curtisinterruptus

THE END OF THIS

2009-12-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

THE BEGINNING OF THAT

VERMILLION

2009-12-11T20:02:00.001-07:00

POWELL'S FIRST CAMP

2009-12-08T07:26:00.001-07:00

NAOMI, RUTH, ORPAH

2009-12-03T16:46:00.002-07:00

GAYZA ...

2009-11-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

Gaza: He Is Never Coming Back
By Curtis Jensen

4_stars.gif Turkey/Tofurkey
3_stars.gif Mashed Potatoes
2_stars.gif Stuffing
1_star.gif Mincemeat Pie

Gaza, He Is Never Coming Back 4_stars.gif
Gaza possess an inane ability to flex out beyond the fringes of transition: when matters seem most clear on He Is Never Coming Back—when the riff and the pulse and the voice and the content are thundering straight-faced along as mallet-tight as ever—the drums appear as an old woman heading tits over teakettle down the stairs. Then comes Jon Parkin’s decaying hell-bellow across the continental ring of the puke-guitars and the listener is suddenly dragged along in a lightning-slur through three octaves in different directions at once. Gaza perform their greatest work in such transitions, extending the boundary of harmony. By those terms is He Is Never Coming Back an achievement.

Gazanese for “angular guitar work” is defined by a riff grammar that is face melting, almost un-trackable, and for most of its peers, unplayable. The finger-tapping acrobatics of earlier works have been overshadowed by a degree, but only by a degree, a perfect measure of restraint which allows the twisted and fecund garden of their octave-spanning twin melodic figures to run its vines and tie its knots around the knock knees of their pollinators. Jon Parkin is a fucking giant, on stage and on wax; here he sounds better than ever—more grumpy and more taller than you, and more straddle-legged.

Thank God (which they probably do not) that the Gazaites have held together through their recent lineup changes. The ideological content of He Is Never Coming Back is rightly a sector of study necessary in dealing with the record as a total work. But to make ideology the primary horizon in a criticism of He Is Never Coming Back would be misguided.

Two kudos to close, in reverse alphabetical order: Casey Hansen is a mind-wrenchingly inventive drummer whose performances are incessant and who deserves more credit than he gets. The production and performances on He Is Never Coming Back stand up to anything in metal today, which is a tribute to the skill, character, and kick-ass barbecues of Andy Patterson.

UBU

2009-11-26T09:36:00.001-07:00

AS SEPARATE AS SEA LICE ...

2009-10-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

AS SEPARATE AS SEA LICE

As separate as sea lice in a lonely salmon pen
Adrift in the northern currents of some cold sea,
A pair of parasites, appendages drilling,
Antipodally plunged into a fishy host brain.

As separate as the flesh dressed head off,
Cross linked post mortem, no longer easily
Consumed, batiked canthaxanthinly,
Dubious, upside down through a pinhole.

Accumulating wax on the retinal screen
Of some unseen snuff mill: a lonely pin
Hole in a field at the brink of two gorges
Which lead to the sea, to a drifting salmon pen.

Two gorges coursing over a split stream bed,
Two sea lice antipodally drilling at the host's head.

SCROLL PUMP ...

2009-10-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

MIDDLING LOVE: GLOSS BY R.J. MAITLAND...

2009-09-26T17:43:00.002-07:00

LORD, SEND ME A MIDDLING LOVE
Gloss by R.J. Maitland

CANTHAXANTHIN...

2009-09-10T05:57:00.002-07:00

ПЕРГАМЕН ПАМ`ЯТІ ...

2009-07-17T17:40:00.003-07:00

ПЕРГАМЕН ПАМ`ЯТІ
Вадим Лесич

Пергами пам`яті пом`ятий, не шелестить,
як шумлять затьмарені сади вечора
і вітер гне, наче лук, дугу далечі
і луки ликують під фіялками сутінку.
Бурий дим - і округла, мов гльоб, порожнеча.
Дим від кострубатих кістяків життя,
що попеліють.
Порожнеча, яка чекає на повноту.

Пергамен пам`яті іржаво
запалює свічі на вівтарі вечора.
Мов мох полярний - синіють приморозки.
Під білими зорями тремтить,
мов павутиння, музика Гріга.
Речі зовсім не пов`язані, що існують
окремо кожне для себе, -
але, наче доспілі овочі з різних дерев,
- падають важко у тиші саду
на землю, що меркне в чеканні.

Тіні стають, мов дерева,
і дерева стають, мов тіні.
Пергамен пам`яті
зашелестів
піском розбитих дзеркал
у розсипаній пустині.

THE PARCHMENT OF MEMORY
Vadym Lesych

The parchment of memory changing, not rustling,
like sound darkening gardens yesterday
and wind bends, as if a bow, the arch of distance
and meadows rejoice below the violets of twilight.
Chestnut smoke - and around me, like a globe, emptiness.
Smoke from the rough skeleton of life,
that turn to ashes.
Emptiness, which waits for fullness.

The parchment of memory rustily
lights candles on the altar of evening.
As polar moss - bluing frosts.
Under white stars trembles,
as if a cob webs, the music of Grieg.
Things totally unbound, that exist
each for itself,-
but, as ripened fruit from different trees,
- falling heavily in the silence of the orchard
to earth, which fades in waiting.

Shadows become as trees,
and tress become as shadows.
The parchment of memory
rustles,
the sand of shattered mirrors
in the spilled desert.

translated by Curtis Jensen

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 12, 13, 14

2009-07-15T18:48:00.004-07:00

DAY 12, 13, 14

Home now. Or, at least, in Utah. Not really sure how long that drive was. Left at 2 or 3 in the morning from Newport, Kentucky on Sunday, finally lurched up to the curb in front of Tyler's house around 1 in the afternoon on Tuesday. Punch drunk, essentially- the van has shaken us all to bits. Slept for 18 hours, now awake, but ears are ringing and am not thinking very straightly.

The last show was very big, I did not see final attendance numbers, but it either was the largest or just about the largest show of the trip. In a mansion. The haunted birthplace of John Taliaferro Thompson, inventor of the Thompson Sub-Machine gun. The mansion is across the river from Cincinnati, but I didn't see any ghosts.

*****

What the fuck was that?

The engine of the van is surging violently, a fan belt accompanying with unearthly shrieks. Something smells scorched. The traffic in the canyon is funneled down to one lane in each direction. 71 miles to go.

Well boys, I think we've just lost 3rd gear...

*****

It's just a hell of a thing, that there's just two of you up there!

Yeah man, that's just how we do it!

All that sound from just the two of you!

Yeah man!

I'll tell you what I am going to do-

What's that?

I'm going to buy me another of them shirts.

You bet, a wise choice there.

I've already bought the one with the tentacles, and now I'm going to by the one in the yellow.

Sounds good man.

It's just a hell of a thing, there there's just the two of you up there!

Yeah man, that's how we do it.

*****

I haven't watched Sunn O))) really until tonight. How could I? Most nights there is so much fog that one can hardly see them on stage, let alone 20 feet in front of your face. That and I am usually hobbled to the merch table, which oftentimes is not in line of sight of the performance.

But tonight I have watched them. From the balcony. From the furthest right wing of the balcony, practically directly over the stage. 2 Ohioan metal-ers are in front of me, and as I come up to the edge of the balcony they quickly settle back into their seats as if they had been engaged in some degree of pre-sex act before I stumble up out of the synthetic smoke to their perch. I think that this was so because on my way around the balcony, I encounter two other couples in similarly murky corners of the night clenched in passionate acts. I suppose gratuitous amounts of fake fog lends an event to gratuitous displays of public affection?

I had no idea that Sunn O))) played like this. Greg Anderson and Steve Moore are constantly communicating, through body language as well as through the improvisational device of call and response. Moore is the slap-back of Anderson's slow chords, Rhodes the decay / bloom of Model T, vacuum tube, wave form, Gold Top.

Attila's boots must be bolted down, he hardly moves his lower body. The same cannot be said for his upper body, his hands gesture and sing back and up, down and in, out and forth all the time, his fingers pastiching a product of multiple symbols: the upraised hand of the Ringatu, the closed index finger and thumb of the Vitarka Mudra, the assumed Heart in Hand, the Trinitarian Formula and the 5 Wounds of Christ. The microphone becomes a Vajra, a lightning bolt brushed across his lips as he takes up the third voice in the counter melody of Moore and Anderson. A perverse farrago, or a medley-Varamudra: Attila dispersing boons to the audience? My impulse is towards the later, although admittedly I have ordered breakfasts with this guy- barring such personal history I could imagine the effects of his stage persona to be taken much, much differently. Notably, Attila employs his left hand decidedly more than his right.

Gentry has described Sunn O))) as a music of gestures. From the heights of the Southgate House's balcony, Gentry's description seems very accurate.

*****

You have fucking got to be kidding me. Is this fucker really going to pull me over?

I have just wormed up into the loft. I am very, very tired, and knowing that it'll be my turn to drive at 5 or 6 (it is 2:30 or so now) as soon as the van is moving I head for the loft. Shortly after that the cop pulls us over. Tyler is driving.

License and registration.

What seems to be the problem, officer?

What kind of a setup do you have in there?

There's a loft back there, one of our guys is in there.

The cop shines his light over Tyler's shoulder and into the back of the van. I am tired enough that I don't even look up at the light.

You do know that in the state of Kentucky all passengers in a vehicle must be wearing a safety belt.

Is that so? She passed in Utah, where we're from.

Yes, but you are in Kentucky now.

Well we are headed back to Utah tonight, and we didn't know about that.

All the same, you are in the state of Kentucky now.

The cop takes the paper work. Utah has a the same seat belt laws. Gentry and Tyler talk back and forth loudly and nervously. I pull myself out of the loft and onto the mattress spread out on the speaker cabinets behind the front seats of the van. The cop returns.

Here are these. You know that the safety belt law was enacted to protect you in the case of an accident.

We're just trying to get back to Salt Lake-

But not wearing safety belt, if you guys get in an accident, that guy back there, he's dead.

I'm sorry sir...

The cop doesn't issue Tyler a ticket. He also doesn't make me feel any better about sleeping in the loft tonight.

It is a good thing I wasn't driving, I am always mean to cops- says Gentry.

It is a good thing he didn't fucking breathalyze me!- says Tyler.

*****

This is my fucking baby! Here look I shit it out for you and it has arms and eyes and a rape face!

Gentry is in the back, kneeling, with his knees pointing out, and holding a water bottle full of chew-spit and piss between his legs.

I'm going to fucking Wendy's!- says Tyler.

Me too!- I say as I drift the van into the right hand lane of the street that bisects Kearney, Nebraska. I've been here before, not just once, but a few times. Here I am again.

*****

It is really very cold in the van. In the night I've unpacked my sleeping bag and spread it over myself, which was difficult to do in the loft as you are so close to the ceiling. I can hardly stand to sleep in the loft when we are driving because you are triply subjected to the lurches and jolts of the 30-year old machine. I have hardly slept as I have developed a mind-grinding habit of waking every thirty or forty minutes to check to see if we have yet rolled off into the ditch. I imagine that if we had rolled off into the ditch I would know without checking every thirty or forty minutes.

I pull myself out of the loft, crawl past Gentry asleep on the speaker cabinets, and I fold myself into the driver's seat. It is early, before sunrise. The sagebrush plains of the high, red desert are radiant and rich in the pre-dawn golden hour. I rub my eyes with the palm-heel of my hands, then turn the ignition.

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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 11

2009-07-12T14:44:00.006-07:00

DAY 11

2nd to last show, in Michigan. An email that I've just sent reads something like this:

There is so much fog from the three fog machines which Sunn O))) deploys every night that I can't see the keyboard of this laptop. they are playing right now, it is so loud that the screen seems blurry with certain notes. I miss you. I am very very tired, we slept in the van last night in a truck stop in Gary, Indiana. I woke up at 8 and began driving. The van is not running so well, the transmission has been slipping and there is a knock coming from the rear right hub...

Feel as though I am at last getting the hang of this tour, the routines and the difficult to navigate fields of interpersonal relationships. Really though, the tour as a whole is going very very smoothly, all of us loading and unloading together without more than the usual complaint, and generally everyone is getting along very well. It has been a very peculiar adjustment, this tour, from my previous experiences: I am at the bottom of the totem pole, the merch-slinger. Although it is a relief to have nothing at stake in most aspects of this trip, often times I feel as though that I should.

I have felt strangely the whole trip. It is the first tour on which I've ever been where I don't feel like I am away from home. I feel I am simply just away. From what I don't know.

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EAGLE TWIN NOTES DAY 10

2009-07-11T15:49:00.002-07:00

DAY 10

SHOW REVIEW: DE KALB, IL

What is the link between the improvisational capability of Eagle Twin and the long phrase of Sunn O)))'s Slow Music?

Action. Improvisation is a rational and gestural act, differential in nature, rolling forward from point to point to point never freezing, eye to eye with it's inevitable end, resigned to this end's possibility, but at the same time receptive for opportunities to build and sustain its passage in time. The improviser must communicate, must subjugate the ego in order to allow for the dual nature of the improvisational act- too much self, and the improvisation collapses into masturbatory wang-noodlry. But also the improviser must assert her or his self, must seize the momentary points in the music's current, and again the dual nature of improvisation manifests itself in this aspect of the act: the improviser must at once listen and react, flickering between the two, transient and finite in time at once. Improvisation is not consumption, it does not destroy the line of music in the current of time. And so is determined the long phrase of Sunn O))). Sunn O)))'s human-plectrums are the improvisers, finite in articulation, but transient in their wash of wave forms.

In both cases, the long phrase of Sunn O))) and the improvisation of Eagle Twin, the multiple contingencies of language slough away, so deterring the naturalization process of the unhealthy signs that infest our daily symbolic geography. Improvisation and the long phrase of slow music exist in the indicative mode, at unity gain of meaning. In nature, improvisation and the long phrase share the characteristic of a rational and gestural dialog, a dialog which roots both in the indicative, factual mode, and in so doing fortifies each against the crippling myth-making/marketing processes that terribly shimmer out in all directions of our daily lives. This is not to say that the performances of Sunn O))) and Eagle Twin cannot be recorded, reproduced, and distributed, exactly that has happened, and with the fierce-some marketing force of Southern Lord Records brought full to bear in both ensembles' histories. But live, on a stage in a town in Illinois, plaster and paint flaking off the walls, under an electric storm in full panorama, in every direction flashes and ground strikes, a fire fly tracing loops over the back of your hand, they are unrobbable by the naturalizing, parasitic processes of 2nd significations.

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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 9

2009-07-10T14:52:00.004-07:00

How many Ampeg 8x10 cabinets are weighing down vans or trailers attached to vans, all hurtling down the monumentally overbuilt motorways of our obese and over-entitled nation right this second? Too fucking many. How many shows feature acts that play essentially the same equipment but for relatively slight cosmetic differences? hey can you hurry up getting you Marshall 4x12 slant front speaker cabinet and Gibson SG and Marshall 50 watt head off of the stage so that I can place my Marshall 4x12 straight front speaker cabinet and Marshall JMP head and my Gibson Les Paul on the stage, without all of which I'd never be able to dial in the absolutely critical sonic signature of my tonal avatar?) Obviously considerations for the material differences of instruments must be allowed, however decisions as to practical necessity must be made with a more stern scimitar than that which is now being swung.

And the costs incurred by these and the 538 other bottomless habits of operation sewn into the touring culture of North American Independent Music are foisted upon consumers. Higher ticket costs, higher costs for touring culture's artifacts (which exist as the naturalization of the 'memory myth' of western event-consumption culture, which is a whole other big fucking mess), higher costs for the Coors Light that you just dropped $5 for at the bar (read as time spent laboring, say if you make $12 / hour answering customer service calls from some God-absent corner of some terrifying nest of cubicles at Discover Card's corporate head quarters, then that'd be 25 minutes of your life leashed to a phone bank in one of the most contemptible ditches of such a cruel glass and aluminum hell). Unethical, self-defeating, and at times practically malicious cost dumpings along the entire reach of the ethical spectrum are systemic in the touring process. Growth-focused commerce has no claim to any actual piece of standing ground in the metaphysical stuff of Live Music- about which is North American Touring Culture.

Multiple ideology-reinforcing myths exist within North American Independent Music's touring methodology, a methodology which actualizes a modus operandi determined by misuse of resources, a methodology the successes of which are determined by the displacement of operational expenses upon the consumer, and which assumes an unfounded right to geographic access. Dozens, if not dozens of dozens of further critiques could be set out against this methodology, but I am tired from a day off of lounging by the pool, watching cable television, enjoying the air conditioning of the 5th floor of the hotel in which I will upon a double bed sleep tonight having nuzzled up to a massive plate of Mexican food surrounded by middle-class people nuzzled up to other plates of Mexican food but the line of differentiation is that I paid for my meal with money set aside in the catering budget of the show that Eagle Twin (not I) played last night for which St. Louisians of many stripes paid $15.00 to see.

Most of the anecdotal references made here withstand major distortion in their transposition to the other market segments of Western Music such as hip hop, country, pop (all of which tend towards even greater maluse and profligacy.

The Western Myth of the Individual's Right to Travel Cheaply and at High Rates of Speed is one of our culture's most insidiously absurd significations. As travel industry handouts are retracted by the current trans-Atlantic politics of budget balancing, the Western Myth of the Individual's Right to Travel Cheaply and at High Rates of Speed is a skirmish line shaping up to become a surreal manifestation of class divisions that will will leave the middle class holding their plastic luggages, but without tickets or car keys or mortgages in hand.

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 8

2009-07-09T10:11:00.002-07:00

DAY 8

Gentry tells a tour story that goes something like this:

We're driving and it is somewhere in Georgia on the way to Florida or something and we are in a rental van because we're on like the 3rd van that we've ruined on the tour so it is me and Cache is driving and there is Doug and Chad and I am in the back and the cabinets and the gear are just in the van in the back there are no seats- we are just on the floor of the van and Chad is behind me and there's a bass and some heads and we are going along like at 80 or 90 miles an hour and Cache is driving and then there is kgggaawhap and then the crazy part is then we fish tail back and forth a couple of times and we are just then he hits something and we are off to the side of the road and then I am just in the air but I look behind me over my shoulder and there is all the gear in the air and there is this bass head in the air coming towards me floating and coming towards me and I sort of while I am in the air move it aside and away from my head and then next I know I'm upside down on top of Doug and Chad is in the air his seat just hanging there clipped in and I am up on my shoulders and Cash turns around and just says he says How's my bitches?!

*****

Kgggaawhapfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrump - What the fuck was - frumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrump - that? - frumpkrangfrumpgunkfrumkkrangngngngngngngngnfrumpfrump - I don't know - frumpfrumpfrumpthwackgngngngngfrumpfrumpfrump - a chunk of tire just shot out from - frimpfrimpfrimprrrrrrrrgrrrgrrrngngngngnnnnnnnngfrumpfromp - under the back - frompfrompfrompfrompppmmffffrrroommmppppppffrooommmpppfffroommmpp -What the fuck - fffrroooommpppffffrrooommppppppffrrrooommppppffffrooommmmppppppnnkkknnnnppppphphhhththth.

The van is off on the side of the interstate and it is hot and very muggy and all of the cars are whipping past.

Man you want to not drive?

Yeah man, that sounds good- I say.

******

ggggrrrunnkkkkkkddd

Tyler!

Fuck the fucking jack just broke!

I am around the front of the van and I come around to the driver's side and there is Tyler out to the side of the rusty old van on his knees in the parking lot pushing as hard as he can on the tire which is at a weird angle and then I can see that there is one lugnut on but the jack is crumpled underneath...

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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 7

2009-07-08T23:30:00.002-07:00

DAY 7

Attila is from Hungary.

'Man, what are you going to have for breakfast?'

'Pancakes, I'm going to have some mother fucking pancakes.'

'Banana nut.'

Attila is looking out the window.

At the hotel yesterday morning everyone is inside getting coffee, but Attila is standing on the edge of the parkway in the center of the hotel's half-circle driveway. He is smoking and his spine is curved as would be a knife fighter's tossed from the window of a 3rd story dance hall to the muddy banks of the trash creek below. His rolled cigarette is between the tips of his first and second fingers and his thumbs, and he's looking up towards the tops of the buildings across the street with a half grimace.

'... So basically you are paying a buck fifty for the hash browns.'

'Man, I don't know.'

A tour has a funny way of colluding the inconspicuous and mundane elements of the daily routines of its participants in very pleasant and surreal ways. Same goes for this trip, here we are, the vanguard of Slow Music, the present's manifestation of New Music, card carrying members of one of Metal's most revered and radical party's, around a 3 tables pushed together by a very large woman with a leech-shaped hickey on her thick neck in a Village Inn on a Tuesday morning in Omaha, oversized plastic menus glaring up at our drooping faces the photos of Skillets designed by the Skillet Experts.

Attila is at the head of the table: 'Cool- I am Grandfather!' He nudges me with his elbow, and pegs a finger at one of the laminated omelette photos, 'You see the heart? That is for me.'

3 or 4 or 2 years ago began a striking and continuing trend in Western Independent Music: the exploitation (to great and to poor effects dually) of organ-timbres- Arcade Fire, Beirut, Ratatat a frozen fencepost full of others to which I am not hip. Parallely, dense, polyphonic voicings surfaced (and then engulfed in a synthesized firestorm keyboard hooks) the Industrial Pop Music Complex.

Overtone singing, also known as throat singing, overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances (or formats) created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.

Throat singing is both a generic and a specific term. Generally, the term is applied to any singing style which entails the application of a harsh voice or some other constriction. Specifically, the term refers to a type of Central Asian and Siberian overtone singing

So sayeth the interweb.

Attila, at the crowd-point of the Sunn O))) parallelogram, at the dark yawn of his cloak hood a bullet-form raven's mic in both hands, by means of overtone singing and the harsh voice, delivers the most rich, most full polyphonic organ-timbre in the business, hands fucking down. He actualizes his two, three, and at times four dimensional tree-groan with the exact pathos required of Sunn O)))'s nightly Great Musical Leap. His stage presence and execution call into question the capability of any other member of the human race to do any of this any better than himself.

'I will have this Award Winner.'

'Award winner?'

'Yes, this Award Winner.'

'The pie?'

'Yes, the pie.'

'You want that warm or with ice cream, hon?'

Attila pauses, looking at the menu. Then he looks up to her where she leers large and puffed over his shoulder, 'Warm.'

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 6

2009-07-07T15:12:00.002-07:00

DAY 6

This tour is of present Western Music's most important, relevant, innovative, and prescient happenings.

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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 5

2009-07-06T19:59:00.003-07:00

DAY 5

SHOW REPORT: MINNEAPOLIS

Recent Metal consistently toes a line laid out by its histories' and genres' significations. Closed systems of significations, most usually, or nearly closed with only cracks at its kick plates and jambs through which may (or may not) flicker the efforts of the music's innovators, in cohorts or as individuals.

A creative act is not the singular fulcrum for upturning a closed system; ideology has never been disrupted solely through painting a bowl of fruit. Or by puking out noise/melody on a Moog or through a Big Muff or with Pro Tools or out of an electrified mouth harp or by the deployment of any of the countless other material means available to the individual in this info-democratic period, including literary / theoretical / cultural devices such as repetition, time expansion, metaphor, knock knock jokes, etc. Instruments and devices are complimentary to an action, they may to different degrees be useful in the carrying out of a certain intention, even critical, nevertheless instruments are supportive components to any particular act. On July 5, 2009 at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis, the primary instruments are mostly, well, instruments, plus improvisation.

Eagle Twin can improvise. Improvisation is not determined simply by making shit up while one is on a stage. Improvisation requires that its participants' relations in the live setting bare the traits of communicative interchange, without which improvisation does not exist in its fullest, most substantive forms. Negotiation between the players is possible and necessary, happens frequently and in a sustained and building fashion, and this mirrors the negotiations of individuals one with another, one with each other, one with one's self, one with the natural world, one with the caddisflies smacking the street lamps of Dinkytown on a Sunday night, and so on.

Eagle Twin, on July 5, 2009, at the Varstiy Theater in Minneapolis seized upon the core of such dialectic negotiations- one with another; together with the sign systems of Metal, other Musics, Language et al., and on out into the night in all directions at once. This fertile position between the negotiative poles of improvisation mirrors the malleable mid-belly of our negotiations (one with another, one with each other, one with one's self, one with ruling ideology, one with the world, one with the plume of smoke billowing up from the mini-van in flames at the side of the highway, and so on), and was summarily contracted, embellished, inverted, pummeled, polished by Eagle Twin last night by means of the primary device of improvisation. The negotiations on stage began, were built, were resolved, and then at the shouts and calls of the present hundreds of listener / receivers, were struck up again, built further, and laid out to be examined by all those present, manifested in the hearty dude-embrace by Gentry Densley of Tyler Smith to close the set.

Sunn O))) sees all of this. Sunn O))) takes to the stage, and in doing so takes up the still warm material instruments and devices of the Eagle Twin set- speaker magnets, vacuum tubes, the charged air, the invigorated symbol-fields of Metal- branding irons still hot in the fire of Eagle Twin's four song forge. Sunn O)))'s set is animated, tense, live, and outros with Greg Anderson and shortly thereafter Stephen O'Malley hanging their respective instruments by headstock from the twin art-deco chandeliers strung from the high ceilings of the Varsity Theater's expansive show hall.

Back to the second paragraph- a creative act is not the singular fulcrum for upturning a closed system. Improvisation is not some sort of saving act. A past question rephrased: if Metal is a spectacle of excess composed of closed or essentially closed systems of significations, a multiple systemed spectacle of excess which can be (and was on July 5, 2009 by Eagle Twin, and then Sunn O))) ) manipulated through the primary instrument of improvisation, then what is the moral concept that such improvisers set out, consciously or unconsciously, to purvey?

Admittedly, I've got my fingers crossed for total ideological restructuring.

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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES THE POSTER

2009-07-05T13:24:00.002-07:00

trent call and sri whipple did it:

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 4

2009-07-05T13:19:00.001-07:00

DAY 4

Another day off. The 4th of July. We've set up camp on a heavily wooded island in Wisconsin.

Back in the trees, Tyler has a log over his shoulder, and is walking purposefully towards a swamp. Gentry has two maple limbs up behind his neck like horns, and is running low down and on the balls of his feet through the under brush.

*****

Across the fire, a raccoon is squatting back on its haunches. We all stop speaking and look towards the animal. The animal cocks its head a few degrees to the side. In the firelight, the dark patches around his eyes are even darker, and the fine details of his black fingers are very clearly visible.

I look to Tyler and Tyler looks to me. Gentry keeps his eyes forward, with his arms resting on the edge of the table.

In its fingers, the animal raises something up in front of its muzzle, holds it there at its eye in the firelight as one would with a gem. It is a tick. The tick's legs are kicking. The animal squeezes hard, and the tick is crushed. The animal whips around quick, and we watch its banded tale loop off into the darkness beyond the firelight.

*****

Out of the coals Tyler drags the bottle, and lays it on the leaves below the table end. He stumbles off into the van for the night. The leaves smolder, and a thin curve of smoke works its way up from below the scorching bottle.

www.cityweekly.net

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 3

2009-07-05T10:58:00.001-07:00

DAY 3

Days off generally are no good. Oftentimes they are dull, with too much money being spent.

*****

'...And I had so many stalkers there, it was just so fucking annoying.'

I am seated at the end of the table. Tyler was on my left, but he's had enough and has left the dining room.

'... So I went outside, and I told that fucking ice cream truck driver, I told him, 'You should turn that shitty music off, all the kids know when you are here, I am trying to take a fucking nap.'

On my right is a woman that is short and is wearing velor sweat pants with a large, laminate peace sign on one thigh. Later Gentry says that he is pretty sure that she has done porn.

'...And I am in the museum-'

Last night she stormed through the show with Nordstrom's bags on each arm. She asked to leave her bags behind the merch table, but I told her that there was no room.

'- And everyone is fucking crying! I just don't get that, I just don't do that with that kind of stuff.'

I don't have enough money to order anything at the restaurant in which we are all seated around a long table a where I am sitting next to this woman. When I first sat down, she had a camera in her hands, and she straightaway took to explaining its photos, including a washed out in-the-club shot of her friends breasts.

'... I mean, who does that? Who goes into the Holocaust Museum and just starts fucking cryig? How fucking annoying!'

*****

'What the fuck was that?'

'Shit, I don't know.'

All day on the streets have filed by toe-headed men in pale pink and blue shirts, either in same sex pairs or trios, or accompanied by females in very short white shorts or very short technicolor cocktail dresses. The only break in the pattern has been a tall, dark-skinned transvestite with breaths that looked as big and as round and as hard as squashes.

A man, now, right outside the passenger side of the van, is wiping at his forearms and looking up at the sky.

'Oh shit-'

Later tonight are scheduled fireworks at the lake shore. Most of those on the streets seem to be headed in that direction.

'You backed over that piss bottle!'

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 2 ...

2009-07-03T15:44:00.003-07:00

DAY 2

I've drawn the early shift. Gentry has driven from 2 in the morning to just before dawn; it is 6 or so, and now I am to take over. I have dreamed of playing a very orange, very angular ESP guitar. It has rained very, very hard- practically the entire night. I would wake up and look to see where we are, and out the windshield is only sheets of rain and I cover my ears and hope to fall asleep before the van spins off on it's side into the dark.

The early shift is my favorite shift to drive. The roads are quiet; I am a nervous driver, and I'd rather drive on empty roads. This morning is beautiful, the clouds are luminescent and high, the far edge of the storms we followed (or followed us?) across Wyoming and most of Nebraska, shaded and blushed in the sunrise in the parking lot of a gas station that is still closed for the night, which is across the street from what seems to be a motel that is closed for the rest of the decade, towards which I stumble to take a piss into a broken-out window.

******

Tour is waiting: waiting for sound check, waiting for a shower, waiting to leave, waiting to get there. The first day of a tour is even more waitingly so. Reading at the bar during sound check.

*****

SHOW REPORT: CHICAGO

A middle-aged man with a lisp asking too many questions about too many metal bands of my fellow merch monkey at the t-shirt table. I don't make eye contact. Tyler at his Vistalite anvil, all sweat and skin and hollow logs and thunderheads; Gentry upon the stump-pulpit, acrylic mocking birds flickering out from his thumbs and palms. Then fog, robes.

*****

'Let's get the fuck out of here and find some fucking pizza!' When Tyler says this, he does so very loudly, so much so that the bar tendress, who 15 minutes before last call (an hour ago) floated me a bottle of Old Style, turns and looks and drops her hands to her sides.

'Umm, ok.' Gentry isn't drunk. Tyler's drunk, but I don't think that he means to be drunk. I'm not drunk. I am tired. It might be 2 in the morning. We are loading our gear, but no one else is loading their gear.

'Yeah man, pizza would be kick ass.' I don't think that I mean it.

*****

'I fucking put my balls on this fucking p'roni! Can't you fucking handle that? Huh? Huh!'

The kid in front of me doesn't even flinch, just scratches his chin strap. Behind the counter, the second guy doesn't flinch, he only just sweats and grins and is soft and puffy under his golf shirt, which is splotched with flour.

'Can't you fucking do this? Can't you fucking handle this!' The guy yelling must own the place. He's screaming at everybody like he owns the place. His skin under his chin is blotchy and looks like scar tissue.

Greg Anderson, from Sunn O))), grinning, steps up to the counter: 'I'd like one large veggie pizza-'

'I'm not fucking doing no veggie fucking pizza! We're out of fucking veggies! It's too fucking late for veggie fucking pizza! I'll put my balls on the fucking veggies! Can you fucking handle it!'

Greg steps back, turns with his hands a bit up from his waste, and goes out the door still grinning.

*****

We're asleep. We're in the front room of Trevor de Brauw's apartment. No, Gentry and Tyler are asleep- I can't sleep. Cats, I am allergic to cats, and in this apartment there is a cat. Tyler is asleep, but I can hear him moving on the couch. Twitching? No, he's kicking his leg. His kick drum leg. and his arms are swinging.

*****

Administrative note: Some of this is going to end up in the City Weekly: http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY .5, 1...

2009-07-02T16:17:00.003-07:00

DAY .5

'Mother fucker!'

'So we'll just glue these bitches on the edges-'

'Mother fucking shit! Fuck!

'What?' Gentry asks.

'Fucking fuck mother fuck! Agggggggghhhhowwww!

'What the fuck is his problem?'

'I shot my fucking thumb! Fuck!'

In a warehouse divided with 8 foot chain link fences into individual storage spaces. Saw dust, radial arm saw, liquid nails on everything, stained rags, aluminum burls. Gentry Densley and Tyler Smith are trying to finish up the three stacks of 4X18 speaker cabinets that are blocked about the cement floor.

'Fucking shit!

'How did you shoot your thumb?' asks Gentry.

'Fuck! With the god damn fucking nail gun! Fuck!' says Tyler.

It's Tuesday night, 11 or 12, maybe 1. In Salt Lake City. Eagle Twin's first show of 2 weeks' with Sunn O))) is in Chicago on Thursday. Chicago is 1,400 miles from Salt Lake City. Tyler holds his thumb and yells and kicks one of the cabinets and then says that he is done for the night and then he goes home.

'What the fuck,' Gentry says.

*****

DAY 1

I'm tired. I did not sleep much the night before; I woke up in the middle of some one or something telling me a racist joke in my dream. Right at the moment the punch line should have been delivered, I woke up.

The van is not running very well. That's not it. It is running fine, it is 29 years old. I am 28 years old. It is just running hot. We've stopped somewhere on the high sage brush plains, in a town with not enough teeth, it seems. Tyler is haggling for parts, I am dosing in the passenger seat, Gentry is in the parking lot.

He's feeding the seagulls. A lot of them. They are on his shoulders and at his feet and he is grinning and holding up bits of a sandwich in his gathered fingers to the birds as Tyler comes out from the sun-faded auto-parts store.

'Let's get this show on the road!' Tyler says. He heaves up into the drivers seat, scooping a poke of Winter Green Grizzly into his lower lip with his right hand while clicking his seat belt with his left.

'Those were the coolest seagulls I've ever seen.'

*****

'I just can't fucking wait to see Nebraska!' Tyler says this as he is driving and he is pounding ceiling of the van with his fist. 'I fucking love Nebraska!'

CITY WEEKLY: SUNN O))) REVIEW

2009-06-18T10:42:00.005-07:00

Sunn O))): Monoliths and Dimensions
By Curtis Jensen

In his lecture “The Future of Music: Credo,” John Cage stated, “Centers of experimental music must be established.

In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, turntables, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc., available for use. Composers at work using 20th-century means for making music. Performances of results. Organization of sound for extramusical purposes (theatre, dance, radio, film).”

Monoliths and Dimensions is Cage’s Center smeared across two-plus years and two continents, conveyed by the matryoshka of commercial signifiers that includes metal, slow music, doom, Southern Lord, Sunn O))), and so on. Monoliths’ advance press release in its canny first line of defense: “The album is not ‘Sunn 0))) with strings’ or ‘metal meets orchestra.’” The album is metal with trombones, with a men’s choir, with a women’s choir, with strings, with strings in between tones, with flute, with all manner of horns, with harp, with guys who played with Coltrane and Hancock and Sun Ra, in a church, with a Hungarian accent, all at once. A polished, flawlessly designed document, in the tow of a steely and professional public-relations push, Monoliths and Dimensions reports the recent efforts of the Center of Experimental Music—Southern Lord/Avant Metal Extension.

Live, Sunn O))) invoke metal’s visual signifiers with smoke machines and costuming. Audience members get in on the act with glacial headbanging and goat claws. At the outset of the metal branch of Slow Music, such hollow references may have served as useful points of entry for the metal-raised listener/consumers who have given Southern Lord Records its impressively loyal, sustaining, and staunch target demographic. But lo-fi noise padding between the tremendous essential content of Monoliths and Dimensions are only hollow props of Camp Metal, which empty out the ambitious symbolic brood comb the album otherwise rigorously builds. At this advanced period in the development of the Slow Music project, such determinate symbols, both live and recorded, are becoming increasingly ripe for a good weeding.

That all being said, one of metal-biographic photography’s most kick-ass moments lies smack dab in the center of the hyper-slick liner notes of Monoliths and Dimensions: an overhead photo of Sunn O)))’s four riff-smiths standing in hooded cloaks on the otherwise vacant tier of a terrific Aztecan temple.

Two closing questions, least interesting first: If the virtue of all-in metal is that it is a spectacle of excess, what is the moral concept it attempts to purvey? How did New Music end up here? SouthernLord.com

THEIR HEADS ARE BLINDFOLDED SKULLS ...

2009-06-05T09:51:00.001-07:00

THEIR HEADS ARE BLINDFOLDED SKULLS

Their heads are blindfolded skulls in an ox yoke.
Hung with honey-soaked rags or faces, trotting
Together to the long house, awaited by dung smoke.
A fine time for a wedding;

No Longer dropped are the jaws of their hearts.
Loves' unknown, inevitable laws in fits and starts
No longer conduct their loves' own permutations.
They are patients;

Each comes by a dusking horse to the other's aid.
With dark, broodcomb memory in a cedar hive,
They have revived all symptoms, recalled still others.
Inlaid the wax palliative,

At once remebering and forgetting their flaws,
They wrap and unwrap the other with gauze.

CITY WEEKLY: CAPTAIN CAPTAIN STUDIOS...

2009-06-05T09:41:00.002-07:00

Captain Captain Studios
Oh, My! Art, music and whiskey.
By Curtis Jensen

Captain Captain Studios houses the workspaces of a tight-knit group of Salt Lake City artists, a group which is inextricably tied to Salt Lake City’s music scene. You’ve seen their work not only in galleries and publications, but also in cover art, show posters, stickers and at collaboration events. Even the hipster sucking down Coors Light next to you at the bar stands a good chance at being plim-solled in Patrick Munger’s hand-dyed Lake of Salt sneaks.

Most days, around 6 or 7 in the evening, the tenants of Captain Captain begin to circulate through each other’s spaces. Often sipping beers or whiskey drinks, they check in on each other, on who is there and what they are up to. The following fragments of a conversation took place on April 20, 2009:

Steve Larson: How are we going to pee in the corner?

Sri Whipple: I remember, like two years ago, this whole place was cleared out, I took a pressure washer and I squirted all the dirt that was in that corner, so the water would run out that way, and it is already built up again.

City Weekly: Could somebody maybe say where we are?

SL: In the backyard.

Gaylon Justus Jr.: Courtyard.

SL: Of?

Patrick Munger: Captain Captain Studios.

SW: 825 S. 500 West. But don’t print that.

All: [laugh]

CW: Who is missing today?

SW: The White Salamander.

SL: Cein Watson

TC: Tessa Lindsey.

SL: [yells] Tessa!

PM: Walter—

TC, SW: Ben.

PM: Ben Wiemeyer

SW: Berkley.

PM Bercules.

CW: Who’s been here the longest?

SW: Tom [Mulder].

PM: Well, Trent, Tessa, Sri—

TC: Well, this is the thing: I’m going to say that we’ve got a really nice balance in here. With Patrick and Gaylon—

SW: This is the best lineup that we’ve ever had.

TC: I think it is totally even, except for maybe the ladies in the back.

SW: If they, if we could just love them a little harder.

TC: Yeah. If they would try harder.

All: [laugh]

PM: Trent, weren’t you one of the first ones who thought they kind of had a space?

TC: I was the first one to approach him, but I was—

PM: And you were the last one to get a room!

TC: I guess I didn’t try hard enough

SW: But you moved your stuff in before everyone else did.

TC: We all moved from Poor Yorick.

SW: I moved from the Guthrie building, and Jason came from the Guthrie. Trent and Tessa and Chase and Tom came from the old Poor Yorick. Steve Larsen—

CW: What happened to the old Poor Yorick?

TC: It got shut down.

SW: So how ironic for Trent, because—

TC: That’s OK. It’s a good room.

SW: He’s also the kindest, most gentle person in the whole building. Next to Caroline.

CW: What are some of the shared markers of style of the Captain Captain artists?

SL: A lot of cartoony stuff is bouncing around. On a lot of different levels.

SW: There’s a lot of loose mark-making going around, but then I would say there is a weird mystical element, because there is Trent Alvey and Patrick, and my stuff has some of that crossover stuff, and all of us are getting into those subconscious things, in those ways. Trent, have you seen her drawings? They are what your dreams are telling you. But, you know, I’ve seen a lot of color, a lot of weird things just going back and forth. I don’t know. [pauses] There is a lot of pink.

SW: There is a lot of pink and blue.

SL: Pink, did you notice?

SW: And also it seems the colors have been getting more vibrant, too. And fucking Tom’s absence.

SL: We have to make up for the pink.

SW: I think that has affected their styles, whether people know it or not.

CL: In which way—more bold colors, or?

SW: I’ve seen like Trent Alvey, I don’t know. I’ve just seen a lot of connections. I’ve started all these paintings in pink and blue.

SL: It is hard to deny the landscape; we all seem to have a strong sense of landscape without thinking of it consciously.

CL: It is hard to get away from.

SL: Yeah, sky’s up here, land’s down there, no matter where you look.

SW: And another thing: the horizon line. I’ve noticed a lot of people, just ’cause I’ve caught on because everyone else is doing it, like Steve does these horizon lines that are right at the edge of the top. And Tom’d do these full landscapes with the horizon line right at the top.

SL: No one’s painted Heavenly Father for awhile.

CAPTAIN CAPTAIN
Open Studios
Friday, June 5 6-10 p.m.
CaptainCaptain.org

JON PARKIN INTERVIEW ...

2009-05-11T13:45:00.001-07:00

http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-7977-gaza_bird-eaters-jon-parkin.html

Gaza/Bird Eater's Jon Parkin
The Politician: In conversation with SLC metal giant Jon Parkin
By Curtis Jensen

Jon Parkin is vocalist for Gaza and Bird Eater, both of which are on Black Market Activities, a label distributed by Metal Blade Records. Gaza has just completed their second LP for Black Market Activities, recording with Andy Patterson over the last four months. On March 31, 2009, Gaza played their first show as a four-piece. This conversation took place in the kitchen of Captain Captain studios on a rainy Wednesday evening:

City Weekly: Describe your role at a show.

JP: I am the politician. I am usually the guy that is shaking hands and saying, “Thanks for letting us play your club,” “We appreciate the help on the road,” that sort of thing. A lot of times, I get a strange reaction because when you are talking to kids, seeing a 6-foot-7 guy up on stage, yelling and screaming while there is all this music going on. Then you step off the stage and shake someone’s hand, and you say, “Thanks for coming”—they are kind of set back by that. They say, “Wow, you are so nice; we figured you drank goats’ blood.”

CW: Describe your place in the historical continuum of music. What are you doing?

JP: Refining ideas. Metal right now sucks, let’s just get that out of the way. It sucks really bad, and these are the T-shirts they sell at Hot Topic right now, it’s these guitar players doing the mad sweeps, super scales. That feels empty, like you are taking a guitar lesson and putting it into a metal song, and it is not very emotional.

CW: Hold on: Gaza is technical as shit. What is the line of differentiation?

JP: We’re not just soloing over everything. Like throwing silverware down the stairs, that is what it sounds like to me, those prove-it-core bands. That is what I hope comes across with us, not showing off a riff, but a sense of panic or terror or doom.

<
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Related to:gazabird eaterjon parkinmetalmusic
strong>CW: Why did you record with Andy Patterson again?

JP: We could have recorded with anybody for this record. We could have gone with Kurt Belew, but we have such a good vibe with Andy, why fuck it up? Working with Andy, he is so generous and so willing to try whatever. We knew that we would get the record we wanted with Andy, and that has been the case.

CW: Why has the record taken so long?

JP: There wasn’t a lot of extracur ricular effort. A lot of time the guys were only writing at practice, we’d get together once or twice a week, bang our heads against the wall, and try to do something on the spot, and it just wasn’t working.

We toured for quite a while on the last record. We didn’t really start writing anything until a year and a half ago. Then Casey broke his hand, he punched a wall at a party three days before we were supposed to go into the studio. Vocally, I don’t really ever have a lot of stuff written down before I go in, so trying to create that live and spit words out without having a rewind and stop button, it is very difficult. I really don’t do any of the vocal stuff until we have all the tracks down.

But we are done with it now, and really on that cusp where we are like a parent wanting to show pictures of the kids—we can’t wait to just get it out there. It is a little more grumpy, not so spazzy; for lack of a better term, it is heavier. But, I think, with the guys as determined as they are after finishing this, we could write another record in six months, where this last one took three years.

WHERE ARE YOU, AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

2009-05-04T11:25:00.001-07:00

WITH SINEW BOUND SHEAVES ...

2009-05-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

WITH SINEW BOUND SHEAVES

With sinew bound sheaves of silence you pay
The levy of a day’s travel in contentment
Sky’s autumnal brass sky’s half of light
Plainly furring against sky’s half of dark
As wisped collars of ditch banks ablaze
For this you are come are still here are
Falling away an electric heat measure
Infinitesimal aspect of innumerable horizons
Awhirl under the manacled smith’s heels
The smith’s loess soles driving the coil
You trade all away into quiet dissolve
And the smith’s heels grind you formless

CRIMEAN ELEGY ....

2009-05-04T11:19:00.001-07:00

CRIMEAN ELEGY
Pavlo Fylypovych

Solemn shadow laid down from Ayu-Dah
To a silvery course.
Again the sun pours its own sweet thirst,
And you rest.

Laying on the earth amidst high foams,
They - sorrowful.
Site sinks to gray abysses,
In the distance.

Near the banks murmer, as always, waters,
And a chorus of cicadas
Rings throughout: you are only are a guest of nature,
Turn back.

Already drawn to the city, calls of the night of autumn
And the smoke of dwellings.
You don't remember the seas, foaming,
Silencing cliffs.

And, and, kissing tenderly her arms,
Forget all, -
Winds cold of grief and of parting
Life carries.

Darker, laid down from Ayu-Dah, are shades.
Evening time.
Last ray has reached to foam
And in the heart, extinguished.

- translated by Curtis Jensen

Кримська елегія
Павло Филипович

Похмура тінь лягла від Аюдагу
В сріблясту плинь.
Ще сонце ллє свою солодку спрагу,
А ти спочинь.

Ляж на землі серед високих піній,
Вони - сумні.
Зір потопає у безодні синій,
У далині.

Край берегів шумлять, як завжди, води,
А хор цикад
Дзвенить кругом: ти тільки гість природи,
Вертай назад.

Вже вабить місто, кличе ніч осіння
І дим осель.
Не пригадаєш моря шумовиння,
Мовчання скель.

І та, що їй цілуєш ніжно руки,
Забуде все, -
Вітри холодні горя і розлуки
Життя несе.

Темніш лягли від Аюдагу тіні.
Вечірній час.
Останній промінь долетів до піній
І в серці згас.

Крымская элегия
("вольный" перевод стихотворения Павло Филиповича - С.Новожилов)

Уже и тень легла от Аю-Дага…
Июньские дни...
Солнце пьёт ещё сладкую влагу,
А ты отдохни.

Присядь в тени среди высоких пиний,
Они - грустны.
И взгляд утонет в бездне синей
В морской дали.

И возле берегов шумят веками воды,
А хор цикад
Звенит вкруг: ты только гость природы,
Пора назад.

Уже зовёт нас город, и вот уж вскоре
Тот час настал….
Ты вспомнишь пену моря,
Молчанье скал?

И та, которой ты целуешь нежно руки
Забудет всё, -
Холодные ветры беды и разлуки
Зима несёт.

Темны легли от Аю-Дага тени.
Вечерний час.
Последний луч достал до пиний,
И всё, погас.

AUDIO: SITTING UPRIGHT, BEING PRODUCTIVE ...

2009-04-26T10:52:00.001-07:00

Recorded by Andy Patterson @ The Boar's Nest 4.19.09

MORE FYLYPOVYCH ...

2009-04-26T10:33:00.003-07:00

Pavlo Fylypovych

***

Moon's silver beak
There, in the distance, above.
A city - stone block,
Grief and dream - torches.

A quite usual thing-
And unnoticed by me -
Night wandering
To black, mute fields.

A quite usual everything -
Table and paper, books.
A wave (whose?) carries
Quiet my thoughts.

Disappeared ceiling, walls -
Like they weren't anywhere.
Somewhere walk shepherds,
The heart of roads - hard.

I hear your first shout,
Predecessor, a shout of land -
You, in caves of habit,
Listen to the instigations of evil.

To the darkeness of languages : mine! -
Wife, flock, arrow.
There your son rises,
Sees the sun and an eagle.

The first thought flies
To a boundless world,
The first song rings,
In the song - sunflower myth.

Everywhere flies an eagle,
The sun burns for everything,
From golden springs
Pours joy and laughter.

Maybe, not a son, but a grandson,
Maybe, not a grandson, but all, -
Ascend the kernels of science
In hymns to clear beauty.

A word grows, lives,
Small flower and oak.
Cock sings, and floats
Moon's silver beak.

A thought grows, as though
A tower raised by Babylon.
Passion, tenderness, love,
The dreamer's wise vision...

***

Look, look, boundless fallows
And somber clouds' threat in the distance.
Carried by the wind are great alarms -
Wild wind and bloody days.

Not the first year since vanished the gods,
Remaining are people and corpses as one.
They chew and weep: give us some help,
They oversleep calmly - give us- in coffins.

I hear misfortune. I am troubled by pity ,
And vain pain is overcome by consolation,
For the past, unimpassioned I've been.

For I shall never part with a dream of mine:
Stood a man on black tillage,
As the sky, proud, strong, as the earth.

- translated by Curtis Jensen

Павло Филипович

***

Місяця срібний дзюб
Там, в далині, вгорі.
Місто - каміний куб,
Сум і сон - ліхтарі.

Зовсім звичайне річ -
І не помітив я -
Помандрувала ніч
В чорні, німі поля.

Зовсім звичайне все -
Стіл і папір, книжки.
Хвиля (чия?) несе
Тихі мої думки.

Зникла стеля, стіни -
Мов не було ніде.
Десь ідуть чабани,
Серце шляхів - тверде.

Чую твій перший крик,
Пращуре, крик землі -
Ти у печерах звик
Слухать намови злі.

Темним мовив: моє! -
Жінка, табун, стріла.
Онде твій син встає,
Бачить сонце й орла.

Перша думка летить
У неозорий світ,
Перша пісня дзвенить,
В пісні - сонячшний міт.

Всюди літа орел,
Сонце горить для всіх,
Із золотих джерел
Ллється радість і сміх.

Може, й не син, а внук,
Може, не внук, а всі, -
Сходять зерна наук
В гимнах ясній красі.

Слово росте, живе
Квітка мала і дуб.
Півень співа, й пливе
Місяця срібний дзюб.

Думка росте, немов
Башту дме Вавилон.
Пристрасть, ніжність, любов,
Мрійника мудрий сон...

***

Дивись, дивись, безмежені перелоги
І хмар насуплених погроза вдалині.
Проносить вітер виклики тривоги -
Шалений вітер і криваві дні.

Не перший рік як розникали боги,
Остались люде та мерці одні.
Жують і плачуть: дайте-бо підмоги,
Заснуть спокійно дайте у труні.

Я чую жаль. Мене турбує звада,
Та марний біль перемогла відрада,
Бо у минулім не кохаюсь я,

Бо розстанусь з мрією моєю:
Став чоловік над чорною ріллею,
Як небо, гордий, сильний, як земля.

Fylypovych, Pavlo [Fylypovyč], b 1 September 1891 in the village of Kaitanivka, Kyiv gubernia, d 3 November 1937 in Sandarmoch, Karelia, RFSSR. (Photo: Pavlo Fylypovych.) Poet and literary scholar. Fylypovych studied at Galagan College and at Kyiv University (1910–5), where he later was a professor (1917–35). His first poems were published, under the pseudonym Pavel Zorev, in Russianjournals beginning in 1910. After the Revolution of 1917 Fylypovych switched to writing poetry in Ukrainian. He contributed to the Ukrainian symbolist almanac Muzahet (1919). In the 1920s he became a member of the Neoclassicists and published two collections of poetry—Zemlia i viter (Earth and Wind, 1922) and Prostir (Space, 1925). Fylypovych was an associate member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and secretary of its Historical-Literary Society. His first major scholarly work was Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo E.A. Boratynskogo (The Life and Works of E.A. Boratynsky, 1917). Fylypovych is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and reviews. He made a major contribution to the comparative study of Ukrainian literature, particularly to the study of Taras Shevchenko and Ukrainian romanticism. He edited (and wrote introductions for) the collection of articles Shevchenko ta ioho doba (Shevchenko and His Period, 2 vols, 1925–6) and a collection on Ivan Franko (1927); he also edited, with long introductions, collections of works by Lesia Ukrainka, Olha Kobylianska, Oleksander Oles, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Leskov, and Aleksandr Pushkin. A collection of his literary studies, Z novitn’oho ukraïns’koho pys’menstva (From the New Ukrainian Literature), was published in 1929. Fylypovych was arrested in August 1935 during the Stalinist terror, presumably for his critical attitude to official Soviet cultural policies, and sentenced to 10 years in concentration camps. He was imprisoned in the Solovets Islands labor camp and murdered during the mass executions of political and other prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. His collected poems were published posthumously in Poeziï (Poems, Munich 1959), as were his major scholarly articles, collected in Pavlo Fylypovych, Literatura: Statti, rozvidky (Literature: Articles, Studies, Reviews, Melbourne 1971). In Ukraine, a book of Fylypovych’s poetry Poezii (Poems) appeared in Kyiv in 1989 and a collection of his literary studies was published in 1991.

Roman Senkus

AUDIO: BE SURE OF THE UPHILL...

2009-04-21T18:14:00.003-07:00

Recorded by Andy Patterson @ The Boar's Nest 4.19.09

ВОЛОДИМИР МОНОМАХ / VOLODYMYR MONOMAKH

2009-04-20T12:17:00.002-07:00

ВОЛОДИМИР МОНОМАХ

Павло Филиповтч

Дивиися з вежі

На темний бір.

Там слід ведмежий

І вовчий зір.

Там бродять тури

У далині,

А дуб похмурий

Ковтає дні.

Дививсь і зброю

Стиснув хутчій,

Соколів двоє

Враз на плечі.

Бичача шия,

Мов камінь, крик,

Не Візантія -

До степу звик,

Залізна шкіра,

Серце тверде -

На роги звіра

Не попаде.

О Мономаше!

Ти не навчай,

Що щастя наше -

Покора й рай.

Зійдуть на попіл

Бліді ченці,

А спис і сокіл

В твоїй руці!

Гримить відвага

На всі віки -

Той крик варяга,

Той стиск руки!

VOLODYMYR MONOMAKH

Pavlo Fylypovych

He looked from a tower

At the dark pine forest.

There are tracks of bear cubs

And wolf sight.

There wanders the castles

In the distance,

An oak somber

Swallows the day.

He looked and in arm

He clenched his weapon,

A falcon pair

Suddenly on shoulder.

Bullish neck,

Like a stone, a cry,

Not Byzantium -

To the steppe of custom

Iron skin,

Heart steadfast -

At the horns of the beast

Will not be struck.

Oh Monomakh!

Do not teach,

That happiness, ours -

Submission and paradise.

They depart to ashes

Pale monks,

But spear and falcon

Are In your hands!

Thunders courage

To all years -

That cry Varangian,

That grip of a hand!

-translated by Curtis Jensen

TWEAGLEAGE...

2009-03-08T23:48:00.001-07:00

-from salt lake city weekly 3.4.09

Eagle Twin

Verbatim: A scene from a day in the life of SLC’s Eagle Twin.

By Curtis Jensen

Eagle Twin are Tyler Smith and Gentry Densley: a two-piece metal band from Salt Lake City on Southern Lord Records. A van is an enclosed, box-like motor vehicle having rear or side doors and side panels for transporting people and/or goods. President’s Day is the common name for the federal holiday officially designated as Washington’s Birthday, celebrated on the third Monday of February. Eagle Twin are inside a van, making repairs, on President’s Day.

Tyler Smith: You know what I don’t have? Memory. Or an attention for detail.
Gentry Densley: Mm-hmm.
TS: That’s why when I get on something, I keep going. If I stop I’ll be like, “Oh, what do I do?”
Curtis Jensen: Did you call for your card?
TS: Nah. I should probably get on that. I’ll probably just call and cancel it. I think I left it at Pick ’n’ Pull, and somebody—
CJ: What bank do you have?
GD: Elephantitis.
CJ: Elephantitis of the—
TS: Yeah, I should probably call Zions.
CJ: Umm, you think you are going to get it back?
GD: What the fuck?
TS: I bet they’re closed, though, huh—the bank?
GD: Oh, yeah, today. But there should be … services. That girl was pretty cute at the Pick ’n’ Pull.
TS: The one that was getting shit from the fuck that bought tires from Pick ’n’ Pull?
CJ: [laughs]
GD: [laughs]
TS: I was thinking: Are you the most retarded human on the planet? You bought tires and wheels from Pick ’n’ Pull, and you are bitching about it, that you’ve got to get them realigned.
GD: [laughs]
CJ: [laughs]
GD: They pulled them off a wreck—
TS: I mean, what could you pull them off of? A wreck? It’s a loaded question; it doesn’t even matter what you pulled them off of. You’re a [stumbles] homo fucker.
GD: Homo?
TS: Here, hold this.
CJ: [laughs] OK, question No. 1. Where are we?
GD: Right by the CA-160.
TS: That’s this thing, man. CA-160 air filter.
GD: I blew Tyler’s mind.
TS: Yeah, I pulled this off, and he’s like, “What is this, a CA-160?”
GD: [laughs]
TS: And I’m like, “Yeah.”
CJ: [laughs]
TS: [laughs]
CJ: So, what are we doing?
TS: We’re putting a new heat gauge in the van. Not a heat gauge; that’d be a thermostat. This thing, temperature control pedumbomater …
GD: While he’s doing that, I’m reattaching the stereo in that end. Re-wiring it.
TS: Pedominator.
CJ: Uh-huh.
TS: You know what the hell that is?
GD: And we rigged this guy up so that when you turn the van off, it’ll turn off, so you won’t keep drawing power.
CJ: So it has like a—
GD: Yeah, it just goes in there when it goes off.
CJ: Who is Eagle Twin? Or what?
GD: A mighty god composed of two mountains—
TS: [laughs]
GD: Who rises from the Earth, and on a foggy day …
TS: You’re not writing this down?
GD: ...

He can see for miles!
TS: [laughs]
CJ: It’s on tape, man! [laughs]
TS: Oh, OK. I see, we’re—
CJ: It’s all on there. Every little bit.
GD: Eagle Twin, the funny thing is, uh, Randall [Dunn], the guy who recorded us, told us, when we were in the studio, he had this buddy, I think he was Lakota or something, from North Dakota, and he said, “What are you doing, Randall?” And Randall said, “I’m recording Eagle Twin,” and he said, “Awwwggh, Eagle Twin,” and then he said something like, “You know, two mountains rise to two eagles; we are all one.”
CJ: [laughs]
GD: The twin of Earth, on Earth. He related to it somehow.
CJ: Some way.
TS: I may have fucked that up pretty good.
GD: Yeah.
CJ: Who is Eagle Twin?
TS: I’m Tyler Smith.
GD: I’m Gentry.
TS: Why are there two of them?
CJ: [laughs]
GD: Two of what?
TS: Because I fucking spliced the wrong goddamn wire! Fuck you in your retarded face, Tyler!
GD: Are you kidding me?

EAGLE TWIN
w/ Hundred Arms and Accidente
Kilby Court
741 S. 330 West
Thursday, March 5
7:30 p.m.
All-ages.

-from salt lake city weekly

2009-03-08T23:42:00.002-07:00

from slug magazine 3.6.09

Methods, Monogamy of Eagle Twin

by Curtis Jensen [curtisinterrupts@hotmail.com]

March 2009 [View Issue]

Eagle Twin is a twin-peaked mountain, a tentacled dream monster, a sea of silt causewayed in two. Eagle Twin signed with Southern Lord (Earth, Sunn O))), Probot, Boris, Pelican) in Dec. of 2008. In Jan. 2009, Eagle Twin finished The Unkindness of Crows, an LP to be released in the following months, recorded with Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Boris, John Zorn, Jesse Sykes) in Dunn’s Seattle studio. Eagle Twin is Gentry Densley (Iceburn, Form of Rocket, Ascend) and Tyler Smith (Clear, Hammergun, Form of Rocket). Smith and Densley first appeared together live in 1998 as the three-piece group Furious Fire, from which threads present in Eagle Twin are traceable: air-moving guitar tones, eye-concussing drums, blues-formed solos phrased in the grammar of Greg Ginn, Page Hamilton and Mahavishnu Orchestra, rubato riffs and thunder. Out of the death-pit of collapsed Furious Fire rose Project: Ion, free and traveled. Densley assumes guitar and bass duty simultaneously with Dan Thomas (Tolchock Trio, Red Bennies, Vile Blue Shades) together constructing electrified bop mathletes Smashy Smashy. Then Smashy’s dissolution, less right angles, the re-entry of Tyler Smith: Log-Armed Primalist, more speaker surfaces, more doom, baritone guitars, the mythology of Ted Hughes’ Crow - so has come about Eagle Twin, companion to owls.

Photo: ddbd.photo@gmail.com

SLUG: Why does Eagle Twin play so loudly?
Gentry Densley: There’s a kind of range to them. They’re not always ...
Tyler Smith: I don’t think ...
GD: All loud.
TS: I mean, it is more low response than loud. Hearing it, I don’t think it is so much loud as it is ...
GD: Full.
TS: Yeah, full. Sometimes ...
GD: I mean, I just have worked on getting a more full sound. I don’t know, I think that it’s not these piercing sounds, really. It’s more that you can feel the air hitting you, or the floor moving a little bit. It arises from the world where you have to play loud, or you have somebody with a fucking haircut talking loudly over you while they are trying to pick up girls. That kind of environment. I guess we can play quieter [sic] sometimes, like at Ken Sanders or whatever. Keep it light ...
TS: I don’t think our main goal is ever to be super loud. You know. It’s just to have it be appropriate for what we do. Sometimes being a little louder, I guess, is what it takes.
GD: I think he just hits hard.
SLUG: That’s the next question. Gentry, why does Tyler hit his drums so hard?
GD: Because he can.
TS: It’s the only way I know how to play. I know one way - I’m not finesse. It’s never a conscious effort for me to hit hard.
GD: Yeah, I remember the first time, at a Furious Fire show, I was down and I was plugging in my pedals and he set his bass drum down - and it was BLAGKTP! I seriously jumped because I thought that a shotgun had exploded or something. And back then I was using an Ampeg fucking 2x12, you know?
TS: Man, it was like he just didn’t have any respect for anything, like I’m just going to fucking play. As loud as shit.
SLUG: Why does Gentry play guitar and bass at the same time.(Or play the lower and higher registers at the same time, on the same guitar)?
GD: It’s all the same. I don’t know, I learned at one point. I mean, the big sound, the bass, is just playing an octave lower than the guitar a lot of times, you know, and you might have some other guy at the top doing something, but…it’s probably, again, because I can, and because otherwise ...
TS: It’s fucking because you can, that’s right!
GD: It becomes an all encompassing thing so that at the end of a performance you are exhausted. So you put it all out there, and I think that me and Tyler have talked before about how that’s just the way we do it. Anything else feels phoney, if you are not giving it your all. When I have to play all those things and do all of that, it forces me to give everything. Then we don’t need anybody else. The dynamics of the band change because you don’t have, you don’t develop any two-on-one camps within the band - it’s a one-to-one relationship, like a kind of monogamy instead of the polygamy of the normal band world. Does that answer your fucking question?

Eagle Twin will be making the trek down to Austin to take part in this year’s SXSW festivities, performing at the Southern Lord Showcase alongside Wolves in the Throne Room and Pelican on Friday, March 20 at Emo’s.

Curtis Jensen is a noted verse and prose writer, who recently celebrated his return to Salt Lake City with a reading at Ken Sanders Rare Books. His work has been featured in the pages of SLUG and Swinj, as well as in a series of self-published books, the most recent being 2006’s Watch Me Dig a Hole. Before serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, Jensen played with the members of Eagle Twin in Salt Lake’s own Form of Rocket.

I sent them this, though, which I think is better:

METHODS, MONOGAMY OF EAGLE TWIN

Eagle Twin is born of Crow, conceived in barn, Midway, with Chubba. A twin-peaked mountain. A tentacled dream monster. A sea of silt causewayed in two. Eagle Twin signs with Southern Lord (Earth, Sunn O))), Probot, Boris, Pelican) in December of 2008. In January 2009, Eagle Twin finishes The Unkindness of Crows , an LP to be released in the following months, recording with Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Boris, John Zorn, Jesse Sykes) in Dunn’s Seattle studio. Eagle Twin is Gentry Densley (Iceburn, Form of Rocket, Ascend) and Tyler Smith (Clear, Hammergun, Form of Rocket). Smith and Densley first appear together live in 1998 as three-piece Furious Fire, from which threads present in Eagle Twin are traceable: air-moving guitar tones, eye-concusing drums, blues-formed solos phrased in the grammar of Greg Ginn and Page Hamilton and Mahavishnu Orchestra, rubato riffs, thunder. Out of the death-pit of collapsed Furious Fire rises Project: Ion, free, traveled. Densley assumes guitar and bass duty simultaneously, with Dan Thomas (Tolchock Trio, Red Bennies, Vile Blue Shades) together constructing electrified bop mathletes Smashy Smashy, Then Smashy’s dissolution, less right angles, the reentry of Tyler Smith: Log-Armed Primalist, more speaker surfaces, more doom, baritone guitars, the mythology of Ted Hughes’ Crow- so has come about Eagle Twin, companion to Owls.

SLUG- Why does Eagle Twin play so loudly?
GENTRY DENSLEY- There's a kind of range to them. They're not always-
TYLER SMITH- I don't think-
GD- All loud.
TS- I mean it is more low response than loud. Hearing it, I don't think it is so much loud as it is ...
GD- Full.
TS- Yeah, full. Sometimes-
GD- I mean I just have worked on getting a more full sound. I don't know, I think that is not these piercing sounds, really. It's more that you can feel the air hitting you, or the floor moving a little bit. It arises from the world where you have to play loud, or you have somebody with a fucking haircut talking loudly over you while they are trying to pick up girls. That kind of environment. It, yeah. I mean we guess we can play quieter (sic) sometimes, like at Ken Sanders or whatever. Keep it light-
TS- I don't think our main goal is ever to be super loud. You know. It's just to have it be appropriate for what we do. Sometimes being a little louder, I guess, is what it takes.
GD- I think he just hits hard-
SLUG- That's the next question.
GD- laughs
SLUG- Gentry, why does Tyler hit his drums so hard?
TS- laughs
GD- Because he can.
TS- It's the only way I know how to play.
GD- laughs
SLUG- laughs
TS- I know one way; I'm not finesse. It’s never a conscious effort for me to hit hard.
GD- laughs
SLUG- laughs
GD- Yeah, I remember the first time, at a Furious Fire show, I was down and I was plugging in my pedals and he set his bass drum down-
TS- laughs
GD- And it was BLAGKTP!
SLUG- laughs
GD- I seriously jumped because I thought that a shotgun had exploded or something. And back then I was using an Ampeg fucking 2x12, you know?
TS- Man it was like just didn't have any respect for anything, like I'm just going to fucking play-
GD- laughs
TS- As loud as shit.
SLUG- Why does Gentry play guitar and bass at the same time. Or play the lower and higher registers at the same time, on the same guitar.
pause
SLUG- Anybody can answer this one.
GD- It’s all the same. I don't know, I learned at one point, I mean, the big sound, the bass is just playing an octave lower than the guitar a lot of times, you know, and you might have some other guy at the top doing something, but-
SLUG- Uh huh.
GD- It’s probably, again, because I can, and because otherwise-
TS- It's fucking because you can, that's right!
GD- It becomes an all encompassing thing so that at the end of a performance you are exhausted. So you put it all out there, and I think that me and Tyler have talked before about how that's just the way we do it. Anything else feels phony, if you are not giving it your all. When I have to play all those things and do all of that, it forces me to give everything.
GD- Then we don't need anybody else.
TS- laughs
GD- The dynamics of the band change because you don't have, you don't develop any two on one camps within the band; It’s a one to one relationship, like a kind of monogamy instead of the polygamy of the normal band world. Does that answer your fucking question?

from slug magazine 3.6.09

GOING AWAY OR COMING HOME

2008-12-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

GOING AWAY OR COMING HOME

From some sucked cocoon in a bitter cellar
Comes that most wished to be done with and over:
Going away or coming home.

On the last broken bus ride across a horizon
Brimming fiery with shimmering poison
Came that most wished to be done with and over,
Going away or coming.

Asked of a buck-toothed cashier
Brimming fiery with shimmering poison
Is the petty diplomat fallen?

Asked of a buck-toothed cashier,
Who, in fear of reprisal, shrugs dumbly in answer.

The petty diplomat is fallen,
Is departed, and shall never again
Be going away or coming home,s

Who, in fear of reprisal, shrugged dumbly in answer.
The weary question of his flat feet: Are
We going away or coming home?

INTRODUCTION TO THE HARROWING OF HALYCHYNA

2008-12-17T11:41:00.002-07:00

INTRODUCTION TO THE HARROWING OF HALYCHYNA

The giant dirt fields.
Under the ruined cupola’s September shadow,
At the lee of the lingering autocracy’s blade yields
To historical, neck-slung grindstone inertia the furrow,
Slow, of the eroding collective,
A sweat-sweet plead to the sky, impassive.

Such rank mouths
Under the foiled Union of a half-continent of timber.
With so few prepositions as to confound sympathetic behemoths
And the behemoths’ jingoistic younger
Set come the ignorant assertions, the prideful
Foot stamps in the dirt, so uncivil.

Near-absent means
Lie drunk, blind really, in the dirt: our red-eyed uncle.
The empty cooperative crumbles, like broken beans,
Together jigsaw a cheek-denting pillow of rubble,
And as our uncle snores at the sun and farts
And sleeps away from the present in fits and starts

His dream column
Rolls forth: rumbling German planter-spreaders.
From under each a dozen axles shriek the solemn
Terms of the inky lease that permits such gleaming invaders
Their tires-full-of-water and systematic
Turning over of our village-state’s bucolic
dirt.

THE END OF WASTE

2008-12-17T11:41:00.001-07:00

THE END OF WASTE

The end of waste is upon us!
We have each our seedy habits considered,
We have realized much room for improvement,
Now off we stomp into the desert!

We have each our seedy habits considered
Through an earthen pair of deliberate lenses,
Now off we stomp into the desert,
To the wrong end of wilderness,
and we not knowing it.

Through an earthen pair of deliberate lenses
We, sadly, have allowed ourselves to go off
To the wrong end of wilderness, and,
we not knowing it,
Have on impulse used each other up.

We sadly have allowed ourselves to go off
With demonstrated consensual willingness,
Have on impulse used each other up
Running our mouths together in darkness.

With demonstrated consensual willingness
So tightly we have gripped the hooked carpet knife;
Running our mouths together in darkness
We cannot undo our hands on its haft.

So tightly we have gripped the hooked carpet knife
And so fiercely have we swung, jaws set.
We cannot undo our hands on its haft,
We flail on and away till nothing is left.

So fiercely have we swung, jaws set
That we know our true condition; although
We flail on and away till nothing is left,
Till our insides dry up, are loose gravel;

That we know our true condition, although
We have realized much room for improvement,
Till our insides dry up, are loose gravel,
The end of waste is upon us!

ME AND WALLACE DOWN AT THE HORSE OPERA

2008-12-17T11:39:00.000-07:00

ME AND WALLACE DOWN AT THE HORSE OPERA

Although we don’t together share
An ossified physis circumscribed by prairie-wastes,
I recognize what you’ve put there
In your looking book of wolf-willow tastes,

And, Mr. Stegner, though I’ve never met you
I also came up from the Horse Opera
(We both have myths charred in the dream flue)
And, like you, at my memory’s high-as-a-

Miserable-twitching-frozen-veined-nag-
Cutbanks, with aid of such deceptive instruments
(Frustrations, failures, embarrassments, disappointments)
I can’t see why we ever needed a backhoe to drag

The animal up the eyelevel embankment.
Knee-high gumboots did fit. Peril doesn’t.

ANY ILLITERATE BUNDLE OF BLOWSY ...

2008-12-17T11:34:00.003-07:00

ANY ILLITERATE BUNDLE OF BLOWSY

Any illiterate bundle of blowsy
Can make a noise in a burning tee,
Can kiss the idiot on bended knee,
Can piss itself at the village pillory,

Can proclaim to dawn its egg uncommon,
Can reckon sincerely what the typhlopidae has seen,
Can forsake the principle of tissue rejection
For the sake of its transplanted spleen,

Can, after hours of struggle, positions shifting,
Confusion, embarrassment, legs losing feeling,
Infestations within and without, thumbs throbbing-

Today I woke. I did not conduct below
Wilted rushes and stumped cars a sub Iulio-
Born corpse. I may to you say I don’t know.

WITH SINEW BOUND SHEAVES

2008-03-31T06:06:00.001-07:00

WITH SINEW BOUND SHEAVES
(SILENCE IS THE PRICE OF A DAYS TRAVEL IN CONTENTMENT)

With sinew bound sheaves you pay the levy
Of a day’s travel in contentment
Sky’s autumnal brass sky’s half of light
Furring against sky’s half of dark
Wisped collars ditch banks ablaze
For this you are come are still here
An electric heat measure infinitesimal
Aspect of innumerable horizons
Awhirl under the manacled smith’s heel
Coming away falling towards
The smith’s loess soles driving the coil
You trade all away into quiet dissolve
And the smith’s heel grinds you formless

SANDBOX IN HELL

2008-03-31T06:05:00.001-07:00

SANDBOX IN HELL

Imagine that you are Sisyphus
Not pushing the rock but in a sandbox
Really not many likenesses except
What powers may be have doomed you there
From now until the rest of whatever

The trick is this sandbox has no bottom
Nothing under that shit but a way out
6 inches beneath your big dumb feet
Nothing but a change of scenery

You’ve been given a flat-nosed shovel
You’re on your hands you’re on your knees
You’ve choked way up the shovel-handle
You could cut through the ceiling below

Maintaining the level sand around you
You’re diligent in senseless effort
You motor your perpetual doom
You’re in this eternity you’re in it
On your hands and on your knees
You bring about your own impulsion
You’re in the sandbox with yourself
Till all the lights at last go out
Till maybe even after that

Such is the hell I fear I live out

LIKE YOU’VE TAKEN TOO LONG

2008-03-31T06:04:00.001-07:00

LIKE YOU’VE TAKEN TOO LONG
OF A BREATH

Such an exhilarating thing being in love
I’ve made big plans big packing plans
I’ve chosen which jeans and which t-shirts
And which books I’ll be bringing with
I’m not even sure where I’ll be going exactly
Such an exhilarating thing being in love

Such an exhilarating thing being in love
Seeing red and saving up whole complete thoughts
To be brought up at some other undetermined time
Choosing which friends I could stand to lose
And which friends I would like to keep
Putting off most everything for years
Finally running off and going away
I’m not even sure that it’s over yet
Such an exhilarating thing being in love

WORK ETHIC

2008-03-31T06:03:00.000-07:00

WORK ETHIC

A friend calls me from where she fasts
In long and leading pauses we speak
I do not say I’ve much to do
Smudgings to swaddle these homespun hand-casts
Nor do I say I’ll call her later
This’ll do an excuse for the week
I slip the cedar slat I chew
Under an unfinished embarrassment
I reel off quickly back bent
To getting away from here

THE FIRST WAY THAT THIS ALL COULD GO

2008-03-31T05:36:00.001-07:00

THE FIRST WAY THAT THIS ALL COULD GO

Grass into mud
Gray

Hard fought spittle coughed up in the night
What months ago seemed worthwhile now
Gray

Days do quickly together smudge
A sad long sweep of unbroken
Gray

A DIALOGUE STUDYOF ACCOUNTABILITY

2008-03-31T05:34:00.000-07:00

A DIALOGUE STUDYOF ACCOUNTABILITY

You can’t let him get
His feet set.
I know.
I told you-
Why’d you let

Him do it? You can’t let
Him get
His feet under him-
Self. He got set,
And it was over for you.
I know.

What do you mean you know?
I mean I knew I couldn’t let
Him set his feet. You
Told me fifty times. I get
It. Then why’d you let him set
His feet? You can’t let him

Do that if you want him.
I know.
Then why’d you let him set
His feet? I didn’t let
Him, I couldn’t get
My feet under me. You

Saw it happen. You
Knew that I couldn’t take him,
This is what you get,
You know
You let
This happen. You set

Me up. He set
His feet first thing, and you
Watched him beat me. You let
Him have me when you didn’t stop him.
I know.
I’ll never be able to get

Back to before you let him set
His feet, I can’t get rid of that, you
Watching him smash me up. I don’t know-

WHAT SHALL REMAIN

2008-03-31T05:32:00.001-07:00

WHAT SHALL REMAIN

Ruined at roadside he slumps in rags
His blistered eyes dumb witnesses to
The mauling of his scorched toe-remains
By his thumbish fingers

He spread his miracles in seedings
Up the burned over mountain

What shall remain will rest in us

Then green in fervor and swindle
His works in rumors
Swept down the burned over mountain

My friends I say again that on that day
What shall remain will rest only in us
What is to be carried will be born by us

But for an idiot’s gummy jawings
The empty chapel eager and afraid
Together all were on the mountain
Of his promised raising of their dead

Be careful of that which you remember
What shall remain will rest in us
Within us gathered as if in the ground

Knock a nail into his head

The chapel is full the cemetery is locked
To ensure that there the dead remain
With that which lies gathered in each
Where the living have left them

Your bread cast to water has surely come back

Ruined at roadside he slumps in rags
Blistered eyes dumbly witness
The mauling of his scorched toe-remains
By his thumbish fingers

SITTING UPRIGHT, BEING PRODUCTIVE ...

2008-01-13T04:02:00.002-07:00

SITTING UPRIGHT, BEING PRODUCTIVE

Hills flatten out. Trees retreat down
to rubble, then fine powder be-speckled
by disintegrated home-appliances
trailed off in the long breeze on
its long legs in high wool socks.
Scuffed boots quiet and steady-
coming up some long way from
the horizon’s distant arc.

You are, in an instant, alone.

Sitting upon a straight-backed chair looking
west with hands to your side, fingers hooked
into the sun. From the vanishing point
clouds describe parallel lines to you.
In all directions falls earth in perpetuity.

Your nose is plugged with bees and their buzzing.

You open your mouth to breathe
and to give your teeth an excuse
for falling out each in turn
beginning from your left on top,
1,2,3,4 to drop, so white and
so round in their polish,
pigeon eggs smiling
at their straight descent towards
and dry smack upon
this our long empty arc
being blown by wind
and to be blown by the wind
or our children’s bright future.

Don’t move. You are alone.
Let your eyes follow the roll
of your former teeth. Allow
your eyes their slip up and down
in the hollows of their obits.
Listen for the slosh of fatty tissue.
Forget your once-teeth. You are alone.
They’ve long since rolled out of reach.
Now, lift palm-heels to brow-ridge.
Push. Push and feel. Push and know
each bulbous bone spavin
accumulating under eyebrows’ curve.
Push. You are alone.
Recognize the striation.
Lines, whorls, calluses, dirt.
Dead skin against eyelid’s thinness.
Push. Push and savor pressure transferred
through palm heel, through eyelid,
through vitreous humor. Push.
There is only you, the straight-backed chair,
your nose full of bees, and the earth’s curvature.
You don’t even have teeth for company. Push.

SHIT TO BE DONE BEFORE MONDAY MORNING ...

2008-01-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

SHIT TO BE DONE BEFORE MONDAY MORNING

The Doom-King pushes up his mask
Fist-heel to chin plaster in the fire’s light.

Bend deeply old back. Bend deep old spine-of-back.
Tear muscles ligaments sinewy wires over shoulder-blades.
Blow cold clouds far along some foreign jet-stream.
And mire. And shit-wiped newspapers
Sludge underfoot in the plank-shack.
Shake hour-glassed bellies of spiders on thin webs.
Hang dust-stale carps together with smoked night-shirts.

The Doom-King has shaven his head
Red ears now rudders against such guilt.

CHINESE BUSINESSMEN ...

2007-10-08T06:02:00.001-07:00

CHINESE BUSINESSMEN
IN CHINESE BUSINESS SUITS
SHOOTING VIDEO OF BRASHOV’S
CHINESE RESTAURANT

Wheel back old horse to swing below
This iron crane that I might come
Home with something to show for this.

HONORED PASSENGERS ...

2007-10-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

HONORED PASSENGERS

In heat and in sweat, this afternoon bus.
She lunges, crawls, hitches pants 'round hips.

Honored passengers, this I beg of you.

With tug drops sleeve. In light
warms breast, black-speckled, mangled.

That my child might drink, that my
child might eat, this I beg of you:

BIG, WET MONDAY

2007-04-28T00:51:00.000-07:00

BIG, WET MONDAY

(a Ukrainian closes his abstinence)

As it always blows and it always will blow
wind blows on this Lent’s-end weekend.

In drizzle of Easter after-morning
through lace curtains comes low gray light
to feast-remains in saucers spread:
soiled napkins, smudged shot glasses,
dry cake, salads of mayonnaise-congealed,
and from night out upon table, cured meats hard
and glassy. With feet slipped into velour house shoes,
he gets up and coughs. With thickened fingers rapt,
he cups tea while in house-robe of terrycloth his wife
stirs drippings to be dribbled over morning gruel.

Terry cloth printed with exotic birds.
Gruel overcooked, steaming and soft.

Today there is no work, no stacking milksack-
packed crates, no clipboards, no hand shakes.
Today is his day off. Today is one day after
Lent’s end.

Down steps of poor concrete: sagging graveled lower lips.
Onto courtyard of tamped debris: Doric playground.
Under empty clothesline he deigns, eyeing his
tooled shoes for mud-scuff. On corner he waits
while drizzle quills leather of his thigh length jacket.
Thick fingers stuffed deep into fleeced-lined pockets.
Turkish-spun sweater with zipper tugged to chin. He fingers
his keys.

Suddenly steady shudders the tramvai,
Wires slack-slung above, sparks shake to street.

One of six he sits in booming streetcar,
early this Easter after-morning. Out of
Soviet suburb’s nine story housing blocks, around
dusty and grown-over park smiling toothy in
brittle, futurist monuments, with din of rattles,
he rides and rickets up to cobbled Stop. Vokzal,
ploshka, Hotel Ternopil.

His fair is paid; his feet at curb edge stand.
At red signal he hesitates, looks left, feels drizzle
tickle nose, looks right, sees red still, forward extends
leg to cross.

With sliding doors are closed shops. Today is one
day after Lent’s end. Behind him bustles train station:
cabs, for-rent cell phones, bread, leavers tonight for
work tomorrow.

Without silk wrapped legs and cross to cardboard,
from her usual glower is absent woman beggar.

In secondhand liquor boxes stand filed magazines,
under kiosk counters safe. To him are windows of shack
looking as eyes: empty, damp, blank-watching earli-
ness empty of concrete ploshka’s tiers, his progress.

In drizzle of Easter after-morning, doors of tele-
communications building locked lean. and by balding attendant,
this the day after Lent’s-end, the doors of tele
communications building are unlocked. By attendant
he is recognized, by attendant he is acknowledged:
for extension of his arm to handle, door is held
long enough.

Both are now inside of main floor’s creaking,
among empty counters and glass partitions, alone.

Through thin aluminum door pass both
to thin aluminum central hold lined
with shabby desks and shabby computers, grimey key-
boards, dust-furred moniters. The attendent attends. He
from corner post drags chair, on chair-back hangs wet,
leather coat. He pulls creases of pants, sits, thickened fingers
folded. Waiting.

Soon pops screen, soon whirls drive.
Soon manages modem, in algorithm.

As always thickened-fingers-folded he waits.
Creases pulled, half smiling, forward facing
On this, the day after Lent’s end.

UKRAINIAN REQUEST #2

2007-04-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

UKRAINIAN REQUEST #2

Then I knew people.
Please leave me to my memories
of past aquaintances

I have so much to say of brave trips to the wash-basin,
If only I simply could talk my way through such things
as selflessness and discipline, then we could end this all
now without furthering my embarrassment or
your annoyance.
But such is not our lot.

Sit still while I tell you of all of this:
I followed through once,
I was there,
I swear,
I stole the last two
again.

I came here to say something there,
but not to say anyting out loud,
so leave me to this:
back slumped to pealing lead paint,
ass flat to luxurious, corrugated cardboard,
swollen ankles hidden under a coarse, borrowed
blanket. Please,
leave me to this.

Leave me to rest in this rented saucer,
dozing in warm molasses as 2:38 light slips
through my painted-shut and drafty windows..

Right now I haven’t the time
for taking care of myself, or my soiled clothes.
My jeans are filthy.
they are disgusting,
I know this.
And they smell of wet lettuce.

I came here to not be there, so why must I
be reminded that there happened to me,
that I let there happen to me,
that I broke my thumb,
rubbed my head in the dust,
all without spilling my beer?

I mumble and I am given eggs.
I mumble and I am given fruit.
I mumble and I am given stale cookies.
I don’t fuck this up by speaking clearly.

UKRAINE TANKA # 1 ...

2007-03-09T01:09:00.000-07:00

UKRAINE TANKA # 1
Judge Tutken

He later that night
Upon me looks with that same
Bodhisattva smile
Which equally would regard
Rape or charity.

UKRAINE TANKA #2 ...

2007-03-09T01:06:00.001-07:00

UKT #2

New snow settled on
The straight road between the trees
Where two dark figures
Walk, so dark that I cannot
Make out their numbers.

PUT PIG IN BAG

2007-01-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

PUT PIG IN BAG

Put pig in bag, carry bag down icy street.
Let pig press pig-nose into bag-corner.
Let pig squeal into bag-corner.

Shuffle-footed walk brisk down icy street alone.
Shuffle-footed alone but for pig,
And but for bag in which you carry pig.

Walk head wrapped tight, legs wrapped tight against
Cold wind. Old, cold wind blows, has blown
Longer than that I have walked behind you.

Know that I know now that but for this pig,
We (me you bag, alone) are alone.

When you all leave I will here be alone
With shuffle-footed myself.

REQUEST # 1

2006-12-03T00:38:00.000-07:00

REQUEST #1

Hang me there a thick portrait:
this cinder barge in summer,
in oil, borne upon the river’s filth.

Hang it there above this bed
pitted and collapsing.

UKRAINE IS SHRINKING ...

2006-12-03T00:37:00.000-07:00

UKRAINE IS SHRINKING

This family of starlings sits down
to toast each other and their own return
from being away, from being concerned
with the walking rain and the barking fog.

This family of starlings sits down
to plates of blood sausage, to loaves of
heavy bread, to pungent jars of homemade
pickles, to toast the pig’s liver dumplings.

This family of starlings stands up
and with golden teeth this family smiles
and with squinting eyes this family raises
their glasses to the woman of the house.

AS ROOTS ARE ...

2006-12-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

AS ROOTS ARE / AS ROOTS WERE /
WE USED TO BUILD

She got herself a nosebleed and it would
not stop. We took her to the hospital
and they said she’d need a transfusion
real soon and that’d cost fifty dollars.
That nosebleed stopped just like that.

Anyway we were building a house and the house
was almost finished when the contractor
got killed in a car crash and he didn’t
have the money and it was never finished.
We used to do stupid things. We used to build.

During the war we used to get Harvards
and make them return at the Rosemary School.
That was where they’d make their turns and
go back to Clairesholm or Pierce. After the price
dropped we found other ways to make our money.

She got herself a nosebleed and
It would not stop. W e took her to
The hospital and they said she’d
Need a transfusion real soon
And that’d cost fifty dollars.
Her nosebleed stopped just like that.

Anyway we were building a house
And the house was nearly finished when
The contractor got killed in a car
Crash. He didn’t have the money
And the house was never finished.
We used to do stupid things
We used to build.

During the war we used to snare
Magpies with our old bootlaces.
We’d take them to Rosemary and trade
The feet to the Ministry for sugar.
We sold the sugar to the Blackfeet.
Because they had cash and we didn’t.

Rosemary was where they’d make their turns
And go back to Clairesholm or Pierce. The price
Dropped when the war was over, and we
found other ways to make our money.

THIS IS WHAT FRANCE LOOKS LIKE ...

2006-11-12T00:02:00.000-07:00

tuh duh:

ENTER THE MILKSOP

2006-11-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

The milksop hobbles
swinging her carved cane to strike
the woman’s forearm.

Shrieking, the milksop runs,
swings her heavy cane to strike
the woman’s forearm.

We watch the milksop
swing her heavy cane to strike
the woman’s forearm.

Between the low brick sheds
the milksop runs, swings her cane
to strike the woman.

The woman raises her
thin arm against the blow of
The milksop’s carved cane.

The milksop hobbles,
Swings her heavy can to strike
The woman’s forearm.

IN A PROUD HOME

2006-11-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

take up the moss: stiff: knee
high: light the anvil: lean against:
hack off the beet tops: your own
proud country: which later gives names:
don your cracked rubber boots:

alone in the capital: here again
alone:

your cast iron basket: unbendable knee:
your moon-lit mud-wallow: lean against
your stone bicycle: please name: your own
starving: the sickness begins
with muscle aches:

please name me Nero: fisherman
in hell:

more: stockings tight to knees:
more capital cites: dread: lean
famine: obliteration: your own
count out the staples: which count
out the cobbles: signal beginning:

sing loud: my friend: the animal

MY HOUSE STANDS TO THE SIDE ...

2006-10-21T23:33:00.001-07:00

MY HOUSE STANDS TO THE SIDE,
I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING

So begins this rain;
dogs bark in conjecture.
Sound swells blue, out, up and over
this butter town. These harvested plots.
This bleak country entire.

In unfamiliar constellations
these few stars are in this moment
blotted out.

Such are these nights.

MY NEW MAILING ADDRESS ...

2006-09-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

send me some shit:

US Peace Corps/Ukraine
PCV Curtis Jensen
PO Box 298
01030
Kyiv, Ukraine

or if a street address
is required:

US Peace Corps/Ukraine
PCV Curtis Jensen
48A Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street
01030
Kyiv, Ukraine

STEVE ALBINI'S A DORK ...

2006-09-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

LAST CHANCE FOR A SLOW DANCE WITH THE FORM OF ROCKET FAMILY SINGERS ...

2006-09-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

LAST CHANCE FOR A SLOW DANCE
WITH THE FORM OF ROCKET FAMILY SINGERS

FORM OF ROCKET
EAGLE TWIN
ACCIDENTE
SISYPHUS
CURTIS JENSEN

wednesday, 9.20.06 @ the bar formerly known as todds

i'm leaving. come to this.

FORM OF ROCKET IN WOODCOCK ....

2006-08-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

check it, this was in woodcock, pa in january, 2003.

SWEET JESUS COMING AT YOU ...

2006-08-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

be wary.

BURRIED A HORSE ...

2006-08-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

a little more than a week ago one of the horses was bit by a rattle-snake. it's face swelled up 2 or 3 times as big as it normally was. we got a vet to come out and look at the horse, and the vet said not to worry, the horse was doing well, and the vet gave us some antibiotics to bring the swelling down and prevent secondary infection and pneumonia. we followed the vet's directions, and within 2 or 3 days the horse was looking and acting much better.

last night the horse had separated itself from the rest of the horses, and was breathing very heavily and with much effort. this morning it was laying dead across the creek from the cabin i've been staying in. we just finished burying the dead horse with a backhoe.

i'm coming home friday morning.

ALMOST THERE ...

2006-08-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

i'm so close to being home that my face has flattened like a pancake!

see you at the klampout.

FREE GUITORCHESTRA VIDEO ...

2006-07-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

July 23, 2005 marked the 6th Anniversary of Kilby Court's existence. In commemoration Form of Rocket, Guitorchestra as conducted by Gentry Densley, and The Tremula played a show together, Bransin Anderson video taped the whole thing, and he has made his footage freely available for download at www.8a9ti5m.com.

For those of you who may never have had the pleasure of seeing Guitorchestra live, the project is 16+ guitars and one drummer conducted through a completely improvised and un-rehearsed set by Gentry Densley, patriarch of Iceburn and current guitarist with Form of Rocket. Of all the Guitorchestra sets I've been witness too, this is by far the most powerful, consistent, dynamic, and complete. Bransin's footage has suprisingly solid sound quality, and his renderings of the show, especially the Guitorchestra set, are definately worth the download time. Go there. Do that. www.8a9ti5m.com

In other news, checkout how completely awesome this picture is of Sherlock getting his hacky sack on. Good work D$. Now go to D$'s blog and get some free muzac,pedazoporpaz.blogspot.com.

UNDER THE HAT MAY STAND A MAN ...

2006-07-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

but over the man rests a hat.

VERY NEAR HOWLS A COYOTE ...

2006-07-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is what it sounds like tonight.

I'LL HAVE 2 COORS AND 2 SHOTS OF TEQUILA PLEASE ...

2006-07-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to Ukraine. September 28th. Ukraine is a helluva long ways from where I am right now. That's fine.
I'll be teaching high school English, not sure where though. I'll get my assignment after I finish 3 months of in-country training. Ukraine. Holy flying Christ. Up in the sky. On fire. Wearing a skirt. A skirt made of puppies.

Here's an aerial photo of Kiev as taken by a spy satelite that mostly likely is watching you right now.
Seems like a nice place.

Here's an aerial photo of Chernobly as taken by another spy satelite that is most likely watching you right now. Chernobyl's just up the road from most of the rest of Ukraine.
You can almost see the radioactive packs of wolves feeding on the carcasses of tuberculated horses in the 20-year-empty apartment blocks. I personally can't wait to see them in, well, person.

So last night Schuyler and I went to a bar in Dubois with Rocky O'Neil Junior. Rocky's the guy that takes care of the horses here at Camp Tolerance, he's a full blown cowboy with boots and a hat and all that shit, grew up in Crowheart, and somehow in spite of looking like he just got off the boat from Ireland, he's 1/4 Shoshone. He's a year or two older than me, and when you chat with him, he throws down more one liners than you could count: no shit, I'll be danged, hell yes, you betcha, that sonuvabitch, yup sir, I believe it, I don't believe it, etc. Typically that'd all come out in a conversation of no more than 2 or 3 sentences.

We rolled over to the Rustic Pine Bar and Steakhouse after that Dubois Rodeo in which Rocky rode 3 heats in the team roping competition, and upon our arrival the three of us proceeded to get shitfaced. The place was packed, probably 150 people, and Schuyler and I were the only dudes in the place not in wranglers or a cowboy hat.

Was there a band you ask? Why yes indeed, old dudes playing old songs. Lots of classic rock on a 6 string bass. The drummer smoked the entire night, 3 hours at least. He played choked up on his sticks so that he hardly made a noise when he hit, you could hear him smoking more than you could hear him play.

Next thing you know I'm dancing. Not just dancing, but two-stepping. Rocky and I had been swapping tequila shots and I could hardly even see the ground, but I somehow got my two-step on. Yee-haw.

Then there was a fight. Some young dude that could hardly stand up was pointing his finger at some old dude that was ready to ruin the young dude's night. Some shoving ensues, and then a giant, a 450 pound 9 foot tall red-necked sasquatch with a goatee and a NASCAR hat bear-hugged the squabble and pushed the whole thing down the bar and towards the pool tables. Pretty much the entire bar's drinks were spilt at this point, and just when it looks like shit's going to get all Dukes of Hazard, Rocky jumps into the middle of the whole mess with a margarita in each hand and yelling, 'Hold on there, I'll be damned we gotta settle down yup sir no shit I'll be danged,' and that was the end of it.

And I kept getting drug out onto the floor to two-step. I don't even think the songs were two-stepable, they were playing Steppenwolf and shit. Whatever. Aside from the 9 foot tall giant redneck, I'm pretty sure I was 10 feet taller than anyone else on the dance floor, and I was wasted, so picture it in your head if you will, cowboy bar full of cowboys and cowgirls and one wasted, wobbling, hunch-backed Canadian by way of SLC trying to two-step to some shitty Eagles song without spilling his beer. Heheh.

Next thing I know, the young guy from the fight is passed out in a lawn chair at one of the tables around the dance floor, and Rocky is pouring his drink down the young guy's shirt. Schuyler gets ready to give the kid a wet willy, but Rocky waives him off and does the job his ownself. After that shit's really hazy.

In my head the clock is definitely ticking. I'm having a nice time here in wild, wonderful Wyoming and everything, but I am very much missing my friends and D$. Now that I'm locked in with a departure date I'm wanting more and more to not be here amongst the great emptiness.

I'm going to make a better effort at keeping this shit updated. I've got a couple more poems to put up and I'm going to take a crack at treating this more like a blog, so expect a whole bunch of shit that doesn't really mean a whole lot to anyone but me.

Now it's nap time.

THIS WEEK BLEW ...

2006-07-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

From the end one may learn much of the beginning.

THE HERMIT MAYOR OF MARJUM CANYON

2006-05-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

I

From off the cliffs, the stones are rolled down to
the maze-pit of the dry box canyon. Seams
of white quartzite lace the rotten pinks and greens
of the cliffs’ pockmarked limestone. From here, near the mouth
of the canyon, framed by the planks of the cave’s only
window, the canyon leans back in a series
of cliff bands, each greater in height than those
that are the series below, up until the can-
yon opens wide behind a rotten dihedral
to the left, a high, water-carved chute to the center,
and a threatening slope of scree that the stones being
rolled down from the cliffs skate, gather, and skitter over,
smashing loose more rocks to be collected
by the canyon’s twisted maze pit. As the moon
silhouettes the canyon’s dark shoulders, the Hermit
Mayor leans in close, points a gnarled finger to my face:

‘There are birds up there, they nest in huge colonies
on the wall’s largest flakes, I know this because
I hear them in the mornings, heckling the sun
as it creeps over the ridges and me as I
put on the coffee and rattle the badger cages.
I do my best to leave them to theirs, and so far
those birds leave me be, but who is to know,
our truce is delicate at best, and at worst
it is balanced precarious upon a pillar,
threatening everything and everywhat
that is fool enough to look up upon it.’

With this the Hermit Mayor pauses
his slow speech, and reaches under the rough
hewn table that we now across from ourselves
sit in the dim cave. At first it was best not
to rest your bare elbow upon the table’s
course top planks, but now since much time has passed,
and many bottles have been sat to rest
upon the table’s grained plane, and since many
hands have slapped their oils into its pores,
the table ripples in polished waves, not unlike
a canvas of tempura sea, darkly
anchored to the dusty wall of a Dutch museum.
The mayor and hermit of Marjum Canyon
leans in again: ‘It was just so long ago then.
I left her in nowhere to go and join
the world. It was not as though I wanted to
do it, it was more as though it was to be done.
So I went, I left her there in nowhere, I
accepted a new set of clothes, and I made my way
across the ocean along with everyone else.
I was away with the world long enough that
when I got back to nowhere everything
had changed and she was gone off with someone.

‘With me for a moment, think about that.
Think about leaving nowhere for one reason,
then coming back to nowhere for another reason,
and the reason you come back for, the reason
you didn’t fall off the face of your known
world for, the reason you kept yourself from
falling apart for, alone in the night, even worse
alone in the day as all the trees came apart
and all the walls came apart so that great cities
no longer looked the same, and soon the whole world
has come apart. That reason was it and everything
for me when I was there, but then when I
was back to nowhere, that reason, she was gone.
She was gone when I got back, but I couldn’t
understand that (and I still don’t understand that,
even now after all these years here alone
in my cave). She was gone with someone else, so I
looked around, I packed my things, and I left
that part of nowhere for anywheres else.’

I whistled my agreement in a long,
low note as I leaned back against the darkness
of the cave’s open door, and the light of the cold
milky way, spread in it’s innumerable
and icy pin pricks from one dark corner
to the other of the dry, desert sky.

Another rock breaks loose and rattles down
the canyon’s hollow back. The hermit turns
his head quick to the sound, ‘You hear that?
That’s winter coming. People say there’s no
water around, but you heard that, you heard
that rock come down, and you’re sitting perched at the mouth
of this whole goddamned canyon. You look me
in the eye and think about what you heard and what
you’re sitting up here perched upon, and you
tell me with a straight face there’s no water out here,
and I’ll tell you your a goddamned fool.
There’s water out here enough that when it gets cold
as its beginning to do, that water wriggles
in deep up on those cliffs and freezes itself
wide enough to pop off all that bouncing scree seed,
and give us something to look towards on these
colder-gettin’ nights. Here, have a home-brew.’

And with that he nudged one of the two
cloudy bottles across the table towards
where I was leaning. I came forward quick
to take the bottle, and the hermit goes on ...

II

‘HOLY FUCKING SHIT MOTHER SHIT FUCKING
CHRIST FUCKING JESUS FUCKING SHIT FUCKING FUCK!’
I wail as you smash your foot against the pedal
and smile crooked and cackle as across
the lake bed in his borrowed Ford Taurus
we shoot 65 miles an hour through the dark
lost, without headlights, and not enough moonlight
to see when the lake bed ends, when a rock is coming,
where the fuck we were, or him as he lurches awake
in the back seat of his car so hard that he
hits his head on the window of the shuddering
vehicle that is his, but that we were driving,
and that we were driving quite badly. Confused
you join me with, ‘OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKK!’

III

And who’s to say what it was that stopped him there.
He is, I suppose: ‘The damn thing just quit right out
from under me. One minute my mind was on
Baker and what lay beyond the Barn Hills,
the next minute the stone’s are mortared, and I’m
doing my best to piece together a set
of shelves from a warped slab of pinon left half-
buried in the sand bar down at the mouth
of the side canyon. But that’s just how it happened,
I pointed that thing in one direction, and next
thing I knew I was there; there’s no great lesson
to be learned, no something big and meaningful.
I just started going, then I stopped, and now
I’m here and this is my life. Its not complicated.

IV

Of all the whore shacks in that dried up dust
pot, the one we rattled most in passing was that
which lay closest to the hay-stack-episcipalian
church. I had no idea what it was I wanted,
what it was I was going to do, and if I
were even to begin, whether I would get the
thing done. I didn’t even know what that thing was.

The car was pointed south, then west, then south,
and then after that it would be pointed west again.
Just before my chest filled up with air and my eyes
started shaking, near where the belching steamship
is moored in the alkali flats, blinking it’s lights
and glowering at the night and the cheatgrass brome flats,
the night itself opened in a glowing hole
floating low and near the ground with grain-trucks
drudging through its yawn. It was one of those
difficult situations where I just wasn’t sure
if we were all friends enough for me to say
‘Jesus Fucking Christ, there’s a hole in the sky.’
Oh well, said it anyway, and you both looked at me

the way you both looked at me when I
fell out of my chair drunk, and to avoid
spilling my beer, I crossed my right arm
behind my back to break my fall, and my left arm
in front of my chest to put my beer safely
on the asphalt, and in the process I shattered
the biggest joint on my right thumb.
Didn’t spill my beer. Did break my thumb.

FROM BOB CREEK, WITH LOVE ...

2006-05-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

Meet my new friend, Don Vito.

Don Vito is a donkey, and he is from Sicily.

Who the fuck are you, and where the fuck are you from?

Mas pics y escriblin's coming soon. I'll have a draft of a super long epic that I've been working on up in the next few days.

In the case that anyone was wondering, my mailing address for the summer is as follows:

Curtis Jensen
547 Bob Creek Road
Crowheart, WY
82512

Don't you wish your addy was that cool? I mean shit, Crowheart? It doesn't get any better. Now send me shit in the mail.

And here is a picture of a horse weiner!

THE FINAL CUNTDOWN ...

2006-05-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

4 days and counting until I go here:

I've fiddled a bit with the post indexing on this train wreck, for all the poems in Watch Me Dig a Hole, go

HERE

I should have the Ditch and Sweet Jesus / Andy / Sean / Curtis / Peter MP3's up and accesible by Friday, stay tuned.

Big tittied bitches.

WHAT IT IS ...

2006-05-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

A BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

This blog is all things Curtis Jensen.

The point is to get all of my shit in one spot, writings, images, recordings, jibba jabba, whatever.

I'm going to be leaving town in a bit for places far removed, and I will be using this blog as way for those interested to keep an eye on me while I'm gone. I'm still not sure if I'm down with the blog scene, so in the next few weeks I'll be trying out a few different content ideas. Should be an embarrassing experiment all the way around.

I realize that this interface is a bit crude, and reading poems online blows, but I'm a poor dude with zero interweb savvy, so whatever. I've included some images for a few of the poems, not sure if that's a good idea or not, but whatever, I say why the hell not. I'm going to try and figure out a way to index each poem by it's respective chap book and rough release date, who knows if that'll work though. I'm working on getting all the junk up from COMFORTCANTTOWABOAT and Apologies for Appliances in the Bathtubs of Loved Ones, stay tuned.

I've listed links to most of the musical projects I've worked on in the last few years, sorry so many of them are Myspace based, but again, I'm a poor dude without interweb savvy, and that's as good as it is going to get for now. I plan to have the Ditch and Sweet Jesus stuff live within the next couple of weeks, should be a nice trip down memory lane. Please forgive the poor sound quality and the plain site setups. I'm working on a general time line and explanatory blurb for each project, that'll all come as updates in due time.

If anyone wants to get a hold of me, curtisinterruptus@hotmail.com is the way to do it, comments, critiques, hot fishing tips, whatever, I'm in to all that shit.

Also if anyone has photos, recordings, or video footage of any performance that I've been involved with, hook the mutha fucking hooks.

And you're goddamned right that's me in a face mask attempting to ignite a roman candle in gale-force winds.

ANDY PATTERSON: BEARDS GROW BACK

2006-05-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

As it was printed in Slug Magazine ....

202 Oct 2005: Andy Patterson: Beards Grow Back
_POSTEDON Sep 30, 2005 - 11:10 AM by publisher

BY CURTIS JENSEN

Andy Patterson has been an active fixture in the Salt Lake music scene for 17 years. As a drummer, his pedigree is extensive and includes stints with a representative cross-section of SLC’s most relevant and influential bands: Lumberjack, Iceburn, Polestar, State of the Nation, Red Bennies, Ether, Stella Brass, Hello Amsterdam, Longarm, and more. His touring experience includes supporting Fugazi and Lifetime across Europe with State of the Nation, as well as North American tours drumming for Shelter, Blue Tip and Inside Out. You read that right, Inside mother-fucking Out. Currently he splits his drumming time between popsters Hudson River School, and reincarnated doom-rockers Hammergun.

After two years in Los Angeles interning and working in recording studios on projects ranging from Rage Against the Machine’s live performance on MTV’s T.R.L., to a collaboration between DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, Andy returned to Salt Lake in 2000 to set up his own studio. Like his drumming credentials, Andy’s recording resume reads as a laundry list of SLC’s finest: Clear, The Kill, The New Transit Direction, The Wolfs, Furious Fire, Endless Struggle, The Numbs, The Dirty Birds, Le Force, Spanky Van Dyke, Starmy, Aftermath of a Train Wreck, Tolchock Trio, All Systems Fail, Day of Less, Gaza, Stiletto, Rifle Street Music, Contingency Plan, Thunderfist, Walken, Victrola, Iodina, Cub Country, and Utah Slim.

I bummed a smoke from Andy for the first time outside of the old KRCL building in 2001, while taking a break from laying down basic tracks during Form of Rocket’s Se Puede Despidir a Todos sessions. Now he invites me to his annual 24th of July barbeques.

SLUG: Why recording? How did recording come about?
AP: I am a drummer and, on the totem pole of priority and hierarchy in the band scheme, the drummer is the lowest on the rung. I was sick of being at the mercy of the songwriter, so I bought a sampler, and I was like, “I’m going to make my own music.’ Not fuck being a drummer, just separate; I needed to have some sort of voice. I needed to do something that I could take control of.

SLUG: Was this a response to a person, or just in general?
AP: Just in general, not out of spite. If I wanted to be able to say, “Maybe we should try this or try that,” I kind of needed to have something to back it up, and no one would take me seriously because I was the drummer. Like, “What do you know about chords? You don’t even know what note that is!” I bought a sampler, and shortly after that I bought a computer. I pirated some recording software and recorded little things here and there, but the biggest catalyst was moving to California.

SLUG: Why’d you go to California?
AP: I went to California because, well, I was actually going to go to New York. Most of the friends that I was playing with at the time, Jim (Kimball), Jeff (Johnson), Jamison (Wilkins), Matt (Matteus), Jeremy (Chatelain), Cache (Tolman), all those guys moved to New York. I was going to go out there, but everyone kept warning me about how hard it was to live in New York.

SLUG: Did you feel a competitive thing from them?
AP: I just felt like ... (pause), yeah, there was a bit of competition. Like, “Oh shit, moved to New York and he joined Handsome and those guys are on tour with Silverchair right now and everyone’s blowing up and all they had to do is move to the big city!” That was my and everyone else’s motivation: get out of small town, move to big city. That’s were the success is, where the action is. I actually had a U-Haul booked for New York, to go east, and I got a call from John Bunch from Sense Field, and they were looking for a drummer. They were having auditions, so I switched my U-Haul and I went to California instead. I had like a hundred bucks, and it was your basic cliché story; I had no money, and I ate ramen for a month. I put an ad in The Recycler and this girl responded to my ad, and she wanted me to play in her band. The first night that I met her, we went back to her place, and her roommate is this guy Critter, Jeff Knewel, he’s a producer. He’s from Chicago and did all the old Ministry stuff. He was working on the Guns n’ Roses record out there.

SLUG: The, the ...
AP: The infamous one, Chinese Democracy. The one that still hasn’t come out (giggles). But he had a Pro Tools rig in his living room. I mean, when we walked in, I was like, “Oh my god, this is what I want, I want my life to look like this.” I asked him, “Ok, I’ve got a couple thousand dollars, what recording school should I go to?” He said, “ Don’t. Don’t go to school. Buy a rig and just start recording.” So I did that, I bought a Pro Tools rig, he hooked me up with all his plug-ins, and then he taught me how to use the interface. Shortly after that I moved back here.

SLUG: That seems to be a pretty common theme for Salt Lake, leaving and coming back.
AP: It’s funny because Salt Lake’s a vortex, you go out, and then you realize, and then you come back. For me, I just had to get out of Salt Lake; I just had to do something. I feel good that I lived in California for 2 years and I got along just fine. I paid my bills, I traveled, I didn’t get my ass kicked, and I didn’t have to suck dick for coke or anything. When I would come back, I’d see all my friends and I just realized, you know, this is a really beautiful place to live in, its not gross, its not spread out, its not expensive, and all my friends live here. Like, what am I doing? By the second year I was in L.A., it was just basically work, home, work, home. It was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to go back to Salt Lake. I like that place, it’s cool,” and still, to this day, I love Utah. I don’t have any plans on moving anytime soon.

SLUG: What is your role in the recording process?
AP: To be the extra guy in the band that knows about this stuff. I just happen to know how to use this stuff (waves his hand around the control room) better than you guys, so it makes sense for me to run this stuff and for me to be sitting in this chair and doing the edits and stuff like that. When I make records, especially with people I like, I really try to have the vibe be that we are in our bedroom, making this with a ghetto four- track, and have it be fun on that level. I’m the extra band member, and my job is geeky tech stuff. You know, there’s a drummer, there’s a guitarist, there’s a bassist, there’s a keyboard guy. I’m just a degree off from the keyboard guy.

SLUG: So for you, there’s a personal, an interior, link to all of this?
AP: Absolutely. I think that’s what makes me different from a lot of other studio engineers. I’m really more romantic about it. I want to have a friendship with the bands that I record. I went to a memorial the other day for Blake [Donner] from Parallax, and I got up and spoke, which is weird because I don’t do that. I don’t do any of that stuff, but I had to just get up and reflect a little bit upon how personally special it is to me to be part of something like that. To take his art and his voice and immortalize it, to help bring his art to fruition, I think that’s a really special thing.

SLUG: What do you think is the role that digital recording technology plays in the democratization of music distribution? As somebody who works in the digital format, do you see similarities?
AP: Yeah, absolutely. The fact that I have this equipment at my disposal is amazing to me. Sometimes I feel like an asshole because I listen to Sgt. Peppers or old Zeppelin records or Marley records that were recorded on 1, 2, 4 tracks tops. I have gear that would make them lose their minds. I can’t make those records yet, but back 20 years ago, I wouldn’t be able to have a studio unless I had $50,000 to start it with. For me to be able to quit my day job and do this for a living is amazing, especially considering the investment that I’ve put in has been very minimal. Compared to like, Counterpoint, where they have actual rooms and tape machines and big ass boards and huge monitors, that stuff’s not necessary now. For all intents and purposes, most of the best records are made with meager means.

SLUG: Did Clive Davis [American Idol producer] make you shave your beard?
AP: No, he didn’t make me shave my beard. Our (Hudson River School) pimps suggested that if I had the beard, I would look a lot older than I am, and that Clive is very youth driven. Even with me shaving the beard, they said that we were too old. I wouldn’t have cut my hair. I already feel bad about it. I felt like a fucking monkey, jumping around (claps his hands together), “I’ll cut my beard for you, anything you say! Thank you sir, may I have another!”

WILL SARTAIN SAYS LET'S HANG OUT NAKED

2006-05-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

as it appeared in slug magazine ....

203 Nov 2005: Will Sartain Says: Let’s Hang Out Naked
_POSTEDON Nov 03, 2005 - 01:52 PM by publisher

Subculture By Curtis Jensen

Will Sartain is the music that he plays; there is no separation between what he plays and who he is: DIY romps as the bass player for The Tremula, fragmented lyricisms as the drummer for The Buttery Muffins, or the simply put melodies of his solo project, all of these are Will. He is recently returned from a six-week tour with The Tremula that was marked by a drummer that quit, Hurricane Katrina, and difficult customs officials of the United Kingdom. As a solo artist, Will has toured extensively through North America and Europe. As a promoter, Will held the calendar for Kilby Court from Sept. 2003 to July 2005, and currently he promotes shows around Salt Lake City under his WS Presents moniker.

SLUG: How was the tour?

Will Sartain: It was good.

SLUG: Trials and tribulations?

WS: We were in Texas, and we were supposed to go to New Orleans, but the first hurricane came like two days before that, so we were stuck in this little college town, Nacogdoches. We missed two shows, one in Baton Rouge and one in New Orleans.

SLUG: Lindsay (Heath) quit. How’d everything go after that?

WS: John (Patterson) just started playing. It was ok, it worked. There were some parts I liked a lot more, some parts I didn’t like as much. She quit like six weeks in, and the thing was, none of us could get along with Lindsay. Once she was gone, immediately it was like, “Yes, we can say whatever the fuck we want.” With those three guys, I could see myself touring for a whole year straight. We did two more weeks after she left, and then we were going to go to the UK, but we were sent back.

SLUG: Wait, what?

WS: We just figured it’d be fine; we went in last time with the Will Sartain stuff the same way, and it was totally fine. The plan was to say we were coming in for one day, going to Amsterdam, then coming back and picking up our work permit at the harbor. Three of us got in, then Scott (Fetzer) got a guy that didn’t want to let him in. We were in, we were downstairs with our luggage, but he got stopped and we got sent back home.

SLUG: What is the current state of DIY music and culture?

WS: People still want to be liked. People want other people to like their band, I feel that a lot. For instance, even if people are doing something weird, these people are insecure people who want other people to say that what they are doing is cool. I’ve been thinking about the roots, you know, heavy boom-boom-boom (swings his fists, puffs his cheeks, bobs his head). Look at Vile Blue Shades. That is what is it right now, and it’s not even about the people who are doing it because I could say, “I want to play with you guys,” and they’d be like, “come on down.”

SLUG: It seems like in Salt Lake there’s been a shift back to some of those more primal emotions. A little less irony, a little less, I don’t know, love-songy ...

WS: Totally getting back to the ...

SLUG: Big ...

WS: Yeah. Perhaps it’s a way to connect with people on a broader level instead of writing this stupid-ass mopey song that applies to only these few people. I want to do something where everybody’s boomchicka-boomchicka (swings his fists again, puffs his cheeks again, bobs his head again).

SLUG: Do you look to make a living from music?

WS: I don’t even know anymore. The greatest benefit has been traveling; I don’t know if I want to make a living from it. Already I’m getting sick of it.

SLUG: Of traveling?

WS: No, not of traveling. Just the songs. I question whether they are really applicable to me, or what made them applicable to me. Maybe I’m changing how I feel. I don’t want to feel that way, I’m OK with it, but I don’t want to feel that way, just all sad. The music that has been dominating America for so long is just weak music; we don’t need to be scared or uncertain people right now. We are people that can do things. Why not? Why is it that we have to resort to, “I have to get a job at this place that I don’t want to work at?” Why don’t you start a company? That’s not even in our heads anymore. I think it fits in with that somehow, the music is, “I’m defeated, I can’t do anything, I’m weak.” I can do this, I can be a part of my community, I can contribute something.

Will Sartain’s palm was read for the first time by Annie Hawkins on October 16, 2005.

****************************************

- These are points of originality, your true talents. The things that make you different from other people.

CAPTIONS FOR DIAGRAM

- This is your heart. Your heart rules your life.

- Your lifeline is fucking huge; I’ve never seen one this long. You’ll have a long life, and you will have good luck at the end of your life.

- Love is oceans for you, it is huge.

- Your great love will peek its head in the next couple of years, when you are 27 or 28 years old.

*********************************

QUOTE BOXES

We don’t need to be scared or uncertain people right now

WATCH ME DIG A HOLE RELEASE SHOW POSTER

2006-04-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

Looky there, a poster.

Trent Call put it together, check his big tittied bitches ....

SWINJ.COM

ONE BAD EYE

2006-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

As I tug the puss string
from behind my bad eye
being careful not to tug too hard,
or to let anyone see,
I am reminded of this sensation:
the rub of a pearl strand
against my teeth, and understanding
that its grit and coarseness is
an assurance of authenticity.

As I tug the puss string
from behind my bad eye
being careful not to tug too hard
and rip the delicate string,
I feel for the first time
what it feels like
in the space behind
my bad eye.

I WILL NEVER FORGET THE WAY OUR FACE LIT UP

2006-03-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

We ran for our lives from the burning maze,
and the bullets smacked the walls of the alley
and the tear gas filled our lungs and bits
of sheet metal and tusk cut our bare feet.
I will never forget the way our face lit up
the morning the seperatists took the maze,
the morning we made our escape.

They didn’t offer us water.
Remember how in the dark together
we sealed burned sheets of aluminum foil?
We balanced these delicate, leaking vessels upon
our heads as on the banks we stood,
the wash jammed with the swollen carcasses
of black pelicans, victims that ate hardened,
antifreeze-douzed grease till their bellies tripled
and they floated away.

Behind the slaughterhouse, on the sides
of the broken down livestock were scrawled oaths.
Let us remember these oaths:

The only oath I can remember is Quedame en Richmond.
It being a time of revolution water was scarce.
It being a time of revolution there were separtists.
I can still see you skipping a step to jump
over the unlucky shoes that filled the streets.
I can remember another oath:
Peter has a small dick, and he uses it for bait.

Now let us bow with our face to the curb,
and our nose to the asphalt:

Dear Lord why is it today the clouds are laced
with gold and the valley is filled with smoke?
Do you remember how together in the dark

we sealed burned sheets of aluminum foil?
Do you remember how we balanced the delicate,
leaking vessels upon our heads? As children we ran
naked through the streets. As old women we grab
at water skins held above our heads. I do not think
we are really old women. We might not have been
children really at all. Dear tree please humble us.
Dear wire please warn us, then warm us, then go on.
Until then.

leaking vessels upon our heads?
As children we ran naked through the streets.
As old women we grab at water skins held above our heads.
I do not think we are really old women.
We might not have been children really at all.
Dear tree please humble us.
Dear wire please warn us,
then warm us, then go on.
Until then.

WATCH ME DIG A HOLE (ODE TO THE JERUSALEM CRICKET)

2006-03-31T19:51:00.000-07:00

I

The children of the soil
with their humanoid heads
only come out at night
or when someone is digging.

II

They come out to feed
on the soft tissue of plants
and the dead.

III

They catch horsehair worms that
make them thirsty, worms that crawl
out of their faces into the water
to mate.

THE ARITHMETIST GOES FISHING

2006-03-31T19:49:00.001-07:00

one

On the cleanest gravel bars
red-sided trout spawn, then die.
The largest females fall back
to the water with loud smacks
that loosen their packed and round
seven-thousand-egg-bellies.
This morning is cold, our lines
freeze if left too long on the
water.

Sweating.

A man’s foot

pedals a cast iron cart
overloaded with cages
crammed full of ratty female
pigeons over the curb,
down into the street. A bus,
here from a failed five-year plan,
swerves, its fender hooks and shakes
the man off his heavy cart.
Under momentum of pig-
eon, the cart lurches over
the man’s ankle. The ankle
is limp beneath the flat tire,
and folds on itself as do
our iced lines fold this morning.

two

The fishing was no good, we
were sick from the green water
sliding down the canyon. All
things spun, including my eyes.
I turned around in time to
see the river split open.
I watched a deer lose its hair
all at once. I watched a truck
spin on end like a cue ball.
I watched dogs attack the deer
as it shivered without hair.
The truck exploded on fire.
We dug holes in the road and
filled them with deer hair. We spun
off the bank, into the mud.
There you found green clay, there I
found red clay, my boots still stink.
You slept in a puddle. We
became tired and laid down
ourselves eventually.

three

“Hey umm, hey everyone,” you
say and the moose crashes through
the run you were fishing and
wobbles down the river toward us,
moving fast like telephone poles.
We make it up the slick bank,
the moose lopes over the ce-
ment barricade and onto
the highway.

Someone in a

cargo van stops in front of
the confused moose, blowing
the horn over and over
again.

You say, “If I were

up there on the road I would
put a rock through their fucking
windshield.”
four

“You awake?”

The grass

was dry and yellow because
this high up fall comes fast and
winter is soon thereafter.
“Nope.”

“I could die here.”

The cut-

banks of the small, deep creek lean
over the water.

If one

was quiet and flat against
the dry grass, dangling only
a short length of line into
the water, stunted and hook-
jawed brook trout, orange and white
stripes lining the tips of their
green fins, threw themselves onto
the bank and your heart would twist.
“I am afraid I just might.”

five

In the grass growing in the
shallow bends there are herons
with clothes hangers in their beaks.
This makes casting difficult.
This is as you describe it:

The road across and along
the far bank was packed solid
and slick with thick sheets of ice.
He said he had broken the
reel seat off his rod this fall.
He told me to be careful
and I fell hard, bruised my hip.
It was tough to get my feet
under me.

Six sandhill cranes

were squawking at a pair of
pruning shears sunk in the slough
and rusting up the water.
One of the cranes had been shot,
and as it squawked, its cracked
beak vibrated like the reed
of a feathered and stick-legged
clarinet blowing angry
at junk sunk in a rusty
slough.

I looked up to see the

old man’s feet shoot out and to
his left.

His head smacked the ice

with a hollow sort of plop.
He didn’t move after that,
but I could hear him moaning.
When I got to him blood was
foaming in his ears, and small
owls were picking his pockets.
I cursed away the thieving
birds, propped him up, and asked him
when his birthday was.

He said

“I am sorry, I know the date,
but I can’t tell you it now,
I must have slipped and fallen
on the ice.”

I hung his arm

over my shoulder and dragged
him across the bridge to a
trailer stacked with railroad ties.

While you took and wrapped your coat
around the old man’s shoulders
every magpie in the sky
fell head first into the ground.

six

“I gave it a shot, I mean
I haven’t talked to her in
a week, but I just can’t have
someone all the time asking
me what I’m feeling or what
I’m going to do.

She gave

me a bunch of chances, I
gave her one and that’s enough.”

seven

This morning is bitter cold
like the day the old man slipped
and hit his head so hard on
the ice, like you picking up
the rock, like being burried
in the meadow, like the man
in the oily street holding
his crushed ankle, begging those
walking by for help as I
and the bus move down the street
out of sight, like a deer leg
in a dog’s mouth, like dumping
water out of your boots in-
to the snow, like a lime kiln.

for adam, mike, jason, and peter

EAT THE CROW

2006-03-31T19:48:00.000-07:00

I have disapointed everyone and my mother.
I spoke of twins, both gray and pink twins,
I drank a can of air freshener from Mexico
Aerosol de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
and I puked on a horse. I put a frozen rose
in my pocket and flopped out the door,
rubbing the rose on my face and growling
at the seamstresses about this winter weather.
Lately I find myself flopping all over the place,
over bicycles, down refrigerated streets,
through meat packing plants, out of the bus
and off to the mortuary. I figure hey-fuck-it
this crooked back is my crooked back,
I could paint my head red, or I could go out
into the world and find a good place to shit
like everyone else. Instead I go on about you
to some bald asshole with poet monogramed
on the lapel of his fat head. He kept
picking up the phone and accusing my mother
of biting off his dick. At least she
didn’t really bite off his dick. At least I
fooled some of them. At least now
I know I will quit trying to fool myself.
I have missed someone. I have missed you.
So that is everyone, Mother, you, everyone else:
dissapointed. A while back I rolled down a roof
and flopped through a plywood Spanish campaign sign.
I gave that to you.

DRINK UP

2006-03-31T19:47:00.000-07:00

This afternoon a person might call a few
friends and say none of these sprinklers
are needed, these trees could go up in flames
quite quickly, this is a drought and we all know it,
the crickets are eating their own weight every day.

Could have seen you reach in your pocket with
one hand, unfold the blade with two hands and
with one hand shake the knife as though it were
a dowsing stick. But there are few patches of cold
air between now and there. For now

I have shut off the swamp cooler, I have
thrown up in the sink , and I have scratched
each deerfly bite. At most I will be hot,
hungry and daubing my welts with tissue for
the fifteen more days I cannot speak with you.

At least I will be distracted. There is a Mexican
girl sobbing loudly on the curb. Her lover
holds his nose over the wet lawn, the blood
leaking between his fingers has stained his
undershirt, they are nearly at arms length.

IN THE CAPITAL

2006-03-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

The circular saw sings in memory of
the brick’s demise. In the capital
the electric drill spits dust for the scaffolding’s
plunder of the slick, sodden alley.

Unto man in the capital is appointed death.

The capital’s streets cobbled with horse hooves.
The capital’s storm drains plugged with pigs’ hair.
The capital’s municipal pools filled with ox blood.
To the capital death has come to offer

judgement. Patricide arrives here early
on knobby knees, quietly carrying water.
Across its back walks Punishment. Soon both
are tied in a sack with one monkey, one cock,

and one serpent. Together the five are cast
into the sea. The capital greets her
with wheat sheaves and ginger in its mail slots.
In the capital it is required of each pilgrim

who walks near her to fling pine pitch
over their shoulders and onto the faces
of the penitents stumbling close behind.
A procession in her honor is held in this way.

As pitch leaks under their hair-shirts, stinging their
raw backs, each filthy penitent mouths an oath
of thanks to her. She is hoisted up to a balcony
suspended above the boulevard

by a wrought iron chain run through
the nose of a bronze buffalo. Shirtless
flagellants scourge themselves in protest of this.
The crowd stops suddenly. The pilgrims

mount upon the penitents’ shoulders.
She watches as a young boy is passed
from the back of the procession over
the heads of the penitents. The crowd is

quiet while the boy is passed closer.
She sees that his ears have been burned, and that his
head has been shaved. The boy is passed closer.
She sees that he is naked and

his teeth have been filed. The boy is passed
closer still. She sees that his genitals have
been painted gray. The crowd is quiet
and the boy is lifted up to the balcony.

The boy stands in front of her, smiling.
With the back of his hand he wipes his nose.
She looks past the boy to the crowd which
looks past the boy up to her. The boy pulls

his right leg from its joint with a pop
and offers it up to her. She smiles.
The boy smiles again. She takes the leg
from the boy with her mouth by the ball end.

The boy wipes his nose again. He pulls
his leg from her mouth and returns it with a pop
to his hip. Unto man in the capital
is appoined uncertainty. Around each neck

in the capital are strung pebbles that
remind her of the wooden testicles
of the horse that carried St. James
over the wooden and rolling heads

of the Moors. Punishment is found with
the company it kept. The flaggelants protest this.

A WATCHED POT NEVER BOILS

2006-03-31T19:45:00.000-07:00

Revolution makes time move
faster than any measure of skill.
We will prove

this with truth
tied as bundles of unmarked bills.
Revolt makes time move

arms full of
leather satchels full
of proof

and however we’ve
begun to feel,
this revolt has made time move

past ourselves
into barrels of jet fuel
soon lit to prove

that regret, and our relationship
to the revolution make time move.
I am near you. I am well.
This is proof enough.

THIS IS THEFT

2006-03-31T19:44:00.001-07:00

They spoke slowly and deliberately,
as though they were lighting a fire.

There was this hoochie-cooch show.
When the feller wasn’t looking,
we snuck in under the tent.
There was this gal up on stage,
doing a har-em dance.
First thing I know,
she’d dropped her dress
and she was naked.

All over?

From head to toe.

What’d she look like?

She had a belly button so big
you could’ve stuck your whole
middle finger in it.

SPRINGTIME IN THE GULAGS

2006-03-31T19:44:00.000-07:00

Last night the prisoners’ dreams were filled
with the dead fathers of former close friends.
Each woke sweating and stuck to their leaking
air mattresses, thanking God they were not in Ohio.
Over breakfast and the deafening whoosh
of six month’s snow melting, the prisoners
discuss with full mouths: he was in tears,
I was not sure what it was I was to do.

The conversation soon turns to plans,
the prisoners pledge to memorize accounts
of eachother’s prison stay using pneumonic
devices, approximate melodies for singing
the accompaniment to each other’s account.
Other things were done as well. Some took

to swallowing fish hooks wrapped with
old bits of boot tongues, each line tied to the knob
of the barrack’s door. After the others barked replies
to the overseer’s role call, the swallowers patiently hope
for the sentry to wrench the door open,
for their stomachs to turn inside out ,
and for a comfortable April spent in the infirmary,
sipping gruel and fluffing their moldy pillows
while almost humming to themselves: he was in tears,
we were not sure what it was we were to do.

Each prisoner now waits with patience
for the finish of their internment, after which,
as was pledged, each prisoner will begin to search
for the person who can sketch their songs
as drawings with actors cast as prisoners,
and prisoners cast as narrators emotively whistling
of springtime pounding the barrack’s doors
with fists gloved in black leather shining
bright under Siberia’s equinorial sun.

THIS IS OCCUPATION

2006-03-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

This is occupation. This is an air-raid.
This is starting over. This is the end of
all things planned for. He has two hundred hours
free for the killing

now that she has taken the shovel. He has
taken to resting under hills. His arms ache
after waking curled in the same heep he curled
asleep in last night.

These are left on a dirty quilt, sold
five bucks each at flea markets in a lead
town surrounded by towers, spot lights, guard shacks,
highways empty of

snow banks, blockades. In spite of whatever
treaties signed, whatever toasts toasted since then,
this is occupation. Dozens of sirens
humming with she’s gone.

I AM NO ODDSMAN

2006-03-31T19:42:00.000-07:00

Do you know who took that photo? I did. I took it and
I love it. Don’t you? Do you know who dug this canal?

I did. I dug it and I love it. Do you know who pointed
that light into the sun, who walked across the ice,

who cleaned the lake, who ate the metal shards, who’s been here and there?
I did all of this and I love all of it. I did all of this and

I planted a garden. I planted a garden of windshields.
That makes no sense. I bought a garden of windshields in which

I planted a pond of singing catfish. I relax in the magnified light
of the curved panes, and I listen to the catfish swallow rats.

They are not really catfish, they are diamonds. Diamonds from Equatorial
Guinea. Diamonds with which I clothe an insurgency,

with which I trim my glassy garden. The pond water
is amonia and my shit has turned black.

I offer you the fruits of my garden in good will. I offer them to you
on a truck bed. I offer them to you on a seven year old.

I offer them to you on a waiting list. I hope you enjoy them each.
My garden is growing. Imagine that. I have windshields

over two thousand feet tall. I have other windshields over three
thousand feet tall. I myself am more than five thousand feet tall.

As I look over my rows of windshields, and my amonia pond full
of hungry, singing diamonds, all feeding on rats, I can see the flea

market and I can hear You bartering with the Salesman over how much longer
You can have It and how You are going to pay Him for having It that long.

The Salesman looks like You and Me, One could say that We are in His image.
One could also say that He is in Our image. Another could say that This all sounds

like soft science, that there is not the incessant clicking
of the harder sciences. Really they are not rats, they are cooked hams,

each marbled with a peculiar pattern of fat such that
there is a ham for each apostle’s likeness.

Floating in quorum, the hams confer in the clear amonia
amidst thousand foot tall windshields and gardener,

each ham pink with a different expression as befitting their ministries:
Peter holding a chisel that is pointed at You, James tossing the pelota,

Paul making detailed notes upon a sheepskin as to when yesterday was,
and what time It is after all of This. The disciples take a vote

as to what It was the Salesman meant when He said there were two Others,
a Manager and a Prostitute, inside of Him but outside of Him.
The results are as follows:

Up from the bottom of the planted pond,
through the apostle hams and singing catfish,
into the downpour.

SEVEN JUNIPERS EXPLODE

2006-03-31T19:41:00.001-07:00

Double-helixed trunks are left
with cauterized branches stripped
of bark, peddling thin shade
to the graveled wash.

This spring’s

snow melt will stir the cinders,
blackened flows so quick to slip
off the red bluff, down into
the river.

The glaring east

bank soon becomes clouded and
unfishable for two miles.
Gray Jerusalem crickets
swarm the scorched trees and are
often blown from their sooty
perches down to the water
by the wind gusting upstream.

THE BOATMAN THAT IS A HORSE

2006-03-31T19:41:00.000-07:00

It is the other day, and a boatman walks home with me.
He clears his throat, then pulls both shoulderblades from my back.

I collapse forward at the chest and stop walking. The boatman stops walking as well.
From his satchel he removes bits of wicker and a bundle of bandages.

He chews the wicker like you would an old tire that has been used as a sandal,
and he rips the bandages into coins. He tells me to wait there,

that he will return soon and then we will continue. I wonder what it is he wants
with my shoulderblades. The boatman returns as a horse without hooves,

in place of his hooves are newspapers. He speaks only Spanish,
understanding him is difficult because although now a horse,

the boatman’s mouth still chews the wicker. Have you ever tried to understand
a boatman that is a horse who speaks only Spanish and whose mouth is full of wicker?

I become confused as to what it is he wants with my shoulder blades.
I grow tired, my knees buckle, I am sitting on clay.

The boatman that is a horse joins me, and the clay stains orange both my clothes
and his hide. The boatman now nurses his hooves. Or his newspapers.

He snorts and rubs the messy stumps behind his ears, all the while flapping his gums.
From what I could understand, he was going on about the drought.

I become even more tired. I nudge with my chin my shoulderblades between the boatman
that is a horse without hooves and myself, and I spit into my hollow bones.

With my cheek and the boatman’s horse cheek to the clay, we sip the spittle.
The boatman that is a horse toasts my health and the excellent price he paid
for his makeshift hooves.

THIS IS SANITATION

2006-03-31T19:40:00.000-07:00

For luck I swab the puss from my
good eye with a rotten pig hoof.
For the foul steam swelling over
the flaccid folds of neck skin drooping

down the putrid crowd’s back,
leaves are now sodden. Each
reveler is bare to the waist.
All dance and slobber around
the trash fire lit near
the half-finished cathedral.
The plaza’s dust balls with spittle.

Revelers are burning their shirts.
The fire sparks green with the dead
skin and salt-packed fabric of
this spring’s planting. Some dance
balancing sticky-fingered children
on their damp shoulders. Others
further back rub burnt pig snouts
on their children’s faces for luck.

Even beggars have come
to lay bare for the crowd
their sweating potbellies.

OLD MAN WINTER IS TREES

2006-03-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

Here are bristlecone pines
gnarled to an ancient
shoreline ridge.
I am asleep at the bottom
of an icey trash compactor.

The trees stifly swap
stories of past ice-ages.
I’ve calmed down, but
I’m still shaking.
A trio of singing
serpenting belts
warble the first lines
of my last will:

Please bury my body
someplace warm.
Use my hollowed head
to haul heating oil
for those without hands.
With what money I
haven’t spent yet,
buy a head stone,
paint it to look like
a large lump of coal and
put it somewhere
someone can see it.