Poem from latest collection “Excess Prison Hospital World and Other Sketches”

Speak for yourself, over eager

         You know you’ll leave them all behind.

                  Symbolic death initiations.

      To grow we need immersion, naked

                                               throwing into

                                                   the sea of

 

 

Its strange to hear your own

                           after so much

 

 

We are trying to talk about language.

Planning solid plans for a sandbox house.

                           Tangible in tangible

‘A time comes when everything turns you on

         and on and on and on and on

                  Find something else to make you

                                                               wonder.’

-from another life in my time,

         I used to be so angry all the time,

                           metamorphis, necessary poison

 

 

 

 

A human field

       You are this world of yours

 

 

 

         Words fail me

 

Remind you of the Making             Constant reminders 

Last Nite Djs Killed A Crowd

 

Saw DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist in the Roseland Theater where people from Bob Dylan to Miles Davis have shown up in the past.

 

Got a great view from anywhere, the crowd was lively, and the visuals gave you a sense of Dj history and future, with exploding iPods and all. 

 

 To people who don’t understand DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist as musicians here are some clues:

 

1) they perform with live 45’s on the spot and keep the music flowing by creating loops on the record themselves with strategically placed tape.  With the exception of only a few loop pedals and echo effects, they do everything by hand (like a guitar player, right?) including queuing, syncing, blending, mixing, cutting, all difficult as hell.

 

2) To say this doesn’t require an equivalent amount of skill to say, a ‘traditional’ instrument, is to display one’s ignorance and miss the point.  Like any artist they must immerse themselves in the music and contact their materials daily, practicing, brainstorming, planning, executing and finally performing and presenting their work to an audience.  They make it look easy, which is the idea behind any player who practices to the bone to give the best experience possible.

 

3) Finally, their originality comes from their choice of song, their interplay and participation with an audience, and of course how they put all the tracks and the live show, including visuals together.  The hours poured into finding records, listening to them, linking them takes amazing effort.  They ‘write’ songs with this effort by combining existing sounds to generate a new and unique experience.  

 

A copy of a copy, the hyper extension of modernity in the form of vinyl pressings, exponential growth, a cyber mental experience within some tools of modernity, i.e. record players, records, video  screens, trains, planes, buses, and over-sized speakers.  All magnify and re-examine modernity from the post-hyper-modern digital Tech 21st Century lens.

 

I am defending a culture I love and wish others could open up to this music, so this is my attempt to educate. enjoy

Hell yes the show was inspiring and more than entertainment. 

Til the End of the Beginning (Progress Hyper-Death Modern-Extending)

 

You are being watched for your safety and our progress

Good people——- Keep the dream alive.  Support you local street minstrel who lives for sound and experience not material illusions of ‘rock guitar heroes.’  That type of thinking puts you and your creative juices in a glass box inside a low traffic 20th century art museum–or worse- a rock ‘n’ roll museum.  If you have a shred of dignity leftover from the hangover of the past century, remember this= we haven’t progressed.  Someone said after the Holocaust there is no poetry.  Progress is a fiction___________6 million deaths=progress?   I think not. If anything we’ve gotten better in the Western cultures at killing each other faster and with greater, colder and distant efficiency.  What war?  Like the settlers asked– ‘what indians?’  That is our kind of progress.  Speeding with evermore force and luxury faster faster to our collective grave.  Am I a doomsayer? maybe. A misanthrope? sometimes.  Overall lets forget the all-explanatory illusions we’ve given ourselves concerning science.  It doesn’t give us the answer.  Only illuminates a tiny speck on the face of the UNiverse Question.  Life is to be lived, and curiosity didn’t kill the cat.  Nine lives.  Poetry is back in your science beaker and math in your fashionista’s face on the cover of a magazine.  Its all numbers and proportions.  Remember Miley Cyrus (Incorporated) is on top of a pyramid of hundreds of people on here bankroll who generate her image as we know it—-she is not doing this without help from Walmart.  Thats what separates the modern from the hyper-modern.  We here in the cyber World Wide Wildwest, build our totems without any help.  Desert drifters collect waterbuckets for the Web well, no strings or con-men factories but individual platforms for feeling how you wants to feel.  Free.  No charge. A rehashed rehash of a remake from an original film based on a novel based on a poem inspired by a play. This is what extensions of modernity is like….