FEATHERS LIKE LEATHER

(2009, HEARTWORM).
Upon realizing I write about one thing and one thing only regardless of mask donned, I passed through a series of stages before I could get myself back into it. First was denial, wherein I made the puerilely forced decision to scatter my subject matter at extremes only to find the same weird vagaries sneaking in regardless (the Battle at Sassoferrato, justifying house music, ramifications of the degree of Celt in one’s blood, the benefits of being light not just like the bird but also like the feather, to name a few); then came depression…,…; then confused and angry lamentation, wherein >> I quit << only to find my excess ying spitting out legal briefs better suited for the pulpit than the court, drafting mortgage contracts in rhyme, and a delicate attention paid to the tending to parking summons disputes that not only got me off but got me off!; then came acceptance, wherein I slept in, cooked things I had to marinate first, and never left my protracted dinners until I was burping up cocksure haikus and quippy little truths without even the thought of a pen nearby; finally, I decided to try celebrating it with, and as, a uniform hodgepodge. Feathers Like Leather is a collection of poems, short stories, etymologies and occasional musings that blur, bridge, and play between the aforementioned forms while never straying from this one thing. (Uh-duh, and ever consistent with this “one thing only” theme, I first began compiling the components of Feathers to serve as a distraction from the completion of We Pulse in Pink when Pink began to feel like one quixotic endeavor, only to then find Feathers assuming the same obsessive weight Pink once had when Pink got edged out of the immediate frame due to my focus growing ever more acute on Feathers. My one thing goes something like that.)

*Feathers Like Leather is the only book of pure writing featured in the D.A.P. spring
2009 catalog.

WE PULSE IN PINK

We Pulse in Pink (unreleased, unfinished, beta available) is a long-winded, tedious (but think “runner’s high” type tedious) defense of a newly dumped writer whose ex has set him to the impossible task of composing a “wordless letter” as a last ditch effort to win back her love. Justifiably frustrated by her inability of understanding how her boyfriend -- a writer who’s allegedly dedicated his life to words -- can argue to the fury of zeal that it is in fact the spirit of tone which trumps the tangibility of text in actual conversations while it’s text over tone in matters involving the written word, she deems our writer “poseur numero uno” and with defeated palms splayed flaccidly to the sky dissolves their relationship pending one final challenge: supply her with a “wordless letter” that must manage to express this grand elocution of tone while at the same time be reliant on no definite words to support it. Accomplish this and she will take him back. We Pulse in Pink is the writer’s quest to craft a rebuttal so flawless and vast it feels as if every word and non-word alike make up the fabric of (their) love, and hence, it is irrelevant what words he chooses to plead his case -- if they all lead back to her, can he not just kick back and smile weightlessly?

57 OCTAVES BELOW THE MIDDLE C BUZZED BY THE BEE

57 Octaves Below the Middle C Buzzed by the Bee (2006, Fifth Planet Press) was intended to be New York City’s first epic poem. Seeing as New York lacks a proper epic poem in its name, I thought I found my calling therein and geared up for getting down to tackling that cross. The conduit thereto struck me late one night/early morning getting out of the speakeasy I’d hit after my bartending shift on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when, unable to hail a cab (a combination of there simply being none and of no wise cabby willing to pick up a zombie, which I was at that state in the game) I found myself trying to flag down the giant red tourist buses dominating the streets at that hour on their way to Times Square to pick up their prey and begin their day. If only I could work on top one of those things my material for our epic poem would sort itself out naturally, or so I thought. When I awoke the next morning I walked down to Consumer Affairs, took the legendarily rigorous three-hour 150 question NYC tour guide exam, and scored 147 out of 150 -- finding myself unwittingly with the highest score in the entire City of New York (fact)! For the next nine months I gave three-hour tours three times a day all around Manhattan and Brooklyn while all along pursuing what I believed would be our missing definitive epic poem. However, by the time my pen began hitting the paper it was clear I could produce nothing so reverential and purely beautiful for such an epigeal eye-to-eye city as ours (Incidentally, culling material from tour buses filled with obese Middle Americans, Eurotrash, and wild Israeli’s fresh out of mandatory military service did not support the exalted word much either). No, a work worthy of Byron or Pushkin frankly would not befit our honest city. I offer you the jaunty 57 Octaves as the most appropriate result instead (it’s not a poem).

I then enlisted the illustrator Marcellus Hall to help redeem the project. He added forty accompanying illustrations to the book which function as silent reposes to my endless words that communicate the same NYC savoir vivre in drawings the extents of my yapping only struggle for.

*57 Octaves is featured in MoMA’s 2009 exhibition of illustrated books.

WHITE PIGEONS

White Pigeons (2004, Fifth Planet Press), being my first novel, is an explosion that took a lost freak-out to Bolivia to finally ignite. My hundredth band broke up after my millionth album; I was proving excellent at finding love but miserable at keeping it; was in the thick of my “omg-how-am-I-really-gonna-pull-this-off” late 20s panic having no idea the 30’s would soon bring relief; the wide open world touring offers started losing its mystique once the temporality of a different city every night began giving me more superficial broad strokes than essential minutia the sedentary normal professions are privileged to reap; and most importantly, my lyrics kept multiplying, extending well beyond the lengths of reasonable songs wherein repeating a chorus even felt like wastes of breathes that could’ve otherwise been used more economically for fresh ideas. No, no more nothing of this kind of life for me, I lunged towards the break with a one way ticket to Peru and returned from Bolivia two months later with (an incredible longing for NYC and) the blueprints for a type of love story I wished to purge thereby graduating myself to a better state; a state free of the turbulent flux that comes with raw youth; free from all the tyrannies of nostalgia and hope for a more accepting present tense instead; free from the violent sadisms of truth for well-worn ancient wisdoms I could ease into. White Pigeons is my uncomfortably temporal love story I offer up as fodder for our communal pyre (in a good way). This may be the last story of the 20th Century as well. The Towers were still standing and New York City was more Banlieue than Versailles.

The first pressing of White Pigeons included a twelve-song cd and its accompanying lyrics which serve as Chapter Seven, the (quasi-present) interlude between the past and future love story, as performed by the protagonist’s fictitious band in the book, “The Breaks”, as played by my actual group, Vague Angels . I have toured both the States and Europe several times in support of this book -- sometimes with a band, sometimes with only an acoustic guitar, and sometimes with neither. Since then the cd has been released separately by the German company Expect Candy and the individual songs have appeared everywhere from limited edition colored Swedish vinyl releases to Spanish television commercials to Jonathan Demme’s Manchurian Candidate featuring Denzel Washington.

BIO & EVENTS

Bio moved to Take The Handle's next "Hometown" issue. Go There


July 6th -- Vague Angels performing @ Pete's Candy Store, Williamsburg
July 8th -- Reading @ Bruar Falls, Williamsburg
August 8th -- Reading @ the Heartworm Extravaganza at Santos, Manhattan

OCTOBER FIFTH ALL YEAR LONG

The word nostalgie was coined in 1668 by the Alsatian physician Johannes Hofer. Combining the Greek nostros for "homecoming" with algos for "pain, grief, and distress" Hofer invented a term to describe the disease of "extreme homesickness." At the time, this nostalgie was one ill plaque. It would jaundice the soul, blind the spirit, and wither one to dust if left undiagnosed. Doctors shuddered less even when encountering the similar stiffness of ennui because at least ennui , though an equally arresting condition, had a way of mutating randomly here and there into eurekic snaps back out to languidity; as if the sufferer of ennui, bored to death by life, kept whittling away substance he could no longer find interest in until he'd narrowed it all down to one single dot on the wall, a dot he'd then transfix on for weeks trying to whittle down further still until -- in the fortunate cases -- the force inside this dot propelled by cosmic ebb and flow would then reverse its own trajectory refusing to get caught (think past and future Big Bangs) releasing the ailed into a furious sweat of ideas, and hence, frantic liberation. The sufferer of nostalgie however had no similar simple reactionary hope. He would stare at this same dot transfixed similarly because it was also the end result of his attempt to whittle back to the point he'd come from unable to ever return. Depression came to the nostalgent from the feeling of being stuck on a line oozing pointlessly and joylessly forward, and yet to turn him around would be to place him back in the original direction birth had him running from: nostalgie then was an awareness of the same dot at both opposing ends of that line. And so the doctors were stuck too. No honest treatment could be found for this crippling disease.
Seemingly making matters more complicated, returning home in the Alsace- Lorraine has never come easy. Rarely could a doctor just send the sick homebound to start afresh. Home was often in someone else's hands. The first recorded history of the region has Celts fighting vertical wars with Romans over control of the salt mines; since then some sort of horizontal Franco-Germanic conflict has kept the area inflamed or at a minimum, instantly provokable. A-L (with a naiveté appropriately opposite to that found in L.A.) has been continuously pummeled from every angle. Who knew what language would be spoken in the home you grew up in, assuming your home was even still standing. Well miraculously, it was this same displacement that inadvertently produced the cure. Truth is, Hofer did invent the word nostalgie, but not the condition. The condition was already well researched, documented, and revered in German as heimweh; Hofer was well familiar with it.
Being Alsatian, Hofer spoke both French and German and had formal studies on both sides of the Rhine. In 1668 most of the Alsace was in French hands though, capitulated by the Hapsburgs in the Treaty of Westphalia only a few decades earlier. The Hapsburgs would then lose the rest to Louis the XIV within the proceeding decades therein making French that centuries temporarily imposed tongue (though whether it was by a Franco royal edict or personal preference to speak French, history appropriately does not document), so Johannes Hofer transposing a French word where a German word already existed stumbled him into the recipe for vaccinations one hundred years before the first vaccine was accredited in use for fighting smallpox. In other words, Hofer discovered that the antidote to the virus is always the same virus. The antidote is never very far or different from the original old dote. Dote coming from the Greek didonai which meant "to give" which shares the same Proto-Indo-European root with "grab" which is essentially the same thing as "taking" meant that by fighting heimweh with nostalgie Hofer was able to spin the victim's maligned existential lines into whirlwindic circles that vacillated the victims give-taking between languages thereby losing track of who's on first, what's on second, how will we ever get to third, ad infinitum until being flung from the infirmary on a long slow ginger skip home.
"Wait doctor, so is it heimweh or nostalgie that I suffer from?"
"Well you see, in a word son, both…it was heimweh, it is currently nostalgie, and if I have my way you may very soon carry with you something similar called nostalgia.
"Whatever word we chose to use, this condition which ponders the past exists in all tenses. It is always around us, yet it is also this inescapability that frees us. May I offer you October Fifth as proof? This is a day just deep enough into Fall to begin feeling nostalgic for past summer's follies while simultaneously near enough to the future holiday season you look forward to nostalgically as a summation of all the past holidays enjoyed. On October Fifth both the past and the future are nostalgic. Whatever direction you turn you see the past. This is an impossible equation, no? All things lead backwards? Well if this is the case then we must have mistaken what backwards truly is. Backwards must be forwards as well then. On October Fifth you therefore move forward with no other direction to go. Or better, On October Fifth you are finally just moving unconcerned with direction. It's for this reason you can not recall a single memory from October Fifth {sic: we are pausing while you search}. You were moving forward then, free of memory. You don't remember it, but you were also happy then. The day is so liberated from memory you aren't even sure if it's October Fifth precisely you fail to remember. It may have been the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth, who knows! And seeing as you can't remember the day, you also can't recall the date. Yes, you were happy then because regardless of direction, you were heading home to the cradled beginning -- as you are now.
"Patient, allow me to continue extrapolation. You must also understand that to bring you this word for your condition I had to travel to Greece to seek the words the ancients would have used to secure firm footing for my new word. You would have eschewed a proper new word as yet another propigant further forward and an old word would have been but another reminder of just how impossibly distant the past feels. I needed a nonchronistic offspring of them both. Thing is, with imperial forces in these parts toppled as frequently as they are, I also needed a word that would weather any crown. This is how I solved it: from the Alsace to Greece there are two routes to go, the northern and the southern routes. The northern route would take me through German states, through the circle of the central Hapsburg duchies, and across the Balkans to Greece. The southern route would take me over the Alps, into the Savoy, and down through the Italian peninsula where I would embark via boat to Greece from Brindisi. I decided to try them both as 'both' seemed to be the opposite of the singularity your malady has you only seeing now. I chose the southern route on my way there, and took the northern on my way back.
"As I passed through the Italian republics on my southern route I heard the first part of this word nos which they used to mean "our." On my return voyage through the northern route while winding through the Schwarzwald I heard the second part of this word tal which the Schwabians used to mean "valley." This suffix "gie" was used in some way in every language, dialect, and slang I encountered to mean just about anything so let's call this tail to our word "everything." Inadvertently, I discovered by taking this circular trip to and from my destination that I was in possession of a compound word whose separate pieces with entirely different etymologies from the same compound word of the nostalgie from nostros plus algos I invented in Greece share identical meanings to each other! Fraternal twins who happened to plop out identical! You see, in this circular etymology nostalgie translates quite literally to 'Our Valley of Everything.' Whichever homonym you choose we all therefore suffer from nostalgie to a greater or lesser degree. We carry it with us. It is our communal collection. It is therefore not just your disease, dear patient, we all share it -- and if we all share it well then it can't quite be considered a disease at all then, can it? Please, don't burden yourself with the weight of the entire load. It is there with or without your extra burden."
And so through the wordplay of Johannes Hofer the pain was imparted into all of us and nostalgie mellowed into the softer nostalgia and ceased tormenting us as a disease proper. It may continue to exist as a valley of sorts, but if we recognize it as "the valley" doesn't that in the very least say something of our position on the hill? Nostalgia exists like any element does. It is not a force to eradicate. It is yet another element to monitor and ride as it adds its hue to the impartial scene. Luckily, it's also a beautiful word and just to say it keeps its hazards in check. Say it with veneration, nostalgia. Gorgeous even.
Problem is, our northern fear of stagnation and lack of advancement has created an unbalanced cultural focus on all things future tense that clouds our ability to appreciate nostalgia's full spectrum. Our northern goals for our days and what we feel we need to get done during them place such an unbalanced focus on progress and societal betterment that we push nostalgia to a delicate periphery where a fear of retrospection (in the event that a spelunk too far down could suck you into some reminiscent unproductive bog) could cancer nostalgia back into a disease again. It's not necessarily a negative word though; it doesn't even have to be a depressive one. It is a word that demands a certain comprehensive time-sensitive breath to say right, true, but any word that complete should. Perhaps we get nervous around it in the north because our contribution to the word, the valley, the tal, is the heavy side. If that's the case, perhaps we should. Maybe even the jobs allotted for the proper functioning of nostalgia have been divvied appropriately then: judicial monitoring for the north, executive risk-taking for the south where the first part of the word, the collective part, the uplifting part, the nos came from on Hofer's southern trek.
Along the Mediterranean on his southern leg, Hofer found the northern and southern uses of nostalgia to be rather different, existing in concentric circles that overlapped in the 'comprehensive time-sensitive breath' quadrant and worded similarly in the dictionary, but with a nuance that rendered them almost different words entirely. The rest of the free space in the southern pie of nostalgia that does not overlap with the northern nostalgia actually leans towards things like progress, the timeless wisdom of masonry, and endless inextricable communion. Hofer came to surmise that this Mediterranean soul surrounded by ruins is raised on his imponderable equation: when every direction leads to the past you find yourself heading towards the future back to home. They don't need to learn it on the Mediterranean, it's in them. The ruins have stood millennia as Vespas, theocratic campaigns, and souvenir crazed tourists whipped within and without. They've been bombed, burned, pardoned, and recently internationally preserved. These people aren't living in the past by carrying it with them, they're celebrating the story of past, present, and future as it happens at once in all directions.
It is our northern inability to wrap our heads completely around this notion that not only impedes our ability to digest and enjoy the ruins as our own ruins but also impedes our ability to appreciate the gaudiness of the modern Mediterranean art being thrown up in seeming contrast around them today. We vacation to Rome to ponder both how a modern city grew around ruins without knocking them down (lazy or respectful?) and how the intellect of Michelangelo could produce something as garish as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We can dig into the gaudiness through irony, yes, but to discuss irony is to discuss a different disease altogether. There is another purer way to value gaudiness. Michelangelo understood it. The Egyptians got it. The Moors of Al Andalus sanctified themselves through it long after both their name and their religion have survived centuries of attempts at vilification. It's simple really, Mediterranean art is meant to ripen. Ripen over centuries with salt from the sea air, curious paws of passing patrons, bullet holes from wars we can't too soon forget. The colors are meant to be too brash, the columns are meant to be overly ornate, the grotesques are not all meant to remain. In Mediterranean art what may first appear as overdone is in fact a great understanding of humility. The artist knows that though he is a conduit for a Muse there is a man in between to contend with. A flawed man. A man who can't possibly get it right. Therefore, the Mediterranean artist overdoes it to allow the immaculate visions of history and the elements remedy his faults.
Interestingly, the Romans never specified which Muse exactly was the Muse of Art. Vermeer believed Clio, the Muse of History, moonlighted as the Muse of Art. Vermeer knew that now is the time to see the Parthenon, for example. It's ripened with history. It may have peaked in the past century, but it was certainly way too much to look at when Iktinos completed it 2,500 years ago. History has finally completed the job. It took away what wasn't meant to stand. I think Vermeer would also agree that Venice's Basilica de San Marco awaits some more. Clio's not yet done. She may be waiting for Venice to sink, when the only way to visit the church is by boat and who wouldn't concur with her then that that would perfect the project.
William Hogarth believed Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, masqueraded as the Muse of Art. He was on to something too. Moving west across the Mediterranean to Barcelona we face a metaphor too blunt, too cheesy, to admit: Antoni Gaudi is both the architect and archetype of gaudy. Painfully so. He's bedazzled Barcelona with eyesores Catalans have no choice but to esteem. It would be too much to expect the Catalans to humble into a confession that their number one attraction, La Sagrada Familia, is downright hideous -- Oh there I go with my northern mind already forgetting why Hogarth invoked Thalia! Yes yes, the Barcelonans are laughing at me! Gaudi's creations are modern history! They have yet to ripen with us and the elements! In due time they will mute, soften, breathe and be breathed upon, occupy a nook in "Our Valley of Everything," and our collective narcissism will both take credit for and adore them as they will be worthy of adoration.
I talk this talk though fellow New Worlders further West and centuries younger than perhaps the spirit of any New Worlder is qualified to do. As I pause for a minute to reflect on my own city I realize how hard pressed you'd be to find a single New Yorker not ready to tear down Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim and start anew. We don't just hate seeing it, we think it's dumb. But am I trying to tell myself that in due time this building will make sense? It's already starting to peel and the renovations made to it this year were the first on the abomination in over a decade. Are the curators already on my nostalgic tip? No, I don't buy it. Just because things go up doesn't mean they should stay up. The Guggenheim should come down and I promise my opinion does not stem from a rash American deus ex machina machismo. It just doesn't work. It won't ripen. We're gradually figuring out how to read these things. Beginning with the transference of the banners of modernity to the newer and taller skylines of Asia and then solidified by the bombing of the Towers, the spirit of New Yorkers is changing. We're almost part of the Old World. We're gaining nostalgic perspective. Even New Jersey is producing a successful organic vineyard these days. As New Worlders we're plowing ahead with our ability to accept the past in the present while attempting to carry with us our own past of a complete irreverence for it.
This is obviously no easy task. Thalia's been our Muse since conception. We've been tearing mansions down to build skyscrapers in their stead. We've been consuming everything that floats ashore and claiming it as our own creation. We've proudly sold shirts proclaiming things like "Welcome to New York Mother Fucking City, Now Duck Bitch." We've been laughing at ourselves.
That's not our city anymore though, and yet we're cautious to welcome Clio in as our new Muse. These are tricky times, go easy on us. This flux of Muses has left us debating helter-skelter things like whether to or not to tear down the legendary "punk" club CBGB's. The lease is up and the new one's got an extra zero. In the last century this debate would have never even existed. Goodbye Cotton Club. So long Copacabana. We awaited the next step. Goodbye Filmore East. Goodbye Cat Club. Couldn't wait to see what came next. The dance clubs in West Chelsea have changed names and hands a hundred times. The Palladium became an NYU dorm. Christ! Can you imagine if they all still stood? How old would that make us? CBGB's, though once seminal, still stands and hasn't supported a non-referential act in over a decade. Last call to define the genre boundaries of the bands that play its stage closed at a hardcore matinee in 1988. Of course, newness isn't an essential element of goodness, but packaging redundancy and selling it as newness is reason enough to support that new lease. Yes, love our northern minds for studying the ways of the south, the nos, by trying to officially make CB's "ours", but pity us for being stuck in the classroom still unable to get down to the curb. Eager to get the nos we've tried to lose the tal, yet you need them both to form the word and there are other ways to fill the valley than leaving all the ruins up. The air holds memories as well as the soil does. If we buried CBGB's in the soil of the Fresh Kills landfill rest assured the ocean air would breeze across Staten Island as it does now and bring CB's and all its original smells back to us everyday. CBGB's is everybody's now. Time to offer her up.
So aged Jersey rocker Little Stevie of E Street Band fame has been spearheading the movement to preserve CB's with the inane claim that "it's the last rock and roll club in the universe." Good god how my heart aches for all the good people behind La Sala Rosa in Montreal, The Earl in Atlanta, Kafe Kult in Munich, Mono in Glasgow, The Replay Lounge in Lawrence, Kansas and the myriad other crusaders across the globe losing money dealing with the petty idiosyncrasies of musicians because they believe in it when they have the nagging option all along of just turning on the jukebox and simply selling booze. Muddy Waters is spinning in his grave embarrassed by the hacks that consider themselves his offspring. Muddy Waters was tearing walls down, rockers, not putting them up. Where was Little Stevie in 1971 when Caetano Veloso released the song "Nostalghia (That's What Rock and Roll Is All About)"? Where was Little Stevie when Tim Yohannon led a parade of casket bearers carrying effigies of hippies down Haight Street proclaiming the Death of Flower Power in 1967? And could Little Stevie have possibly made it through school without reading Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" wherein the revolutionary grip of music causes infidelity amongst the refined against their greater will? Tolstoy managed to never use the words "rock and roll."
Yes, it is time to close CBGB's, but more importantly we should applaud ourselves for at least debating it. In debating it we've created something new; a debate where none would have existed in the past. And seeing as this debate truly is something new, I propose we offer up this newness as our appropriate eulogy to the newness CB's once spawned. We're looking back to our musical past for advice and it tells us to start a revolution towards the future, but to tear the building down is contrary to our architectural past which is on one hand ashamed we tore down masterpieces like Penn Station but proud we're rebuilding it in the future according to plans similar to those of the past. In other words, it is October Fifth or thereabouts today and I expect it to remain this way all year long. Savor this transference of Muses on our trip home because if things work out we won't remember it when we arrive.

{Postscript: In the summer of 2008, despite two years of benefit concerts and protests, Thalia's comedy overlapped with Clio's history and the doors of CBGB's closed for good. Thank god.}

Historics Bio & the "Infinidelity" 3 x 12" series

I wrote this for Historics:



Everyone needs to see some sweat, but there's a fault with where we think we need to see it, due to this hard-wired Protestant work ethic that's still trying to cool things down. It's got us thinking we have to see you sweat before we'll believe you really mean it. But what about divination? What about gliding with the gift? What about finding the faith to believe some people are just tapped conduits channeling this stuff out with Jedi-Mind-Trick ease? This is where Don Devore's deftness is so dope it can have the affect of arching back around the curve of things toward being a disability. 'Cause really, how can you believe this guy isn't behind the scenes sweating it out like the rest of us? I mean, maybe he is, but if so, he does it like the savvy gentleman that doesn't really exist in this age outside of Graham Greene novels; which is to say, if he does it at all, he does it in classy secrecy.

The first time I met Don I played a Thanksgiving Day party he threw at some three-story town house in Central Philly. "Hey man, come down and play a party," was all I got from him first. Upon arrival I found a massive spread with cranberry sauce, stuffing, savory pies from ye olden tymes, weird beers brewed according to Ben Franklin's own personal recipes, a decent p.a. in the living room, a packed house, and not an exclamation point on Don's face. For all I knew, this was just how this guy lived it (except when he mumbled under his breath, "I actually prefer Thomas Jefferson's brewing methods"). Nothing about Don gave the impression that this night was any different than any other; nor that there was even a finger lifted to make it happen; nor that any worlds involving the spectrum of things between oxycodone and lawn croquet (or both together) would seem discordant to either nun or non. No, the dude just channels it and you follow. Always has. I've seen him play in Ink and Dagger with make-up on his face in front of 700 sweaty kids in an industrial suburb of Detroit. I didn't flinch. I've called him up to jam, only to find out he's in Melbourne recording a Souls She Said album for the week. I didn't ask. I've arrived at parties on the Lower East Side at like 11 am to find Don both bartending and DJing whenever he felt moved in either direction. I just accepted the drinks and danced. And whether there are or are not sacks of money following this guy around seems beside the point. Like a proper diviner, it appears like he's operating aside from even that tectonic.

Part of this particular brand of divining is a Gertrude Stein-like craft at curating the ever movable feast -- and that goes for not just Don but everyone in this band. In fact, it was Mickey Madden from L.A.'s Maroon Five that first envisioned how this puzzle should congeal. One might think Mickey’s already being busy with music non-stop would render the dude spent, but it doesn't work like that. When more is really on it always makes more, and if only the goodtimes weren't so fast that we could actually remember how they happened, I'd ask Mickey which cocktail lit the lightbulb that said, "Don, tonight we do not go to that party, we jam with Josh instead", Josh being Joshua Grubb of Austin’s Vietnam. So add to that trio of puppeteers the hard-to-catch wandering myths (that somehow got caught) of Ryan Rapsys from Chicago's Euphone and Dale Jiminez from Philly's Need New Body, and so begins the writing of "Strategies For Apprehension", on both coasts, in studios ranging from the sun soaked Sunset Sound studio number 2 (already made famous many times over by the likes of the Doors, the Beach Boys, and Zep, etc.) to Earl Greyhound's rat-infested Dumbo basement studio in the dead of winter. All the while the studio doors remained perpetually open with a collage of helpful hands and ears that might look like puke if you put all those colors together on one canvas at the same time (I'm sorry did I say punk, I meant puke)-- you just have to accept that these things happen casually, don't ask how, I tried. You stop asking when Don tells you he hooked the track up with Kool Keith at a chance encounter at Sundance when Kool Keith was transitioning between his Black Elvis and Black Warhol stages. Word dude, word.

Anyhow, it's also beside the point for Historics -- and this is where this sort of channeling bends all the way over the curve to a disability. Historics are not Rasputin-like augurs working to bed the queen and topple the empire (I mean, maybe that too, but first), they just wanna make perfect sounds and when the bliss is this guided no one will or can say no to the pursuit thereof. But listen, now I'm just looking to write this bio for reasons that may be obvious to you and me -- to convince people that they must, must, go forth and seek "Strategies For Apprehension" -- but this is not so obvious to Don. When I tried getting out of him what I deemed to be the proper info I intended to use to pique your interest, he instead took me through the entire album track by track describing where aerosol spray cans were used in place of a hi-hats, or how fat fingers hit heavily on a floor tom with a blown out mic sound like thunder, or why at some points it's necessary to run to Radio Shack and just buy the cheapest mic you can find. Dude, girls don't care about that stuff. There's a cover of Queen's "She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)" on this album along with a cover of Sub Society's "A Lot Less" and they flow with the spectrum of pure Historics surrounding them like they were always just there, you don't ask how. You just sweat it 'cause it seems like it always was, like these songs were already here and just needed to be tapped. There's sweat here yeah; it's yours though, not Historics'.

And Egads! In August 2009 RVNG Records will be releasing a 3 x 12" Historics series. Mark McCoy is on the art, here's my part for the words:


Infinidelity
Part I


For awhile nothing happened. Fantastic excursions to amazing maize mazes with spiked cider and Dutch mansions with 400 hand-carved pumpkins upstate with couples Nick knew from academia; extended-hour museum galas with proven German djs and home in time for sober fucks with familiar hands that had figured out just how to slap me; pasta a casa in front of the tv for marathons of “Locked Up Abroad” and gossip; weekend strolls through the barrio with endless drool dripping from the corner of my monkey boyfriend’s mouth as we passed every Dominicana ass which I always balanced with something like, “I might not drop my pants for the entire Greater Antilles, mon amour, my tastes are a bit more selective, but I would and will do every last one of your friends and you‘ll never know, so who’s up?” So perfect that when one of us failed to tease jabs about infidelity for a long enough gap we assumed the other must be concealing something. This wasn’t an obsession of ours, more like an exercise in honesty, like c‘mon, after a complete spliff and an hour in the frankincense and culo drenched Iglesia Dio Poderoso we‘d hit up some Sundays, are you really gonna tell me I’m the crazy when I explode on Nick after all he had to offer was “do you have to find Faith to be the drummer in a church band?” that he must be hiding something because he hadn’t mentioned a single Dominicana ass all service? The drummer! Right, he was paying attention to the drummer when there was a swaying chain of three generations worth of Latinas who knew Dio loves the way they paint their threads on so tightly as to better facilitate His views of the fine work He’s crafted (at least that was Nick’s logic during what I perceived to be more honest times). I mean we were perfect. The cosmos had lost their frigidity, the homing pigeons homed, if the grippe grasped me I wouldn’t have flinched, and the confinement I once dreaded at first snowfall had given way to cozy with a capital Comfort, which is all to say we were veering perilously close to that nothing that consumed all our other “spoken for“ peers, those time-bomb relics of slavery. Nothing. Serendipity (when it came) came with a smiley face. Night had a destination. When New Yorkers walked fast I really believed they had someplace to be. This was solid. There was nothing I couldn’t do with him, nothing I couldn’t bring to the table, no chamber he wouldn’t let me in, I need only ask. Thing is, I didn’t always ask, neither did he. Knowing we could was enough to make curiosity feel like one fluid breast-stroke. Fluid, that was it. Even our fights were fluid. Slamming bedroom doors, storming out of bars with half finished beers, and poverty even felt fluid. Rare bouts of paranoia even felt fluid. Everything was breast-strokes. When the apartment was silent I no longer heard the Fear. Yes of course, “thank god” you say. I’m with you, the Fear blows. But to not even hear it when you know it’s there? That’s some frightening shit. The Fear slices, hacks, pounds, haunts, and terrorizes -- but at least it engages. This other thing, this residue, this seeming handle on things, stares up at you expressionless from your empty brunch plate, deceives through keeping plans, patiently replaces your frayed ends one by one with fauxly-synonymous fantastical encyclopedia entries. I unplugged the refrigerator because it hummed. I picked up my phone and frantically avoided all my impulses to call Nick (he'd become my go-to when I was scared), shaking the phone with nervous tears in my eyes staring at the number that memories-of-phone-calls-past had morphed into another image of him, I kissed the "Nick", turned the phone off, hid it in a nook in the couch, and left the apartment. To save this relationship, to highlight our chafes, to connect through tatters and pulsing vulnerabilities, to keep the breast-strokes blissed, I needed to conceal something. With a secret between us we’d be closer to the knowledge that the knowledge isn’t ours. I needed to conceal to remind us both that something is always concealed.


Infinidelity
Part II


But now which avenue to choose? Since I was bubbling with ballz I thought about sneaking off and scaling Mt. Shasta alone to bring back some light through the lie (‘cause there’s that other conduit to the Fear through light, remember? The kind that reveals via the limitless vastness of the first summer days when too many options flatten into one grand inconsequentiality, where any path taken leads to a marvelous story, so what‘s so marvelous about that?), but no, no Shasta for me; passing the couples along that trail searching for the Fear in tandem with matching t's and posturepedic rucksacks would divert my attention to a bitter and very non-transcendent impotence, or whatever the girl version of impotence is, implodence? I could leave him a note saying "Babe, I'm off, I'm out. Try to not overunderstand my need for freedom, try to sweat some, try to let it bite a bit please, Yours" and hole myself up in a hotel room until I’d estimated he'd found the Fear again and, not knowing which road he went down (be it jealousy, suicide, moving on, worry, muting, rationalizing) I’d thereby work myself into my own palpitating horror wherein paranoia would bring me close to that fabric I sought. Can't though, can't impose the pain, that assumes some safety-netted interconnected “we’re in this together” support which is exactly what I’m trying to extract myself from. I could get a nose job or ass implants and return perfect, so perfect I’d conceal through the flaw which is lost for good and more impossible to recreate than a perfection. That would fix him fucked! But then the Fear would be ever present and overt and let’s not forget I only seek this slit so I can return back to a more well rounded breast-stroking. This is the same reason why I can’t just run down to the candy store to drain my retinas pale with complacency. Regardless of what they tell you, no one’s ever gone down that route and returned home, they remain elsewhere even (especially) in sobriety. However, they do sell things there that make you hyper-aware; I could conceal through accuracy and come back with my eyes bulging bright hanging on his every word! Still, could I really take credit when a guide led me there? No, I had to re-find the Fear myself without any vice as advocate. I could become an expert on something on the sly, maybe entomology so he’d have no idea I knew all there was to know about all those little creatures feasting off his filthy flesh flittering about him, my refocusing on the little guys would make him seem huge and who doesn‘t want that in a lover? Think about how lonely he’d feel if ever I was to bust out that I knew everything about katydids. That would bring the Fear on a‘ight, but it seems like a trick and tricks wear off. I needed something with a constant subtle sustain that I could never risk leaking. I thought about immersing myself into the icy healing waters of the River Béarn with no illness to heal only to therefore emerge hypothermic where others find Creed and wither in some Pyrenees bath retreat for months, backwards backwards backwards into history -- when you wander through those ancient villages don’t you feel eyes following from their shaded windows? That could be me! And what a pure way to conceal, simply by sticking a twig in the spokes. But nope, know why I’ll never do it that way? ‘Cause that way sucks, and I’m psyched on things. When I get back to that fissure I wanna greet it with a cackle not a cough. I’m finding this Fear again, I’m bringing it back home, and I’m getting off in the process -- not just for me, as an ode to us as well: Nick wants me happy, not miserable. Oooh, the Fear already tickled a trickle in once I’d made up my mind I was seeing this thing through. For a heartbeat I even thought that was enough, I proved my point, done. But no, no way, the only way to secure it was to live it. Up until this point my head had done all the walking, now it was time to lay her aside. Well, one more job for her before we parted ways; I stopped by the pharmacy on my way there to buy the same bar of soap Nick and I share at home so I could lose the trail in lather later.



Infinidelity
Part II (I Mean, Really)


So now which avenue to choose? I thought about how often I regretted snapping at Nick that he only thinks about one thing. “One thing!?” he’d flip back, “One thing?“ and his eagerly inflating eyes would elate with the rare opportunity I’d just opened up for him to expound upon the fantasies he’d been harboring on this One Thing, “I think about little ones that get me pitched like a quarterback ready to receive the hike, and formidable mounds that position me as a lumberjack at one end of a heave-hoing saw prying open the sequoia’s base, and quick ones in public bathrooms so I can continue conversation at the bar with you, and lengthy one’s that give me something to talk about at the bar with them, and white ones that spent as many centuries under clouds creating diversions to kill the time that inevitably lead them to twisted obliquities off course as I have, and brown ones…and the brown ones!” etc etc until he’d hammered it in stiff for me to never ask that question again. And then the aftershocks he’d hit me with blocks down our jaunt, “…and the brown one’s that though sapped of pigment by the Februaries in New York we’ve all shared together are still not what you'd call white, and the short ones…” Fair enough, so which “non-one thing” would it be then for me? A Nick clone so I could examine nuance through similarity? A beast so I could limit my confusions that it might be about anything else (I’ve always envied hideous gay men for this reason, pure hole with friction)? Or do I take it when I’m least needing it to approximate that same purity? Or take it when I absolutely need it to approximate that same purity? Or one of his best friends I could walk arm and arm with at a later date with Nick present and Nick think nothing of it? Maybe even call our potential into question via a sexual joke to ensure he’d think nothing of it and conceal through transparency? With a close friend all things are possible; I could have close friend text Nick that he’s boning a skinny bitch like his chick and ask for pointers and see what Nick comes through with and see how close friend then acts them out. I could extract a small fee from close friend, something nominal like 40 bucks, just so we can notch that one off as well (and how much you wanna bet I could up it 10 bucks every time thereafter once I got that ball rolling?). Or what if I went with a man with a face of no coast? Could I implant a sea about such a face or would I be the one who walks plasticed with prairie? Foraging the fridge of a man with the face of no coast in a banana strap and no panties! Or along those lines, what about a man that looks like he knows no one? I could just grab a guy like that off the street. To smear across my belly the seed that spewed from a spring with no outlet for story could be one precious story indeed to keep; one that would bleed into fiction before I even started to sweat about keeping it a secret, and thereby one I’d need to do again -- remember, I need that secret. Or should I orchestrate a “swap” that isn’t a swap at all? That would be some multi-pronged assault with concealment: find my meat, tell him he needs to find a complimentary chick for Nick that he’ll pretend is his girlfriend and call it a swap and see if Nick ever catches on that in fact it isn’t, just four people fucking. Or is it not the who but the how? Do I in fact want to leave tracks that he can find and then chew him a new ass when he suggests I might be up to something? Men are such steadfast retards with their reasoning that without substantive facts he’d eventually sell-out his proper intuition laying it aside (as much as he could) for the “facts“. I could freak out on him about it! Blame him for paranoia about ever ever insinuating such a thing knowing the whole time he’s right! All I need to do is build a solid case in my defense and he’ll sell his own gut right out for reason. Or I could do something purely for me, something that wouldn’t torture Nick at all but that he thinks would; I could grab an ex, someone who knows my body but whom I also detest (as is the cases with exes), do it strictly for the bone and the breach. Aye, this is far too much jurisdiction to allow my head free reign in, she being the fabricator of those calcifying non-secrets, when it’s her grand collection of things that’s threatening to appear like some discernable picture that got us into this precarious state. No, I just need to leap. K, just one more job for her before we part ways though; I stopped by the pharmacy on my way there to buy the same bar of soap Nick and I share at home so I could lose the trail in lather later.


Infinidelity
Part III


It’s incredible how little time it all takes! From buzz of the doorbell, to the stairs up to his flat (Jesus, another flight up? How am I supposed to fake any semblance of cadence?), to his opening of the door, to full on, through cigarette breather, to return to full on, through cuddling like we knew each other, through showering and the lingering molassesed infinity from the turning off of the faucet to having to peel my mind away from that image of the bar of soap I was leaving there, and then the drink together at the bar next to the bar that Nick sometimes goes to, what, was it even three hours? Best yet, our return to civility at that bar revved me up all ready to go again -- which of course is when I re-invited my head back into the hang to ensure the go-again would be with Nick when I got home. To return to that persistent statistic with a million epithets, scarlet letters, and inferred approvals within the respective sexes, that old fail-safe paradox that still bears such dripping fruit after all we’ve dredged her through that never ever ever dries up, to be just another faltered number while at the same time feeling like a vital viral piece working towards a more sinister unraveling gets your incisors bleeding ecstatic venom through the panthered panting. Venom? Venom, from the love-potion pricking goddess of beauty and love herself, Venus! And from where else could such a name come other than the Latin “venire” for “coming”. I’d succeeded at putting all the pieces back together again, all these words that once danced together around the bonfire in more closer-to-the-ground-living times: “amare” is "to love" in Latin, but a couple letters away from “amarus” for “bitter”, and hence always tinkering with/teetering on the “amoral” -- and “amorire” was “to kill“, baby. Really, have you ever savored placing your house key inside the lock and turning it? How ’bout even noticed it? How about fidgeting in your bag for eternities looking for those keys amidst the tampons, wallets, make-up, pens, gum wrappers, business cards, and assorted black matter? On this day it was religious, all of it, the two block walk from the subway home even had weight, felt like it meant something, the creaking open of the door to the hallway light that’s always on that no one needs, the quotidian menus from “Great Wall” slipped under the door that daily find their way directly to the garbage, the pallid glow from the tv that somehow blankets its dampened hues into the most light deprived cavities, the perfume of whatever sauce Nick was up to over the stove, all of it. My “Hey Cad” welcoming home together slap on his ass and subsequent big smooch had it all too, the complete pie, everything, which is to say that finally the all-out terror I’d lost now made up a gigantic piece of this puzzle again and his attack of my lips for a more curious second slip in meant the fibers of secrecy do ruminate! He tasted it, he liked it, he needed it, he didn’t ask about it, he didn’t want to, he needed it. I know I know, in time the Fear will (better) find its sweet spot on the bell curve sleeping snuggly in the convertable's backseat while we cruise up front with a wall of breeze between us (I’m no fool, I know the sensation of its presence will also dissolve in time like it had before and we’ll be back where we started; kinda can‘t wait), but for this moment at least I was trembling only slightly above hysterics with the idea of Nick at that same amazing maize maze that so bored me last fall disappearing around that same bend of corn stalks as something now no longer corny but frightening, freezing, my god petrifying because now I could touch it again, that one day he will in fact disappear behind those stalks. This horror was birthing some potent breast-stroke desire, and quickly. Maybe go to the movies together manana? And his stale colleagues from academia who’d never connected with a single thing their entire lives unless there was a published reference point functioning as mediator? Well their glacial separation from the rips, the cuts, the tears I was suckling like a fiend exposed their lack of abandoned joy as in fact the most brutal articulation of the Fear I’d witnessed yet and I could not wait for another excursion together. Call ‘em up Nick! And when we breast-stroked that night I felt a slight resistance in my wide brushes, little shocks as reminders to hold on tight, tiny snaking sizzles cautioning that none of this is mine, and again I found myself back with a man that I did not know, will never know, and yet whom I love and know unlike any other nonetheless. Fluid, that’s it. Fluid like the fluid that’s not only moving towards something, but also running the hell away from something else.

More on Knowledgeful

In White Pigeons Vera and Chris sat next to a family of Basques at a Burger King near 14th and 6th in Manhattan and decided that the word is "knowledgeable" rather than "knowledgeful" because true knowledge is nothing stable, it exists in a state of flux and lust.

If I'd moved to Italy before I wrote White Pigeons my tempo would have changed and that book would have never been written; conversely, it would have been impossible for me to move to Italy until that book was written. Two working titles for the book were "A Stroll with an Explosion" and "Can't We At Least Sculpt This Purge?" so you can see how you'd have to dive deep into a Napoletano or Calabrese dialect to find suitable translations in Italian. I opted to sculpt those explosions a little.

If these two versions of me somehow did manage to coexist though that passage would have been ever so slightly longer. Chris would have said something to Vera like, "Yo! How much you wanna bet that "noleggio", "to rent" in Italian, and "knowledgeable" are related words. We're just summer renters, aren't we babe? I mean, if we weren't we'd get this seasoned life over with and move to the tropics once and for all, ne? Wait! wait: "to season" and "seasons"?! The seasons are assassins the like French assaisoner!"
Vera, "Chris, yuck, don't...and anyhow the word "assassin" comes from a different land where there were never any seasons to assassinate."

More on "Gran Raccordo Annulare, You Spin Me Right 'Round" and "The Sword in the Sheath"

As Beniamino Ambrosi and I began editing "Gran Raccordo Annulare, You Spin Me Right 'Round" and "The Sword in the Sheath" for their inclusion into Feathers Like Leather it was clear that neither was going to be one of those magical pieces the writer only need usher along, pruning here and there while the he waits for the piece to miraculously wrap itself up neatly taking credit when its done. No, these ones wanted to keep going. They became monsters we spent more time battling ceaseless barnacles off of than tending to the sails. New, bigger, stickier barnacles kept calcifying at every turn just when we thought we'd finished. Well dry dock the boat, you say, but that would have just killed the stories. "Gran Raccordo" and "Sheath" must always remain wet. In the end we left you with the most streamlined version the topics could afford, all along knowing we'd need to find a place for the accruing barnacles at some point somewhere down the road. So here we go.

For "Gran Raccordo":

-- Throwing a middle finger up is called "flipping the bird". As stated in the essay, Italians call their member a bird. To communicate the same sentiment flipping a bird does for us, Italian men grab their crotches, i.e. their birds.

-- A man who eats a bird would therefore be considered gay. A tasty bird to eat is a pheasant. Italians therefore call gay men "pheasants", which are "faggiani" in Italian. If they are in a rush, they could call them just "fag-".

-- A duck in Spanish is "patos", again, a synonym for dick; just one letter away from "patois", the language of the dick. Otherwise, most languages refer to gays as ducks, yet/and ducks are one of the only birds with dicks -- and not just any dicks, dicks 20 to 40 cm's long!

-- But Wait! Both English slangs for cock, "woody" and "pecker", were once part of the same word, "woodpecker" -- a bird! Though, truthfully, "pecker" could have also come to us through imitation of "pecado", Spanish for "sin", or via the "prick" to "pick" to "peck" chain. "Prick" has always been used for "cock". In 16th and 17th century England women even used "my prick" as a term of endearment for their boyfriends.

-- a sparrow is a "passero" in Italian and hence, being a bird, also a cock. However, Italians feminize it to "passera" if they want to refer to a pussy. Sparrow and passero both come from the Greek "aspera" (wish) and earlier "aster" (star) from the Proto Indo-European sper, a starling. By the time the root made it to Germany as "spar" it was "to break off" and by the time it made it English it was "to box" and by the time "box" made it to American English it was yet another synonym for pussy. If a passero inside a passera is not a boxing wish wherein the end result is things breaking away from the participants involved, then the thing we are speaking of does not involve passion at all, just passing. And a sparrow is not one of these birds with dicks. When sparrows conjugate they therefore place star to respective star, they "wish" upon a "star".

-- If you still don't find the articles before "el coño" and "la poya" respectively shocking after reading Gran Raccordo, try referring to them in their pronoun form instead; tantamount to calling one's penis a "she" and one's vagina a "him".

-- "Fashion" shares the same root as "fica" (pussy) and "fuck", from the Latin "facere" for "to make", but though it looks like "fascinate" probably does not share the same root, it may share the same root with the "fag" we get from the Latin "fascis" for "a bundle of twigs". "Fascinate" once meant something more akin to "bewitch"; to get back to the knotted root, picture a witch whispering spells over a cauldron she's stirring with a bent stick.

-- Though we generally think of a sycophant as an ass-kisser, it also has its roots in The Maker. A sykon in Greek was a "fig" and phanein was "to show". A sycophant is therefore someone who "shows the fig". To "show the fig" you place your thumb between two fingers creating what the Greeks believed looked like a vulva -- sykon was also "vulva" in ancient Greek!

-- "Geil" means "horny" in German and Dutch, but kids use it to mean "cool". Seeing as "cool" is something often exclaimed, the stress comes immediately: "GUY-l!", which sounds like the way Italians pronounce "gay".

-- Like "la poya", "la pizza" and "la cella" are other feminine slangs for cock in Leccese and Marchigiano respectively. However, Italians switch back to Standard Italian when referring to them in pronoun form thereby restoring them to their proper sexes. If mother tongued English ears were to hear an Italian say, "ho tocato la mia pizza, l'ho tocato" it would translate as "I touched my lady dick/pizza, I touched him". To English ears "pizza" comes in triangles and pies with red sauce and is therefore a synonym for pussy, but the sense in Italian is that pizza is only something a maniac could deny and hence an effective plea for putting it in the oven ("fornication" comes from the Italian "forno" for "oven", which became "horno" in Spanish who have the tendency of adding h's to things which means that by the time it made it to the North it was "horny" as well as "oven". The logical opposition to this etymology would be that "horny" comes from "horn" which comes from "corn" which is mais is American, wheat in English, rye in German, and antlers in Italian -- all invoking the same protruding imagery we associate with horny. Doubtful though. The idea at the base of all of those is "kernel" for "hard shell", same root as "cranium"; not perfect, but when one puts hard shells from protrusions into the oven things do pop. Plants have many roots, one days words will too).

-- A logical pursuit on the heels of "el coño" from the "icon" and "fica" from "facere" could lead one to "fica" as "the figure" then, but you would be selling her short. The subtle difference between an icon and a figure is that a figure must have a form. A form for fica as synecdoche of everything is too limiting though. "Figure" does not come from "facere" like it sounds like it should; "figure" has been a "figura" since it was the Proto Indo-European *dheigh for "form". On the same lines, neither "false" nor "fake" nor "fiction"(all with separate roots!) come from "facere"; if one thing can not be make-believe it has to be The Maker.

-- But if men are naming the parts, "el coño" from "con" as "the not, the opposite" seems properly primitive.

-- Or if God's calling the shots, women as Satan's vesicles by which to tempt men could give us "el coño" from "cunning", which comes from the German "kennen" for "to know" which brings us back to the All Knowing "Maker" again and, again, we are growing less and less confused by the article gender confusion of these words. If "cunning like the fox" draws its "cunning" from "coniglio" for "rabbit" we're beginning to see how Brits find an excuse to slip "cunt" in between every other word in a sentence also.

-- I mention that the Afarian word for nipple is "dikika" but that I had yet to hear anyone call a dick a nipple. However, I have heard clits called nipples and therefore, by extension, seeing as we discussed many words that mean "dick" in Italian but "clit" in English, we are almost at completed cycle.

-- Let's call this addition "Three Lefts Make a Right, Three Links Make it Tight". On the never ending saga of how all things left, back, and bad come from bent, and all things right, forward, and good come from straight, I draw your attention to the German "links" for "left" vs the English "link" for something used to hook things together. Both "links" here are related to bending yet not related to each other! However, our word "slink" is a top runner for best bad left curvy word and an immediate derivative of the German "link" for "left". Now, if you think I'm way off base with all my amblings through twisty-curvy land, stew on "articulation" whose Latin roots came from "separating into joints". "Gelenk" is "joint" in German, related to our word "link".

For "The Sword in the Sheath":

-- The night after I concluded the essay with "words, swords" a couple other things came to me during my celebration.
Unrelated: quality of dancing rides a bell curve from African-American to African proper with all other shades falling in between. Cockiness had me hitting the dance floor jet black, which quickly exaggerated to a flaming giddiness after the first cheers, which when then totally toasted turned to my best recollection of the accompanying moves to Meatloaf's "Bat Outta Hell" which wasn't playing, at which point my blood-sugar levels sent me soaring into the throes of a Yoruba conniption.
Related: Deep in this dark trance Orisha spoke to me, "If sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you, then sticks and stones must not be words, which we know they are, which means they can not hurt you either" and my fever broke.

-- Between the Latin "ex" and the Italian "s", the Spanish negate with "es" which, consistent with the paradoxes that occur when one detaches or attaches Latin prefixes to words, "es" is also "is".

-- Therefore, (S)pain's relationship with (S)Iberia is made magnificent with "España"!

-- And speaking of Spain, one of the examples I used in the essay to communicate the confusion that ensues when a Latin article attaches itself to the host word erroneously over time was "inverno" (winter) vs "inferno" (hell) if assuming both words draw their lineage from "forno" for "oven". It's the end of March 2009 now and seeing as I am in New York and not Italy, I revisited the names of the seasons through Spanish ears rather than Italian -- where one jarring difference reveals an incredible truth: "summer" is "verano" in Spanish, not "estate" like Italian.
That is, "primavera" is therefore "before the truth", prima the vera.
"Verano" is "the truth".
("Otoño" is from an Etruscan root, not a Latin, so forget it."Vernacular" is also Etruscan and looks like it should belong here, but it doesn't, yet.)
"Inverno" is "against/not the truth".
And if the truth apparently occurs when it's warm, none of this negates my seasonal etymologies from the "oven" where we put things that are "seasoned".
To think, up until today no one was sure where the word "simmer" came from. Glad we've finally summed that up.
The "ver" sound found in both words related to "verita'" (verity, very, the straight truth, etc) and "versus" (vernal, verde, and things that bend and turn, etc) have been kissing cousins as far back as we can currently trace words to their Proto Indo-European sources, or should I start saying springs? No wonder the more "verse" I dedicate to this matter fails to set it any straighter.

-- But back away from the immediate post-Latin Spain to the immediate pre-Latin Greece where much was once known and then lost again as the wide brush of history mandates. In ancient Greek, an "uncovering" (i.e. a "fuck" and a "scopata") would have been an apokalyptein from whence we get "apocalypse" in case you were skeptical of the gravity of this matter! Apo in this case serving as the "un" means that rather than doubling the prefix to get us to the ever salacious ununcovered(ish) ex-fuck as we must with the Italian "exscopata", we can take our cue from the Trinidadians and dance around this slippery topic with the aid of streamlined "un un-ed" calypso, from the Efik phrase ka isu for "go on, continue" as we know things do anyhow, so go on, continue.

-- But how could we have really been expected to bring all of ancient Greek's info along with us through the ages when they were so ruthlessly relentless with their unloading upon us of such complex riddles? Riddles that they themselves never got. Was there ever a king of the Aegean who didn't expedite his fate by misinterpreting a Delphic vision? I mean, they called themselves "Hellen" afterall and we're expected to just overlook the glaringly evil root therein? Or did they see "helle" as they do in Germany where it means "bright" -- a marked improvement from the Latin "Graeci" possibly meaning "grey", and one can imagine hell's fires generating quite a bit of light therefore making a euphemistic attempt at reversing one's ill fortune of spending an eternity in misery could be to see it as "bright", a possibility. But I'm not buying that, last I checked Greece represented something quite the opposite of hell to most. Or maybe that's just it; they called themselves Hell to dissuade invading Persian armies! If Xerxes and the leather-clad Scythians from barren steppes would have made it to the land of sweet figs and fermented grapes the Greeks would have never gotten rid of them -- send mis-info. Or maybe their advanced understanding of the endless cyclical astral peek-a-boo game led them to the same word play this (equally endless) essay can't move beyond: "Hell" comes from the Proto Indo-European kel which meant "to cover" like the shell on the outside with a hall on the inside the hellion in the cell is counting down the days 'til he can stick his helmet back in; um hello, what is covered now will be uncovered then and vice versa world without end of exscopatas.

On Black Flag's "Louie Louie" and the Death of Debate

This will be out in a future Heartworm reader on Black Flag:

At an early age my mother recognized my means of putting it all together was by taking it apart first, coming to my conclusion on things by abutting the whole with its pieces before I'd allow myself to become a proper believer. She waited patiently while I tore apart a box of tea bags on the kitchen floor separating the tea from the bags into two huge piles and then sitting perplexed at the uselessness of the two without each other in tandem. In the end, she salvaged one intact tea bag and held it up to my nose and I giggled. One Halloween I painted myself instead of the pumpkin because I thought it a better arrangement for the pumpkin to be put to bed while I waited on the steps to greet the ghosts. My parents took a Polaroid of my paint-drenched body next to the naked pumpkin and showed it to me adding a "doesn't the pumpkin look lonely that way?" to drive the point home. Not enough. It was the maple syrup I loved most about french toast so I showered in it one Sunday after church thinking this way I could lick it whenever I wanted. Rather than scold me, knowing scolding just gives us an enemy to rebel against, my mother waited until my father came home from his parish meeting to clean me up, giving me ample time to learn the lesson myself. By the time he arrived it was impossible to assess just how delicious my maple caked skin may have been because, neglecting to account for its adhesiveness, the history of inedibles I encountered between the pouring of the syrup over my body and the lashing about in sticky frustration had now formed a second coating my tongue could not penetrate to taste. When my father found me he donned me "sticky" and the nickname has stuck ever since, like a lesson I repeat over and over again refusing to learn: things are stuck together, whether I take them apart or let them be, I should just believe.
Nope. Though gradually I am increasingly zeroing in on all out believing and know I'm getting hotter and hotter by the day, it's never come easy. I have all the faculties to line up the evidence affirming the obvious that, yes, I'm most certainly of this place; yet why don't those mathematics bring with them comfort? Why does the base still feel so unstable? And it's not just me! Look around! All sorts of things are freaking out uncomfortable to be here like they have any other choice.
I wonder, if instead of my mother encouraging me to explore the things I didn't understand she pushed me to pursue only the things that inherently came easy (if it's allegedly all sticky anyhow Mom‘s, what would the difference've been?) would I have been a bigger Black Flag fan than I am? This isn't to say I'm not a Black Flag fan (hold your horses), I like 'em just fine; but growing up I felt like there was that comfort level in their dissent I couldn't jive with. While my angst was embattled in martyrous jihad, dissent seemed to come to Black Flag, and by extension their fans, comfortably as yet another inextricable piece of the whole. When I threw an egg at a cop I did it in the name of justice and Rites of Spring and Econochrist were my soundtrack. When sharing the same carton of eggs with a Black Flag fan I felt like they did it in the name of pure splatter. I'd construct my manifestos against the priests using a precise combination of words recently plucked from a vocabulary textbook as a foundation from which carefully placed vulgarities could then leap off of striking with sacrilege, Dag Nasty and Youth Brigade were my soundtrack. I remember the Kosciusko brothers (both Black Flag fans) arguing with me that ideas, and by extension arguments, did not have to come in the form of words. I hated them yet we skated together everyday and passed mix-tapes back and forth.
At the time the differences didn't seem so profound, just a subtle hue change in preference. In fact, I always appreciated the Black Flag fan's contributions to the mix-tape. They worked well alongside the songs I plucked from the socially and aesthetically awkward DC punk scene whose uncomfortabilty felt congruous to my concept of (lack of) place. Black Flag's "Louie Louie" stands out as a song at the time I remember both not computing and loving at once. When the mix-tape rolled to "Louie Louie" it was like a cue to set all the serious 360 nollie backside hand grab heel flips aside and invent some real gay shit. This is when step-off tricks would be momentarily pardoned, everything without a name became a "backside shadrack", caveman slides could be done with one's butt on the board, it was legal to slide your deck into another skater to fuck up his trick, and the execution of a perfect slappy reigned supreme.
All the fun during "Louie Louie" doesn't mean I got it in any permanent way though. Frankly, it seemed pretty stupid to me. I was still too caught up breaking down the whole into pieces before I could accept the whole. In my mind there were a series of retarded events leading up to the whole that stood at odds with the core of me:

a) Of all the cover songs Black Flag could chose from to cover, they chose "Louie Louie".
b) Not just once, but enough times to actually take it to the studio wherein they spent money rerecording a song that has already been rerecorded a million times.
c) This is early in their career (1981) and they're wasting their time like this?
d) They'll then spend even more money releasing the thing.
e) Of all the records duchebags can buy, enough will buy Black Flag's "Louie Louie" that it makes it onto mix tapes at least one coast away.
yet
f) the Dischord catalog did not offer me the same follies.

I've since come to understand that "Louie Louie", in all its incarnations both past and future, is the best song ever written. Not even the Gin Blossoms could fuck it up. But by the time I would've been cognizant enough to go back and reassess the Black Flag catalog, other things had already filled the burgeoning gap that was so nascent in the days of those first backside shadracks. Falling off skateboards hurts now so I use Martha Graham to keep my awareness of empty space in check (and fine, to form arguments without words). And when the anthem was killed once and for all after the last vestiges of puberty finally burned off, I was free to find house music (and yes, all the silly subgenres therein). Discount it if you need to, but Black Flag's "Louie Louie" is both responsible for and stuck to the same piece of twine that can lead one to house music and modern dance. It may be taking me a long time accept the validity of all elements (in my heart, I got it in my head), but with "Louie Louie" enlisted as both substance and rebuttal to substance of my every move, I know I can't lose. Try it yourself! Keep “Louie Louie” on the tip of your tongue to be used as a response to whatever they throw at you and see what they're left with. No way! The only response to "Louie Louie" is more "Louie Louie" and we all win.

Saints Senza Sense

I wrote this intro for the fiction anthology, "Santi: Lives of Modern Saints" on Black Arrow Press:

Six zillion pages later would you please come back and reread my intro? All I get may be these few lines, but I wrote this thing out on my hands and knees longhand, with water not wine, feeling like I was that guy they talk about when the guy with the black eye says "well you should see the other guy." These words may be short, but they're slow puffed with heavy breathes. You have to come back, It'll all look better then with bruised and blurry eyes like the ones I'm wearing now. And when you get here think about that day when you were twelve and wondered if since lesbians don't like boys and gays don't like girls could they maybe then reunite at the final bend of the circle and get it on? And then keep moving to when that same line of reasoning completed its own orbit years later and you got stuck on the word "sacrilege" and wondered how a "holy (L. sacrare) holy (L. religionem)" could possibly come to mean its own opposite. You wondered if holy over holy cancels itself out, leaves you with a void, voids are dark, dark is bad, hence "sacrilege" and for a moment you forgot again whether gays and lesbians do get in on with each other or not. So six zillion pages later and not a shred of evidence of any lives of modern saints, in fact mostly the contrary, and finally the battle I lost to innundation blurred the words the way I was meant to see them. The lives of modern saints is a bunch of lies of mai derm s'aints. These things just don't exist (they aint), they also have that Italian s' negating prefix biz and they never (I. mai) have skin (Gk. derma) as things that don't exist tend to not have. Naturally, a book dealing with lives of things that don't exist thrice is gonna be a book of lies as well, no? But you can't devote a book entirely to lies without at least proposing a truth to break from. When everything is lies it flips on itself, so how's it go? If someone tells you they never tell the truth they're lying, right? The sentence cancels the idea out. The crux: I'm beaten by this equation the Black Arrow fam's laid upon us despite the fact that initially I was following it all fairly well. Years ago that holy over holy negation got me thinking about the "san." If San Cristobal is literally "without Cristobal" I figured it meant "he who is not Cristobal" like "he who is so holy he's transcended his name." I was on it up to that point. Even through "Heiliger Christophorus" I was still doing fine. Heiliger simply meaning holy and holy and holes as things that cancel themselves out to transcend to form a whole was still an easy enough ride to follow. It all started to fall apart with the Italian "santi". Not only do we have the negating "anti", but trying to follow if that negating "s" prefix negating the negating "anti" means the saint is or isn't who he says he is crunked me up once and for all. It was then I tried running to the French saints for clarity on this negation equation only to find that not only is their "saint" still locked in a double negation, but it especially seemed antithetical to everything I've ever believed that the word "aint" could be used in both Metz and Mississipi. Maybe the Louisiana Purchase has something to do with it, maybe the racists that ran Metz when it was the Vichy capitol being cut from the same genome of their Southern brethren has something to do with it; either way, I was losing track, which is also to say that six zillion pages (and a cd!) later I'm finally beginning to know something of the lives of modern saints.

Omitted in this introduction because I surpassed my word limit long ago is the connection between "san" and "sand." Again, after the sand on the shore what lies beyond? nothing. And does not the "sandman" take you to the same place as the "saint"? In Old High German "sand" meant "true." In Old English a "sand" was "a messenger" which is where we also get "sense" from. Does anyone need to be reminded therefore that "sin" also shares the same route? And so like sands in the hourglass...

My Namesakes Rule

Check out This
Chris Leo
and this
Chris Leo
and this
Chris Leo
and this
Chris Leo
and this
Chris Leo

More on Vinum i Aqua

In regards to 'Where Cherry Blossoms Breeze Past Lotus Leaves' in 'White Pigeons,' I thought I went through every volcanic cluster, graphing combustible passings in the Atlantic where the margins of moment get their edit on, but really -- what fun would it be if I didn't miss the keystone entirely!
In Madiera (so I stumbled upon too late) they pray on the precipice of the Holy Ghost! In Madiera, an island whose name is etymologically tied to "matter" worships the piece of the Trinity with the least representations thereof! Cheers to Christianity for gracing us with an inbetween more enigmatic and religious than any other faith on the globe! It both makes up for and explains the filler surrounding it. It is the Holy Ghost that perverts the Catholic and aren't we all happier for it? And Jesus, does he not come to us in the form of a flaming tongue? How how'd I overlook Madiera! Yes, I say extract the Holy Ghost from history and God would have abandoned us long long ago, for it is hardly an overstatement to proclaim the Holy Ghost IS/AS faith. My namesake, St. Christopher, patron saint of both travellers and the Irish-gypsy Travellers, was decanonized in 1969 when man landed on the moon. The Church, having learned nothing from Capernicus it seems, thought man travelled blasphemously too far, too close too the heavens, which leaves me blowing in the wind amidst Cherry Blossoms and Lotus leaves. No worries you see, I'm happy to let it go, but do we need to continue meeting in the middle See; i.e. I'm taking the Holy Ghost with me while I renounce my faith. And yes, this would all be enough to cement my argument about times out of time, but of course as I speak of Trinities I also know that all things come in twos and thus there was even more I overlooked about Madiera: from the days of scattered outposts to the birthing of our wet nation, all wine supplied to America came from Madiera. Their fortified port built our fortified ports, unless we were drinking home brewed meads and malts. Washington loved beer. Jefferson and Franklin loved port, and when push comes to shove I choose the latter bunch. We drink wine to transubstantiate into Trinities and in order to transcend this matter we must first admit we're also made way way of it: the Romans believed to enhance an orgy properly one need only mix 1/3 wine with 2/3 water.

Artists on the Verge, A Van Pelt Bio in Two Sides

Inside: Stances (scroll down for 'Outside: Circumstances')
The Radioactive Orbit of Brevity and Almost Is




During a New York Times interview for an audio series on New York City raconteurs, the interviewer asked me who my peers are, and as I was rattling off the list of my typical dudes, a glaring theme began deciphering itself to me for the first time: though my friends may be as varied as anyone’s – painters, architects, teachers, designers, lawyers – they’re nearly all involved with the making of music in some small way, as am I. So, duh, this might seem so obvious I should’ve picked up on it from the get go, but thing is, I do my best at avoiding facing music head on at all costs. I try monitoring it sideways with my periphery, keeping it at an arm‘s length. Kind of a don’t ask don’t tell policy between it and me. Like the sun, though reading it through its reflection off the moon might not seem like the most direct source of info, if you look dead on in going straight for the goods it’ll be the last thing you’ll ever see (I drifted off for a couple of seconds here in the interview, getting into “my peers” and “peering into the sun“ and if peers are so called because they let you peer into them and that‘s always something combustible and fiery like the sun and the Greek pyros for fire, i.e. to peer is to burn? The New York Times never called me back and never ran the interview. I think this is where I blew it). This is to say that music is second bliss or near, but definitely not first, for all the people I move about easily with.

For some of us though, myself included, music wasn’t and isn’t always allotted to second bliss. If we fail to surveil it properly it can sneak itself right into first bliss despite our repeated appeals for it to ride a bit behind. In fact, I even think we're unconsciously inviting it to: if Leo’s are extroverts in need of constant attention and hence perfect fits for the stage, and music is as demanding and needy as the most insecure Leo, it would seem the pair needs each other and we therefore need them to be needy in order to ensure more giving. For the rest of us though, placing music at first bliss is too much. We need to desecrate her like the bitch asks us to or suffer the consequences of post-coital praying mantis fodder. Like the metaphor that is not a metaphor, music is heroin when it’s first bliss and all the other awesome drugs when it‘s kept in second. No need to elaborate further on the pyrrhically proven love affair between those two when they are not a metaphor, but when they are a metaphor it’s still not much different -- you find yourself living in windowless practice cubicles on the Gowanus Canal with a membership to New York Sports Club just so you have a place to brush your teeth and take the occasional shower (I sealed the deal killing the New York Times piece by already taking another aside that jumped back a few lines here while at the same time rushing ahead to the end of my thought: if Leos “fit” on stage and the stage is a place where one throws and induces “fits” and junkies always need a “fix” and I am arguing how gravely unstable the Truth music brings with it as first bliss is, then to “fit” into a “fit” sums up why I try to keep music at least in second place). In second place we make music that people can actually enjoy, music that (dare I say) might even make people smile. In first place you wipe ’em out, blue funk, deep fall, take me take me into the abyss stare out the window at the lone pigeon on the adjacent roof as your French press worships, beckons, and accepts the pervasively murky c’est la vie this sludgy morning. Say who? I wrote this poem in response to a Leonard Cohen song:


I’ve Got My Own Ghosts/Get Your Own Ghosts
Is this really what you wanted,
To listen to a song
That makes you feel
Haunted?


Hell no! I wanna dance and get laid and laugh and point at people when they trip and shout doo-wop nonsense WOOOOOLLLLLY-BULLLLY from the top of my lungs with whatever costume jewelry I just stole from the chick who ran away with my blazer as I zig-zag my bike like a pathological shark across the Willis Avenue Bridge all the way home! Visions of Suzanne and Harvest Moons I forsake you. Where’s that gonna get me? It’s gonna get me finding weight in everything. Oh we’re so weighty aren’t we, us poor poor pitiable humans! No way, not me. I yearn to be public domain like the elements already dictate I am *. The weight’s a false weight, I tell myself as often as I can. But when it baits me with “everything is” I agree and bite and then it sacks me with “then nothing is false” by which point my gills are drying out and there’s a hook through my eye and finally it guts me with “then weight too is as heavy as it claims to be” and music has hijacked me yet again which is to say that when music has writhed its way into first place, there is no second place. There is no other drug.

In a self-flagelling way I suppose one could make a strong argument that it did get me here so I shouldn‘t be so wary, but I never would have made it if I was an all out junkie keeping it in first. No, I’ve been on the William S. Boroughs diet with it, an on again off again for eternal youth that’s rendered me seasoned enough to know that regardless of what I proclaim or protest, I can never be off off off (which is to say in permanent second position) with it. In fact, I’m writing this in the wake of a Van Pelt practice for a reunion show at SXSW 12 years after we broke up. Initially excited to revisit the rockin’ songs that should have had the right amount of ignorance in them to get me where I need to be (with it in second place), I find myself instead moping down the street thinking about our song “Let’s Make A List” wherein nothing ever happens and when it gets to the chorus, even less happens. I am destroyed and wallowing in it, wanting yet not hurrying to put music back where it belongs so I can move on and maybe even dance tonight. Moping down this street with the muting "List" in my head, contrary to my whole M.O., I start writing bitter poems in response to my response to that Leonard Cohen song, like this little piece of acid:

The Scoring of Pity
Poor Shane McGowan
With so many friends
"A kinder soul there isn't!"
Is a blunter of his ends


As a second bliss though, music can actually help the other arts. This is why I think it’s that common thread amongst my closest friends. It serves as an essential agent of novelty, brevity, and rhythm that keeps our primary callings in check from running away with themselves. With novelty: there’s still no recipe for creating a good song, still no rational defense as to why we like the songs we do, and still no reason why it should please us to hand our moods over to the whimsy of music to juggle as it wishes. Allowing this element of chance to contaminate our other arts keeps us tapped in to nimble lightness. With brevity: songs are respectful of the necessary reciprocity between art and outside influence. The brevity of song allows for a taking from the outside world and a spitting of a regurgitated product back out in perpetual cycle that fireside thousand-page tomes do not. Brevity respects reciprocity as all art should. Keep moving, brevity is reciprocity. With rhythm: of course we all know there are no such things as flat lines or dead ends, but it can feel that way upon emerging from an exhaustive (egotistic!) piece of prose. Lyrics and poetry welcome rhythm in integrally to affect the essence of words in a dramatically highlighted way. This can serve to venerate, tease, sync us up, or simply draw attention to the broader language riding beneath it all. And anyhow, anything that makes you dance -- as music as a second bliss does -- solves everything across the board.

On the surface we knew this with the Van Pelt. Our songs almost don’t exist at all. Our set lists already arrived at the encore after the 6th song (and that was only on paper, we never actually played the encore, just liked toying with the idea). We hung out together often, but still maintained separate lives. We remained in NYC because, though there were a million other American cities in the 90’s that would have better suited us as a band, we believed it was the everything else of NYC that kept this band vital. We wrote our best album when there were no original members remaining yet no one ever thought that meant we should franchise the band out into a never-ending Menudo twirl; we buried the band when it felt right. We were novel, brief, and rhythmic like the recipe dictates yet we still found ourselves, our songs, and eventually even our band consumed by music. At the peak of our career we broke-up mid-album. Applying the same protective strategies music offers to our other arts to also keep music itself in check, turns out, doesn’t work at all and I suppose anyone who reads this sentence over again will be immediately clear on why it implodes. As aerodynamic as we stripped it down to, it still got heavy. In fact, the more aerodynamic we made it the heavier it got. Tough lesson to learn even though things almost always work this way. If I hadn't stop eating meat when I was fourteen would my palette have ever expanded past the typical American fare? And would the English language have wound up with the biggest vocabulary in the West if we hadn't torn out the excessive articles and conjugations that weigh our parent languages down? Conversely, extreme heaviness always approaches the spherical form until lift off into orbit.


I look back on “Nanzen Kills a Cat” as a foreshadower I missed. Midway through the song when I say “on top of the world, think about it, there’s nothing” that was my way of saying “there is no something in nothing” and conversely, by the song’s end when I say “eat my body’s finest and tell me how it tastes” that was my way of saying “communion tastes like boring bread, and shit will always be shit, and there is no nothing in something”. By trying to whittle it down to the bare essentials I got myself all tangled up with no room for any second or third blisses. Years later I lived Nanzen’s mysteries in a chronological order that played out comically. I took a pill before the sun set, said goodbye to all my friends, asked them if they had any messages for grandparents or dead dogs, and ran and ran and ran and saw it all, every bit of it, and it all felt the same. By the time the grand vision was wearing off I found myself at the old Pan Am terminal at JFK watching airplanes disappear into the sky. I knew I was losing the info when I snapped, “wait, they really are going somewhere other than here and we‘re not going with them!” Worse, as my lymphatic system tapped my intestine for every last drop of anything hydrating it could find, my gut was left with a universe of condensed little spheres and the Bang was about to happen all over again. Shit was still shit and I was back where it all began. The big big and the small small, note to self: abandon the endless preoc with harpin’ on this ish.

Part of knowing once-a-junkie-always-a-junkie is protesting it nonetheless though. I wrote this passage for my short story “Serengeti”:

The stage is never the highlight of my night. Honestly, I should
really quit music once and for all. After the stage I’m either too
upset that we didn’t play well enough, in which case my night is
ruined, or too wound up in my head with rightfully ridiculable artsy
existentialism if we were on fire, in which case my night afterwards is
also finished. The only rare self-pleasing balance my mood ever strikes
is when we were very very good, but not quite incredible. Very very
good makes it possible for me to continue with the night post-concert.
I’m neither depressed, nor am I feeling too creative to do anything
other than make more music or write, I’m just right, ready to drink
and dance and the shite. Still, I think this means I should quit. There’s
no balance in this for me. For example, when I play with rockers they
want me to teach them the parts. I tell them to make up their own
parts, feel it, intuit it, collaborate. This just leaves them thinking I don’t
have it together. However, when I play with jazzbos they tell me how
my own songs go. They tell me when the changes are, how to hit the
notes, when to open up, when to tighten. If I try to give them direction
they tell me I’m not feeling it enough, not intuiting, not collaborating.
To jazzbos, the song is already written and we just need to channel
it. Is there not a compromise? No, if my ultimate goal therefore is
to perform only a par or slightly sub-par, semi-collaborative show
but not be too bad, good, open, or tight, I should just be playing
cover songs and flirting with trashy girls whose feelings I don’t feel
responsible for afterall. Those girls are somehow more comfortable
with their human-being-as-object side while remaining Catholic
anyhow, whereas the girls at my concerts often believe they aren’t
in fact objects yet they remain in that object-friendly collegiately
atheistic counter-church. I love their idea. It’s scientifically ethereal.
Like if we were to probe the border between human beings and air
with the world’s smallest microscope to the nano-degree wherein only
atoms were perceivable we’d be able to fly straight through people.
In one side and out the other. That would make my fans correct, they
are therefore technically not objects, just cosmic mirages. But then
nothing is an object and the next thing you know we’re bound up in a
semantics war and no one is getting laid. No, for now let’s stick to our
loose definitions: until we’re able to walk through walls, we are all still
objects. I mean, somehow I feel like the tactic of arguing that if you are
not an object and therefore I too am not an object either and therefore
you are not a “girl” object and I am not a “boy” object and then
neither is your crotch and then neither is my cock so why can’t we
put all these non-objects together and continue digging in on our nongender-
specific-an-atom-carries-no-sex subjectivity wouldn’t get me
anywhere would it? Following this reasoning it would be fair to argue
that infidelity is just a matter of degree then, as the universe expands
we are fidelitously separated, but once it starts to contract it’s just a
matter of time before my cells meld with her cells and I just cheated on
Benedetta with her best friend, a sofa, the State of Nebraska, the ass of
an eagle, well with everything as the universe infidelitously calls all its
atoms back home. And these girls are worried about letting me get too
close now!? In a million years we’ll be so close you won’t even be able
to tell us apart!


I let that quote drag on after the relevant point was made only to illustrate the contagious ramifications the burning-itchy-skin discomfort of rolling with music as first bliss brings. I rant for ages on getting and not getting laid only to find myself at the same old end of Nanzen again, while the dj that night probably just snapped his fingers.

And we can't end this convo without addressing the bizarre human phenomenom of watching music that sits about as well with me as equating sex with love. I've never understood what I'm supposed to be looking at when I go to a concert. The rationale that to like a band's music is connected to the enjoyment of watching them perform it has yet to be convincingly articulated this way. Be it Francoise Hardy or Pere Ubu on the stage, I can't get out of my apparent levelheaded rut that only understands music as something we in fact listen to, not watch. This makes me both the last guy you want to watch on stage and the last guy you want to go to the concert with. My god, I envy the fervor though! It's that same fervor that rallies the kids to keep seeking out and creating new music, I just didn't come equipped with the same voracity for it. Instead, I'm a sucker for the written word from the debased to the sublime who, yes, has pissed many a real day away for vicarious play instead held captive at the whimsy of even non-writers' writing like Dan Brown. Why? Because it's my form, plain and simple. If music were more my form I would accrue a grand collection and zip through songs endlessly that would then get my brain into the code thinking of other bands to download into an endless flurry that keeps things light: again, heavy makes light. However, I'm the composite that discovers just a precious few musicians a year, latching on desparately listening to the same songs every day forever. Me and Kate Bush won't leave each other alone like the neurotic couple who lets no outside influence in creating a paranoid spiral down that kicks the bucket over as soon as the cow yields milk. Oh oh oh, here we are back at heroin again. With the word I'm a vigilant slut who could tag team Daisie Marie and any fat sow with equal vigor. With music I'm the dedicated boyfriend who impresses quick out of the gates but whose obsessive steadfastness and moral fortitude bores the girlfriend for the same reason she loved me months earlier.

I know I'm wrong, some of the most basic musical words involve vision: the difference between "bass" (from Oscan "basso", same as "base" for low note) and "treble" (from Old French "treble" for "third" part above the melody) is expressed in distance. Like sex and love (maybe) the defense of music as something to be watched wins its case on examples, not theory, and this is where I falter. {Edit: When I emerged from writing this article Sunday I needed some fresh air so Laura and Madeline accompanied me on a walk across the George Washington Bridge at sunset. On the way back home we passed by the United Palace Theater, second biggest theater in NYC after Radio City, and were lured in by the endless stream of tail entering before us (though I may have offered a different excuse as why we needed to go in). Turns out, it was for the "Spanish Service" mass wherein a chain of about 80 Latinas held hands swaying back and forth singing to the almighty Signor Poderoso at the base of the stage while smoke machines, twirling nymphettes waving marching band batons, a chorus of operatic lungs fattened by fast food, a live band, and a doyenne belted it out center stage beneath TWO movie screens showing images of Jesus Christ being both crucified at times and shooting the shit like he too is just a dude who eats chili dogs and drinks the occasional corona on a hot summer day like the rest of us at other times. No ritual slaughter seance happening simultaneously in the Matto Grasso could have been more ascendant. Without an ounce of booze in our bodies we then floated drunk down to St. Nicks Pub in Harlem where everyone is a star, where Billy Holiday got her start, where the black band on stage called me a nigger (second time this season it happened to me in Harlem; first time was when Obama won the presidency and I made the mistake of applauding McCain's dignified concession speech, but this time it was a compliment! The only other time in my life I was called a nigger was by an Indian from India so I don't count it.), where even if you were white you were entitled to free homeade banana pudding, and where the party was razed to ashes and back up again when the chantreuse wouldn't let anyone loose as she wailed "I will wait for you I will wait for you I will wait for you I will wait for you" and though her body and mine had very little to do with each other I was plotting all sorts of convoluted strategies to mount it. Only way out: 'nother round of drinks. By the time we finally managed to peel our souls stuck via sweat in the dead of winter off the plastic furniture coverings, it was too late to go home. One more stop for Hennessey and live bachata at El Presidente where the four eyes the three of us were donning by this point were not enough to take in all the opposing physics happening at once on every Dominican body: faces, stoic as the ice outside; waists and knees, 1 and 2 and 1 and 2 and; asses, lava lamps on coke! Home: a three person, one canna, youtube best-dance- party-evah conclusion to the evening. By the morning, all the snow was melted and spring was in the air.} Without that articulated reason at the base of all the definitive examples I just can't get on board though. To get with yous, I try telling myself that the pleasure one derives from watching music comes from an addition of two concurrent novelties, which therefore creates a third. As we got into earlier in this essay, music by nature is novel, so when music is then played live the course of the song too becomes unpredictable making it even more novel and this is where the third must be birthed. The problem with this theory is that it remits me back to where I wanted to quit music in the first place; if the performance is flawless then I just found myself looking at nothing on stage. So put yourself in the shoes of a performing musician! People pay and give up their Saturday nights to watch you fuck up. If you don't fuck up, fine, they'll tell themselves they liked it anyhow; but if you fuck up in the wrong way you put on a bad show, if you fuck up in an intended way you've just blashpemed your art -- there are apparently right and wrong ways to fuck up here and hence, I (am desperately trying to) opt out of this madness.

So this means I have to quit again, I guess. Not yet though, there must be a hit in this band somewhere. Have you ever heard our song "The Speeding Train"? It comes so so close to a hit. Gotta hop on that bell curve and nail it next time.


* This unfortunate malady has been leaching away at me since Powell Peralta released their skateboarding video "Public Domain" in 1988 wherein every terrain was held theirs to carve up. Problem is, skateboarding is a bloody art that leaves shreds of tattered flesh and freshly reopened scabs on every curb and park bench they grace -- so who's property is that? The skateboarder's who just lost it, the groundskeeper's who has to clean it up, or the elements'? And if something I built that was still mine when I woke up this morning becomes public domain of the public domain in but the blink of an eye one's mind starts to feel both owned by and ownership of everything. My heart, however, is in no way near accordant with head on this.



Outside: Circumstances
A Tribute to the Unreadably Overdesigned Raygun Magazine (R.I.P), the Who’s-Fleecing-Who A&R Guy (R.I.P), and the Young Idea (but not so fast! If George released another masterpiece it would have been called “All Things Come Back”)


NYU freshman wearing Dag Nasty t gives nod of approval to NYU freshman wearing Simple Machines "Cog" design hand-screened thrifted button-down. Make friends the next day when wearer of Velocity Girl t's jaw drops agape at the other's faded out "Seven Sisters" era Shudder To Think t. Just saw a delightful tourist say "Aww, no thanx sir, I don't do thayt!" Just saw a homie get a “Quality-of-Life” ticket for blasting Stevie V's "Dirty Cash" from his boom-box while walking through Washington Square Park. Hate it, both sides. Thank God Wu-Tang came along to salvage said sitch‘. Thing is, what’ll be had of the guitar and live drums in this age of turntableism? Are we both the youngest and last real band left in New York City? That is, a band that doesn't stroke its communal jazz patch to Glenn Branca's and Wharton Tiers' 100 guitars? You can understand our preoccupation with making recordings sound "live"; though the logical line to follow is live-is-live and recording-is-recording, for a spell that wasn't so clear. Assuming we make it through the Y2K crash, will the world have any use for anything other than djs anyhow? NYU just got a computer hall and I was taught how to search for things via "Alta Vista" and send notes to people via electronic mail. Heard of new veggie resto with break-away staff from Angelicas Kitchen who opened a place on 20th and 6th but can't find anyone to venture above 14th street unless there's a show at Tramps or a shoegazer band at the Limelight or a $10/hour nude modeling gig at the School of Visual Arts. Took my first student teaching placement at PS 261K way out on the Bergen F stop in Brooklyn, a Yemeni neighborhood where children wore head scarves and played kickball in Reeboks. Went to get a space cake at The Kingdom across from the Hell's Angels on 3rd Street only to find it shuttered. Weird. Pick up the Post that morning, find a map of 21 other targets Giuliani's goons trashed last night. Sharing the same page with the "no goats may saunter three paces within a spittoon" there was a cabaret law stating no more than one person at a time can dance in an establishment that does not have a dancing license. Create a task force and enforce it. There are tanks on 13th Street and copters above and the squatters are waving banners that almost say "David Dinkins and your Crown Heights Riots, we miss your political impotence that kept us free!?" Can’t get close enough to see, let’s get some free Krishna slop at the base of Thompkins instead. It's yours gratis if you promise to finish you plate, have to, food's already been offered up. Met this culty named Lucas at a hardcore matinee with Lifetime, Another Wall, and American Standard at the Anthrax in CT who’ll be dishing out the dal. Always had to ask what the powder was because brown sugar was masquerading as socially white for awhile, whiskey had yet to be offed by tequila as the official city drink, and microbrew was still a good word. There’s another burgeoning strip club zone away from Times Square down in desolate TriBeCa where girl bass-players work when not on tour. Check it, Drew Barrymore put her clothes back on at the Blue Angel last week and The Harmony won't accept waifs over 110 pounds. Let's go, Chinese New Year is happening right around the corner and firecrackers smoke up waist high red clouds and you can play a chicken at tic-tac-toe in the arcade on Mott. Let's go save Neil after, he's drawing dots for a conceptual artist on West Broadway all day and the only way he can make it through is by listening to Mingus. After a Strong go in the 80's, Australia is finally toppled by New Zealand as Down Under go to. Man, I live all the way at the end of Grand Street in the Baruch Houses. Even though I have a balcony and a garden with a swing, can’t get no one to make the trek out here. Only “Vinnie” in his real pink Cadillac and the brain freezer he claims is weed oozes down the street. So far removed, when I met Hasids in the lobby they'd "welcome to the neighborhood" me. No, the farthest anyone ever ventures is to this place called "Planeat Thailand" in a little storefront on the first stop of the L train in Brooklyn. Knew some pioneers with brutal dogs and windowless lofts on the Lorimer stop, but their parties were full of scowls and art that demanded industrial decibel power tools, not for me. Christ, under the wrong moon how many times did we find ourselves running for our lives to and from Life Cafe' on B and 10th, muchachos? I ask the clerk at the Bodega on 11th and C for coconut Tropical Fantasy soda, "No way man! Makes Latinos and black men go sterile, haven't you heard? We have weed and milk though." Barry London and Dave Baum told me they needed a bass player for their band called "Soma" so I visited their rehearsal in the basement of the Brittany dorm. A girl named Ellie who dated the guy from Junction was drumming but she kept stopping when she wasn't feeling it. Soon she was gay for a bit but still slept with Dave just becuse he had one of those "Prince Alberts" on his prick. I didn't get it. Played my bass with a quarter like the dude from Ned's Atomic Dustbin if he was in Jesus Lizard, Dave was a very late era Gregg Ginn who brushed shoulders with Randy Rhodes at a Bad Brains show at The Whiskey, Barry had a Big Black t and an Assuck patch on his man-pouch but out-reverbed Dick Dale and I swear at least one baked semiotics major loved it. Told them this Neil the drummer guy I met at a Hoover show at the drummer from Born Against’s house in Westfield, New Jersey could prob make it through a song. I think he asked someone why they needed to run out and buy whole wheat pitas for the hummus and garlic when there was bread already in the house. After practice, to Max Fish where for one year only, even though we look like we're 12, we're able to drink before Rudy begins dusting off these law books. It was a djs job to be pretentious, fuck Can, we're talking Amon Duul soundtracks to movies that were never made and Beefheart flexi's from vintage zine's only available from the clerk who stepped out of 8 Ball comics at See/Hear in the basement on 7th and Pretty Things were briefly better than Led Zeppelin. The Van Pelt never played Brooklyn. Heartattack gave our album a bad review and someone else made fun of our dueling strats. I saw Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson at a gallery in SoHo that was fusing digital and analog technology together into one “lazer needle” and spun records made of beeswax! What to do about this band Cathode Ray with Brian Maryansky and Sean Greene? We need them. I know, stop by Angelica’s take out window where they both work, grab some bread and spread, and feel ’em out before we snatch 'em up like we did with Toko from Fermina Daza, and like Blonde Redhead in turn then did to us and my older brother did with Sean and Jets to Brazil did to Brian the second they were all free agents? Jordan’s working at Limbo Café. Free espresso all night. Party on the Tascam 424 at mines till the sunrises thereafter, make tunings we won’t remember to fit into ensembles with antique typing machines and vacuums conducted by Sun Ra from his studio on Mars. Thank god we called that album, the one with the Seam song followed by the Sonic Youth meets Blue Oyster Cult song followed by the Ian guitar with the Guy vocals one followed by Boss song as sung by Three followed by another Seam song followed by the Charlatans song as played by Boy era U2 as sung by Jackie from the Dust Devils if she were a lapsed Catholic still trying to shake off a bad case of the morals, thank god we called that album "Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves" because for every influence we were aware of that we tried to keep at bay there was another subtle latent one we couldn't hear sneaking in. But thank god too there seemed to be a grace saving counter balance wherein what we went into as Soundgarden came out Firehose -- we once even had to rename "Dream Theatre Song" to "Superchunk Thang" after hearing our demo of it. Learning to play an instrument bares some fruits mastery does not. Thank god we believed we would be something, otherwise the costly pay-by-the-hour practice space rehearsals fueled by coffee to get the job done and dream would have been weed and beer strewn basements with solid gear we so envied in Baltimore, Richmond, and Dayton. Let's move to Worcester! We can make it cool! From there we can lay siege to Springfield, Holyoke, and Brattleboro! Booked a tour via phone. Buy a tent when they all fall through. Break your wrist skateboarding when you’re killing time. Wait what? Some kid in Kalamazoo likes us? We’re there.

Stop. Blizzard of ‘96. Total halt. Playing pool in the basement of a billiards hall on 12th street as the snow falls and falls. Announcement over the loud speaker: we are under quarantine until further notice. Vietnamese gang stabs homie who tried to step to. The City of Amsterdam just paid Rudy to talk to its police department? Table by table the officers questioned us. The storm stopped everything, but we had no idea then it would be the last one ever. We were the last table to be set free. Except for the echo of the officer's voice in the empty chamber, silence everywhere as the snow fell in sheets. College done. Like the fruit that fortunately does not exist between the plantain and the banana, we were no longer green enough to fry yet not yet sweet enough to just pluck and eat. No more F-1 visa for Toko. Blacks, Jews, and Koreans had agreed to disagree so no more savage streets. No jerk booths within 500 feet of a school meant nowhere safe to vent for Catholic priests. And where’d all the steady girlfriend’s go? Know mine married the regular who'd visit her everyday during his lunch break for a $20 lap dance. You got a free laptop from your web surfing job in Silicone Alley on the condition that you show your face at your company’s three week 24/7blowout “ABCNBCBSyonara” party? But how come no one in my band did? We paid our band funeral bill in $4.99 increments everytime we stopped by a gas station west of the Mississippi and bought a "bargain best of" cassette by the likes of Wings, America, The Guess Who, and The Moddy Blues. In fact, I think such thrift and desperation has us logged in as the only band ever influenced by the other Procol Harum songs. Spent the early 90s dodging industry agenda to mold us into hit makers, but by the time we were moving mad units on our own the only label that was still talking to us was the one we couldn't even get one "quarterly" financial statement from --ever -- our own label, Gern. One time he did give us each $50 checks and two vegan pizza pies he made himself to get a tour started right. Oh and once we did ask him if we could swap "quartely" for even just "annually" and if not, then even annually for "once" would solve a few things. His lawyer responded that it was us who owed him for unpaird merch. Shit! Who let it leak that we'd be doing it for free regardless! Gonna sound crazy, but I gotta leave the city guys. Can’t afford it. Moving to Williamsburg instead. Practice out at my folks place in Jersey so we can stretch the practices out and dilute those dreams. Seems like the radioactive relationship of our individual varying influences is fizzling, but if it really did fizzle would any of us have had the energy to break up? Breaking up takes action and action takes energy and better break up just in case. Fleetwood Mac was one of only two bands I ever wished I was in. The other was San Diego's Heroin. I suppose if their are reigns to reel in, there must be a beast at the other end. This new “Sultans of Sentiment” album is a bummer anyhow even though everyone apparently loves it. Wait, everyone's a bummer, of course they love it. Who are these new faces at our shows? Bedhead, Blue Aeroplanes, Talk Talk, Scott Walker types and kids who carry Celine and Bataille books with them they already read ages go. The better we get at playing these songs the more I hate myself. Thank god we recorded the album before we’d nailed them. This way I can still listen for the mistakes and near misses, otherwise I could never put that thing on. By the time we hit the Ruhrgebeit I was convinced some other force wrote "Nanzen Kills A Cat". When we returned the two note couplet signaling the closing of subway doors always felt empty without the third. I sang it silently to myself. Met a Cuban on the 42nd Street N/R platform playing the Irish fiddle. Made me skip two passing trains while I rapped with him. Had the gall to tell me "this is the beach." Wow! If an apparation with creds as solid as that guy's can be so embarrassingly wrong, there's no way I'm getting out of here easy.

Holiday Guitar

(Wherein the Title Character, Unable To Reclaim His Trinity, Straps Bells to His Thigh and Severs the Singing Synapse)


They were so bad that they never missed a note
The drummer’s hands flammed on command
While he filled at will over the beats of another drummer
With half his skill
And you know I miss their flawless skill

(Chorus)
How many songs do they know?
How many sets will they go?
Tomorrow night they play calypso
At the hotel down the road!

Babe, we followed that band from Johnny Canoe’s
In Nassau up to Finnegan’s in Maine
And what a treat when at Martel’s Pier at the Point
We bumped into them again
Yeah through races and states and genres and bars
They never let us down with that holiday guitar

(Chorus)
How many songs do they know?
How many sets will they go?
Tomorrow night they play calypso
At the hotel down the road!

It took us two days but we learned to slow down
You took the hammock, I took the ground
And as you rested above I scribbled one out
Inspired by Westin’s Wailers (or was it Surf Soundz?)
Then awaited a flicker of eyelash so I could read it aloud:

When I Wrote Upside Down the Inc. Dripped from My Pen

“After Earl Greyhound practice we stopped by Tres Palmas under the N near Ditmars para seis coronas and a conversation that began about our long overdue Food and Beverage diplomas inevitably led to The Holy Childhood and things that really matter so I found this melancholy manner which was more mellow than sadder whence I retreated to my Uptown lair to watch a dvd on Kingston streets and well it goes without saying that Vinnie made the scene,” said Matt the brat unaware at the time what he held in his hat – “Ah, to be twenty-three with a band and still sleeping with your friends,” said Jake who met us too on this Ave! Ave! Nue! I think it was Lafayette and Spring where we each converged from our thing, “See now I rely on strangers’ eyes, of which ten I’ve seen this month alone. Wherever I lay my hat is my home, and last night it was a condo her parents must’ve owned, and if all goes well I worked it out that I was not the one” – envious to some, but I did not flinch where others might have run, no I decided to hold my ground and tell the truth which is that “I laid behind her back for three hours while her will waited to speak and after three hours more she reintroduced me to her cheek. Three hours after that we held a very formal chat amidst jeers and guffaws from the days dimming rays as they turned to yawns and when three hours more were all that were left another forty from those we stretched, I swear, and then we finally made it out of that bed, put new sheets on, and climbed right back in.”

Expecting to impress I was met with a pout
Which in recoiling to our room escalated to a shout
So in accordance with the Empress the bard threw it out
-- Paper, Pen, Promise and Pact --
In but one faulty poem all her bags were packed

Now when I roll down my windows on a tour of my own
And shut off the radio to try and be all alone
My memories take me back to our favorite worst band
While we danced by the poolside and made out in the sand

(Chorus)
How many songs do they know?
How many sets will they go?
Tomorrow night they play calypso
At the hotel down the road!

More on Other Essays in FEATHERS LIKE LEATHER

On "Bread Circuses":

-- On the Father and The Son and The Word and The Body and The Bread, "figlio" is "son" in Italian, from the Greek "filo" for "thread", which the Greeks also call a type of their bread. The sense is preserved in English with "files" to keep track of ones fiscal "bread". However, a "file" is also something that cuts in English; the relationship between the Father and Son continues to phoenix.

Same theme in "Margaritas in Spuyten Duyvil":

-- On dethrowned and deseatful, "thread" shares the same root with "throw" evidencinging, yet again, that there is no removal from the sitch.

Same Theme in "Gran Raccordo":

-- Both "thread" and "throw" are related to "twist", you fag.

On Janus, the true patron saint of Ireland, in "The Needle on the Scratched Groove":

-- Though "Hibernia", the Latin name for Ireland, comes from the Gaelic *īwerion for "land of abundance", the Romans didn't think so and henced transcibed the spelling into Latin as a relative of "hibernus" for "wintry".

On "Baby, Baby, All The Date Blur Together With You (When We Are Anywhere But Here)"

-- "quick", like "merry" and all the other words for happiness that stem from a sense of fleeting, originaly meant "alive".

-- "Breakfast" in German is "Frühstuck" for "and early piece". In Italian it's "colazione" as in "to collect one's self". The Spanish is "desayuno" which means to "break the fast" (from the eatless sleep) and therefore the French "petit dejeuner" means "the little fast breaker". So what the English speaking world calls "breakfast" began as a "fast breaker", which one might imagine is a time to gorge oneself, yet sounds like a "fast break", which one might imagine is just a nibble for the road. The confluence of differening times and sizes is therefore yet another epitome of "merry". It's for this reason the Englsh speaking world holds the crown for doing the first meal of the day the best.

-- Eating fast food makes one large.

The Whole Note Has neither a Flag nor a Body

I’ve shed her she sheets
Down to the bottom of the bed
Opting instead to smother in the burden of
Were words, all dead
So confined by the constructs that
Conned her to our end
-- So bound now myself by the same aforesaid
That even her absence renders cleft the counting of the good times that were spent:
No addition can take place when the numbers are all numb
(stunned sums)
Yet still I’m tempted to admit how sad I am
If I thought she’d find it fun
Mute Muse, these lying lines
Are tattled by a tongue that weighs a ton
Bloated by blows of no’s
Deafened by definitions
That whittle wit down to its bone
And celibate her soul
What I meant has never been spoken, those were only jokes
And the pokes she misread as cloaken?
I thought I was powered to pause time uncoited
And so, look at this hack, it seems I have:
Love’s expense has imposed this sheetless sentence
Disengaged from both sound and seconds
Posed in punctuation that, though a breath, feels like a noun
At another angle an explanation, but to this degree a dash
Proceeding one after another, broken only by marbled stutters
Eeking essay of defemminate defame, like envying the professorial sash
Worn on graduation across a purple velvet dress
A silent siren distress
To mark the compromise between excitement and crass:
Up plus lull equals Dea gone null

A Visit From The Vague Angels of Vagary

I knew nothing of the myth of the Kievan Rus’ or the Jews of Birobidkhan or the Tuvans’ troubled booze, so I set my eyes on train tracked tundra spanning two continents, I mean pages, and I perused. When I awoke I was in the Ukraine, I mean Greenpoint, on the “G” so I swapped encyclopedias and leafed to IRT thinking it would say WPA or “The Great Mistake” when Brooklyn lost its City. Instead, nothing of the sort, no nothing even short, so I searched the web and as history ebbed I came up with only last year’s maps and MTA delay reports. The lack of info wore me out and once again I could not contend with my couch. This time when my eyes shut I was waiting with Keili on a platform underground and y’know what she had the gall to say to me? She said, “A tryst is not a trip unless it’s a tour not a skip” which negates the brief boulevardier and the romantic rue which is untrue which she knew, but she chooses to be stupid because she’s stupid through and through. Jen claims she’s too dumb to be manipulative so she’s a liar and a sneak. Henrietta can’t stand her too but has to work with her twice a week. That’s it, that nap was my last, afraid of what the next might bring, so I changed my shirt, unlocked my bike, and peddled across the bridge just in time to meet my girlfriend as she tallied up her ring. I was happy to see her that night and she was happy to fix me a drink.

Conjugation:

To you (formal) / to her (singular and plural):
“The Princess and the Newt”
To you (familiar) / to him (bro):
“A Newt Can Be a Newt, a Butterfly Can Be a Butterfly, But A
Man Can’t Be a Man, the Princess Won’t Condone Such
Constructs”
To you (plural) / to them (mixed):
“The Princess and the Newt”


As I was using a cocktail umbrella to clean out the crepes from under my nails, Maureen dug in, “evidence of absence is not evidence of absinthe” which meant I should know the difference between silver and tin, which I do, so I stood up to dish it right back, and predictably “crack” – the wooden garnish now impaled so I resat. “Coincidentally Chris, this is no coincidence” meant I should take the blame for every time I was late (and my height), so I began my list as I did every day with a series of apologies that will never be seen, I crumpled it up and threw it at Maureen. I said, “Next to your name you’ll find a song you should know.” She read what I wrote: “Calling All Men Between The Ages of 22 and 40, Calling All Men Between The Ages.” “Yes, if I recall the lyrics ran ‘Oh please, massage my feet’” and we fell back to sleep by 8:38.

Tanakh Liner Notes

Tanakh is an incredible band from Florence. I was lucky enough to write liner notes for two of their albums.

one, 'Ardent Fevers':

‘Ardent Fevers’ slipped its way into my pocket at some point after the show in Florence, in the thick of my stomach working through the pesto lasagna I ate hours earlier, while my liver filtered the “whatever you’re having I’ll have” in my cup, after the virus known as politics ruined my chances with the previously intrigued Croat at the bar, before the party on the balcony at Pietro’s flat became the balcony at Pietro’s flat where there was once a party and now only sunlight, a swarm of mosquitoes, me, nobody else, a few birds perched in mockery, and fulfillment remained, after three weeks of tour, and before another three. It made its way out of my pocket and into the car stereo when I just couldn’t bare Colin Blundstone, Kate Bush, or Amerie’s voices any longer – thereby committing three Cardinal sins in a row – because in a frenzied rush packing for tour I neglected the importance of collecting a thorough assortment of discs to get us through. I chose quality over quantity and sometimes the maxim does not hold true. You know, I remembered very little about that first interaction with Jesse Poe when he handed “it” to me and told me about the San Francisco literary mag he wrote for. I remembered less about Jesse when ‘Ardent Fevers’ didn’t make it out of the car stereo while Alex and I drove along the Friulian seashore stopping the car only for a brief walking stretch around the palace of Miramare where we weren’t sure, nor did we care, if we were watching the sky or the sea(so mira "to look" + mare "the sea" here equals "see" + "sighed") . Then, when we pulled into the Reeperbahn and parked the car to grab some gluwein at the Wienachtsmarkt and ride the ferris wheel overlooking the city before the gig, ‘Ardent Fevers’ paused once again when I shut the engine off and I continued to remember even less about the two guys from Tanakh it seems I may have met in another life. Finally, I successfully remembered nothing of the people (dare I say peers!) behind the disc still stuck in my car stereo at five am while I drove across the Oresund bridge before the sun came up, while it snowed into my headlights, after I just dropped Young-Ah off at the Copenhagen airport and headed back to Sweden to continue tour alone. A week later I was in Glasgow and confident that I had purged Tanakh down to a pure ethereal happening, unmanly magic, so I shot a humble email into what I assumed was the dark, that is to say the address markered on the cdr, yet not only was it answered, but it came back with a copious set of tangibles you’ll find listed somewhere in the credits within. Avoid the burden they imparted upon me if you can, listener! They’re gonna give you names, dates, places, and instrumental breakdowns of how this thing came to be. There may even be a way to contact someone involved. Don’t let boredom take you there! Don’t investigate this any further than you need to. What I mean is, to say that ‘Ardent Fevers’ is an album by a band named Tanakh is already more grounding than I care to stomach. Both the words ‘Ardent Fevers’ and ‘Tanakh’ will leave you as they left me within a listen or two. You will lose interest in what chords it was they played, what city they’re from, and how many tracks you’ve listened to so far. Unless you bite the apple like I did you should begin to doubt the existence of a “they” at all in time. I am meeting Jesse Poe at a bar to hand him these liner notes in exchange for a margarita today and I hope to never see him again. Wish me luck.
With you always,

two, 'Saunders Hollow':



Piecing together Tanakh from Manhattan places me somewhere elsewhere. With every new album I'm losing grasp on which direction they're hitting me from. If though, they've come here from Italy as Giovanni Da Verrazano did when he named our harbor Lago Margherita; and if they've come to me from Virginia where the Indians once spoke a similar Algonquin to the one once spoken here, the language wherein those first Italians were referred to as "The Salty People"; and if they apparently also now come to me from Saunders Hollow, the ancient bog in Old Lyme near the Connecticut River, the river that separates remnants of two continents that crashed into each other forming a part of Pangea that then refused to part ways when the rest of Europe went back across the Atlantic; if it's fair then that in light of my excusable disorientation I'm allowed an invokation of the homophonic sum of Lyme, salt, and Margherita that slurs out another homophone by the bottom of the glass throwing me into the Indian from India debate of samay, the art of ascribing ragas to certain times of the day, seasons, and holidays, I appeal to my divided Carnatic and Hindustani masters that samay has neglected to ascribe ragas according to place as well and hence renders Tanakh free to continue blanketing us across all senses. For this time of day, in this year, at this place, Tanakh makes music in concordance with whatever harmony we may chose to argue for or against. I love this band.

Magdeleno on the Beach

Magdeleno on the Beach can also be found sung by Yours on Jeniferever’s album available through www.disrecords.com , where it is known more directly as Magdeleno.


When the gypsy read my palm she traced down some line’s crease as it splintered and divided and then looked me in the eyes. “Your future is a bell curve which is the same as hers and his and hers and if you do not stress it it will not swerve. It will remain but a bell curve with a singular ring, nothing more than a ding. Whereas if you attempt to hold it back blockading its track its timbre won’t crack, just course into a cauldron whose call drones a cacophony of strings.” And so I looked her in her eyes and to her earthen surprise I said, “Yes, yet you sit in this seat and live through others lives then take your pennies to the teller to calculate the size – another seer who’s a eunuch and every eunuch lies! What’s the other option for a bosom that denies?” “I see your point. I understand,” she said still holding my hand. And thus I anointed Lady Jesus with my oils from the sand.

Well it is too late, Rockwell is dead

When the cult urban Rapturist Rockwell asked me to write the liner notes for his "Freeplay" release I entered his world through www.millionstories.com careful to always shadow myself behind free standing gothic butresses or twitch and caw like a madman as to ward the truly mad away. Exhausted by the charade posing as naked bones posing as charade I caught a nip at a place called "The Bowery Bedoin's Boudoir" and a poet named Neverest slipped me these notes on a gin soaked doily:

Save Rockwell!

Save Rockwell! He's undersiege by droves of Khakis, some in pleats
Whose coat of arms is the Indonesian Guatamalan breakfast seed.
They're driving him crazy!
They've overrun Miladies!
This City's silent succumbing's more sinful than
Haiti's Hades!

In his palace he resees when the roadside repertoir was the repartee of homies
Not just the dwindling "ho" hollering of Christopher Street's homomies
Who even they, losing their gay
Will be leaving any day
-- With this encroachin' Hoboken
It seems impossible to stay.
But this is not Versaille, this is Marseille
Built upon the dirty word, trade –
We know when they drudge the harbor what'll turn up in the waste
And more importantly, won't they the Leviathan awake?
We have reached the precipice and now await the break.
So hurry up and meet Rockwell!
In exchange for this freeplay he asks only for a drink and if you sock him in the gut with the goad
"This one's for the City"
He'll appreciate how you think

Read on my friends. It took my a weekend to exit his site so give yourselves time because you might find a piece of yourselves already inside. I found a song of mine. A whole song! It looked like this:

107, 363
(words by Chris Leo)

Yous anemic anemonies planted in this great wait cast your seethy tentacles into the bombs and grenades amongst such an inundation something must break yet nothing's blowing by in this slight and steady wake

the Hudson doth barely lap when new battle lines are drawn The Bronx River sits still in fact I think I heard it yawn From Lenox Hill to the Gowanus one huge communal "c'mon" Yous wither in whispers for all story is gone

Scream dude I dare you but we've heard that one before and brother there isn't even contrary in perverse anymore Puglies and Drabbits, now how come they ain't never bored? Bliss for them's a bodega and some rotgut and some whores
and for us, well I think it might, look are you ready for such spite? Cowardly Courtesans I'm not kidding and it brings me no delight for us it's a fall golden chariots and all

CooMooCockleMungMung

Take a break from English and check out my Spanish childrens book illustrated by the miraculous Francesca Massai:

www.flickr.com/photos/francesca_massai/sets/72157594499366394/

Abutting the Arabic "dik" with the French "Coq" as two words for "chicken" naturally washed contentness across my soul. When I later found out that "Dikika" is an Afarian word for "nipple" I thought of the "Matter of Perspective" entry and reclined rubbing my belly like it was an alabaster globe.