Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Freak storm looks set to break, and break the record heat spell. That'd be ok w/ the right line breaks.
Frustration: Todd Haynes Superstar is there to be downloaded (along with much other intel-pro-challenging vid-stuff), but it's big and slow and high-trafficked and unreliable. Probably the streaming version is ok, but I want the mpeg. (Link courtesy Harlequin Knights, at left.)
Felt I wasn't getting much out of John Godfrey's Private Lemonade, suddenly began to click a little less than half-way in -- it accumulates, both referentially (light and smoke pass by often, and many poems end in a swerve toward a 'you' that might be a beloved or a pleonasm, depending) and formally (the steppy Williams line that recurs every few poems, though most are in three or four line groups, with the very occasional burst of Ceravolo/Blackburn less-symmetrical shapeliness). Struck by this quietly immense reorganization (reheirarchialization?) of perception, opening "Blush": "The land is/squashed/between/gases and bones," though I'm not doing the spacing. Book seems to get harsher/darker as it goes, but I might not think so if I started again from the top.
Maybe you know a little about the Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader, who was based in So. Cal. for much of his working life. I believe he may have taught at Cal Poly Pomona; I know that he was married to someone my father used to work with. (Which I did not know when I first encountered his work.) He was fairly obscure in life; he's among the figures recovered by the last decade's re-evaluation of Conceptual Art (esp. the varieties involving photo-documentation).
He went missing and presumably died at 33, in 1975, during one part of a performance piece entitled "In Search of the Miraculous," in which he set out in a tiny sailboat from Cape Cod, attempting to reach England. (A fuller description.) Not as clearly death-as-art as Ray Johnson, but the age makes one wonder. Or, as it goes in "Dry Spell," a song on the upcoming NPB album: "Bas Jan Ader went to sea/Searching for the mystery." (I try not to talk about my own work here, though maybe I've largely honored this norm in the breach; oh well.) 'Miraculous' didn't scan.
An earlier piece, or earlier part of the same piece, under the same title, is in the Armand Hammer's current "The Last Picture Show," which I'm making my students take a look at. It consists of a series of night photographs of the artists skulking around various Los Angeles streets and alleys. Across the bottom of the pictures, in metallic-marker script, are written the lyrics to the Coasters' "Searchin'," by Lieber & Stoller -- a song I'd been thinking about as a less-overt predecesor to "Is That All There Is?" but didn't mention in my talk. (You know: "Gonna find her...Gonna find her.")
I don't know -- not much of a punchline, which must be why I was putting off this entry, but coming upon it was a strange little clicking-together experience last week. Score one for the inadequacy of (my) language. Score one for me, for not going on longer about (my) song.
Frustration: Todd Haynes Superstar is there to be downloaded (along with much other intel-pro-challenging vid-stuff), but it's big and slow and high-trafficked and unreliable. Probably the streaming version is ok, but I want the mpeg. (Link courtesy Harlequin Knights, at left.)
Felt I wasn't getting much out of John Godfrey's Private Lemonade, suddenly began to click a little less than half-way in -- it accumulates, both referentially (light and smoke pass by often, and many poems end in a swerve toward a 'you' that might be a beloved or a pleonasm, depending) and formally (the steppy Williams line that recurs every few poems, though most are in three or four line groups, with the very occasional burst of Ceravolo/Blackburn less-symmetrical shapeliness). Struck by this quietly immense reorganization (reheirarchialization?) of perception, opening "Blush": "The land is/squashed/between/gases and bones," though I'm not doing the spacing. Book seems to get harsher/darker as it goes, but I might not think so if I started again from the top.
Maybe you know a little about the Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader, who was based in So. Cal. for much of his working life. I believe he may have taught at Cal Poly Pomona; I know that he was married to someone my father used to work with. (Which I did not know when I first encountered his work.) He was fairly obscure in life; he's among the figures recovered by the last decade's re-evaluation of Conceptual Art (esp. the varieties involving photo-documentation).
He went missing and presumably died at 33, in 1975, during one part of a performance piece entitled "In Search of the Miraculous," in which he set out in a tiny sailboat from Cape Cod, attempting to reach England. (A fuller description.) Not as clearly death-as-art as Ray Johnson, but the age makes one wonder. Or, as it goes in "Dry Spell," a song on the upcoming NPB album: "Bas Jan Ader went to sea/Searching for the mystery." (I try not to talk about my own work here, though maybe I've largely honored this norm in the breach; oh well.) 'Miraculous' didn't scan.
An earlier piece, or earlier part of the same piece, under the same title, is in the Armand Hammer's current "The Last Picture Show," which I'm making my students take a look at. It consists of a series of night photographs of the artists skulking around various Los Angeles streets and alleys. Across the bottom of the pictures, in metallic-marker script, are written the lyrics to the Coasters' "Searchin'," by Lieber & Stoller -- a song I'd been thinking about as a less-overt predecesor to "Is That All There Is?" but didn't mention in my talk. (You know: "Gonna find her...Gonna find her.")
I don't know -- not much of a punchline, which must be why I was putting off this entry, but coming upon it was a strange little clicking-together experience last week. Score one for the inadequacy of (my) language. Score one for me, for not going on longer about (my) song.
