Highway 41 Revisited

THE GEROGERIGEGEGE

2009-01-30T19:34:00.000-08:00

"Fuck composition, fuck melody, dedicated to no one, thanks to no one, ART IS OVER".
-Juntaro Yamanouchi, The Gerogerigegege

2009-01-30T10:12:00.001-08:00

So I haven't posted in a while...hmm. Some interesting stuff I'm into right now:

1. Poet and all-around-New-England-Superstar Richard Wilbur (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/202). Professor Wilbur (with Professor David Sofield) is teaching a class at Amherst this semester I'm enrolled in - "Writing Poetry 1." Slam dunk, right? I know.

The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

2. Tortoise - TNT
This albums is fucking awesome. Recommended for anybody who likes things that are awesome.

That's all for now...gotta learn how to play my computer.

Max

2009-01-23T08:56:00.000-08:00

Popular blogger and author Christian Lander will discuss his book, Stuff White People Like, on Monday, January 26 at 4:00 p.m. at the University of Minnesota Bookstore in Coffman Memorial Union.

Lander decided early on that he did not like white people who did not watch the TV show “The Wire.” His thoughts soon focused on what white people were doing instead of watching the show and thus his widely popular and provocative blog stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com was born. Now after nearly 30 million visitors, Lander has compiled some of his best thoughts and stories from the blog into his story behind the blog—Stuff White People Like.

Lander will sign copies of his book following the discussion.

2009-01-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

Jenny Holzer

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
CHICAGO
Through February 1
Curated by Elizabeth Smith

In dealing with the edgy overlap between art and language, Jenny Holzer's work connects with the Conceptual art of the 1960s and '70s, but its quality of social engagement is more explicit—it started out, in fact, as street art, a kind of enigmatic agitprop. Fairly early on, too, it moved into sculpture, installation, and elaborate experiments with computerized lighting and signage. The early '90s, according to MCA chief curator Elizabeth Smith, marked "a turning point where [Holzer] began to work more directly with issues of violence and trauma," and this exhibition surveys the years since then—a period in which the country again went to war. Holzer's will be an important voice on that subject. The catalogue features contributions by Smith, Whitney curator-at-large Joan Simon, and an interview of the artist conducted by art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.

— David Frankel

ARTFORUM

Hot, Flat and Crowded

2009-01-17T18:34:00.000-08:00

This is a passage from the first chapter of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's most recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. The book examines (what Friedman sees as the) three major crises at the moment: global warming; the growth of the middle class; and the population boom.

(Some background: during his presidency, Jimmy Carter raised standards for automobile fuel efficiency to 27.5 mpg - but during Reagan's first term, he ordered it lowered to 26. Bush I re-raised in in '89 to 27.5, but it stayed there until 2007, when Bush II raised it to 35. By contrast, the Pew Foundation reported that in America "the average car and truck sold at the end of the 90s went about a mile less on each gallon of gas than it did in years earlier.")

"According to Amory Lovins, the experimental physicist who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute, if the United States had continued into the 1990s to conserve oil at the rate it did in the period from 1976 to 1985, thanks in large part to the improved mileage standards, it would no longer have needed Persian Gulf oil after 1985. 'When Reaged rolled back CAFE standards,' said Lovins, 'it was the equivalent of "un-discovering" one Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's worth of oil. It wasted as much oil as is believed to exist under the refuge."

THANKS SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS!!

2009-01-13T20:42:00.000-08:00

"Some stupid guy had thrown peanut shells all over the stairs,

and I damn near broke my crazy neck."

Dalek - Gutter Tactics

2009-01-12T17:11:00.001-08:00

Today, I (Max) received in the mail my FIRST CD AS OFFICIAL "SCENE" REVIEWER!!!

I can smell your virtual excitement calling my name to the winds of victory as we speak!

Anyway, I haven't gotten a chance to listen to it all the way yet, but I'll post my comments (maaayybe) after I get all the way through it. For now, here's the note "John" (read: the record label) enclosed with the disc:

The enigmatic singer songwriter JOHN FRUSCIANTE, best known as the guitarist for The Red Hot Chili Peppers, delivers his 11th solo album, THE EMPYREAN on January 20th.

Friends and Fans,

The Empyrean is my new record that will be released worldwide via Record Collection on January 20th, 20009. It was recorded on and off between December 2006 and March 2008. It is a concept record that tells a single story both musically and lyrically. The story takes place within one person, and there are two characters. It contains a version of Tim Buckley's "Song To The Siren," and the rest of the songs are written by me. My friend Josh plays on it, as does Flea. It features Sonus Quartet, Johnny Marr and The New Dimension Singers. I'm really happy with it and I've listened to it a lot for the psychedelic experience it provides. It should be played as loud as possible and it is suited to dark living rooms late at night.

- John Frusciante, November 3rd, 2008

---

The Empyrean Track listing:
1. Before The Beginning
2. Song To The Siren
3. Unreachable
4. God
5. Dark/Light
6. Heaven
7. Enough Of Me
8. Central
9. One More Of Me
10. After The Ending

2009-01-10T22:03:00.000-08:00

This Just IN:

Jonas Brothers Tickets Just Went On Sale!!!!!

100 Things You May Not Know About the Bush Administration

2009-01-10T10:19:00.001-08:00

You can find the Bush administration's list of "100 Things You May Not Know..." here.

I'm not going to bother writing about this. But it is, nevertheless, fucking remarkable that anyone with even a sliver of self-respect would stoop to write and publicize a list of ideals they embody. What a charade.

...and of course, you can read about Bush's approval ratings here.

2009-01-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

artist David Shrigley here

2009-01-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

Max here again to drop a link to a particularly interesting experimental rock album I've been indulging in. Original Silence's The Second Original Silence (regrettably I do not have the first record) features Thurston Moore and Jim O' Rourke (Sonic Youth), Mats Gustafsson (Peter Brotzmann, The Thing), Terrie Ex, Paal Nilssen- Love, and Massimo Zu. It's kind of like the Foo Fighters meets Ornette Coleman - very free, very improvised, but lots of thought going on. Check out the comments section.

Steal This Movie

2009-01-05T20:28:00.000-08:00

this documentary is about media piracy, very interesting, very relevant.

READ about it here
DOWNLOAD the film here

Sunny Murray - Sunny Murray Quintet

2009-01-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

I've been digging into this Sunny Murray album, the Sunny Murray Quintet, that I picked up at Reckless Records in Chicago (along with the Replacements - Let It Be and Thurston Moore - Psychic Hearts). I haven't listened to it too much yet, but I'm way into the interviews included on the disc...mostly just Sunny kinda talking about how he learned to start playing, yadda yadda yadda.

Some brief background on Sunny Murray for those of us (...all of us?...) who don't listen to or know much about free jazz / avant-garde. Sunny famously played with Cecil Taylor, one of the most incredibly important free jazz pianists of all time. Cecil once said that he thought of the piano as 88 tuned drums - so you can connect that quite simply with Sunny's playing. Especially the first track on the album (an interview) right around 14:00 starts to talk about the ways of playin' different that first brought him to Taylor. Anyway, cool shit.

I'm hopefully going to start uploading some albums to share here, if you are all interested. The first is this quintet album, so...lemme know what ya think! (Check out the comment section.)

MoMA'S Sex Change

2009-01-04T19:23:00.001-08:00

The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA—complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude—is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one. It is one of the most seductively rebellious artistic gestures since Lynda Benglis’s notorious Artforum ad in 1974, for which she posed naked wielding a dildo. Benglis’s action slapped a biased art world awake; Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) suspends us in a primordial sea of liquids, and performs a metaphysical sex change on the Museum of Modern Art. The atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate.

CONTINUE READING here

The Virtual President

2009-01-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

ORDINARY PEOPLE GET THE NEWS, they don’t make it. Mediacs report, repeat, spin, repeat, and pummel non-ordinaries with self-serving rhetorical questions, and, except for dead people and “undecideds,” or the living dead, Americans are addicted. Media junkies, by definition, can’t stop: They need more of that blah-blah powder. Obama himself, the public recently learned, had to go cold turkey off his BlackBerry—and the world sympathized. He too needs instantaneity, to be connected, like most twenty-first-century characters. (...)

...CONTINUE READING the article here
and then, WATCH THE VIDEO here

2009-01-02T23:12:00.001-08:00

All right - Max here, opening up the 2009 blogging season with a fuckin motherfuckin bang.

Seriously though. Matt and Paul and I are down here in Milwaukee for the weekend, going to Chicago tomorrow to visit the MoCA and maybe take a trip to the Chicago diner for a vegan milkshake and some "ribs". We're having a nice time fooling with the speech preferences on our various computers. Paul's computer ("Matt") has called me a penisface a couple of times, but I'm willing to let bygones be bygones as long as I get to take one good shot at Paul's nuts tomorrow when he's not looking.

Matt and I have kinda been thinking about doing something like this for a while and I guess we finally got it together. (For once.) Paul happened to be in the room when we were talking about it, so we had to include him too or he would have thrown a tantrum.

After spending two hours creating names for this fkn thing, we were talking about what we wanted to put into this last night (keep in mind at this point it's about 1:30 am). As is typical, we digressed - over and over and over - but eventually got around to what the three of us actually "do" - i.e., study, enjoy, practice, etc. I said that I study music and poetry, Matt said visual arts and art history, and Paul said he reads the New Yorker (which means he just looks at all the pictures over his afternoon cup of juice). We decided that instead of trying to figure out a way to work everything together, the best approach would be to just - post stuff and let it figure itself out from there.

So that's that. The first thing I'd like to post is a poem by a guy named Joshua Clover, called Ceriserie. He's part of a school of poetry that challenges the conventional "grey scale" of poetry - lyric poetry (e.g. Shakespeare, John Donne, Dylan Thomas, etc.) vs. "modern" poetry (Larkin, Stevens, Collins, et al). Rather, his poetry searches for a radicalism of the medium itself, a new way of writing poems that is really an openness to any method of writing poems. (It's like the free improv of poetry. Kinda.)

The poem's here, and here:

Ceriserie

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.

Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.

Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.

Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.

Music: The unless of a certain series.

Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.

Fire: The number between four and five.

Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have,it reminds you of of.

Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, “frei aber einsam.”

Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face.

Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time.

Art: That’s the problem with art.

Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds “like Katharine Hepburn.”

Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno’s wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out.

Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . .

Hausmann’s Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping.

Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind!

Sign at Jardin des Plantes: games are forbidden in the labyrinth .

Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. “Nothing has been changed,” sez Michael, “except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews.”

Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum.

The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city.

Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania.

Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann.

To say about Flemish painting: “Money-colored light.”

Music: “Boys on the Radio.”

Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges.

Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds.

The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech.

Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return.

Pop song: We got your pretty girls they’re talking on mobile phones la la la.

Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible.

Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have.

Thus: I came to the city of possession.

Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done.

Paris: The train station’s a museum, opera in the place of the prison.

Later: The music lacquered with listen.

~ Joshua Clover