Blase Princesses

Reduced

I'll keep the yearly histrionics down to simply this: though I'm not entirely thrilled about the passing of another year - I am thrilled about where I've ended up. My thanks to everyone who has had a part in that.

More Elision:




I'm hoping to give the reading at Midtown Cinema a try tonight. It starts at 7:00 and you should definitely stop by. After that it's on to Midtown Tavern where there just might be a Colin Cameron sighting - this is big news people. Get ready.




Enough.

Tithes

In order to occupy my immense bloc of free time I have been playing with elision and found poetry. These poems are as much puzzles as expression. Reading through and finding the unintended phrasings is a little like living inside the codebreaker scenes from A Beautiful Mind. And that is just a whole lot of fun.

Much to the chagrin of every person I know who is named Kenny Johns I have decided to post some of the more successful results.

Enough.

Tired Eyes, Tired Heart

She just wants something
she can feel; a cigarette
and a steering wheel.

------------------------------------------------------

Country Fair and Errata

He toyed with the scrap of paper
in his pocket. She would be back for her books.
Certain of its future he sat down heavily.

He would fold it and place it
in the pages between her third
and fourth favorite Simic poems.

Months later, when she found it,
enough time would have passed
that she would be unsure as she unfolded it.

Enough time would have passed
that she would smile as she read it,
refolded it and dogeared the page.


Enough.

Leveling

A hard right turn to
right the ship; we spent a long
moment nearly lost.

-----------------------------------------------------

With my immersion in DC I've been fortunate enough to have been shown some of the cities' sights and, more importantly, sounds by a select few somebodies who sincerely love language. In these endeavors I've been exposed to the world of spoken word and slam style poetry performance and have fallen pretty hard for the potential that can be found in the rhythms the life the joy the love and the hate embedded in each sing-song, sling-slung stone-smooth syllable. Since then I've made a number of attempts to write something in a similar vein. Many of these have been abortive at best, but, after finally giving in to the idea of relying upon alliteration as my driving force I ended up with this (and yes, that IS a blatantly lifted and transmogrified C.Finn line as my title. And first line. We all need prompts occasionally, alright?):

The Streets Gained what the Binge Washed Away

Lately I feel as if I’m walking with wide open wounds
with scars on my shoes,
a pain in my side and an internal heat
so intense that it burns through my heart.
Chars it completely,
cremates it quietly
and leaves me cold.

Selfless, cold and composed
of counterproductive accounts
of my life and no clear
account of the strife
and conflict I cause through remote,
uncalculated actions and crimes
of passion and lust and untrustworthiness
while moving freely - without feeling -
unfettered by consideration or concern for consequence.

Lately it feels as if I am removed from myself.
My consciousness surgically culled and carelessly
kept near the withered remains of my once robust conscience.

I am afflicted with that endemic,
twenty-something-specific epidemic
of callous hedonism.

Blinded by that gin and tonic fueled fire that divides,
through equal parts Illusion and Self-Delusion,
each night from the next.
Living now,
right now,
under the pretext
that what happens this evening
stays with this evening
and never reaches past the partition of 2 AM leaving
only the morning’s headache as a monument
to the potentially monumental mistakes
of the prior evenings’ practices.

We are our own cycles.
The circles we run in, while
providing contributing cause,
are never strong enough to excuse
the burden of our missteps.
And the pratfalls that showed themselves funny through dusk
reveal themselves foolish come dawn.

Lately it’s only on days like this one -
heavy with humid air and sticky with the sadness
of things sought after but not attained –
that I can ever set before my mind
each of the issues at hand.
Yet the plague that hangs
over my eyes is never a dark one.

More often it’s a blinding mix,
a spinning, sliding, streaming view
of rum and coke soaked scarves,
gin and tonic tarnished t-shirts
and all these ginger-whiskey washed,
wash and wear warriors who wear me out.

I’m wrung out,
wishing like hell I was strung out
so that at least then
I would have an excuse for all of this.

In this world, wet
with the slick of dance floor sweat
there are no mistakes, there are no accidents.
The dark and the drinks may lend license
but the daylight demands recompense.

Payment in full,
plus interest,
comes due on our uninterested
and casual affairs.




Enough.

Sylvia

I always think of
how she sealed the doors before
turning on the stove.

--------------------------------------------------

Alright. So to celebrate my triumphant return to Gchat after a dreary two week absence and as a way of introducing Andy to Grooveshark.com we engaged in our favorite roadtrip game via the interwebs. It's a fun little exercise that can be as easy or hard as you choose to make it. We tend to shoot for middle of the road.

Anyway, the basic idea is that you are given a song that you have to start from, for the sake of an example lets say... Beat It by Michael Jackson, then you are given a song that you have to finish on, let's say Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by the Beatles and a set number of "moves" to get there. In this case, to keep it simple, we'll limit it to one.

So: Beat It ---> as yet undiscovered song ---> Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

Now we just have to find a link. That link can range from something as simple as a similar guitar tone or tempo to a similarity or overlapping in album or song titles or lyrics, to shared personnel (people who worked or played with both people) or personal life (dated the same person, etc) and anything in between.

In the case of our example the obvious choice to me would be a Wings song like "Jet" with Paul McCartney as the link having recorded with both Jackson and The Beatles.

So:

1) Beat It - Michael Jackson who recorded The Girl is Mine with Paul McCartney which takes us to -
2) Jet - Wings - McCartney's post-Beatle's band, taking us to -
3) Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da - The Beatles.

See? That easy.

Here's the one Andy gave me yesterday:

- Get from Wicked Messenger by the Faces (covering Bob Dylan) to Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window by Bob Dylan in five moves with the middle one by a female artist over the age of 39 (apparently his reasoning for this was to disallow both Neko Case and Zooey Deschanel. The Jerk).

Immediately I considered using only artists that have covered Dylan. Which narrowed the field of artists to choose from by a whole... 2%. So then I had to go ahead and try and come up with some more concrete connections. Some of them (like the incestuous mess that is the first three songs) are very concrete. Others, like the last jump, feel a little less substantial. Anyway, here goes:

1) Wicked Messenger - Faces (covering Dylan) takes us to -

2) You Shook Me - Jeff Beck Group - As you know at one point or another both Rod Stewart (Best. Voice. In. Rock.) and Ron Wood played with Jeff Beck and were, of course, also the revitalizing force between the switch from The Small Faces to the Faces and Ron Wood carries us through to -

3) Shine a Light - The Rolling Stones. Despite his questionable personal life decisions Mr. Wood (though not on this track) is a fine guitarist but it's Mick Jagger that takes us to -

4) Because The Night - by Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen - John Agnello produced both Patti Smith (who was married to the lead guitarist from MC5(!)) and Mick Jagger at one point or another -

5) Hot Soft Light - The Hold Steady - As if the Springsteen to THS thing wasn't enough, this album is also produced by John Agnello (as was Patty Smythe (former lead for Scandal), who is often confused for Patti Smith and is featured in the lyrics of The Swish from THS' first album ("she looked shaky, but nice")) but it's The Hold Steady's second album (Separation Sunday) that takes us to-

6)The Chain - Fleetwood mac - This connection is fairly straight forward. The song Stevie Nix by THS off of Separation Sunday ("She got scared when it got druggy. The way the whispers bit like fangs in the last hour of the parties.") brought me to Stevie Nicks who has a writing credit on this riff-riding, totally driving-with-the windows-down-worthy song

7) Can You Please Crawl out your window - Bob Dylan - so, this one is a little bit more of a stretch... but she has toured with Dylan. *long, exhausted exhale*

And the one that I gave Andy to work on today is:

- Get from "Too Much Monkey Business" by Chuck Berry to "Thriller" by Michael Jackson in five (5) moves. With the Berry song coming out in 1956 and Thriller in 1982 I'm going to (approximately) split the difference and the middle song will have to be off of Motown Records (1965-1975). Of course the other four songs can be from anyone and any time. I wouldn't be surprised if your first pick after the Berry song was suggested by the opening guitar sound.

[more than] Enough.

Cartlidge & Brown

Two glasses stained Red;
Last night we listened slow
and sighed as dawn slipped.

-------------------------------------------------------

The View From Victoria Place

Toes touch down to tile,
steel tipped and rubber soled:
minuscule mop-topped creatures
crushed as commuters commingle. Group
patterns present themselves:
twos threes and fours
weaving around between and through
the confused, circling orbits of street map stares.

There is no balletic beauty here -
trips stumbles and footing blunders bound each grace,
hawkers hover wouldyouliketotry-ing their wares to every
fourth passerby. Emboldened by downcast eyes
they forge on hammering out cries
to heat the air.

Swatting through this sonic haze one sees, centrally,
a red-faced and bellowing man
large in his impatience: shifting his considerable weight
and shuffling his feet while waiting
for a young girl who, with lips pursed
in the very best mix of unpracticed concentration
and burgeoning frustration
knots the polka-dotted shoelaces on her nearly too small shoes.



Enough.