Wednesday, October 24, 2007

POUMZ

Fun-eral:

No priests.
Or monks.
Or imams or whatever.
A Unitarian would be okay.
No one in black.
Scatter the ashes on the faces of my enemies.

Invite everyone I've known to a potluck,

And

Make them talk about how awesome I was. Or like,

Have you seen Batman two?
Near the end when the penguin dies (spoiler warning),
Near the end when the penguin dies,
His mournful namesakes gather,
Honking sorrowfully.
And, downcast yellow beaks clenched upon black fabric,
Waddle his bloated, pin-striped corpse,
To
the icy depths.

You know what?
Just do that.

***

Here's Dani with the weather:

I'm not reaching towards the sexual when I say, "you could charm the pants off me."
Like a micro burst deals with ill-parked convertibles shaded by top-heavy trees,
You send the rigid frame of my better judgment onto uninsured violence.

***

Glug glug:

I can find your name in conversation-- an excuse or inhibition.
I can find lust in kneading hands on the jeans of your peers.
I can find sincerity underneath your whiskey-dusted breath.

***

4am in the parking lot at work:


The blizzard is back lit thermonuclear orange by still active street lights.
Flakes mass and stagger towards contact.


A winter-soft bomb aftermath.
A radioactive snow globe.


***

That's actually the name of my metal side project:


You had the gall to drink at the wedding reception.
And It was offensive.


Like,
If you'd arrived hours late,
With "faggot-nigger abortion"
Tattooed on your forehead,
And proceeded to cup the groom,

It was like that.

***

Those lithium ones:

I found him motionless;
Disproportionately room temperature within the broiling minivan interior.

RadioShack was having a sale on batteries.

When you lose a child, a part of you,
Does it rule you out for 'parent of the year?'

***

The Unauthorized Biography of Allison Smith:

You will be the same at 30.
Your waxy Adrian-Brody-features,
Like six pack rings half-buried in sand,
Shaming the concept of decay.

You will be the same at 40.
Because shifting your opinions induces pain--
Harsh-physical-actual-pain.

Excepting the divorce,
You will be the same at 50.
All darkened missionary sex,
Seething judgment,
And giggles tailing speech.

You are the five; you are the mean of our species.


***

She has big juggs too:

She is pandemic
Draping in friendly pinks and speaking in absolutes.

She is plastic flowers and clove cigarettes.
Indifference on a pedestal.



***
This was in what? Jr. High?:

Walking home
I encountered a Doberman,
Alert behind stained wooden planks;
Barking like I was a rapist.

I set my books against the sidewalk

And,

Through high-pitched imitation,
Matched its guttural aggression,

Then spent the next week pondering his owners expression.

***
And the "bapjism":

I loathed the hours.
Waking near the edge of twilight
To the pull of my mother's leather-clad hands,
Then huddling naked in that snowy forest clearing. But,

The worst part of satanic mass
Was the placental cakes frosted in menstrual blood.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

THE VERY FATE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ITSELF.

The Internet:

Famed antagonist of the elderly and those who didn't "realacize that there dun was a camera in the barn," it's been warping the very fabric of our existence since it's inception. I can order shoes without leaving my house; I can order pizza without out picking up my telephone. I can spend hours vanquishing electronic dragons or view massive stockpiles of explicit pornography during the time I've allotted for writing this very paper! We live in the goddamn future; a land of iPod touch screen phones with innumerable Usher (Ft. Lil' Jon) ring tones. Flying cars and cancer-curing sex-robots are not far behind.

Some will claim that it's advent has stifled a once flowering English language; that the written word is nearing it's death rattle. While their, no doubt, ineptly composed papers would appear to back, at least superficially, their equally moronic claim, I am not in possession of this fear. For you see, I have read pitchforkmedia.com. Ornately constructed and entirely heavy-handed with their reviews, Pitchfork is one of the more popular websites-- both to read and to bash-- at the moment. Take comedian David Cross. You might know him from his television appearances (Mr. Show, Arrested Development), his voice acting (Those tremendously popular Halo video games), or his stand up. The latter falls into the field of pitchforks reviews, and both his CDs have seen appraisals by the site. When he was invited by their editors to submit his top ten album, Cross responded with:

Hi, I was a somewhat surprised that Pitchforkmedia.com would ask me to participate in this. Here's why:

"The devastating paradox of David Cross' pre-recorded comedy: Is it funny that everything Cross says is nauseatingly smug, yelped out in smarmy, supercilious prose? Or is David Cross just a giant fucking asshole? That Cross is such an immensely unlikable live performer-- condescending, defensive, arrogant, patronizing-- is both his greatest asset and his most crippling flaw."

And while the above review of my second cd It's Not Funny is certainly more thoughtful than, "David Cross? Yeah, he's funny" or "He sucks", it's still a bit shitty. "...immensely unlikable"? The paradox is "devastating"? How is it devastating?

And that's just one reviewer, Amanda Petrusich.* There's another one, William Bowers, who claims to: "...having developed a strange, extra-textual concern for David Cross. Likeminded futon-psychoanalysts fret over his fluctuating weight, his fitfulness, and despondence..."

Fretting over my weight? Oh well. But regardless of their opinion of me and/or my act, they've asked me for my Top Ten List®, So here is my contribution to the Top Ten List® For Pitchforkmedia.com.

Cross then went on to review ten fictional albums at the expense of Pitchfork.

You can see, from the text quoted in Mr. Cross's list, that the written word is alive and well; perhaps a little too alive. This is not some obscure little backwater URL that features blog posts about what the webmasters cat did, this site is a giant; a behemoth of taste-making. Bands like The Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or Tapes N Tapes have all exploded into the limelight with a mere positive word from it's staff. It receives (according to the semi-reliable Wikipedia) 200,000 hits per day and 1.5 million unique visitors per month. People would jump off a bridge if it received anything higher than an 8.5.

Plenty of non-digital publications are striving for a dumbing down of the populace-- pick up a USA Today-- and It's well known that newspaper circulation in America has been graph-plummeting with study determination since the Carter administration. Printed media is at a, to borrow a the title of a Britney Spears vehicle, crossroads. Newspapers increasingly consolidate and congeal into more compact larger firms under bigger and more faceless corporations. Conversely, the quantity of magazines has increased dramatically, driving competition among frantic publishing magnates to be the next Maxim or FHM and grab a slice of the ever thinning market share. Both those magazines are vapid nudie-mags for men too chicken shit to view actual pornography, but their success in a dying industry has spurred numerous imitators. Rolling Stone even hired a former editor from the latter magazine to spruce up their sales-- I'm guessing that cover with Jessica Simpson vacuuming in her underwear was his idea. While that might appeal to John Q Stupid, a snob like me would avoid that image like AIDS. The most sex appeal you'll see on popular Internet music sites is from the American Apparel ads and Jenny Lewis interviews. For a prude such as myself, that's almost too much.

Rolling Stone Magazine is the analogue counterpoint to Pitchfork. Founded in 1967 (Pitchfork's birthday was in 1995) it has somehow managed to stay culturally irrelevant for the entirety of it's shameful 40 year run. This is a magazine that despised Led Zeppelin during their prime creative years and gave Nirvana's landmark album Nevermind a nondescript three stars. This is a magazine that would rate Kid Rock or Creed as favorably as Radiohead. This is a magazine for your self-aware uncool father; It's VH1 in print. With a circulation of around 1.3 million, they also lay claim to the burliest market share.

While they have published some commendable journalism (I am a card carrying progressive), RS is a music based publication, so I will judge them by that. Their business model seems grounded around selling CDs. Look at a list of recent album reviews in any issue you'll see a mean around three and a half stars. It's a brilliantly ambiguous rating really. You could apply it to a Lenny Kravitz album or an Elliott Smith CD and no one will be the wiser. To be fair, unlike Pee-Fork, their reviews are mercifully short and entirely readable. Here's paragraph one of a criminally enthusiastic Creed review:

On Weathered, Creed's lucid powerhouse of a third album, the Orlando, Florida, trio emerge as masters of hard-rock atmosphere. As Soundgarden proved with Superunknown, there are a million little intricacies to pulling off what sounds like big enormous rock. And Creed are all over them: Weathered is rock of unusual focus and arrest, a beautifully distressed dance of sustained style and unapologetic emotion.

If there's a video of what Scott Stapp (Creed's grotesquely untalented frontman) did to the editors of RS to get that printed, I hope it was thrown into a volcano. For it surely involved the most base of carnality and the most unwilling of livestock.

But you can see, comparatively, the text is dumbed down-- refreshingly so. And yet this is a printed medium; a relic from the days of Gutenberg and the enlightenment. Shouldn't it at least be stuffier? Harder to read? No, our linguistic mass grave does not lie in the shadowy crevasses of the Internet, but our humility, our unpretentiousness, just might.