Hambone's Heartache

Me Performing at the Dil Pickle Club on Chicago Amplified!

2008-08-11T15:02:00.002-05:00

Listen in on Chicago Amplified!

Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Jim Larkin, and the cadre of Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) and the Charles H. Kerr Company—and made famous by "clap doctor" Ben Reitman—the Dil Pickle Club became known as the controversial center of the "Chicago Renaissance."

Writers Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Vachel Lindsay, and Kenneth Rexroth, mingled with radicals, unemployed workers, prostitutes, gangsters, and slumming Gold Coast socialites at the famed "Pickle." The irreverent spirit of the Dil Pickle Club was illustrated by the motto emblazoned on the club's door: "Step High, Stoop Low, Leave Your Dignity Outside."

Although its original location (reached by squeezing "Thru the Hole in the Wall Down Tooker Alley, to the Green Lite Over the Orange Door") is long gone, the new Dil Pickle Club will meet three times yearly, in July, November, and March, featuring works by Chicago artists and their international cohorts.

This recording of the first revival at the Gold Coasts's Zebra Lounge includes live music by Tom King Clear, short speaking by Gale Aherns, and new writing by Michael Marcinkowski. The reunion also included a picture show by Robin Hustle and performance art by Matthew Nicholas and Eric Warner.

*Text from Chicago Amplified

A Reconstruction Room Bestiary Curated by Yours Truly...

2008-05-18T12:11:00.004-05:00

"Bestiarum Vocabulum"

curated by Jacob S. Knabb

Here begins an examination of the nature of beasts. Of lions and panthers and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and apes. Of poets and fictioneers and audio-visual mavens, lurkers and disreputable types, hyenas and scalawags, and all of the mean, lean, mangy, hidebound skinny, worthless cattle in every particular drove.

Wednesday, may 21, 2008
Black Rock Bar
3614 N. Damen
Chicago, Il
8:00 pm

Line-up:

Philip Jenks & Simone Muench: Will be reading poems about Hydras.

Matthew Guenette: Will be reading poems about otters of ill repute.

Jonathan Messinger: Will be reading a piece about wolf-punching.

Greg Purcell: Will be reading poems, dealing with beasties.

Erika Mikkalo: Will be reading poems about the zoo.

Aras and the Volodkas: Will be singing songs about birds and girls with glasses.

Nick Garcia: Will be freestyle rapping about furry topics.

Nicolette Bond: Will be performing a crank-machine paper-roll play about a goat named Yoshi.

Miki Howald: Will be reading a piece on cryptozoology.

Jacob S. Knabb: Will perform a short one-act play about a couple of country rabbits.

ACM needs your words...

2008-05-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

ACM is at work on a special issue, but we need your help. We are compiling an ACM Bestiarium Vocabulum. Here is a link to give an idea of what we mean by that...:

http://bestiary.ca/

Also, check out this link to the entries for a host of beasts (we really love the Pelican, in particular)...:

http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalphashort.htm

We are not doing a "by the rules" Bestiary. However, we are playing with the ideas that form the basis for them. We also have an amazing Chicago-based artist named Rob Funderburk at work on illustrations to accompany our content. We've got several pieces at present that fit with the theme, but we want more! If you have an interesting story, poem, or Creative Nonfiction essay, please send it our way. Be certain to indicate that the submission is for the ACM Bestiary in the cover letter, and address it to...:

"ACM Bestiary"
c/o Jacob S. Knabb
1842 N. Humboldt Blvd
Apt 3A
Chicago, IL - 60647

Keep in mind that this is not our regular address for submissions, and that only appropriate content will be considered. All other content sent to this address will be rejected outright. Please forward this to writers you know and admire who may have work suitable for this issue. And bear in mind, we don't want any "my dog is so cute when he runs in the grass with the kids that sometimes it makes me cry" type animal stories. Of course, if you've ever seen an issue of ACM, you already know that anyway.

Looking Forward to What This Appeal Might Bring,

Jacob S. Knabb
Managing/Fiction Editor
Another Chicago Magazine

Short Attention Span Theater, Vol. 1

2008-04-13T10:53:00.001-05:00

-curtains rise-

man, seated on a freshly painted green park bench. naked.

Man: (whispers) Who, me...? Unctuous...?

sexy voice: Yes.

-lights fade to black-

The Greatest Thing I've Seen, vol. 1

2008-03-15T11:43:00.000-05:00

Behind the Curve

2008-03-15T11:31:00.003-05:00

Well, I have given up being ahead of the curve. I'm just not a hipster, and I don't have time to pretend to be one. And I am certainly no music critic-at least not in the sense that I listen to everything that comes out, and can make erudite comments about the music like some of my dyed-in-the-wool music critics friends can. It means I have to spend far too much time hiding behind my headphones, listening to amorphous postpostfreejazzpostpunknoisepostbands, and reading crappy journalists rave about how sucky, pretentious-for-no-good-reason bands like the Black Swans are as good as Nick Cave, the best new thing, and will be playing amazing music that could be a soundtrack to a western from hell (and all of that because they wanted free merch, and a guest pass (+1) for the Black Swans show at Hideout)... So, if someone burns me a Lupe Fiasco CD, and I like it, I'll say, yeah this is really good! It's already a year old? Oh, that's nice. Just seems that people who are always rushing forward to catch the next thing don't spend any time with what they've got. And that just strikes me as shallow. If an album is that good, spend some time with it. Learn the words. Try to figure out what they mean. Who cares if someone else 'heard it first.' Otherwise, just admit you're a barnacle, and you don't care what kind of material (mammal, metal, wood, etc) you're hanging onto, even if it turns out to be a rusticated tin-can. Just try your best not to get dislodged...:

Tune in Next Week for scenes from The End of the Days of Our Lives!

2008-03-07T11:21:00.001-06:00

Our radio-play turned staged reading went over quite well. Check it out!

A Working Draft of a Radio Play!

2008-03-05T16:11:00.000-06:00

It's a radioplay starring me....! Give it a listen....!

"The Birthday Party"

Rec Room Apocalypse...

2008-03-04T12:00:00.004-06:00

Come a check it out!

Reconstruction Room Presents:

This Wednesday, March 5, don't miss the end of the world (as we know it).
Join us @ black rock at 8p.m. for: Apocalypse!

Curated by Eugenia Williamson and Literago.org with performances by:

Richard Fox's poems have appeared widely in many literary journals including Court Green, Diagram, TriQuarterly, Spinning Jenny and Painted Bride Quarterly. His first book of poetry is Swagger & Remorse (Tebot Bach). He received fellowships for poetry from the City of Chicago and the Illinois Arts Council. He holds a BFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art and, until the apocalypse, lives in Chicago.

Jeb Gleason-Allured lives in Chicago (for now). The Apocalypse will never happen only if Mel Brooks becomes actually funny.

Jacob S. Knabb is 6-feet tall and full of four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Fred Sasaki has been described as the angel of death, glutting lost dreams and penultimate despair.

Julie Shapiro is the managing director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Before moving to Chicago, Shapiro worked at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and was assistant director of Transmissions, an annual experimental sound and art festival from 1998-2001. These days Shapiro makes audio art for public presentation, teaches at Loyola University and can occasionally be heard on the public radio airwaves. She keeps an audio-relevant blog at www.notetheslantoftheovals.blogspot.com.

Lauren Weinberg is the Art & Design Editor of Time Out Chicago. The native New Yorker studied English and French literature at Cornell University before switching to a more useful field—the history of decorative arts—at Parsons School of Design. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews and CS and her influences include George Eliot, E.M. Forster and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

((REC ROOM INFO))

What: the reconstruction room (a biweekly theme party -- with art, literature and performance)
Website: www.recroomers.com (check it out for updated archives, photos from past shows, and a roster of upcoming shows!)
When: the first and third wednesdays of every month -- 8:00 p.m.
Where: black rock (a bar at the corner of damen and addison in roscoe village. two blocks west of the addison stop on the brown line.)
Cost: free
Organizers: erin teegarden, trinette mura, meg barboza, miki howald.
Contact: recroom at recroomers.com

Dostoyevsky is a bad mutha....

2008-02-28T01:36:00.002-06:00

Our friend had certainly acquired a few bad habits, especially during recent months. He let himself run to seed visibly and rapidly, and it is quite true that he had become slovenly. He drank more, he was more easily moved to tears, and his nerves grew weaker. He had become far too sensitive to evaluate anything of artistic value. His face had acquired a strange faculty for changing extraordinarily rapidly, from the most solemn expression, for instance, to the most ridiculous and even stupid. He could not bear being left alone, and he was incessantly craving for amusement.

Comment #1

2008-02-10T14:31:00.000-06:00

I met a pugdog at a gallery opening two nights ago. The pugdog was small, and of indeterminant sex, as the space was very dark (and also in the basement of an apt complex) and I could not manage an appraisal of its gender. The artist had made a unicorn out of a horse skeleton, painted the bones gold, arranged soil on the ground, and placed limbs from Iowa trees vertically (reaching from floor to ceiling) to make a sort of landscape. The bones were lying, more or less intact, in the dark soil, the gold paint sparkling in the glow of a single spotlight. I crouched to pet the pugdog, and it sat down while I did it. It made that cool pudog noise and all was good and I thought: "I need a pugdog." And I thought: "Shanna Nelson has a pug dog." And I thought: "I am jealous of Shanna Nelson." And this morning when I sign on to MySpace who else do I see but Shanna Nelson. I see that Shanna Nelson and Shanna Nelson's much desired pugdog are happy and, I must admit, I don't feel very good about it. All I think is: "There is no way that I can ever have a pugdog like Shanna Nelson's happy pugdog because pugdogs cost 70-trillion dollars and 70-trillion dollars is a lot.

"My Favorite Poem of the Moment" or "I have/never been sad for appropriate reasons."

2008-02-09T15:58:00.000-06:00

Matthew Zapruder read this poem at our AWP Fete (organized and ass-kicked by Sarah @ MAKE Magazine)

THE PAINTED DESERT

Right now in the rest area it’s sunny and cold. Someone
is taking a picture of the vending machine. I have
never been sad for appropriate reasons. Never
have I sat in the wet grass looking not at dark sky
but blue paper someone had carefully taken
hours to punch out in a shape invisible
until the flashlight is turned on below. Earlier
when I said everything is a switch immediately
the interlocking gears in the self-hatred mechanism
began to grind. Part of me is always about to turn
in a direction I will never go. Trucks roar
filled with things people need. Sometimes I sound
to myself like a robot. Too many times as a teen
I stared onto the surface of a mysterious
solvable multifaceted cube. I can see you don’t need
me to stretch out my hand to point to dread
and its little button. The door swings open,
one entire miserable summer I should have been happy
flashes in the word molybdenum. I saw people
mining cinder from volcanoes. Cinder
is made into blocks lighter than cement to hold
the plywood shelves holding one or more
than one person’s books. To intermingle
is so difficult to extricate. Shells marine organisms
abandon dissolve into ooze. Found near waterfalls
it’s known as travertine. Goodbye, someday
I’ll invent the magic lantern, then music,
then whatever’s the opposite of the need
to control everything so it can be perfect for you.

"There seems always to be an 'and yet'"

2008-02-09T14:03:00.000-06:00

Studying a text on Lagerkvist¹ (yeah, I'm starting to fire up the old scholarship machine because the thicket needs cleared of all those weeds...) and came across an interesting bit of information about the past:

Young Lagerkvist must surely have felt that he had left the past behind him when he departed from Växjö to study literature and art history at Uppsala University in 1912. In 1913, absorbing the avante-garde theories of art in a Paris alive with the cubist activities of Picasso and Braque, Lagerkvist must have believed himself light years removed from his birthplace. The poet and fiction writer, experimenting with cubist theories in Motiv (1914) and Järn och människor (1915), and the essayist programming a revolutionary esthetic change in Ordkonst och bildkonst (1913) did indeed appear to be a stranger to his origins.

And yet, and with the paradoxical Lagerkvist there seems always to be an "and yet,"Lagerkvist never severed the umbilical cord to his youth. The further he seemed to progress, the more he found himself tied to his past. The quiet cathedral town of Växjö that stubbornly refused to yield its faith to the onslaught of fin de siècle forces, the pietistic religion of his parents' and grandparents' households-these nagged at his conscience, beckoned to him in his insecurities, and lured him with their simplicity. He had rejected the orthodoxy of his grandfather, who, when "he heard the thunder rolling," could proclaim, "It is good to know that the Lord reigns."² He had turned away from the farmhouse that rested secure in its faith of the single star that shined eternally overhead, and he had gone forth to wander beneath a maze of stars that attracted his intellect, but could not satisfy his soul.³ The past has remained a part of Lagerkvist throughout his adult life, shaping his personality and his work.

There are several things to love about this bit of analytical summary by Spector. I love the quote of the common Scandinavian saying that when you hear the thunder rolling you may proclaim that it is good to know that the Lord reigns. We had one in West Virginia (and I'm sure elsewhere, though I heard it first on a pontoon in Summersville Lake when my Grandmother commented on the thunder) that stated when you hear the thunder you knows the devil is beating his wife. It's a very telling detail about the nature of faith, and a faith that many would consider to be simplistic. Yet, it is a faith that even a mind as complex as Lagerkvist's never could come to grips with. It is also interesting to consider a past that may not be outstripped, no matter the nature of life's progression away from that past. It puts me in mind of that moment in Magnolia when:

just before gameshow host Jimmy Gator, played by Philip Baker Hall, goes on stage, Burt Ramsey, played by Ricky Jay—who is wearing a masonic ring—asks him, "You with me, Jimmy?" Jimmy says, "The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us." to which Burt replies, "We met upon the level and we're parting on the square" [00:51:23]."⁴

Aside from Masonic notions of the squareness of morality (and the idea of the square being the basis of Christ's "Golden Rule"⁵), we have a fully formed idea of what the past may indeed be in our lives: an ongoing influence, inescapable and indiscrete in its impact on our actions and deeds.

For Lagerkvist, this seemingly old testament religious past led to an ongoing examination of holiness, and an obsession with the frailty of faith. For Piccoline (the narrator of The Dwarf), faith is botched horribly by humans, and is most disgusting in the hands of individuals like the Princess. For Barabbas (the obvious central character of Barabbas), the faith of the Christians who worship the crucified Christ is an unyielding mystery, one which leads him on an obsessive search for the nature of Christ, and one which refuses to be illuminated, even when he is at his own end and himself gives up the ghost. Yes indeed, with Lagerkvist, there is always an "and yet."

1. Spector, Robert Donald. Pär Lagerkvist. New York: TWAS 1973.
2. Sven Linnér, "Introduction to Scandinavica, 10 (May, 1971), Supplement, 1.
3. See later discussion of Aftonland (1953), in which collection Lagerkvist uses these images
4. "Masonry in the Movies."Jephtha Masonic Lodge 494 F&AM. 9 Feb. 2008.
5. "Strive to live with love and care / Upon the Level, by the Square."

An Awesome Obituary for Francis Crick

2008-01-25T18:04:00.000-06:00

Just fooling around on the net when I came across a post on Baseball Think Factory where the poster referenced an awesome obituary of Francis Crick. Here's the link to the full obituary, written by a fellow named Mark Steyn. It's impressive, and Crick seems to have been quite a character. I had no idea.

For example, apparently, on the night that Crick made the breakthrough discovery of "a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid," he went to his favorite pub for a nightcap. That's right, after sussing out the core of humanity, Francis Crick had a few drinks. Upon entering, Crick "crowed to the barmaids and regulars at The Eagle, his Cambridge pub, on a triumphant night in 1953" that he had "'discovered the secret of life.'"

Crick was staunchly atheistic, and his beliefs, founded in childhood, were inexhaustible:

Religion he never let up on. The university at which he practiced his science is filled with ancient college chapels, whose presence so irked Crick that when the new Churchill College invited him to become a fellow, he agreed to do so only on condition that no chapel be built on the grounds. In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel and Crick's fellow fellows voted to take the money, he refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn't were not obliged to enter it. He offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and when that was rejected, he resigned.

If you ask me, the world might could use a few more brothels.

Crick was also a bit misanthropic, and coveted his privacy (despite the fame his discoveries garnered him). "Crick disliked celebrity, and had a standard reply card printed to fend off his fellow man: 'Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to …' There then followed a checklist of options with a tick by the relevant item: 'send an autograph,' 'provide a photograph,' 'appear on your radio or TV show,' 'cure your disease,' and so on...Dr. Crick also automatically turned down honorary degrees and disdained the feudal honors offered by the British state (though he eventually relented and accepted an invitation from the Queen to join her most elite Order of Merit)." Crick was quirky. His wife painted nudes, he came to believe that aliens may have started off life on Earth through transporting bacteria from their planet to this one, and, though he felt emotions in general to be simply genetic reactions, he "was never a dry or pompous scientist, he liked jokes and costume parties, he was a late starter with one great obsession." It was this last work that defined his belief system for others to ponder: "'The Astonishing Hypothesis,' trumpeted Crick, 'is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.'

Part of the reason I find this so interesting, aside from the obviously interesting details of this man's life, is that Crick is vastly more interesting than his rival in Richard Powers' novel The Gold Bug Variations. In Powers' novel, Crick is a mere spectre, a figure who might find the solution first. Powers creates a scientist named Stuart Ressler who is young, talented, and tortured by his love affair with a married coworker with whom he labors on the solution to the tangled formula of DNA. The novel bears none of the compelling detail found in a quick survey of Francis Crick's life, and, to my mind at least, is grossly overrated. The only reason I bring this up is not to berate Powers for his work (he's a vastly talented novelist, and many folks much smarter than I find him exquisite) . I just felt bored by his characters, dissatisfied with the "broken lover gives it all up and becomes a recluse" formula the book follows, and felt the prose to be overwrought (even at times a bit purple). But, boy, what a novel could be made out of a man like Francis Crick! What a novel indeed!

A Poll for the ACM Folks & Anyone Else Who Actually Reads This Piffle

2008-01-22T16:58:00.000-06:00

Numbers as Words

2008-01-21T15:23:00.000-06:00

Reading summaries of Bill James' old Baseball Abstracts, written by Rich Lederer, and came across an interesting bit of baseball number theory from James' essay "Making Sense of Numbers"..:

What is disturbing to some people about sabermetrics is that in sabermetrics we use the numbers as numbers. We add them together; we multiply and divide them. Rather than saying that Gunzie Bushcracker is a .300 hitter as a way of saying that Gunzie is a good ballplayer, we say that he is a .304 hitter and that the measurable impact of this is ... [fill in the blank] In using the numbers in the way that we do, in adjusting them for whatever influences them unfairly, in restating them in unfamiliar forms in which they retain no standards, we rob them of their traditional meaning. Sabermetricians often aggravate this problem by dismissing as meaningless the traditional reference points, so as to emphasize the need for their new methods. It is not surprising that this is disorienting and sometimes irritating to baseball fans who love the numbers as words.

I really like this bit of writing by James. His voice in his essays is not spiteful or ironic, yet he dismisses so many of the traditional ways of expressing athletic performance in the game as being somewhat worthless. Traditionally, hitting .300 is, perhaps, the simplest and most reliable way to convey that a player is good at baseball to pretty much anyone who grew up in America. Upon closer inspection, hitting .300 is one of the least reliable ways a player can display that he is good at baseball.

Anyway, what I particularly like is the idea that people love numbers as words. That numbers can tell a story about someone. James' provides his own example..:

Suppose that you see the number 48 in a player's home run column...Do you think about 48 cents or 48 soldiers or 48 sheep jumping over a fence? Absolutely not. You think about Harmon Killebrew, about Mike Schmidt, about Ted Kluszewski, about Gorman Thomas. You think about power.
In this way, the number 48 functions not as a number, as a count of something, but as a word, to suggest meaning. The existence of universally recognized standards--.300, 100 RBI, 20 wins, 30 homers--plus the daily lists of league leaders and the weekly summary of everybody, transmogrifies the lines of statistics into a peculiar, precise form of language. We all know what .312 means. We all know what 12 triples means, and what 0 triples means. We know what 0 triples means when it is combined with 0 home runs (slap hitter, chokes up and punches), and we know what it means when it is combined with 41 home runs (uppercuts, holds the bat at the knob, can't run and doesn't need to).

This can apply to people who are not even as statistically knowledgeable about the game as well. In a memorable episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza becomes incensed when friends of his fiance steal the name "7" from him. They are in a car, the woman in labor, rushing to the hospital. They ask George for his opinion on a name, and he tells them they should use a word like "soda" because it is original. He also tells them he has the perfect name for his own child, which, when prompted, he reveals to be "7." Just the number. Nothing else. It's the perfect number for George. It works for a boy or a girl. And it was the number that belonged to Mickey Mantle. 7 symbolizes perfection to George, a life well lived, a perfectly magnetic name due primarily to the fact that it was Mantle's jersey number.

Bill James is right. In baseball, numbers can tell stories. And for all this time here I thought I had something going with all my words...

But, if you don't believe me, perhaps this video will help elucidate my point...:

Reading Joe P. Made Me Realize that Tom Hanks Was Our "Big Brother"

2008-01-14T15:00:00.000-06:00

As kids, like most of us growing up in the 80s, we would watch pretty much anything that was on TV (I saw the film Legal Eagles far more than I would care to mention, for example). This isn’t to say that we never went outside, or didn’t participate in things like Cub Scouts or Little League or whatever. We did all of those things. But, when we weren’t doing all of those things, we were watching TV. HBO ruled cable for movies, along with Cinemax/Showtime/The Movie Channel a little later, and was the only possible avenue to movies that would at least entertain us, and at best might piss off our parents. I can remember nearly going blind trying to see Daryl Hannah’s anything during the opening underwater scenes to Splash, for example; or when we counted the number of times that Eddie Murphy said “fuck” during Raw; or seeing Porky’s with my older cousins. There was literally a sort of physical high for films with a PG rating. R ratings were overwhelming to our systems, and caused actual panic and the need for constant vigilance at the threat of being caught with the R rating on the screen. But, from time to time, it’d slip past our parents, or there’d be the basement TV at 2 a.m., or whatever, and we’d get to watch movies for adults.

The point of all of this is that Tom Hanks movies were on all the time. Every day. Forever. And it seemed that Tom Hanks starred alongside a lot of attractive actresses. And he was very lovable to all of us. And he was very much like an older brother, or a young dad. He was a bit juvenlile and awkward, and we felt like he was one of us. Of course, Big really, really worked due to this. There was also Steve Guttenberg. Sure, we all watched Police Academy, and sure we all knew who Steve Guttenberg was, but he didn’t have the volume of movies Hanks did on HBO (though, in his defense, Short Circuit, The Police Academy series, and Cocoon were on a lot). To some extent, my generation grew up with Tom Hanks in a lead role.

I can’t speak for every kid on this one. I’m sure there were some mega-smart kids out there, and kids who were more sophisticated about film than we were. But, it didn’t make any difference at all whether the movies Tom Hanks starred in were actually good. Hey, we loved Turner & Hooch, for example! Loved it. Awesome dog slobber jokes. I mean, I don’t think Hanks is even acting in those (and from the goofy, aren’t these takes funny clips during the end credits, it seems to be true)! I think they just kept the shots where the dog slimed him in the grossest manner, and he reacted in the funniest manner, and worked those into the film. We watched all of those Tom Hanks movies many, many times.

And then we grew up.

And then Tom Hanks did A League of Their Own and a lot of us cried at the end. And then Tom Hanks did Sleepless in Seattle and many of us fell in love (though, ironically, really all of us, man woman and child among us, fell in love with Meg Ryan through Hanks; not so many fell in love with him, per se). And then Tom Hanks did Philadelphia, and a certain portion of us were moved. And then Tom Hanks did Forrest Gump and it just seemed that all of us trusted it as somehow showing us the truth about an entire generation of life in America (though I will say that I personally hate that movie more than any other). And the rest is history (including all of that weird shit with the soccer ball). And by now, I'd imagine a lot of us will one day get chill bumps when we learn that Tom Hanks has died, even the most subjective among us, and all because we grew up watching Tom Hanks movies on cable. And, yeah, Joe, The Burbs is pretty good too.

This is when I fell in love with Norm MacDonald...

2008-01-09T01:45:00.000-06:00

Did you ever see that movie with Meryl Streep and a horse?

Traveling Jitters

2007-12-20T01:46:00.000-06:00

I've got them. Philip Jenks and I are heading to WV tomorrow, and even though it's a trip I've made many times, and I'm excited to see everyone back home, I've still got traveling jitters. I'm edgy and, obviously, still awake. The older I get, the more predictable this becomes. I've already finished reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, so that's out (I will write more about Mishima later). And I just can't bring myself to go back to Krasznahorkai just yet. And so here I sit. Typing about nothing. There is always YouTube...:

A Limerick I Liked...

2007-12-19T11:11:00.000-06:00

...from a book I inherited somehow from one of the former roommates of Joel, or from Joel himself.

The Limerick is from the section of the book entitled "Medical, Psychological, Problematical." As you can imagine, this section contains lots of not so good verse about Freud, pocked cocks, and botched surgeries. But this one was quite excellent:

There was a faith-healer of Deal
Who said: 'Although pain isn't real,
If I sit on a pin,
And it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel.'

It's kind of a perfect little limerick. It also is a nice summary of the sorts of confusion I feel after reading G.E.M. Anscombe...

This is what Mishima can do...

2007-12-17T11:25:00.000-06:00

...

Gradually a blurred form at the water's edge was sharpening into a building. As Ryuji stared at the red bulb blooming above an emergency exit, he became painfully conscious of the texture of shore life. He would be thirty four in May. It was time to abandon the dream he had cherished too long. Time to realize that no specially tailored glory was waiting for him. Time, no matter if the feeble eaves lamps still defied the green-gray light of morning by refusing to come awake, to open his eyes.
Though it was New Year's Day, a submerged tremolo pervaded the harbor. Every few minutes a barge unraveled from the moored fleet and hacked dryly down the canal. As a rosy hue stained the surface of the water and seemed to inflate itself into round abundance, the poles of light slanting away from anchored ships began to dwindle. Twenty minutes past six: the mercury lamps in the park clicked out.
"Are you getting cold?" Ryuji asked.
"My gums are stinging, it's so cold-but I don't mind. The sun will be coming up any minute now."
Are you getting cold?...Are you getting cold? Ryuji asked again and again, and all the time he was directing another question to himself: Are you really going to give it up? The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The sweet tears you weep for your song? Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness? The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was "beyond," wrong or right, had always been "beyond." Are you going to give that up? His heart in spasm because he was always in contact with the ocean's dark swell and the lofty light from the edge of the clouds, twisting, withering until it clogged and then swelling up again, and he unable to distinguish the most exalted feelings from the meanest and that not mattering really since he could hold the sea responsible-are you going to give up that luminous freedom? (Mishima, 110-111)

The Melancholy of Adaptation

2007-12-16T15:14:00.000-06:00

I am trying to read The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai right now. It's the book Bela Tarr used to create Werckmeister Harmonies. Both Tarr and Krasznahorkai are Hungarians, and most likely not familiar to many Americans (even folks who read and/or watch film on a regular basis). I'm a huge fan of Bela Tarr. His films are awesome, and Werckmeister Harmonies is just stunning. I loved it so much that I wanted to check out some of Krasznahorkai's work too. I thought I'd be opening up a new world, so to speak, having never read any Hungarian writers. Krasznahorkai is very prolific.. I haven't read anything by him until now, and I purchased both The Melancholy of Resistance and War And War off of Abebooks.com, thinking I'd jump right in.

I don't know what's been lost in translation, or how much poetry has disappeared through the act of making this into an english-language novel. But, I'm simply not enoying reading it very much. Of course, I most likely have severely high expectations, because I love Werckmeister Harmonies so. Still, it is shocking to see just how heavily Tarr (& perhaps Krasznahorkai) adapted the novel, stripping away all of the fat, altering the order of some discoveries, shifting dialogue in order to maximize its impact, cutting away other dialogue, and simply showing the very things Krasznahorkai seems to me to be struggling to tell us. The film is completely from the perspective of Janos, a newspaper delivery man, and resident eccentric. The novel employs an almost Virginia Woolf style of character switching, as employed in Mrs. Dalloway, (folks who have seen the Linklater film Slacker will also understand this style).

We begin with a female character, Mrs. Valuska, riding the train back to her hometown, and noticing all of the nasty types around her on the train, and stay with her for around about 50 pages. She gets to her destination, is nearly raped along the way, exits the train to see that the power is out, and makes her way home, through crowds of menacing drifters who are not from her hometown, and are likely farmers and roustabouts who have followed a carnival that has been traversing the Hungarian plains. This carnival features a giant whale, dead and preserved (though very stinky), and a "prince," some sort of freak, who preaches to the crowds, and is converting masses of uneducated laborers into a fascist force. Or at least that's what people are saying is happening (and, in actuality, all of the gossip and conjecture proves to be quite true). Once Mrs. Valuska gets home, she is visited by Mrs. Eszter, who is pushing her own agenda to reform society. Mrs. Eszter tries to convince the woman to agree with her, and fails. She rises to go, her anger fomenting internally, and we follow Mrs. Eszter as she leaves our first character. In this manner, we move through a few characters. However, it is still Janos that is the "main" character, as he is the center of several of the concerns of the other characters (He is a caretaker for Mr. Eszter, the son of the Mrs. Valuska, and the key for Mrs. Eszter to get her husband to agree to her plans as well).

This is all a longwinded, and somewhat confusing analysis, I fear. What I want to say is that this book feels overwritten. The prose is smothering, demanding, and very specific, leaving the reader either: completely swept away by the narrative flow or trapped and following the author's hyper-controlled gaze. The older I get, the more I love writers like Mishima and Lagerkvist and Coetzee: writers who are able to be both accessible and philosophical, and who use a more imagistic, fabular approach. Think Hemingway, for a more common reference point. This is not to say that I only like this style, or that I unfairly judge non-practitioners, or whatever. Quite the opposite, in fact. As with most people, when someone tries to do the thing I value most, I am very particular in evaluating their work. What this is to say is that Werckmeister Harmonies is the full (cinematic) realization of the best aspects of kind of writing I most love, and want to one day be capable of writing, and The Melancholy of Resistance is not. I'm a little bit flabbergasted. And I've already begun to cheat on Krasznahorkai! I slept with Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea next to me in my bed last night. I feel bad having an affair like this. I truly value discipline, and finishing what you start. I don't like muddying things up in this manner, and it makes me feel guilt which is of course quite silly. I'll finish the book. I always force myself to do that. I just hope I can burn through this affair with Mishima as quickly as possible, so that Krasznahorkai doesn't find out...

Walks Can Kill You, Volume 1

2007-07-30T15:00:00.000-05:00

It's quite funny, really. People are so obtuse regarding walks. The old school folks mistrust them, think they're sort of like 50% of a hit, or worse, that they clog up the bases and hurt the offense. Yet, those same old school folks think in a radically different manner when some of the parameters are shifted slightly.

For example, suppose you're watching your hometown team, say that's the White Sox, and it's a close game. Your team's pitcher, say his name is David Aardsma, walks the lead-off man to begin the sixth inning. This undoubtedly has a psychological impact on the White Sox. The first thing Hawk & DJ (two of the oldest school guys in the industry) will immediately interrupt their nostalgia for their own playing careers to express the following sentiment: "You hate to start off an inning like that. It just seems like those walks always come around to score." Then the camera shows Ozzie Guillen in the dug-out (one of the most walk allergic players in the history of the game, and a manager who thinks walks are overrated) and he's flipping out. Not again, Ozzie!. Those walks are killing their chances.

Think about all the tired cliches broadcasters and managers wheel out when a guy draws a walk: Walks will kill you. Seems like they always come around to score. You can't give a good team extra chances. He just gave up a three run homer, because he walked the first two men and had to challenge the next hitter. Wow, he really worked the count back from 0-2 and got on base. That has to be devastating for the pitcher. Etc. Etc. Etc. Yet, when the framework is flipped, and offense is under discussion, these same grizzled men 'o baseball mistrust even their own wisdom.

If you'd really like to see how damaging a low OBP team is, check out Derrek Lee's statistics in 2005. Go ahead. Here's a link. I want you to look at the disparity between how many runs DLee scored and how many he knocked in. He batted .335 and was on-base nearly 42% of the time. He scored 120 runs, because he generated 199 hits and 85 walks. When the folks batting behind him in the line-up came to the plate, DLee was on base nearly half of the time, meaning if they got a hit, they likely got an RBI. Yet, within this stat line, there is one total that makes no sense. Despite those 199 hits, 50 doubles, 3 triples, and 46 homeruns, DLee could only generate 107 RBI. Think about that for a moment. If you simply subtract the homers from the RBI totals (logical since DLee knocked himself in on each homerun), you are left with 61 RBI. Subtract the doubles (we'll be kind and assume the Cubs had a runner on for each of them, and DLee knocked him in), and you're left with 11 RBI. Subtract the triples, and you've got 8. That still leaves 100 singles for DLee, which generated only 8 RBI. That is pathetic.

In 2004, Pujols had nearly the exact same stat-line as DLee's '05 season (here ya go). In fact he had a few less singles and one less triple, but 99 extra base hits, the exact same total. Yet he was able to knock in 123 runs. If we subtract the extra base hits, as we did above with DLee, we are left with 97 singles for Pujols, generating 24 RBI. Well, why did this happen? Is it because Pujols is a "true Yankee" er "True Cardinal"? Nah. It's because in 2004 the two men who most often batted in front of Albert were on base more than the two men who most often batted ahead of DLee. Far too often, Dusty Baker penciled Corey Patterson in at leadoff (gotta have speed at the top of the line-up), and Neifi Perez in the 2-hole (you need a guy who can handle the bat hitting second). Patterson was on base 25% of the time (a truly pathetic table-setter) and Neifi was on base essentially 30% of the time. Phat Albert had Tony Womack on base 35% of the time and Renteria on base 33% of the time. Of course line-ups vary from day-to-day, so other folks were occasionally batting #1 or #2 for the '05 Cubs and the '04 Cards. And, of course, those OBPs include hits as well as walks. But still, just from this small comparison, we can see that, yes, Walks/OBP isn't at all misleading. Actually, quite the opposite. Pujols had more men on base than Lee, and thus his hits generated more runs. A higher OBP meant a more favorable scoring outcome for the Cardinals.

I don't know how much more straightforward things could be. If a hitter gets on base, he has a better chance to score. Walks are important. OBP matters, because getting on base is absolutely crucial. You can't score without baserunners. A free pass means another baserunner. Of course, there is one other upshot to OBP, and a player who generates plenty of walks. That player causes his opponents to throw more pitches. And, in getting on base, he forces the pitcher to throw from the stretch. Pressure is amplified, the inning is prolonged, and that player's team has a greater chance of scoring. How are folks not able to realize this after following baseball a long time? Perhaps they should follow a little more closely...

An Upside Top Ten: Bankable Pitchers

2007-05-22T12:54:00.000-05:00

Ten Pitchers With "Stud" Abilities

Christopher Harris recently published a piece in his "Big Rotowski" column on the ten pitchers he considers to be the most reliable going forward. Harris is relied upon to be a shrewd fantasy analyst, and articulates his trading philosophy as follows:

When I evaluate trade questions, I almost invariably answer that the team receiving the best player in a deal wins that deal. The best players get the most at-bats, pitch the most innings, hit a proportionately higher number of the homers, win the most games and make a higher impact on the bottom line. Don't get me wrong: When the studs are equally distributed, those who win in fantasy are those who unearth the sweet sleepers in spring, who jump on the upstart closer in July and who play the waiver wire like a harp. But you have to have those studs.

For Harris, the top ten of those much coveted pitching "studs" are:

Johan Santana

Jake Peavy

Roy Oswalt

Brandon Webb

C.C. Sabathia

John Lackey

Daisuke Matsuzaka

John Smoltz

Josh Beckett

Cole Hamels

Of course I do have a few thoughts on Harris' list, and before I get to my own list I should probably articulate them first:

Johan Santana: I took Johan with the first pick of the draft for my much beloved Bandytwon Hootowls. This is my longest running fantasy league and the one I care most about. Need I say anthing else? It is interesting to note that Johan is giving up more flyballs (FB) than groundballs (GB) this year, disrupting a steady trend towards a higher percentage of GB over his career. Johan has never relied on GB outs for his meal ticket (see Derek Lowe), and has generated something pretty close to an even number of GB (37.3%) and FB (43.6%) over his career. His career GB/FB ratio is .86, meaning that batters generate 86 grounders for every 100 flyballs (with a tick above 12 of those being infield flyballs). Last season saw Santana allow fewer FB (242) than GB (248) for the first time in his career (for a 1.02 GB/FB ratio). Though 2006 could be anomalous, he had been trending in that direction since he bacame a starter. This season is a bit different. Johan's GB/FB ratio in 2007 is .80, and nine of those flyballs have resulted in homeruns. Harris is right to point out that Johan Santana is a less dominant (for Johan Santana) in April and May, so odds are that the numbers will out, and Johan converts some FB into GB. In any case, aside from a far too often anemic Twins offense, there is absolutely nothing to suggest Johan isn't on his way to a 3rd AL Cy Young, and utter fantasy dominance.
Jake Peavy: Boy Jake Peavy sure does strike a lot of people out every nine innings. And his K/BB ratio the last three years has been a thing of beauty. Last season Peavy gave up mor FB than GB for the first time in his MLB career (though he did come within 0.2 % of breaking even in 2003. Peavy's generated a pretty substantial sample size. It would appear, loyal readers, as if 2006 was an outlier. Peavy's ERA and WHIP may creep a bit towards the mean, but this may also be his career season (he turns 26 at the end of this month).
Roy Oswalt: I'll grant you that ERA is a suspect method of assessing a pitcher's true performance, since it is so reliant on defensive performance (thus all the GB/FB ratio buisness littering this post). But I grew up studying the backs of Topps cards (god bless the GWRBI!), and Oswalt's ERA over his career is a thing of beauty. I'll always remember driving back to Purdue for the beginning of my second year of grad school and listening to the Cubs playing the Astros on the radio. It must have been 2001. Both Kerry Wood and Roy Oswalt were young pitchers with worlds of potential (though Wood had already pitched his 20 strikeout game, and had major surgery). I grew up watching WGN (yeah, we got WGN in Boone County, West Virginia; long live the days of Robert Jordan's maroon suits...), and I was quietly pulling for the Cubs. Wood pitched a great game, but Oswalt outdueled him. I want to say Oswalt pitched a Shut Out, though memory does often betray. Since then Oswalt has clearly been the superior pitcher, and (as one of the few starting pitchers furtunate enough to go deep into ballgames with a lead/have consistently effective bullpens) he may well sniff 300 wins before he's done (though he would have to avoid injury and pitch into his early 40s to pull it off; not so far fetched as it might seem at first blush). He's currently at 104, and could feasibly end up with 116-120 by the end of this season. He's walking quite a few more batters this year (as Harris wisely notes), but I'd be surprised if that trend continued the rest of this season, much less the rest of his career.
Brandon Webb: I've never owned Webb in a fantasy league. I think he's boring and I don't know why. But I'll admit, he's certainly deserving of this #4 ranking. Webb's another one of those pitchers who murderizes the worms, as evidenced by the fact that nearly 65% of the balls put in play against him are GB, for a nifty 3.82 GB/FB ratio over his career. He made a significant breakthrough in 2004 by cutting his BB by 50%. Since then, he's been gravy, burning his infielders' gloves (and all those poor worms) with perfect consistency. He is walking a few too many batters this season, sporting a 1.33 WHIP and Arizona's young offense is a bit inconsistent. He's typically a fast starter, with better numbers Pre-All Star Break for the last three years. However, he's lagging a bit this year, and runs the risk of a down year if he lags even more Post-All Star Break, which is why I'd rank him a little further down this list.
C.C. Sabathia: Rock me C.C. (sorry, I couldn't resist). C.C. is big and fat and scary and hardthrowing for a lefthander and much younger than most realize (though maybe not). He's been a consistent #3 fantasy starter since 2001, and won't turn 27 until July 21st of this season. Sabathia was utterly dominant for a long stretch of the season in 2006, but he still lost 7 games after the All Star break (and those wins all too often count in fantasy baseball, as much as they conspire to keep Burt Blyleven out of the HOF!). C.C. also ripped off a string of games like this in May of last year, going 5-1 with a 1.20 ERA and a 6/1 K/BB ratio, as well as a juicy .93 WHIP. Then came June: 1-3 7.57 ERA and a pulpy 1.59 WHIP. I don't know if I'm comfortable ranking C.C. this high. He's the #2 pitcher for my Prunytown Juveniles, so I'm banking on a breakthrough year, with consistent excellence and/or trade potential for my squad.
John Lackey: I detest walks, and so I've never owned Lackey. Those 2/1 KK/BB ratios eat away at me, even if they do come with 200 strikeouts. But this year, oh this year, Lackey might be experiencing a breakthrough. He's certainly reliable, making his 33 starts each and every year. But at a playing age of 28 for 2007, he's a bit older than one might expect. He should be in his prime, so the 3.86 K/BB ratio may be a harbinger of things to come. But his career K/BB ratio is 2.55, and I expect a return to the norm going forward. I just won't own him, or trade for him. I am aware that my reluctance to make deals like this may well be the reason for my "always a bridesmaid never a bride" status as a fantasy player (quick aside: do you realize that a Google search for "always a bridesmaid never a bride" can lead you to this photograph?). I am the king of second place. But that means I don't face those 1st and 3rd ranked opponents in the first round of the playoffs, so I can live with that.
Daisuke Matsuzaka: Who knows? Harris is taking a shot here, remaining bullish on both Matsuzaka's Japanese stats, and the first nine starts of 2007. I tend to agree with him, though Matsuzaka did post a win/loss averages of 11.4/7.5 in his Japanese career. I don't know what the hell that means. I'd add, only, that I find it interesting for a pitcher with his repertoire to be this close to .500 for his career. I personally am also very bullish on Daisuke. It may seem sinsane (wow, I like that typo. I think I might use that word again...), but I would rank Matsuzaka above Lackey as far as "studliness" is concerned.
John Smoltz: John Smoltz is just sick. He is old as hell, and may get hurt. But I'd doubt it.
Josh Beckett: Josh Beckett is Harris' first risky pick in his top ten list (I suppose you could make an argument for Daisuke, though I wouldn't). His career has been a bit unkind to the fantasy community. He gets hurt every year. Beckett's 2006 is the baseball definition of outlier. He has skin tearing loose from his digits once again, though this time it isn't a "blister." I think Beckett's a sell high candidate, and he gets hurt. I'll enter the long line of prognosticators and their self-declared dares by vowing that I will shave my hair if Beckett logs more than 170 innings (so strong is my belief in historical inevitability).
Cole Hamels: Hamels is Harris' second risky pick, as well as his blue chip/thoroughbred/hisbreedingmakeshimgreat selection. He could become Roy Oswalt, or he could become Kerry Wood. We just don't know. But, for the time being, he looks like a bonafide #1 fantasy starter. Let's play a Sesame Street game to see if we can isolate which one of these kids is doin' his own thing, shall we? Well, that kid plays in Citizen's Bank Ballpark, and so he must be forgiven...

Personally, I'd make the following amendments to Harris' top ten, with a brief explanation of my rational to follow:

Johan Santana

Jake Peavy

Roy Oswalt

C.C. Sabathia

Daisuke Matsuzaka

Brandon Webb

John Smoltz

Dan Haren

Cole Hamels

Curt Schilling

8. Dan Haren
: Dan Haren can't get no love, man. Well, he probably can get love, given the fact that he is a newlywed and there is a 1-5 year window for hot lovin' ahead of this fellow. But in the fantasy world he's not properly cherished. It is true that he may not get 200 strikeouts, but he should get more than 175. And, yes he has lost a lot of games the past two seasons (12 & 13, respectively). But Haren is stingy with BB (2.2/9 on his career) and he has a k/9 on the rise (peaking at 7.22/9 this season). He's got nasty stuff, and spends half his games in a very pitcher friendly ballpark (as well as quite a few in Seattle). Haren's off to a great start and one he can't likely sustain. But he doesn't turn 27 until September 17th and I'll go on the record and say he'll have a better season than Lackey.
10. Curt Schilling
: I'm going to go all WCW here and say:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Sox need Schilling. He is their #1, and maybe yours as well. He's a heat miser (meaning he strikes out a ton and hardly walks anyone). He has a 4.35/1 K/BB for his career. 6.5/1 K/BB last season. True, he is down to 3.13/1 this season, but still. That's better than Smoltz, and just behind Daisuke. And it's pretty certain that Schilling will improve this rate as the season progresses (if his career rates are any indicator). He's got the same Red Sox offense behind him that Beckett and Daisuke have, and more of a proven track record than either of the two. Sure he's a year older/fatter/more cantankerous. But he's also one of the top ten "studs." This is not the season he breaks down, and it's likely two seasons before he goes all Roger Clemens.

I think we might have to wait until tomorrow for that other list. I just blew four hours on this one...

Juan -- Gone?

2006-05-16T13:13:00.000-05:00

It's interesting that once Corey "Don't Call Me Patient" Patterson left the "toothpick chomping, nurturing papa bear meets Samuel L. Jackson" (or whatever Buster Olney called him the other day) uber-manager that is Dusty Baker, he begins to put up exactly the kind of stats everyone expects (steals, homers, a decent BA and no OB%). It's also interesting that Baker drew a line in the sand for Patterson: take walks or else! When the Cubs are the most walk-allergic team going. Is it simply because Patterson whiffed so often, instead of weakly grounding out to 2nd as Pierre does? Perhaps to an "old school put the ball in play" manager like Baker, whiffing looked so bad due to the lack of activity, whereas weakly grounding out is putting the ball in play, and, by God, that's what the #1 is sposed to do!

Pierre's line is even more abyssmal than Pattterson's was last year, since he doesn't have any pop in his bat:

BA: .225 OB%: .269 SLG%: .291 OPS: .56

And they're paying good money, shit, the Cubs TRADED for this. In a market where it is supposed to be so difficult to find a good center fielder, they trade 3 quality arms for a noodle-armed slap hitter with an OPS below .6. Hell, I'm not sure if Neifi is even this bad. Imagine how sucky Pierre would be if he didn't practice from dawn-til-dusk...! Why not just bring Lofton back in for a year until Pie is ready?

And meanwhile, back at the ranch, Patterson is logging a line like this:

BA: .262 OB%: .303 SLG%: .429 OPS: .732

Hey, it ain't Rock Raines, but it's on-line with the rest of Patterson's career. And don't tell me the Cubs and their "very knowledgable fans" couldn't use that instead of the Jacque and Pierre show. In 88 ABS (vs 151 for pierre), Patterson has 10 steals (to Pierre's 12), 18 runs scored (to Pierre's 20), 4 homers (to Pierre's 0(!!!)), 16 RBIs (to Pierre's 2 (and I watch a lot of Cubs games; it ain't cuz he never comes up with men on base)), and 5 walks (to Pierre's 8).

The Cubs are the most retarded franchise ever. I think they lost oxygen during the birthing process. Why not have Dusty and Jim Hendry fight to the death and then let Ozzy Guillen make like Zed on the winner (I'd venture to guess either one of those gentlemen would look quite nice in a gimp suit)...?

Another Unborne Baby...

2006-02-12T16:13:00.000-06:00

Jacob Knabb: How do you perceive Black Ox to be functioning in Constellation’s long-standing tradition of “valuation in relative aesthetic freedom.” Is it an aesthetic issue, or something more concrete?

Scott Gilmore Levin: As a band, I don’t believe we ‘function’ in any kind of aesthetic program dictated by Constellation. My understanding of the label is that it acts in more of a curatorial role in putting out records that appeal to its aesthetic and political sensibilities. To state it more precisely, I think Constellation puts out records that it wants to support: records that it believes in.

Black Ox certainly shares a certain approach to making music with other bands on the label. We place a heavy value on composition and arrangement, on digging deep when we write parts, on thinking through the music. In terms of this creative approach there has probably been a lot of cross-pollination among Montreal bands. Similarly, there is a shared set of values regarding the increasingly corporatized culture of indie music; we try our best to bypass it altogether. We love our local attempts, however humble, to record and perform outside the sad world of Clearchannel and Co. And we love those ragged little scenes in other towns that sprout up like mushrooms and make good music and good touring possible.

So I guess we’ve taken this approach to music making, and the whole substructure of recording and performing, and applied it to this obscure old music that appeals to us so. We never consciously decided, “Let’s start an indie-klezmer band” or any nonsense like that; it’s just the natural way that we work in our community. The politics and the methods aren’t genre specific. I mean everyone in the band has jumped in and out of different styles and we have all played stylistically dissimilar music with exactly the same people in Montreal.
I’d say that Constellation has done a lot to present some of the fruits of this communal effort and to offer up some alternative models for structuring non-corporate local economies.

JK: Is Black Ox a klezmer band? And if so, how does that tradition inform the music? What’s it like to be reviewed in Klezmershack?

SGL: I wouldn’t call Black Ox a klezmer band, mainly because we don’t play very many klezmer songs. On VerTanzt? there are perhaps three or four actual klezmer tunes--that is dance or ritual tunes from the repertoire of East European Jewish wedding bands. The majority of the songs draw on the tradition of Yiddish folk singing. It may sound like hair-splitting, but this is a significant distinction. The traditional Yiddish folk song (and most of ours come from the late 19th century) was principally an unaccompanied tune, sung by an amateur in a rude voice in coarse circumstances. One should think of workers singing in factories, (which actually happened, it’s not just some agitprop wet-dream) mothers singing to children, and men with nicotine-stained beards howling in damp wine cellars.

There is an amazing old Folkways recording of a Yiddish singer named Prince Nazaroff which sounds like a man and an accordion drinking vodka in a birch grove somewhere. These are the kind of things that we try to evoke with our music. We’ve been trying to write our own song-settings for these old fragmentary vocal tunes and this imagined tradition has probably informed us the most. An imaginary republic of dybbuks, Spinoza scholars, and socialists.

The best thing about being reviewed in Klezmershack is that for once, the reviewer was fluent in Yiddish and recognized some of the literary sources and the explicit reference to Kol Nidre in the song “Ver Tanzt?” I also think it showed real equanimity that they gave attention to a band whose political positions are probably anathema to a lot of their readers. I guess some people are happy just to see Yiddish being used, no matter what you are actually trying to say with it. Kind of a medium is the message situation isn’t it?

When conceiving the last record we often said that we should approach it as though we were going to release an album in some alternate world where Yiddishland never perished; where the listener wouldn’t need translations and reams of footnotes to understand what was happening. By doing so, we could confound the listener. All those klezmer revival records with their pages of musicology are in effect telling you how to listen to the music. We don’t really want to tell you what this music means. It doesn’t matter if you understand the lyrics because the culture that those lyrics referred to is gone. The loss is incomprehensible.

The truth is that you can’t really listen to it. You can’t identify yourself with it. To listen to this music is to fantasize settings and personalities for it, to populate it. But at a certain point you begin to recognize a measure of falseness. ‘Folk music’ is by definition ersatz. Maybe that’s why we always have a temptation to break down the structures or at least pierce the façade with little bleeps or screeches or drones. It’s a way of revealing the artifice and of throwing the whole project of reviving the music of a murdered culture into doubt. The unbridgeable distance is important to this band.

I think the best Holocaust memorials are the ones that create an absence.
We have the opposite approach to the U.S. Holocaust museum, which, like an amusement park, works at every turn to create an experience, a sensation, a connection. It wants you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. We just want you to see the empty shoes, all the empty shoes.

JK: Both Black Ox and ASMZ have used the term “punk” in very interesting ways, especially given the negative detritus the term has come to be stuffed with. There is certainly a history of controversial, and usually more accurate, re-interpretations of punk as it has come to be understood by communities, independent and otherwise. What is your understanding of punk as an aesthetic choice? And how does this choice function in relation to the history associated with the term?

SGL: We might have gone ahead and complicated things a bit, but Yiddish music is basically three-chord music that anyone can play and use for dancing or crying or whatever. That’s true for almost any folk music. You don’t have to be a virtuoso and you don’t have to be trained in some institution. That’s one thing that sucks about klezmer and Yiddish music today; so many people playing it are either professional wedding hacks or concertizing music professors. There are so many times that we would listen to recordings of Jewish music and have to slough through the stiff performances and chloroformed production values to get to the divine spark within, to use a kabbalic metaphor. Again, go back and listen to Prince Nazaroff’s out of tune mandolin and you’ll begin to see the punk potential of this music.

Ok. Why punk? Because it’s still an inspiring and powerful thing and in a way it seems more relevant today than it has been for a while. I only say this because sometimes when I look around at the swelling corpse of popular music it feels like there’s almost no room for anything good to grow; there’s no soil left for the weeds. Try booking a tour in the United States and see what your options are if you want to avoid feeding the corporations. Where is this going to leave us in 10 years? And it seems that more and more indie bands are just saying ‘fuck it, we’ve been squeezed out too much: we might as well just get with the program’. Look at Le Tigre. I mean I like Le Tigre. I loved Bikini Kill when I was in high school. That shit was totally punk rock. But doing a cell-phone commercial? Are you kidding me? I know we’ve all got bills to pay, but now in a time of war and dirty right-wing lockdown politics? How do you justify that?

Sometimes we would joke that the best thing about playing klezmer music is that there’s nothing cool about. These days you have to choose to play in a way that is not easily co-opted. And that’s a pretty punk-rock choice. Incredibly long, densely arranged songs and eerie melodies sung in a garbled, incomprehensible tongue; might there not be something cheekily rebarbative in these refusals to make hits?

JK: There’s been a good deal of controversy in the various attempts to make puzzle out the most accurate interpretation of your choice to play largely pro-Palestinian lyrics in Yiddish. Why exactly did you come to this political stance? How is it informing your lyrics? And what do you make of the polarization it has engendered?

SGL: Most of the songs on VerTanzt? are about war. Two are about the First World War (or possibly the Russo-Japanese) one is about the civil war (Reds vs. Whites) in Ukraine, and one is about the Israel-Palestine conflict. While the old Yiddish folk songs are not protest songs, there is something they all have in common: they are disgusted with war. In the simplest way they describe the brutality of conscription and the bestial acts expected of soldiers. They all suggest the mistrust of government and above all nationalism that was a defining characteristic of pre-Shoah Yiddish culture.

We found ourselves playing these songs in a new time of war. We would gather together to dig up old weird Jewish music and then go home to read reports on the war in Jenin, Nablus, Gaza, & Jerusalem. How could we not say something about this? How could we, in good conscience, resurrect the Yiddish songs that elaborately cursed war, and the wicked tsars and Kaisers who declared them, while all this was going on?

I just wanted to turn the professed values of Yiddishkeit against the present realities of Jewish culture, particularly at a time when Yiddish was undergoing a revival. When Tzadik was making it hip to be a Jew and the satisfying glow of a revived past was blinding the Diaspora to the dirty truth of the occupation.

I don’t want to knock anybody; I’ve certainly listened to my share of Tzadik albums. It’s just that certain things have always gotten under my skin. For instance, if you look inside the CD booklet of Masada’s Bar Kochba you will see a photograph of the mountains of Sinai with a gold Star of David super-imposed over it.

That’s a bit of a fucked up symbol. Ok so the Israelites wandered in the wilderness there. That doesn’t excuse you from the political suggestions of this image. Sinai is no longer a part of Israel-- you wouldn’t know it from all the Israelis on the beaches, but that’s another story. I hope that John Zorn isn’t openly advocating Israeli expansionism. I want to believe that it’s just a careless oversight, because I know so many people who love that record and were really introduced to the possibilities of new Jewish music. But I can’t help it, every time I see that booklet, I think about the gun-toting settlers I saw in the West Bank. I think about their idea of Eretz Israel, of ‘Greater Israel’, that involves the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the Biblical land. And you know what, I’d prefer my ‘radical Jewish music’ free of nationalism thank you very much.

So if being Jewish is hip, does that mean that Jewish militarism is hip too? What kind of Jewish is hip anyway? I don’t see too many hipsters imitating the shaved head and sunglasses, Shin Bet agent aesthetic. You know the ‘downtown’ scene wasn’t exactly riffing on the Phish-like folk music and trance techno that seems to be Der Judenstadt’s contribution to world music. No, it’s the culture of the old Yiddish ghetto Jew (always mocked by the robust Zionist movement) that everyone got so excited about in the late 90’s. Hasn’t anyone read Philip Roth?

And what do you imagine that culture would have to say to Israeli house demolitions, checkpoints, torture and targeted assassination?
I just wanted to give the angry Yiddish ghosts a chance to speak.

JK: Why did you decide to include the translated lyrics to “Ver Tanzt” in the liner notes, forgoing the inclusion of others? Was it a conscious decision?

SGL: I guess the main reason was that Ver Tanzt has the only original lyrics on the record. The other vocal tunes are either traditional texts or song-settings of poems. Clearly part of our intention was to let the song’s message articulate our feelings about the Israel-Palestine conflict: we didn’t want to write a manifesto or anything. On the other hand, it didn’t seem right to include a song with such a strong message and leave it untranslated.

In retrospect, I sometimes wish we had included translations of the other songs, because people are curious and it’s not so easy finding translations of these texts. We’ll try a different approach next time.

JK: How has the improvisational nature of the Constellation community influenced your personal sound? How do you approach improvisation, especially given the tradition in which much of your music functions?

SGL: The Constellation community and the broader community of musicians in Montreal have always helped define our sound. We have all played in various improv arrangements around town and in our living rooms and improvisation has clearly found its way into the music. I’d like to thank Sam Shalabi in particular for possessing the uncanny talent of recognizing people’s potential for improvisation and composing around that. In the past few years, all of us in Black Ox have played with Sam on numerous occasions, working out a strange new Semitic music that blends Arabic and Jewish modes through the liberating force of improvisation. Black Ox has evolved a lot through this practice.

Traditional Klezmer music allows for a rather limited improvisation. Dance tunes tend to be rigidly structured and repetitive. We have tried to open them up by drawing on Balkan and Romani sources that incorporate improvised passages over dance beats. The one field where Jewish music does excel in improvisation is in the liturgical cantorial tradition. The long rubato (arrhythmic) passages we sometimes indulge in derive from this style, as does a lot of the ornamentation and variations in my singing.

JK: Would you say that your experiences in Palestine has informed your work as much as your experiences collaborating or listening to klezmer records?

SGL: We honestly started playing Jewish music as a way of expressing ourselves emotionally and as a way of meditating on Montreal and the imagined old country that somehow seems to lurk in the rafters of this city. It was years later that Israel and Palestine started informing our music or rather that our music starting saying something about Israel and Palestine.

Actually being in Israel and Palestine didn’t really make me want to play klezmer at all. I was way more interested in listening to Oum Kalthoum or Feyrouz or the punishingly loud Mizrahi techno blasting out of Israeli taxis. It made me realize that our music is rooted in the Diaspora. It’s rooted in the big cities on the Atlantic, in the Ashkenazi and Sephardic neighborhoods of our towns, and in some vague recollection of a Ukrainian steppe.

JK: You’ve described your work as more of a cultural intervention than a political one. How do you see culture as it relates to the global political context? Is there a divide between aesthetic and power?

SGL: Our aesthetics are no challenge to power. They are better than nothing though. I don’t imagine that Black Ox Orkestar will ever take Likud down. I do hope that we can cheer up some people, or help soothe some sad people, as the case may be. We just want to do something rather small and humble and kind of dorky that at its best achieves some kind of awkward beauty that can inspire people and communities to keep on going, to pull through the dark days, to regenerate the burn-outs and heal the wounded ears of those tortured by biopower’s elaborate superstructure. If we can make both Palestinian refugees and middle-aged Jews from the Midwest dance and clap and commiserate, then that’s maybe a hopeful sign.

Our side has been taking a bit of a bruising of late. It’s scary. The world is getting scarier everyday and when people do things like sell their songs to cell-phone companies and Volkswagen it makes me think that reactionary cultural actions like these must eventually have a negative political impact. Resign yourself to corporate power. Isn’t that the message?
Well goodbye to all that.

JK: Much of Brecht’s focus on the engagement of actor with audience was alternately necessitated and invigorated by the vicious turmoil that surrounded him. You have expressed your engagement with Brecht’s ideology. How do you see you work in relation to his? Does the situation in Palestine correlate to Brecht’s Germany? How has your separation from “the situation” in Palestine differed from Brecht’s immersion?

SGL: I’d say that Brecht’s theory has helped us understand performance. Several of us have experience in the world of puppetry and a lot of work coming out of the Bread and Puppet school owes its theoretical bearings to Brecht. His concept of verfremdung (alienation) is seen as a given in puppetry: the audience is always aware of the character (puppet) and the performer (puppeteer). It has occurred to me that singing in Yiddish to English or French speaking audience is very much like performing with a puppet. The language is a mask.
It’s actually caused me no small amount of anguish trying to figure out how to connect with an audience in this band. I don’t know if I am being myself or playing a character. I like to think that people can see both. Between songs we chat and introduce the material and then, with the first few guttural consonants, this grotesque mask goes up and people, even if they find the music beautiful or sad or fun, feel somehow distanced. And that’s a good thing. We want to be kind of challenging.
I wouldn’t say that the situation in Palestine corresponds with Brecht’s Germany in any way. In fact, I don’t find that the situation is easily comparable to any other. The post-colonial Left makes frequent analogies to Algeria or South Africa. While might be helpful to some extent, it eventually starts obscuring the realities of the situation. Israel is different from other occupying powers because there is at least some kernel of legitimacy in its claims, and its colonization, which always identified itself as a national-liberation movement, is not an imperial extension. I don’t want to get lost on this point, but I think it’s really important to examine the singularity of this crisis.

One needn’t live in Israel or Palestine to feel immersed in turmoil. The crisis reverberates throughout contemporary Jewish culture. Neo-conservativism has a design for North America as much as it does for the Middle East. Naomi Klein has talked about the Likudization of American politics and I think it’s quite fair to talk about the Americanization of the Israeli experiment. As an American and a Jew, I am part of two cultures at war, two cultures that are presently being transformed into war machines. We are immersed in World War IV; it might not have pierced our dream world just yet, but it will. So it is very important to break the spell these days.

JK: If it’s so sad, then why do we dance?

SGL: ‘Cause you have to bottom out. Pour out your guts, then get yourself together, have a drink, put your arms around a friend and spin around. That’s what our forefathers taught us and who are we to question such time-honored traditions.

Unpublished Interview w/ Tim Rutili...Anybody want to run it...?

2006-02-12T16:00:00.000-06:00

Jacob Knabb: I feel like I’ve read a lot of interviews, and I’ve kind of looked around, and I haven’t seen a lot of people address what you’re doing lyrically. So that’s what I wanted to talk about. How do you compose your lyrics?

Tim Rutili: There’s not any set way that I do it. But I love to write. And I write words every day.

JK: I understand that there’s not a set way. But people are habitual. Do you find that you have a sort of approach?

TR: Sometimes I write in advance. Sometimes I wake up at night. Sometimes I don’t say it until I pick up a guitar. And it might start with something I wrote a year ago. And eventually it will develop into a song. It might be a block of text that somehow fits.

JK: perhaps it’s just that sometimes you need words to verbalize the sound-

TR: -it’s not so much verbalizing so much as it’s trying to make words physical.

JK: Your lyrics are often explorations of some emotionally scarring shit. These are hard moments. You don’t shy away from painful material. How do you screw yourself up for it?

TR: Well it used to literally be screwing myself up for it. Now it’s about finding silence. You have to find a quiet place. It’s finding that quiet place and getting out of the way of it. You know? A lot of it’s about the log of images that we all carry around. And not necessarily trying to make sense out of it. But to accept what it is. To create a bubbling mass of everything.

JK: That makes sense. But you say that when you were younger it was about screwing yourself up for it. Maybe that’s an ill-formed idea that a lot of people have. Drunken craziness appeals-especially with rock music.

TR: Yeah it’s just that when you’re in that state you can’t really feel it. I mean, I don’t want to be afraid of myself. I don’t want to be afraid of what might come out. I want to find a way to get out of the way, and let whatever might come out, come. If it’s ugly it’s ugly. And if it’s beautiful it’s beautiful.

JK: So why fight it? If it came from you-

TR: -why fight it?

JK: On one of your older EPs—well I’ve got it on a double album Sometimes Good Weather Follows Bad People, there’s a song called “Electric Fence.” In this song you write “Jesus drains electric fences to fill you again.” You’ve got this clash between two things that don’t seem to go together: an electric fence and Jesus. To be able to transcend modern life we need something to drain from it and to put it back into us. Is that something that just came out in the moment?

TR: I just spit it out. I don’t know. I just remember going ‘oh my God, electric fence electric fence.’ That’s when I was working for my dad, moving furniture. And we went to this house to move their furniture. And there was a little dog. We came through this door, and were in the front room moving the furniture. And there was a little dog, yelping, running from the back of the kitchen, to the doorway, where we were working, and hitting this invisible wall and just yelping. ‘Ruhr ruhr RAAK! (busts out laughing). ‘Ruhr ruhr RAAK!”

JK: The ‘invisible fence.’

TR: It had a collar (busts out again). There was a plane that shocks-

JK: -Shocks the hell out of it.

TR: Yeah. So it couldn’t come and get hair on the new furniture. And it fucked me, fucked me up. I mean it was hilarious, but it was just… I didn’t say anything because I was working for my dad. I didn’t want to upset anybody. But I wanted to know, why do you have a pet? Why did you take this animal into your house if you just want to torture it? I remember writing down all about that. And whatever creepy images came from that. And a year later, when it was time to record it and finish it, I just got the line from that day. There’s another line in that song about “giv[ing] you belly to the lions-”

JK: -yeah, “and your throat to all their babies.”

TR: And that was from watching nature shows, and thinking about animals being suicidal.

JK: Many writers see themselves as a vessel. A channel for something that comes from somewhere else. Especially with Heron King Blues this seems to be the case.

TR: Maybe. Yeah. I don’t know if I define it as that.

JK: So you don’t try to define?

TR: That album is too close right now to really say what it’s about. As I’ve been playing the songs, little lines pop out. Little moments: that’s what I was thinking about at that time. Or that’s what I think about it now. Or that’s what had to happen. When you’re dreaming. Or when you’re in that stage where you’re more concrete, but you’re out of the way. When your brain is out of the way, things that shouldn’t make sense make sense. Juxtapositions and opposing pictures that shouldn’t go together make perfect sense to me.

JK: Well that’s something you’re really good at. One of my favorite examples of this is off of Roomsound. The song “Porno Starlet vs. Rodeo Clown.” At first the juxtaposition of a porn star and a rodeo clown doesn’t seem logical. Where does that link come from?

TR: It was just the people that I was seeing. I wrote a story. It had nothing to do with the song, I guess. It was just two very very different people, who worked really well together. It was about astral projection. It was about it was about self-mutilation. It was about all these things that I was thinking of at this time and this place.

JK: One of the moments where it becomes real for me is where you describe the bruise on the porn star. You know, that seems to be a very specific wound. These are people that punish themselves. There’s always something about the act of watching pornography. It’s built on fantasy. But if you’re really watching it, and not just trying to jerk off, there’s always something that makes it real and unsettling. And oftentimes it’s a bruise on thigh. And that’s a detail that for that song made it a really hard moment.

TR: It’s also that, if you put these two people that beat the shit out of them for a living and have no clear qualms about it, together, they find peace and comfort and some shelter. That’s what the image is for me.

JK: But these people that would be classified by society as horrible or undesirable are able to find these moments of redemption or silence.

TR: But they don’t really want you to feel it.

JK: It doesn’t imply that-

TR: -Or need you to feel.

JK: And why should they?

TR: I knew this girl who used to, ah, if you got her drunk enough she’d talk about how she would leave her body. And how scared she was. You know? And it wasn’t even a spiritual-

JK: -It’s not transcendence.

TR: (Laughing) No. It’s about her waking up on the ceiling. And the first couple of times we heard it. It was so matter of fact, the way she talked about this, that people who might question that sort of thing would listen. It was pretty amazing. It wasn’t about the difference of her being there or not being there. And the song isn’t about being conscious of what they were doing. Or being conscious of the bigger symbol.

JK: But sex is described as a moment of godliness. A person who makes a living, or not even that. Not even, ‘I want to make a good living by fucking on tape.’ Porno is an industry that’s centered around a holy moment.

TR: It could be a holy moment. Or it could be just being.

JK: It might have to be that way.

TR: It is holy, I guess. Or it could just be wrestling and fun. I’ve had it like that. And sometimes it’s been something else where it’s more than just sex.

JK: But to get back to the rodeo clown, it could be like the stallion, or the bull, or whatever the hell he jumps on. It’s very similar. It’s adrenalized. It’s brief. You’re linked to something larger than yourself. And you literally have to ride it out. Or not be gored by it. It really is a logical link. In the song “When Leon Spinx Moved Into Town.” Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but the song begins with the declaration that, “Our sex became a boxer.” Again I’m linking sex… But I’m not even really sure if Leon Spinx did move into town. Is this to be taken as metaphor?

TR: Have you ever had a relationship with a person-a friendship or a fight or sex or whatever-where the two of you together create another being. That’s all it was. And filling in the blanks. And he did move in.

JK: But it’s interesting that, in the song, you don’t talk about it. They’re “not saying anything.”

TR: If you’re in it, it’s really hard to, uh…

JK: Well how do you step away from it-especially if it’s a violent thing? If love has become a boxer, that implies violence. Even the most beautiful of fights, ultimately it’s bent on one person being rendered unable to move.

TR: But together you become this destructive machine. There is no awareness. You’ve become a destructive machine. It’s really fun to feel that power. And it’s also really really scary. And it’s also pretty brainless. You know?

JK: Yeah boxing and intelligence…

TR: One alone is this. One alone is that. The two together become this being. I think our spirits meet in that kind of way too. I think of two people’s mutual essences that way. I think it really does make another being. It’s no ones’ fault that it had to happen that way. It’s something that you have to experience.

JK: Sometimes the energy that is created is not a good thing. I mean to get back to the boxing idea, ultimately it’s a bloody sport-

TR: -But to have had that experience, to feel that is necessary. There’s no such thing as good and bad. Because in the long run, everything is just what it is. You can’t say that it’s all negative, because what’s going to come out, that experience is something that had to be. You created that. You had to do it. No matter how bad it is you had to experience it. This person had to die.

JK: And how do you quantify something like that? Why do you define it? Perhaps this is what allows another theme to run through your songs, which is…well…abuse. I think of the line, “The way you kiss your uncle on the mouth,” from the song “Michigan Girls.” Where does that song come from?

TR: It didn’t feel like abuse to me. It felt like fantasizing. You know? I used to go up there for vacation. I can spot a Michigan Girl from a mile away. And it was just about watching a moment. What was so beautiful about it—it was this microscopic view of a beautiful body. And also this body finding power. This girl finding power, finding her own power. The kissing her uncle thing was like, she knows her uncle is looking and now she’s starting to understand it-

JK: --and use it. But it’s also, obviously taboo-

TR: -I have seen that shit.

JK: Well that’s the thing: everyone has. If you haven’t been part of it yourself, you know someone who has.

TR: It’s beautiful. And interesting to watch. And if you know what’s going on, it’s really interesting to be a part of it too. We both play. I mean we’ve all played both parts. In anything that anybody writes, I think even anything anybody dreams, you are every character. You are every archetype. So in that song, I’m the girl. I’m the uncle. You know? I’m the sand.

JK: I mean, the line I really keyed in on, “God’s eyes are closed,” or, “God’s eyes are crossed,” even. There is an inability to focus. Is that God ignoring what is happening?

TR: It’s just feeling in the presence of a lot of things. And then feeling the presence of a personal joke.

JK: But you explode God’s presence when you talk about “God’s eyes [being] crossed / just like yours.” That’s an interesting line because part of it is an inability to focus. But it’s also ironic in a way, because it’s undercutting what came before.

TR: I didn’t really think about it. I just kind of spit it. That song just felt like a moment that you would find beauty in. In everything. Because you didn’t really want to be feeling what you were feeling and you were still looking at that, was difficult.

JK: Then it does make sense, that joke at the end. Because that’s how people deal with it. There are two typical responses and one is to close your eyes. The other to make a joke about it, because if you can laugh about it, it didn’t happen in a way. To say it’s a beautiful thing makes sense on a certain level, though, because we are attracted, at least most people are attracted to things that would be classified as horrible. But you watch. And why?

TR: Well it’s something you might not understand within yourself. It doesn’t necessarily make it beautiful. It’s definitely part of you.

A Teaser From ACM #46 (Available in Early March)

2006-02-11T15:41:00.000-06:00

Girl

by: Peter Markus

Us brothers, we love the sound of that word ‘girl’ so much that one day, out of nowhere, we start calling everything we see, Girl. Let’s go, Girl, we say, to each other. Let’s go down to the girl, one of us will suggest, and to the river is where we go. Let’s catch us some girl, the other brother will then say to this, and we’ll grab our fishing poles and a bucket of mud and worms. Girl sure is girly, one of us will point this out, pointing with a finger at the muddy river flowing past our feet. After a while, after we fill our buckets up with a whole mess of girl, one of us brothers will say, I’m hungry. Let’s go fry us up some girl. Like this, we go back and forth between us, girl this and girl that, until it is raining girl. The moon in the sky is girl. The sky is girl. It’s us girls walking round this girl town with girl dripping from our lips, girl this and girl that, till bottles and buckets and rusty trucks and trains, till hammers and fish heads and bent back nails—all of these things come rushing up to us, all of them drawn to us brothers by the sound that those four letters make: G-I-R-L. But the way that that word, girl, was meant to sound like: with twelve r’s, thirteen u’s, and twenty thousand l’s at the end of girl, stretching across the earth.

--copies of The Singing Fish, by Peter Markus are available from Calamari Press.

While in the Rain a Memory of Chickens

by: Jeff Parker

Sam-John doesn’t do umbrellas, and he hates how they clog a city sidewalk in rain like this, a sea of horizontal throwing stars far as he’s concerned. A guy of his height stands eye level to every ball-end metal tip.
So he crouches and ricochets off bodies. He leans down and in.
He leans into one beautiful woman, a face like a sheet of construction paper. A thought occurs to him then and he allows a moment to dissertate: Beauty means that you want to look through someone. The most beautiful woman would be a translucent one, translucent peach.
He attaches himself, walks along with her, trying to see through to the shop windows on the other side of her face.
Then her heel finds a crack in the sidewalk where grass is pushing apart the cement. The heel breaks off and she keels left, sticks him in the eye with one of the umbrella’s ball-end metal tips just as he makes out the sign behind her, Last Empress Plums of the Season.
He feels the ball-end metal tip enter his eye, then exit. This sparks a memory of his bitties: The chicks trying to eat the eyes of their brother. He never understood how they were able to peck an eye and actually get it some, like tweezering ink. And what was a chicken eye? A human eye had colors and veins and concentric circles, but a chicken eye was black if it was anything.
Sam-John is on his knees, in a wet trench coat on the sidewalk. He looks up into the rain to see if he can still see. The woman is sorry, oh she’s so sorry. She gives him some umbrella, to try to keep the water off.
The next thing he knows he’ll be back in the café, in the dry season, sitting there without the word for fork again.

Jeff Parker's new book, The Drinking Game, published by Jovian Press, is available at Amazon.com

Lucktown

by: Bryan Penberthy

Stay here long and the close calls will turn you into glass.
Half the people in town will die weird: freak storms, tempers,
bad decisions; but always one person staggering
back from the wreck, wide-eyed, to tell what happened. It is
always chance; the bus slides off the road, twenty-three kids
drown, the driver walks away. A hospital snatches
lightning from seven miles out, a hundred burn, but

a candy-striper breaks a window, tosses herself
into the three-story air, lands alive. This one guy,
Mike, famous in town for his escapes, now operates
as an oracle, predicting malady and harm.
By high school, he'd perfected his art of avoiding
girls, close friends, extra-curricular activities.
Above his door, there's a small sign that reads Survival

is the worst thing that can happen. His biggest error,
he tells customers, was asking for a pet one year.
That Christmas, his parents bought him a German Shepherd
puppy that he named Sally. A few years later, she
went rabid and bit her way through a screen door, killing
his mother and turning her shivering grin his way
before his father, home early with a headache, shot

into the room and tackled the thing, stabbing at it
with a screwdriver, struggling while it bit and bit
and bit everything flesh. The house stunk death. Only Mike
survived. He says that his craft is easy: look for chance,
for possibility; if found, eliminate it
swiftly. You can't have luck without disaster, he says.
Good fortune is merely a condition, but luck is

months of skin grafts, arms that don't grow back, anything close
enough to kill you that doesn't. And then you're just a
story, and everyone's talking about how lucky
you were. Later on, at a crowded bar,
people drink themselves into arguments over who
among them is the luckiest of all. The police
chief who had half his face taken off by a shotgun

suicide attempt, who's since found Jesus? The store clerk,
Janet, thrown from a crash that killed her husband and kids
because she wasn't belted in? Mrs. Flannigan,
fourth-grade teacher and candle maker, who just found out
that she isn't pregnant, isn't diseased from her rape?
In the restroom, graffiti uncoils on the walls
near the toilets and urinals: Luck Is Just A Glass

Of Wine / You've Pissed Away. Lucky numbers?: 9-1-1.
Luck You. It fills every available surface; luck
as a woman, as a twine-wrapped package, as a stroke
of lightning. Mike doesn't agree with any of them.
Luck is a wide-jawed dog, he says before his clients
walk back into the world: sometimes scary, and sometimes
carrying the very thing you wanted her to fetch.

Bryan Penberthy is a former AWP Intro Award winner, and resides in Charleston, SC. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including Crazyhorse, West Branch, River Styx, New Orleans Review, and Bat City Review. For more information, visit Losttimepoetry.com.

Fluoxetine

by: Matt Zambito

Is this prescription the Riker’s Island
for my depression? Tonight, I hide it
in the cabinet like a time capsule.
A few days from now, I’ll fix my mind
with these little wrenches or let
a bullet ping inside my skull, a pathetic
lightning bug against a jar. Suicide
seems so childish I’m surprised
more nine-year-olds don’t gulp gasoline.
Vioxx and vodka. SUV asphyxiation
on a Friday. A hop in the aquarium’s
piranha tank. In my bedroom,
the tube groans ads for a grocery store,
pro wrestling, phone sex, beer. Maybe
any lack of happiness needs a double helix
kind of discovery, not something
simple as 5x + 3 = 62 or lumbering as André
the Giant. I should crush the bottle. Back
in the bathroom, I rifle the sucker
against the window. Tablets click on the tiles
like 30 teeth. I never know what to say
to myself. To me, all other people are drunk
undergrads in New Orleans. Outside,
the fireflies flicker, like X-mas bulbs,
maybe to alleviate their loneliness,
maybe to avoid meeting their bug-maker.
59/5. Watson and Crick. Maybe lithium
instead. I’ll make a new appointment
tomorrow, read all about it in Ecclesiastes.

Matt Zambito, originally from Ransomville, New York, currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, West Branch, LIT, and Barrow Street. He is the drummer for several bands, including Furlough & Cropchecker.

2006-02-02T19:37:00.000-06:00

2006 Chicago Literary Awards
Sponsered by: Another Chicago Magazine

Fiction Prize: $1,000 + publication in ACM
Poetry Prize: $1,000 + publication in ACM
& new this year
Creative Nonfiction Prize: $1,000 + publication in ACM
Judges: Charles Baxter (Fiction), Calvin Forbes (Poetry), &
Robin Hemley (Creative Nonfiction)

Deadline – May 1, 2006

Entry fees:
$12/ story, 6500 words max.
$12/ set of 3 poems, 300 lines total per entry
$5/ each additional poem up to 100 lines

Checks payable to Left Field Press;

No names on entries. Include cover page with name, address, e-mail, phone #, title(s), word count for fiction and creative nonfiction entries, & line count for poetry;

Entries will not be returned;

If you wish, include SASE for notification of winners. No certified mail, please;

Notification by August 1, 2006;

No previously published work eligible; ACM must be notified of Simultaneous Submissions & work must be withdrawn if accepted elsewhere.

Send entries to:
Chicago Literary Awards
Another Chicago Magazine
3709 N. Kenmore
Chicago, IL 60613-2905

'I took the knife as well': A Brief Examination of "Freedom '90" by George Michael

2006-02-02T13:48:00.000-06:00

I am fully aware that it will out me as "lame," or whatever. But I don't care. I 'd like to take a moment to espouse my belief that "Freedom, '90" is quite possibly one of the finest Pop Compositions from its era. Forget the schlocky Music Video. Forget the incident in the bathhouse, or his work with Wham (Make it Big, is exactly right...). Forget "I Want Your Sex." This is the song I'd hinge his career on.

Lyrically It's just so interesting. Throughout the song, Michael rides a train of subversive innuendo (as am I, apparently...), verging on coming out blatantly for all of the Top 40 listeners who tuned in to Kasey Kasem's show, and also in front of Helena & Cindy & Paulina & Christie & Tyra (or whatever other SI models "were swimmin'/were swimmin'/were swimmin') on the MTV.

For example, consider the lyric: "I think there's something you should know/I think it's time I stopped the show/There's something deep inside of me/There's someone I forgot to be." Sure, this could be a song about misunderstanding, hinging upon his discomfort with his own image as a sex-symbol (Don't forget, kids. He most decidedly was that. And in a thoroughly hetero-normative kind of way at this point in time). Yet, given the lyrics we're presented with in this track, it would seem that Michael's sexuality was perhaps the worst kept secret out there. Note too the shifts in sonics from standard, if not exciting, late 80s pop beats and synth to the much more spicy/funky backing track that accompanies the transition from the "expected" George Michael to the "unexpected," "closeted" version that's going to "stop the show," once we can forget our "Singin' in the rain" construction of him.

But Michael isn't comfortable with simply outing himself. In fact, through a good deal of self-deprecation, he undercuts the expectation that this is a completely serious matter, and we should take this revelation with the utmost reverence & sincerity; and w/ a healthy dose of humor, implementing a pair of couplets loaded to the gills w/ double entendres, Michael turns the song completely on its head, introducing a mainstream American audience to a persona it still isn't completely comfortable with. Consider: "When I knew which side my bread was buttered/I took the knife as well" or "But when you shake your ass/They notice fast." Maybe he is just describing his breakfast ritual, or making a reference to finance, but I doubt it. It seems he's actually introducing humor into a situation where things could get a little tense otherwise. When viewed through this lens, even the line "there's something deep inside of me" conveys an unexpected punch in the guts. In any case, Michael forces us to look back at the lyrics that preceded this verse and assess exactly what he is singing about.

Of course, not everyone seems to get just how subversive this track is, and either glosses over it as another dance track, or mentions how it stands out from the rest of the album as decidedly more like his earlier work ("Father Figure," indeed). Note Amazon.com's "crack reviewer" Steve Gdula's take on the track...: "Freedom '90" had a strong groove, a catchy melody, and of course, the sex-bomb video." Wow, changing the world one listener at a time, eh...? Perhaps if RuPaul had appeared in the video...?

But what does Gdula refer to exactly in referenceing the "sex-bomb video"...? After-all, the video's liberal use of acceptible sexual "objects" (re: underwear models), layered with jump-cuts to George Michael as another image to objectify, to lust after, only further establishes his stance as sex symbol, and is as homo-erotic as any Rambo movie you might pick from the ashes of Stallone's porn career. Michael may be cast as the "director", controlling the various fantasy sequences for each model (for each girl a different colour scheme & a different role to play), but we don't see things from his vantage point, really. In fact, the camera cuts in on Michael in such a manner that he becomes "just another fantasy," in all actuality. And, whether the viewer is aware of it or not, Michael becomes saturated with the lustful gaze of the TV audience (Sure, sure. I know: you don't want him, you want to be like him. Hey, I get it. You're not gay. It's cool. I can't tell if a guy's hot either. I just like it when Sly gets all slicked up with vaseline and holds that big gun with his shirt off because it shows me how manly he is.) just the same as the models. Afterall, as the man put it himself, "But today the way I play the game is not the same/No way/Think I'm gonna get myself happy." No more pouting with his 4-day-old beard for all the "hungry schoolgirl[s]." By this point, Michael has completely capitalized on the promise his arse offered to so many of the MTV generation as he shook it in the video for "Faith," exploding much more than a juke-box.

I've included the lyrics in their entirety below, for your greedy consumption. Or, get Cabos and download it for yourself..

I won't let you down
I will not give you up
Gotta have some faith in the sound
It's the one good thing that I've got
I won't let you down
So please don't give me up
Because I would really, really love to stick around, oh yeah

Heaven knows that I was just a young boy
Didn't know what I wanted to be
I was every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy
And I guess it was enough for me
To win the race? A prettier face!
Brand new clothes and a big fat place
On your rock and roll TV
But today the way I play the game is not the same
No way
Think I'm gonna get myself happy

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I told you so
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone else I've got to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Take back your singing in the rain
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take

Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy
What a kick just a buddy and me
We had every big shot good-time band on the run boy
We were living in a fantasy
We won the race
Got out of the place
I went back home got a brand new face
For the boys on MTV
But today the way I play the game has got to change
Oh yeah
Now I'm gonna get myself happy

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I stopped the show
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone I forgot to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Don't think that I'll be back again
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take

Well it looks like the road to heaven
But it feels like the road to hell
When I knew which side my bread was buttered
I took the knife as well
Posing for another picture
Everybody's got to sell
But when you shake your ass
They notice fast
And some mistakes were built to last

That's what you get
I say that's what you get
That's what you get for changing your mind

And after all this time
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes
Do not make the man

I'll hold on to my freedom
May not be what you want from me
Just the way it's got to be
Lose the face now
I've got to live

Long Fence SunriseBy Dobby Gibson

2006-01-18T22:35:00.000-06:00

First there was a horrible storm
followed shorty thereafter by a horrible storm,
and when ultimately we emerged
from our homes only old couches slouched
there half buried in snowmelt
beneath a redundant dramaturgy of late morning sun.
We the otherwise nude had been inside,
pleading with each other,
laughing, using our tongues,
then dazed on our own front stoops
by the day's blank announcement:
winter is dying.
The traffic reports finally broadcast
what they meant to say all along,
"Stay the hell home,"
so we soon fled to the kind
of place a lonesome tractor
might sputter out halfway
through a field and cover itself
in a turtleneck of rust,
forcing all who pass
to measure from a distance
the cosmic American puzzle:
beauty half about the showboat dying,
half about the weird hay bales
too big for every known mouth.
We had been on all fours,
praying, coupling mightily,
searching for lost buttons.
There was a horrible storm,
then another we knew to be quelled
the moment the next hurled
some newer precipitation at our feet.
There were many storms,
a few that we chased.
There was the sound of banjos
picking hellfire bluegrass,
then the sound of banjos
never to be played again.

Jonny Gomes can't get no love...

2006-01-17T21:33:00.000-06:00

Forgive me, but I'm a little confused. I've been reading tons of press about the Devil Rays over the winter months, and nary a single article mentions Jonny Gomes. The guy was a savior for my fantasy baseball team last season, and his stats match up awfully well with Ryan Howard's (another fella who helped out the old Bandy Town Hootowls to a 2nd place finish). People continue to gush about Howard (and rightfully so), but it seems folks in Tampa are happier about Rocco Baldelli (of the injury plagued season and pathetic career OPS) inking a deal. It can't be Gomes' age--he's actually younger than Howard, and only one year older than Baldelli--who I might mention is coming off a crucial season missed where he could've been working on his paltry career .326 OBP & .752 OPS. What's the deal...? I watched quite a few D-Rays games on my MLB-TV deal in the second half last year to see of this guy was legit. Gomes looked solid in the outfield. Had a good arm. Took pitches (as he has at every level, I might add). And posted a stunning .372 OBP w/ a .906 OPS. I've never thought much of Baldelli as a player, and I'm the first guy to laud the stolen base (hey, I grew up watching Rickey Henderson, Vince Coleman, Eric Young, Gary Pettis, Bip Roberts, Willie Wilson, & Rock Raines wreak havoc). But it seems to me Baldelli's inflated batting averages are harshly mitigated by his complete lack of walks-and 20-something steals is a pretty nominal #. And, sure Gomes strikes out a lot. But he's a power hitter, with over 30 dingers between AAA and the majors combined last year. Baldelli is not to be confused with a power hitter by even the most obtuse fans. And after Tommy John surgery on his elbow, and a torn ACL in his knee, I can't imagine he'll be running wild on the basepaths and throwing frozen ropes from the center field wall at Tropicana. So, can you tell me: What gives...? Why wasn't Gomes considered more seriously for ROY...? Why isn't he mentioned in any of the long term discussions of this team...? Why the complete lack of press...? Is he fated to become the next Melvin Mora, waiting until he's 29 and his head is completely screwed up for his first legit shot at a full-time role, because a bunch of "School of Bobby Valentine" jagoffs can't see the monstrous potential, and established performance, this guy provides...? Why hasn't Billy Beane stolen this guy away from the D-Rays...?

Joel Craig #2

2006-01-12T00:57:00.000-06:00

Again, taken @ Simon's.

Joel Craig#1

2006-01-12T00:48:00.000-06:00

Taken @ Simon's

Woody Wagon

2006-01-11T23:50:00.000-06:00

Preethi's Elliot Smith Era #3

2006-01-11T22:52:00.000-06:00

I'll kiss you again/between the bars...

Preethi's Elliot Smith Era #2

2006-01-11T22:47:00.000-06:00

Vampin' in Andersonville.

Preethi's Elliot Smith Era #1

2006-01-11T22:04:00.000-06:00

My god, I'm in love...

Mystery Hole Series #3

2006-01-11T19:41:00.000-06:00

Almost Heaven...!

Mystery Hole Series #2

2006-01-11T19:34:00.000-06:00

Never have understood the gorilla...

Mystery Hole Series #1

2006-01-11T19:29:00.000-06:00

From my pilgrimage last summer. I especially dig the shatter-patern on the driver's side of the windshield, as well as the bullet-hole daiseys

Unkown Relative

2006-01-11T19:16:00.000-06:00

The Original Patty Knabb

2006-01-11T18:44:00.000-06:00

Un Foto

2006-01-11T16:31:00.000-06:00

Studebaker

2006-01-11T16:06:00.000-06:00

I have never been able to describe the way my father’s voice sounded with his nose full of blood as cars passed us on the interstate. I was just tall enough to see my reflection in his belt buckle. I remember him crouching on the side of I-65 to get a closer look at the new dents in our overturned Studebaker, the rear wheel spinning slowly above us. He ran his fingers over the crumpled quarter-panel and said he was leaving us soon. He wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand and told me an accident is something that can't happen. To my mother and to him. To me. Someone who has never been in your life—someone who is the main character in their story too—could come along and hurt you. Just like they had our Studebaker. And maybe they didn’t even see you until the last minute. And maybe you had been waiting for them all along.

Joy #1

2006-01-11T14:32:00.000-06:00