Everything in Generalities

awkwardladies: don’t read the comments on news articlesdon’t...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:20:28 -0700

don’t read the comments on news articles
don’t read the comments on blog posts
don’t read the comments on anything

This print was inspired by friends @bwdiederich & @mrgid and every single comment I’ve ever read on nytimes.com (sigh)

1-color print, measures 5” x 7”
On Crane Lettra paper
Printed on a Vandercook cylinder press using a polymer plate

for sale on etsy

!!!!!!!

THIS IS THE MOST USEFUL THING and my internet curmudgeoning helped inspire it!

gh

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:24:56 -0700

you are all ghosts,

all of you, each and every one

in your indefinable being,

and I have wronged half of you

and half of you have wronged me

and there is no way to make this right,

and there is no way

so i am left without a sense,

without sense, he says,

and I can try and try for

days and weeks, and I can say

certain words, charms and incantations

from no tradition,

because I have lost all faith,

so there is no sense that this will work,

tell me,

please,

will this work?

-06/14/2013

poetryeater: I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:37:03 -0700

poetryeater:

I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgments—but I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.

—Anne Carson, from Economy of the Unlost

taking my breath away, perpetually, this one

[Live Audio] Deafheaven - Echoplex 05.24.2013

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:52:30 -0700

[Live Audio] Deafheaven - Echoplex 05.24.2013:

cavistapes:

Deafheaven

Echoplex

Los Angeles, CA

May 24, 2013

Audio Source: DPA 4061s > SP-PASM-2 > Edirol R-09HR

Setlist: [47:33]

1. intro

2. Dream House

3. Violet

4. Unrequited

5. Sunbather

there are times when this band feels perfect

in 24 hours I will be on a plane to stay in a room in park slope and listen to weird noises and...

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:36:22 -0700

in 24 hours I will be on a plane to stay in a room in park slope and listen to weird noises and drink coffee with dear friends and meet new friends and then ride a train and write poetry with the rhythm and sway of amtrak to Providence, where I will drink beer and cook potluck dinners and remember that life is beautiful, and remember that life is terrible for lots of other people, and I will write and write and attempt to explode the world, but I will fail,

anneboyer: I will see you in Oakland, 3 pm Sunday, the Public School, 2141 Broadway, okay? I...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:06:09 -0700

anneboyer:

I will see you in Oakland, 3 pm Sunday, the Public School, 2141 Broadway, okay?

I could normally walk to this, and would do so, but I will be in NYC and that is a damn shame, but I helped make the summit happen and everyone else should go and enjoy what I cannot. Lots of lovely people reading amazing things.

I faxed it to you, thinking nostalgia Might help break the news in a way that Wasn’t so hurtful, But...

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:40:33 -0700

I faxed it to you, thinking nostalgia

Might help break the news in a way that

Wasn’t so hurtful,

But I didn’t count on the slow arrival, each line of ink forming

Each letter, your eyes guessing at each new

Line

And the message was simple, clear, direct, like you taught me,

And it was that there is nothing left to say.

- 05/21/2013

remembering how to write, remembering how to not get lost in the weeds,

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:52:11 -0700

remembering how to write, remembering how to not get lost in the weeds,

"The Church has become close to me in its distrust of man, and my distrust of form, my urgent desire..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:29:19 -0700

“The Church has become close to me in its distrust of man, and my distrust of form, my urgent desire to withdraw from it, to claim ‘that that is not yet I,’ which accompanies my every thought and feeling, coincides with the intentions of its doctrine. The Church is afraid of man and I am afraid of man. The Church does not trust man and I do not trust man. The Church, in opposing temporality to eternity, heaven to earth, tries to provide man with the distance [from] his own nature that I find indispensable. And nowhere does this affiliation mark itself more strongly than in our approach to Beauty. Both the Church and I fear beauty in this vale of tears, we both strive to defuse it, we want to defend ourselves against its excessive allure. The important thing for me is that it and I both insist on the division of man: the Church into the divine and the human component, I into life and consciousness. After the period in which art, philosophy, and politics looked for the integral, uniform, concrete, and literal man, the need for an elusive man who is a play of contradictions, a fountain of gushing antinomies and a system of infinite compensation, is growing. He who calls this “escapism” is unwise…”

- The irreligious Witold Gombrowicz articulating some of the reasons why even the incredulous might find credulity closer to their principles than many popular forms of unexamined, incoherently reductive materialism. (via mills)

YES

bombsfall: A quick editorial cartoon about the intersection of...

Sun, 05 May 2013 11:50:41 -0700

bombsfall:

A quick editorial cartoon about the intersection of self-pity, entitlement, rape, territoriality, misogyny and fear of women. You see it all over the place online in the form of Men’s Rights Activists (of whom there are a few reasonable non-misogynists), Men Going Their Own Way, Pick Up Artists, and dudes touting the “Red Pill”, because The Matrix is a good movie. Look any of these up if you have the stomach for it. These are extreme examples, but watered-down forms of these ideas are everywhere.

In lurking their blogs and youtube channels for a while, I’ve noticed that beyond the standard patriarchal chauvinism there is this deep fear of women - what they will do to me, how they will reject me, how they will use me, how they are changing society in a way that does not favor me, how they are making men into something I don’t like, how they are making themselves into something I don’t like, that they won’t give me what I want, and that they won’t give me what I think is rightfully mine. This goes beyond fear of feminism- this is fear of women at its purest. And that, to quote a puppet, leads to anger and hate. It’s sad.

I am a feminist. I think there’s enough ice cream to go around, but it does mean those of us with 3 scoops might have to give one or two up. Also, The Matrix is a fun movie but probably not anything you should be basing a philosophy on.

EDIT: I WROTE A LENGTHY POST ABOUT THIS HERE.

EDIT: DUE TO AN ALARMING NUMBER OF REQUESTS, TSHIRT PREORDERS ARE FORTHCOMING. 25% GOES TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD.

SECRET BULLY no. 1

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:52:43 -0700

cynthiaschemmer:

My new zine, Secret Bully, is done! This first issue is about New York, the home I left for Philadelphia at almost 30 years old. It has four short essays and each cover was drawn by me and individually screenprinted by my favorite human being, Jeff Bolt over at Stupid Bag Records.

You can get a zine over at my Etsy shop, that also has my other zines, too!

Buy this buy this buy this please everyone. It is bowl-over good so far. Cynthia is a brilliant shining light.

There is so much bad of late in the world, and you can face it,...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:34:45 -0700

There is so much bad of late in the world, and you can face it, but some days it’s better to just retreat and stare at a face you feel probably absurdly close to while he sings sweet, wise songs and miss old friends and people you’d like to think of as old friends.

Kitty at Cafe du Nord during her last song tonight with a random...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:03:05 -0700

Kitty at Cafe du Nord during her last song tonight with a random girl wearing Kitty’s boyfriend’s face on her tshirt.

I feel a bit bad for being a 31 year old stick in the mud leaning against the bar the whole time but hopefully my ridiculous smile made its way to her eyes so she knew I was having a hell of a time.

She killed a tiny room, charming a bunch of nerds and calling a kid’s haircut ‘very youth crew’ like five times, to my delight. Also, Main Attrakionz behind her all night.

I happily sat for 3 hours today watching Christian...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:33:21 -0700

I happily sat for 3 hours today watching Christian Marclay’s The Clock, an excerpt of which is above. This is around the noon mark I believe.

I got to SFMOMA around 11 am, was seated by 11:10 or so, and a few minutes after 2 my friend and I got up to leave, both marveling at how quickly those three hours had passed.

There are these things about Hollywood movies and television, these tropes and tricks, and they are all present in the footage, so you get the feel of tension building, a run up to a climax of some sort, but it rarely comes. Characters and actresses and scenes you know will appear and disappear, and while there is no narrative as such, you get the sense of narrative, the sense of a flow, of things making sense. But it doesn’t, not really.

The only thing that really drives this forward is time, and it does it beautifully, and sneakily. I’ll be going back before it’s gone to catch other sections.

poetryeater: “Poetry does not have subject matter, because it...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:05:00 -0700

poetryeater:

“Poetry does not have subject matter, because it is the subject. We are the subject matter of poetry, not vice versa.”

—John Ashbery (pictured here with Frank O’Hara)

sup cool dudes

Alexis De Tocqueville*

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0700

anneboyer:

even the traffic complains

in the language of trade

sub-woofed gossip, sirens,

2chainz & gentrified

sexts

We volunteer for the rack

on which we stretch ourselves,

bring our own coffins

as Hannibal brought

elephants.

What great fortune to be born

in the homeland of dimming

and drone-light,

in the empire of anti-poetry

at its dimming,

to be of all anti-poets the most anti-poetical

ourselves mostly eviscerating against

and dimming,

eclipsed in anti-chanting

from the anti-center called “Kansas”

which you might mistake as no place

but which resembles future war.

*“Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States”

She’s been writing punches to the gut so consistently the last couple of weeks, just bowled over.

but my heart hurts for you, and I can whisper that to myself for hours on end, but just like slowly...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:35:00 -0700

but my heart hurts for you,

and I can whisper that to myself for hours on end, but just like

slowly repeating back to you all of the things you know,

this does not help

and I am without the words to finish this thought, to finish this

- 04-07-2013 fragment

I spent about four hours on trains of various sorts yesterday....

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:10:06 -0700

I spent about four hours on trains of various sorts yesterday. In between I drank beer and saw a great crane and considered mental health and felt distant from the person next to me and then felt close to a person around me but not next to me.

On the trains I read Geoffrey G O’Brien (seen above) and various people talking about brutalism and wrote quite a bit.

It is spring, right and that means renewal. Although I think accepting and understanding ones own brain chemistry are more important than the seasons changing per se. At least in this case.

I want to live in language and am figuring out how to make that happen.

I guess happy Easter is my point?

Toshiya Tsunoda - The Temple Recording

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 09:02:50 -0700

I’ve listened to The Temple Recording in multiple contexts, at work and on transit with headphones and at home on one of my two sets of speakers. While it’s been lovely in most of those environments, there’s something really spectacular about these two discs in the open air. The idea is simple, stethoscopes on temples recording the sounds of the movement under our skin and open air microphones facing outward to capture the trees and birds and wind of the environment. Those two sources are combined in each channel. What you end up with is unedited, a pure field recording in a sense, but it’s a combination, an aggregate of these two sources. A complication.

Tsunoda’s work has always been about that, complicating the conventional field recording. Starting from the position that a field recording need not be solely about a microphone pointed outwards, capturing what is OUT THERE, whether wildlife or urban environments. A field recording is an attempt to access and explore the possibilities of a specific space, the field here being more like a field of possibilities within a given constrained ‘space’ whether that be a wharf or a pipe or a bottle. Someone like Chris Watson has this outward focus, even when recording some of the tiny buzzing spaces of his earlier records, he is capturing these sonic vistas. Tsunoda’s work to me has always been about this obsessive desire to dive in.

On the first disc there are two pieces, each hovering around 15 minutes. You can hear birds and wind at times, but the overwhelming sound is that of the temples themselves. Blood racing beneath skin, breath occasionally, and rustling as head and neck move. That inward focus is given priority, or perhaps just had priority in the combined recordings. In my apartment, the windows open, I was struck by how seamlessly it fit in. It became impossible to determine birds outside from birds on disc, but that human hum and buzz were always just themselves, and clearer than anything else. I expected when I listened on headphones that there would be more parity between the two foci, out vs in, but even in the relative quiet of the office, the human part overwhelms. And it’s a lovely set of recordings, rewarding each and every time I listen, but it also feels sort of silly to even consider it in those terms, as something lovely or not. Because while I’m sure it’s important that the listener enjoy the experience to some degree, it seems more about exploring a given field of sound, listening into and around and through (stolen wholsale from Michael Pisaro who said on facebook, “they give you the feeling of hearing _around_ and _through_ things instead of just taking them in”).

And if I had any doubts on my second listen to disc one, the second disc erased all doubt The second disc is five tracks, and each of the five tracks are views on the previous 30 minutes, but exploded, distorted, played with. The first two tracks are like the first disc, except track 1 is only in the right channel, the second track only in the left. And then that third track, this sudden explosion of tone on top of that buzz. You hear humming, high and low, fade in and out, and not a delicate, precise hum exactly, just a very human tone, but heard from within. The fourth is just the outward facing microphones, and the fifth seems like the third, but only the outward mics again, bird and wind and tree and idle human humming, this time from mouths, not movement under the skin. And it’s all also lovely, which again feels silly. Because there’s so much more going on here, so much complication.

But it’s not just complicating the field recording, it’s about complicating our ideas of what it is to hear. The medium is a recording in each case, but this is about how we hear, not just how we hear recordings. The field of these tracks, even when literal, in that fourth track of just the outward facing microphones, is expansive, but there’s a dual expansion at work across these discs, an expansion both inwards and outwards. While the stethoscopes are literally focused within, even the outward facing mics have this inward expansion in a sense. With the channels starkly separated, each a unique view on the space, there’s a constant reminder of how we hear, how hearing really takes place inside our heads, within. And even with the stethoscope recordings, Michael put it perfectly, Tsunoda’s approach gives the sense of inhabiting the sound. Taking the outside world and reminding us we only know it from within our own heads, and taking the sounds within us and exploding them, allowing us to move around an inward space.

leave/trace

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:06:00 -0700

Grisha Shakhnes - leave/trace

I always liked those mites records, the name Grisha Shakhnes used to use. They were murky, muddy messes in the best sense. With this new LP he’s left behind the moniker, using his own name instead. And there’s a clear connection between the two projects. I’d guess leaving behind mites is less about rejection of approach and more about not feeling the need for a moniker, and since I’m feeling bold, I’d venture to say there might even be an inclination towards more transparency, less obfuscation. leave/trace explores similar spaces to those mites records, but immediately it’s clear this is also something different. Something more expansive, still murky at times, but with more space, the parts of each track feeling a little more distinct.

The first track starts with repetition, a theme here. Whether it’s the repetitive skritch of the runout groove of vinyl or something else I can’t tell, but it calmly repeats itself, the rattle and clang coming up from below, and then a couple minutes in that hissy, tape-y murkiness I love from Grisha’s earlier music slowly shows itself. But throughout there is room, space, even when those roughly textured slabs of sound show up, there’s an openess to what you hear. Snippets of the outside world, field recordings maybe, sounds appearing again and again, but it’s never clear if things are being looped or if it’s a recording or live. And the machines themselves seem to play a role. Whether it’s tape or vinyl or what, throughout the first track these steady rhythms fade in and out, tying together muffled voices and hiss.

You can almost reach out and touch the space between though. Where before there was this maximum density with mites, the feeling you could tunnel through the murk and be endlessly surrounded, here each element feels separate, but not disconnected. Like I said, this record feels expansive, more open. And then the second track starts and those slabs have been removed completely and you’re left with this seemingly clear image, a field recording, mostly unadorned, plays itself out for a few minutes. Children’s voices, a playground? and then this seamless transition to a loop, swingset creak repeated forever, and on my first listen almost literally true as I didn’t realize it ended in a locked groove. The longer I let it play though, the more the sound seemed to change with time and repitition, even well beyond when the locked groove took over. A pretty nice achievement, that.

The B side starts with the densest of the tracks here. There’s a pleasing aggressiveness to the sounds. The hum of electricity is insistent for much of it, and while it’s the densest of the four, there is still space between the crumbling and the creaking. There’s a confusing sort of clarity to this music, with the individual sounds and sources, even when mysterious to my non-technical ears, appearing individually and discretely, but quickly becoming subsumed into the whole with few exceptions. And somewhere in the last third ‘a man aflame’ takes its claws out. What sounds like the same or similar playground field recordings are buried under crackle and hum, it’s nearly impossible to not read it as ominous, yet it works, abstract enough that I don’t feel I’m being told a story, just happy to be along for the rough ride.

And it ends with the final track, at times feeling familiar, like some of the same material is reused, given a new sort of life, but there is a patience to it now, the sounds all stretched out, the repetition slower, deeper, and this beautiful shifting tone underneath throughout, like a bowed bass, or multiple? It’s not soothing, or serene, but it has an unnerving patient sort of calm.

Only Grisha really knows why he’s left mites behind, but I feel confident saying it’s no coincidence that on ‘leave/trace’ it’s not mites that delivered an LP of beautiful, flawlessly executed concrete style assemblage it’s Grisha himself. A stunning record, highly highly recommended.

Out on Glistening Examples.