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clawing at the low end of the frequency band
This Sunday [November 27], my band, Number None, will be attempting to ritually convert Chicago's airspace into a single resonating antiprism through the use of technology provided by Loyola University's radio station WLUW. Thanks to Philip von Zweck and his fine program "Something Else" (which features "Sound Art, Electronic, Experimental, Improvised and Avant-Garde Music, Field Recordings, Soundscapes, [and] things beyond description") we'll be able to begin this process somewhere shortly after 11 pm Central Time.
Chicago residents can hear us on call number 88.7, but out-of-range listeners hoping to darkle their own zip code can tune in to a live webcast (available through the "listen live" link on the station's homepage). To best witness the effect we suggest you point the speakers out the window and towards the waning moon. Thank you. Labels: number_none |
Thursday, November 24, 2005
5:10 PM
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mpls II
In praise of Minneapolis, I can say that I found its restaurants delicious, its coffeehouses spacious and relaxed, its independent bookstores ample and well-stocked. This comic book store deserves special commendation, especially for introducing me to the very sweet comics of Simone Lea and Liz Prince.
The Walker exhibits I mentioned before I went were fine and dandy, but I think I was more personally intrigued (and humbled) by the festival happening over at The Minnesota Center for Book Arts: I'm coveting a letterpress now more than ever (as well as, um, a place to put it), but I'd settle for a copy of this book.
Thanks to Darren for the tip. Labels: comics |
Monday, November 21, 2005
12:23 PM
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mpls
Tomorrow afternoon I'll be headed out to Minneapolis, MN, with CJO, to generally slack around in the cold. (Aside: I really kind of like the Rand McNally Trip Planner.)
We're most excited about visiting the revamped Walker Art Center, which has a lot of nice-looking exhibits right now, including the Minimalism retrospective "Elemental," a Warhol exhibit on "Stars, Deaths, and Disasters," and "Quartet," a set of installations by Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Sherrie Levine, and Kara Walker.
Raccoon / Sleeping JPB readers who are familiar with the Minneapolis area are invited to suggest additional destinations using the old "comments" link below. Labels: art, personal |
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
10:49 AM
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poetry beat : e. tracy grinnell + craig watson
It's been a while since I've done a write-up of a poetry reading—I think the last one was the write-up of Dana Ward's reading back in May of last year?
That date would line up with around the time when I moved into my new apartment (the "Blood Dorm"), which put me further from a subway stop and made it harder to get to Myopic Poetry Series or Discrete Series events. But I've been missing them, and I'm going to try to get back into the habit of once again attending them regularly.
So, this past Friday, at the Spare Room, we had E. Tracy Grinnell and Craig Watson. Of the two, I made better notes on Grinnell, so I apologize for the slightly lopsided write-up here.
Grinnell began by reading a segments from her chapbook On the Frame (available as a free PDF from Jerrold Shiroma's Duration Press) and a work-in-progress called 'Wolf.' Grinnell has spoken often on the influence of music on her poetic practice—in this interview she cites "Erik Satie, ... Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Beethoven’s sonatas, Messaien, [and] Cage" as influences—and this attention to "musicality" showed through in "Wolf." At one particular point the poem distilled itself down to a fine-grained particulate which struck me as a poetic analogue to the minimalist patterning of a musician like Morton Feldman... short words repeated in various rhythmic configurations... careful attention given to the duration and texture of the silences between them...
She followed this up with a piece which will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of Aufgabe, featuring writers responding to a lecture on Cage by Norman O. Brown. Her piece (the title eluded me) was a traditional [?] Cagean mesostic, with "raw materials" derived from Finnegans Wake (a text of central importance to both Cage and Brown) and the middle row "key text" being the (again musical) terms fugare and fugere (to pursue and to flee).
She closed out with a series of poems from Some Clear Souvenir, many of which again had a "musical" attention to rhythm, particularly the staccato "Clip One," built around a one-word-per-line constraint.
Grinnell was followed by Craig Watson, who struck me as a good example of someone whose poetic practice can be simultaneously avant-garde and political. His poems felt very palpably like "protest poems" or "poems of resistance" while at the same time not exactly being "about," say, a particular issue that's in the news. The work is chock-full of phrases like "repression / entertainment / repression," which isn't exactly oblique in terms of political content.
I don't mean to imply that it's heavy-handed: Watson has a light touch as a reader, and he's often quite funny as well—that "repression / entertainment / repression" sequence is delivered as comic, and his acerbicness throughout the reading was coupled with equal parts wit. With the emphasis on unexpected juxtapositions, avant and "post-avant" poetry has a built-in ability to deliver laughs, exploited by only a few poets I can think of (Bernstein, Ashbery). It was nice to see Watson play up this approach ("Go with God / and take your stuff") which counteracted (or complimented) the darkness inherent in writing poems about empire—his "Steppe Work" is a cycle about Genghis Khan—or the "last twelve months of human existence," as in his "Last Man Standing" cycle.
The next Discrete reading is Elizabeth Block + Jordan Stempleman, December 9th. Labels: poetry_commentary |
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
9:46 AM
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aesthetics & allegiances
In 1990, John Ashbery gave a set of lectures at Harvard on six poets who he claims as influences, all lesser-known: John Clare, Thomas Love Beddoes, Raymound Roussel, Laura Riding, John Wheelwright, and David Schubert. These lectures have recently been gathered together and published as a nice-looking volume, Other Traditions.
In this post, Ron Silliman sums up the central question of Other Traditions as "how do we know if some writing is great if it is also, at the same time, unintelligible? And what do we mean if we say that unintelligible writing is great?" These strike me as very "Ashbery" sort of questions, by which I mean: I'm not surprised to hear that Ashbery's contemplating these questions, because they're the same questions I contemplate when I'm reading his poems.
The New Yorker recently ran a profile on Ashbery (PDF supplied by Josh W.), which writes eloquently about the experience of coming up against these sorts of questions:
"Resisting the impulse to make sense, allowing sentences to accumulate into an abstract collage of meaning rather than a story or an argument, requires effort. But that collage—a poem that cannot be paraphrased or explained or 'unpacked'—is what Ashbery is after ... This is one of the reasons it's a pity that he has a reputation for being a difficult poet: a reader who likes difficult poetry will tend to concentrate fiercely and bring to bear all his [sic] most sophisticated analytical equipment in order to wrestle an explicable meaning out of a poem; and while he may well be able to come up with one, it is unlikely to be the sort of meaning that Ashbery was after."
It's slightly disappointing (although not unexpected) that once having taken what I think of as the fundamental step towards a progressive poetics—the recognition that "sense" or "meaning" is not the only valid end of a piece of writing—our New Yorker writer does not pause to consider the larger implications of this somewhat radical observation (as Ashbery does in his Other Traditions lectures) nor does she suggest that this observation may lead to an appreciation of other poets doing similar work (in short, an aesthetic). Instead she rapidly back-pedals to safe ground:
"It's true that verbal abstraction can be jarring and, in a literal sense, repellent, darting about with zigzagging syntax or hurling projectile nouns [?], but Ashbery's poetry is neither. Its transitions may be confusing but they are rarely abrupt. Its syntax is usually conventional. Its meaning is elusive but only just, like a conversation overheard while half asleep; it is not incantation, not sheer sound, not nonsense, not scat. It has an abstract structure but the smell of a story. He seems not to be smashing up meaning but, rather, to be gently picking up old pieces of meaning that he has found lying about."
While this passage may reassure the dubious reader enough to give Ashbery a try (a valid goal), it also seems to redraw some battle lines: the New Yorker may be broadening their circle of approval so that it firmly includes Ashbery (a white upper-class New Yorker), but they're in no way broadening it enough to include the rest of the poetic rabble, engaged, as they are, in all that unseemly smashing and hurling. Labels: poetry_commentary |
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
1:03 PM
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two million tongues : preview I
For those of you who can't be in Chicago for the Two Million Tongues festival (hyperlinked lineup below), I figured I'd post some relevant MP3s.
Since tonight Tony Conrad will be playing [!], here's "Trance #2," a sweet little drone miniature featuring Conrad in collaboration with Velvet Underground alums John Cale and Angus MacLise. This is from 1965 (!) and yet you could slot it next to something more contemporary (a psychedelic noise jam from Finland, or a slab of lo-fi sound from New Zealand, say) and it would still sound completely at home.
I'll try to post another MP3 from one of Friday's performers tomorrow, but my schedule is pretty tight, so... we'll see?
Unrelated: list of books I've read this year now up-to-date. Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary |
Thursday, November 03, 2005
5:09 PM
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