Joe’s coming from NYC. Come. Hear some stuff. Buy some books. Drink some booze with us.
I’m doing a thing! (That’s me, the one who’s “coming from NYC”). I think I’m going to write one short essay about each of the cities I have lived in. I meant to start them today, but the Celtics won last night and then the bar had a Pengo machine, and you know how that goes.
Walking back from my friend Andy’s house while listening to this album on headphones, it occurred to me that it’s about time I publicly revise my middling review from a few months ago. It is, in fact, a grower among growers, having done its thing to the point of settling in as one of my favorite albums of the past few years.
It’s heavy on the labored “drunk in 1950’s rural America” vibes, yeah, but behind that the songwriting owes a strong debt to synth-driven pop songs so sparse and self-assured that, under the right circumstances (walking down Manhattan Avenue while the sun is going down, for example), they sound huge. Songs like “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, “Distortions” by Clinic, and “Skool’s Out” by Ladytron, which don’t have that much in common now that I see that list written out, except they all favor holding synth notes for a long time and I love all three of them so much I’m almost willing to fill out some type of binding document so all three of them are played simultaneously while my casket is lowered into the ground.
(Does Tumblr count as legally binding? Why not, with all that venture capital and no Storyboard money pits weighing down their legal department? A post for another day, I guess.)
I’m no expert on the relation between correlation and causation, but I do know that I drank one of those Bud Light Lime Straw-Ber-Ritas yesterday afternoon (C-plus, wish it tasted either better or worse but 8% alcohol so hey) and I couldn’t manage to fall asleep last night. As a result, I re-coded my Ramones haiku generator from the ground up. Now it looks nicer and can optionally count syllables for the perfect 5-7-5 haiku.
Bonus for the nerds in the audience: It is no longer a horrifying result of me having just learned javascript and also trying to cram PHP in there for some reason. I bet if you looked directly at the old RHG code for more than five seconds you’d turn into a pillar of salt.
“I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”
– Best-ever Simpsons writer and all-time hero George Meyer, on why he doesn’t like advertising. (This whole profile is pretty great, actually. At the very least, whoever transcribed it wrote ‘funny’ as ‘fanny’ a couple of times. Can’t go wrong with that.)
Here is a professional “tip” for you, suffering solitary creature: put a small can of pineapple juice on your bedside table when you go to sleep.
In the middle of the night, when you wake from a nightmare or from your mind’s persistent, cogent analysis of your ruinous position in the world, a position from which no escape is possible but which is itself untenable, unstable, indefensible, such that you must escape, and you think to yourself: I cannot torture myself with these thoughts, I must go to sleep; nothing can come from this monologue, nothing ever has; yet my problems are real, and I am simply fleeing them, ignoring them, living in a state of irrational, deliberate flight from reality, even as I judge others for not confronting and understanding reality, etc. etc.—
—in this moment, whereas you normally turn to another sleeping posture, perhaps your most trusted, with the cool sides of the pillows and the blanket tucked under your feet, or however you prefer it, and what determines how we prefer to sleep, anyway? Genes? Childhood? Society?—
—instead of flopping onto your belly or pulling your knees up or sighing or sobbing, you can sit upright, turn to your left or right, and reach out into the darkness;
—instead of desperately scanning the darkness to see if it’s light yet, if you’ve already squandered your night, if the world is already moving along, indifferent to how much time you need to spend defending yourself against your own accusations in the middle of the night, you can grasp the small, warm can;
—instead of increasing panic and the debate about whether you need to go to the bathroom, whether the movement and light involved will wake you further, irrevocably, you have instead a plan:
1. Sitting upright in bed, you crack the can and guzzle down the sticky, sugary, idiotic Dole Pineapple Juice that has been waiting to take you on a very artificial vacation since you closed your eyes.
2. What am I doing here in the middle of the night? I’m having some pineapple juice; it tastes like summer camp or elementary school; it tastes like being on a bus with teachers headed on a field trip; it tastes like something Americans used to like a lot; it tastes childish.
The walls of the can are thick; the can is smaller than that of a Red Bull. Imagine old tin cans of beer, World War II beers, World War II troubles. Imagine Dole in Cuba. Imagine Bob Dole. Imagine a crippled hand holding a pen, and how that war injury became a joke: how much of a joke are your injuries? How much of a joke are you?
3. The can is empty: drained as though you are a monster, or a bear, or just an adult in a child’s world, all the objects too small, all the flavors too sweet, all the colors too bright. You’re done.
4. Lie down and go to sleep. Who cares about anything except acid reflux anyway?
For the last six weeks or so, some type of business has been under construction around the corner from my apartment. Nobody seems to know exactly what’s going to end up there, but today I noticed some new signage that, uh, raises more questions than it answers.
“An aging actress whose star has fallen, a thuggish bodyguard, a Holy Rolling studio head, an actor whose sexuality is in flux—these people inhabit the world of beleaguered publicist Joe Bernardi. Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Joe operates in a 1940s Los Angeles full of femmes fatales, hucksters, and shady movers and shakers. But he’s no hard-drinking tough guy, just a man desperate to clear his name—the cops think he killed a dead actress—while trying to find satisfaction in his job at second-rate Continental Studios. He also wouldn’t mind reuniting with his ex-wife, Lydia, whose house he watches in the wee hours.”
– Here is what you find when googling your name and a phrase at 3 o’clock in the morning in an effort to see if you’ve ever used that phrase in a published piece of writing: You share a full name with the protagonist of a series of mystery novels.
To the extent that it is possible to have a video stuck in one’s head, I have had this video stuck in my head for two days. There’s something about the theatrical hamminess of late-seventies and early-eighties new wave that’s really off-putting and appealing at the same time.
I love this song, but Squeeze would later repeat this with the terrible song “Black Coffee in Bed,” which gets hate-stuck in my head on a semi-regular basis.
The narrative of the dream is unclear. However, it takes place in a world where, with each new pressing of Electric Warrior, Marc Bolan demanded dramatic additions and subtractions from the ‘thank you’ section of the album’s liner notes based on who he was hanging out with at the time. This ends up creating a large collector’s market for various editions of the LP.
The pressing I was looking at in the dream was notable for including Lou Reed but not the rest of the Velvet Underground.
