If we are not to blame his habit of playing Superblotto every night, perhaps we can take Chris Hitchens' recent banalities and solecisms as lending credence to the supposition that becoming a Republican is something like getting a lobotomy wrapped in a tax break.
My favorite has been his decision, when confronted with the supreme absence of WMDs, not to mutter about how the Iraqi regime was so heinous they had to go no matter what (even sober, Hitch knows that argument sounds real funny as soon as someone down at the Blarney Stone says "Um, uh, so what's up with North Korea, sir?")
Instead, the man who inspired the word "Rotgutterdammerung" simply suggested that there was no need for any justification of the war on Iraq. At all. Never mind the shock'n'awe, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, et cetera. The recent conflict, despite the billions of brain cells expended on justficatory rhetoric by a massive administration and Chris, was merely doncha know part of an ongoing "long war of maneuver with Saddam Hussein that took more than a decade to conclude." Well, cheers. Looking at my 216-year calendar, I'm pretty sure we're still at war with France, and I feel certain Mr. Hitchens is itching to conclude that one as well.
I also like it when the good gentleman explains that Alliance soldiers are busy with "the reconstruction of Iraq," drifting over how they have made precious little progress, particularly in comparison to the Iraqi-led reconstruction conducted during the 1991 lull in Mr. Hitchens' permanent war. This is perhaps because the current heavily-armed day-laborers are busy killing and being killed, which surely puts a crimp in the schedule.
The saddest thing about all this is that Hitchens' pathetic what-I-did-with-my-high-IQ story comes in large part out of a sense of dissatisfaction with and betrayal by the party of Lincoln and Clinton. Which is neither inhuman nor unreasonable. The tragedy comes next: he could have left the plutocratic sphere and become an actual political critic, rather than soggily signing on with The Other Party. His story is merely a retelling of the national narrative, this choice or none, copied out in blood-stained bourbon.
The reading of French Poetry in Translation at the Maison Francaise, organized by Belladonnna* Press, was ten translators working mostly on contemporary writing, mostly by women. Alas! I most enjoyed Paul Eluard, the ringer in the queue, translated with a direct serenity by Lisa Lubasch. Apparently, a book will come out from Green Integer this year or next. The evening was well-attended (they often are, with ten readers; if everyone has four friends, that’s a minyan de la poesie, ami) and good-spirited.
Afterward, the local posse by which I had been adopted and supplied a cranberry shade of lipstick adjourned to an Upper West party, rumored to involve elite journalists, none of whom I encountered unless one numbers main celebrant/birthday girl Alissa Quart. Mostly I met Finns. The one who resembled an unattractive Jurgen Prochnow immediately pointed at a colleague and said “We are...too drunk...to fuck.” This was bad news for somebody, I am sure. The red-dredded Finn (who looked like he was on vacation from Bomfunk MCs, claimed he was from “Mack-a-donia,” and did not quantify his innebriation) and I stood there taking pictures of each other until Kenny Goldsmith arrived. From this point, things get hazy. The action and setting combine gentrification and streetfighting: This makes a fine opportunity to reinvent the term ferngully, as in, “that party at the Time Magazine foreign correspondent’s crib was all ferngully.” Goldsmith is equipped with a furry man-purse and some Lubriderm, and at some juncture, after a fractious debate about exchanging iPods, certain objects are defenestrated to the gravitational tune of twelve stories and they pursue their destiny. Brian Kim Stefans presides; Ange Mlinko is bored, but recovers from her ennui well enough to give a thoroughly pleasing reading the next night at the Anthroposophical Society (pleasing for the audience; her style is premised on seeming to regret that poetry ever crossed her path, while making it delight in same).
Hello to all. I am blogging from the Apple Store in Manhattan because a) that's what you do, and a.1) now I can have written the phrase " I am blogging from the Apple Store" and meant it.
The lines "The most awful thing / About the phrase 'Every Germinal must have its Thermidor' /Is that one never gets to say so anymore / And really mean it" did not get a laff, even a rueful or despairing one, in Orono, Maine. This filled me with inertia, but the reading was generally a happy one. I felt like my set lasted about 55 minutes but when I sat down Steve's stopwatch was just switching to 30:00. "Perfect," I muttered, forgetting I was still miked with the mobile lavalier, which I suppose means there's an archival tape now in which I conclude that the just-finished set was sans flaw. It was not. But my three poet friends at the University helped me read "Their Ambiguity"; I wish I had Jennifer Moxley's voice, but then I would miss our conversations.
Karen MacCormack's set was hard for me to focus on, but I enjoyed our co-unease taking questions afterward. There was an incapacity to find a comfortable rhythm, and this was itself reassuring, that people could still be legitimately different, and that difference had, along with its discomforts, a negation of the mechanical. Still, it tasted like tin.
Report on the New York reading of French poetry in translation to follow...
[the alarm has just gone off here, either because someone has walked out with a digital camera, or Paris Hilton just walked in]
Money follows money like coochie follows hoochie in the eternal dance of the entertainment industry. So with a certain movie about the religious aspects of repressed homoeroticism slouching toward a 400 million gross including tie-ins (I haven’t really been keeping up with Catholicism since Vatican II: The Encyclicaling, but isn’t it still somehow wrong to vend fake martyrdom doodads? Isn’t it, perhaps, some sort of heresy?), you can bet the marketing gurus are going to get their ass in the conga line and start churning out trendriding product to capitalize on exactly what brought all these dollars to market. That’s right, ready yourself for lots and lots of Rock en Aramaic. It is Aramaic’s time to shine. Serious beatheads have been bobbing to “Technnomaic” and “Drum’n’Bassyrian” (as well as its more intellectual comrade, “deepsand”) since the late Nineties, and one Aramaic death metal band (Mount Terrorat) has developed a loyal following online. But the combination of scenester trickledown, an ongoing interest in exotic sounds, and the sudden flood of “flow-follow” capital should lift numerous boats from passionate subculture to the pop charts. One report has leading Aramaic alternarockers The Dead See preparing not one but two new discs: one is a rerelease of their failed English-language release Down Comes The Bliss Bower, restored to its original tongue. The other is apparently a soundtrack for The Passion’s sequel, The Harrowing: Three Days in the Valley of Death. Joel Silver, who will produce the film, suggested that the band (whom he befriended while shooting parts of The Matrix: Resurrections “in Aramaica”) had the same relation to System of a Down that The Pixies had to Nirvana, and that they were, in a word, “Gethseminal.” Said the lead singer, “I’m not sure language matters so much. Rock has always been about nailing the passion.”
Sugarhigh! is on the road for a week; now would be a superlative time to break into my house and make off with all the CDs with titles longer than four words. Enjoy your emo! I will endeavor to blog about the various poetry events in Maine and New York, but in general, traffic will be lighter. This is why I encourage The Lost Unicorn, The Lazy Flaneur, and The Noise Formerly Known as Useful to pick up the slack and kick it up a notch, like the great ones do at crunch time.
Reminder: upon my return, this site will be relocating to the tony, lucky neighborhood of Abstract Dynamics.
I had a bad bicycle accident once, bad enough on my smashed head that sometimes I would try to say someone's name and say another instead, even if I was really concentrating. During this time I was staying at Maison du Louis and Jen, who dressed my wounds in the kitchen and rented that Jenny Shimizu movie, Foxfire. Jen was strangely compelled by the film's other star, which did not presage good things for my hosts' marriage.
This was the night right after the accident, after a stranger in a passing car had driven me back to the Maison Albany and I had failed an online IQ test. There was something pressingly wrong with my head and I was having trouble speaking. It wasn't just names; there was a sensation that whatever sentence I was trying to say was out of countrol and I didn't know where it was supposed to go; there was a lot of stopping and fumbling. I was fearful, each second more than the last, as the aphasia writhed and did not relent, as my inability to form basic thoughts gathered into the evening. Making sentences was what I did. I was terrified.
However Joyce Carol Oatesy the movie is, Mazzy Star is on the track, and when that song came on -- I don't even remember now; was it "Halah" or "Fade"? -- I wasn't afraid for a couple of minutes. It's not that Mazzy Star is "soothing," exactly; the song wasn't oil on troubled waters. Instead, something in its weather matched my interior weather. Not the terror but the blankness; my thinking was becalmed, without dynamics, an upright coma. In this it did not resemble the world wired with activity, threat, desire. But for the Mazzy duration the world was as vacant and easy as my mind, I didn't feel all wrong, and I was so grateful for this that I wept, as I had wept the first time I ever got high on dope.
The corollary realization was that, for all the rigs that try, almost no band gets heroin right (and that includes VU, all my doxological cheries). And for this, Mazzy Star, which is good at essentially nothing else, gets called "psychedelic" by All Music Guide.
Transcend, dental medication! Twelve years before that I took two Percocets and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, lying on a cot in a friend's girlfriend's apartment. There was so little in that experience that could be called experience that nothing seemed to be happening at all, and I thought being dead must feel just like that.