"From the time he had shoes, he roamed the neighborhood."

--Nik Cohn "Tricksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap"


Defective and partly invisible
as the pagination of a yellow thesis
loosening like dream-teeth
or niblets blackening on the grill--
a study of piracy as much as trade,
of simony as much as privacy,
of property as much as specie,
thus an alum farmer of Yorkshire
is exempted from impressement
by the same principle as sugar bled
from a tree implies crystallisation,
not seeing its fate in the sticky Smitty's window
the summer not quite even over.

For the monthly purpose
of re-upping the state of emergency and toward
the interpretation of shipwrecks
we will assemble in this playhouse
by the light of a gibbous moon--
and not a crumb or shred or maccaroon
of what is said will leave this room...

Alka-seltzer stars scattered on blue felt,
the good warm smell of a dog smoking a cigar
with Lady Luck and her 52 imaginary friends
found curled in the ditches with coffee ends,
no one wants the burnt dregs of the last car
with a hole burnt through or to eat their phone.
Everyone just wants to go home.

Parkway four. 

Parkway three. 

Parkway two. 

Parkway one. 

informative piece on Humphrey Jennings & Mass Observation--

"In a 1938 radio talk, Jennings had suggested it was no accident that the search for the meaning of everyday life led to history. "Mysteries reside in the humblest everyday things," he said; they are a kind of legacy, and the poet, by examining them, can extract "an idea of 'what I am' from the past." To share this discovery, he relates it to contemporary experience, "the things that the community knows about, the things that they're interested in." Jennings cited, as an example, "The Waste Land," in which Eliot represents the past as a Christopher Wren church and the everyday as a pub in Lower Thames Street. The poet has to love both in order to connect them, Jennings insisted; "Everything else is snobbery." "

Pluto stays put in Maine's solar system

Driving south, it's hard to miss large planets like Jupiter, which is 5 feet in diameter and weighs close to a ton. The solar system ends 40 miles later with tiny Pluto, only 1 inch in diameter, mounted on the wall of a visitor information center.

"We're not planning on taking down Pluto," said McCartney...

...If astronomers keep discovering new dwarf planets, McCartney conjectured, the solar system model could one day stretch all the way down the coast."



 

A Letter From Hammertown


Only the densest
dentist insect overtones
dare drop into the valley

from the Sunday construction
so impatiently at ten begun above
though the rate of such things

varies more than you'd think:
some build as if session men
called out by the union

to short time the undergrowth
for the X-box simulation
of the Birth of Skiffle, others

as if flown in on Blackhawks
to build an interrogation centre
five days ahead of the army--

outward facing polished tin walls to
conduct heat, spirit animals
laminated into every post for

low grade hallucination
when the Redbull & castor oil
kick in--others as if alders were

closing in with a green man's leering
face and that aggregate should
be poured down his throat right now.

Over in Townsite
evolved sparrows turn into lawn
ornaments at will &

the sleepy subsonic rumble
of Chase River thru the park is
unbroken either by the snap of skateboard

veronicas or the dream-
speech of dogbarks & east of that
the Kingdom of the Cranes and Spiders

occupies the Arena
where Fats Domino once stood
where the roll of the Second Line

& the two-four of the bass drum
echoed from the Foundry
across Newcastle Channel.



 

new EP from Colleen

"We started to record the music boxes but things turned out differently from what I had expected; the melodies weren't that interesting and were actually quite cheesy. And then I happened to bend and stroke the comb (the music box is basically like a rolling pin, kind of like a big pin full of small staples or spikes and they're the ones that, when the pin turns or revolves, lift the blades from a metal comb) and, struck by what I heard, started to experiment with the comb itself. When played manually with my thumbnails or with the glass harmonicum's small mallets, a very rich sound is produced that's reminiscent of gamelan, marimba, and glockenspiel, and all sorts of sounds mixed into one. I recorded some really old and battered music boxes and some of my own which are either hand-cranked or mechanical; I also used a componium, a music box into which you feed strips of paper that you punch yourself, like a player piano."

reconsideration of Leszek Kolakowski

"Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today's "flat" world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. They are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at someone else's expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing "systems" of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing "systems" of rule..."