Saturday, February 20, 2010


Alan J Pakula's flawed (but at least as handsome as say Days of Heaven) Comes a Horseman on TCM late tonight--
The delight of the film lies not only in Pakula’s recognition of what makes a cliché an archetype, and what he does with his film’s archetypal content, but also in the sheer audacity of the Pakula style...




Friday, February 19, 2010




6.

A ferry receipt's too thin
for the sort of work engaged in
by a jimmy-wielding skeleton

& the crocuses would like to know
if spring is here or will it go
the way of Dr Zhivago

garden shovels in a row
outside Rona row on row
yellow blue green yellow

our reno hit a rock
our reno hit the hard pan
our reno hit the wall

a business card's too thick
for all but thin-lipped heretics
stirring their Kool-aid with a stick.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010


dose encounters
Apparently, everyone decided to take a break from reading the day in 2002 when author and Brown University psychiatrist Dr. Peter Kramer wrote in the New York Times that “Prozac was no more, and perhaps less, effective in treating major depression than prior medications. . . . I argued that the theories of brain functioning that led to the development of Prozac must be wrong or incomplete.” Tell that to TV and those ads that hypnotize the consumer-patient directly: “You just shouldn’t have to feel this way anymore” (Zoloft); “Lexapro improves symptoms of depression.” And the clincher: “Feeling unusually sad or irritable? Find it hard to concentrate? Lose your appetite? Lack energy? Or having trouble feeling pleasure? . . . To help bring serotonin levels closer to normal, the medicine doctors now prescribe most often is Prozac.” For all we know, like 35 percent of American adults, according to a 2003 survey on the health effects of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, Kazmierczak walked into his doctor’s office on a day he felt a little worse for wear and requested a prescription for the fix-all himself...







5.

The reasons why I mumble
are numerous
& far from simple

from truck to trickle
bare arms tickle
conjoined manfreckle

we could talk the handshake talk
Harewood muscular under the dome
& pigeon walk home alone

I know that I'm shouting
or would have been shouting
before we got re-routed

but please lean forward
& look toward
the world's reward

radio free Olympus for instance
Triumph of the Will-itis
sclerotic eighty-sixers

with wooly Bouvier fists
grasping cans of Lucky
clip-boards gently plucking

slushies like cold melon
roughly sensuous
like freezer burn hung

from a ceiling rug
drug against a goat's beard
like anything when it stops.

my favorite dylan



Displacement is Happening
Given the considerable power differential between the new condo owners moving into the neighborhood and the low-income population that has been rooted there for many years, the language of social mix serves to justify giving the right to space and property to those with wealth, and taking it away from those who are poor. Social mix, then, is a strategy used to expand hierarchical structures and mask asymmetrical power, and as such it undermines the possibility of genuine social solidarity while rhetorically appearing to promote it. It is the wolf in sheep’s clothing...