May 30, 2005
Poetry
It was a beautiful spring week in Lake Woebegone. Oops, wrong blog.
This is, in any event, my 5th day of lovely weather amidst the Green Explosion
that is Wisconsin in May. Junie was expecting to fly in for the Third
Annual Memorial Day Poet's Roundup, an event that includes standing invitations
for The Wemster, Blake-Who-Shall-Be-Called-Leslie, TitleMaster, Die Cloud, The
Tattooed Muse, and Silent Jon. Allykins and The AxeMaster were ready to
drive up to Boulder County when I had to cancel the event and hop on a plane.
On the plane, I did get a chance to read Poetry, backwards from Letters
to Introduction, hoping that it would improve in much the way a country-western
song does.
Dear Editors includes a note from Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Taylor,
who notes that 30% of all references to Edwin Arlington Robinson call him Edward
(I first met Henry, wearing a fabulous plantation owner's hat, outside the New
Orleans AWP hotel). Dan Chiasson responds with wit to what Kevin Simmonds
describes as his "diatribe" about Walcott's twilit epiphanies. Brook
Sadler suggests that Poetry include a feature where poets describe what they
love about a poem (displacing all this wonderful thrust and parry?). I'm
still trying to figure out what Michael Sowder means by "the owl of philosophy
always appears after history", but then he ascribes it to Nietzsche, and even
spells him correctly, so I'll give him some slack. Two readers comment on
the last month's roundtable, and one agrees with Wojahn that Lowell's For the
Union Dead exemplifies the nexus of Ambition and Greatness.
This month's reviewer is D. H. Tracy, who seems to delight in propping up a
poet in just the right position to rap his/her noggin. Eamon Grennan's
The Quick of It displays a "sparkling activity of the senses" in lines like
"Nimble blood has dried to my mud-caked knuckles", but questions whether Grennan
is single-minded or stubbornly limited. Joshua Mehigan's The Optimist
is "a work of some poise and finish", which displays "a profound sincerity of
interest that justifies profligate attention to anyone and anything", which
Tracy seems to think are accolades. Stuart Dybek, once again, "attempts a
sanctification of urban decay" in Streets in their Own Ink (a reference,
I presume, to chipirones en su tinta) with Chandleresque lines like "Just
think, she said, // unzipping her skirt, of all / the lovemaking that happened
there. / Just think of all the broken hearts, / she said, as her bra fell."
Maxine Kumin's Jack and Other New Poems are the product of a woman
"enjoying the blessing of being happy and stable", which sounds rather like an
indictment. Tracy has trouble liking The Maverick Room, by Thomas
Sayers Ellis, whose poems about D.C.'s urban (read: Black) oddities are "good
for a whoop" -- probably for the same reason that Tracy is compelled to call
canine fornication "canoodling dogs". Even Albert Goldbarth escapes faint
praise, as Tracy tires of yet another AG book (Budget Travel Through Time and
Space) sprinkled with Neolitic corpses, SETI, and Lucretius (generally, all
in the same poem), a book AG hopes might get at "the quarky heart of things",
but to D.H., sounds like polka. More impressive is Susan Wheeler's
Ledger, which deals with the oft-ignored topic of lucre, but Tracy finds it
"hard to say what" this "difficult book" might "amounts to" ("fiduciary re / no
sib /ability re- / spond dis / Eisenhower, Eisenhower"). Jan Valentine's
Door in the Mountain (2004
National Book Award winner) comes in for a drubbing, being eight books south of
her Yale Younger winner Dream Barker, and filled with poems that "seem
like footprints of poems in her head", and Tracy finds it "wrenching to see a
poet erode herself in this way". In The Sugar Mile, Glyn Maxwell
displays his dramatic gifts in the description of "the interaction of human
beings", something which Tracy finds absent in most contemporary poetry ("One
time I say my brother's a marine. / Joey says merchant marine? / And I'm like, a
merchant marine? / No a marine."). C.D. Wright's Cooling Time
is a "scrapbook of reminiscences", "critical doodles" and the odd poem, a book
unified by a "vague dissatisfaction with the position of the poet in our time".
Adam Kirsch reviews The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia
Hamilton, providing example of where "the publication of [his] letters has the
potential to help clarify the complex relationship between his life and work",
but fails (though this is hardly a failure) to change the outline of his life
established by former biographers. Would that we all could adopt Eliot,
WCW, Pound and Tate as mentors, even at the price of displacing a surrogate
father. Christine Pugh pens an odd essay on the value of experience in
poetry, coming down mainly on the side that it is overrated (e.g., Sexton, Plath,
Lowell), and noting that even the "chattier" New York School poets "played down
the role." Peter Campion's curmudgeonly piece is called Grasshoppers: A
Notebook, which starts off with the dubious claim that "We are not
instinctive creatures ... born with no knowledge of the behaviors we require to
survive" (tell that to our forbearers who survived the Ice Age). Campion
suggests (by way of Bruno Snell) that "loneliness and isolation [are] formative
elements of the work", and calls the movie Open Water into play as
evidence of the power of distillation of "full sensory potential". In a
strange segue, Campion then switches gears and begins a general rant against
weblogging, with specific mention of a blogger who faulted Frost as a dead white
heterosexual male (couldn't he have found a more interesting aberration, for
example, almost anywhere on Jim Behrle's pages?). CDY gets another 15
minutes of fame in Campion's verbatim quote from a blog entry in which C. Dale
comments on how many rejections it took to get Vespers published
— an example so objectionable that Campion would
take up needlepoint (or perhaps Peter is just miffed that he hasn't made it into
BAP yet, as did Vespers). The rest of the article discusses the
narrative tradition, the "galvanizing force" of the sentence, the Grosse Fugue
on the San Mateo Bridge, the inanity of trying to "find one's voice", and
eternal question of "why write poems, anyway?", concluding with the admonition
that we'd best just soak up the sunlight, like that king among bugs (?), the
grasshopper. I have to admit, I liked his observation that "the greatest
risk for any poet ... is the loss of nerve."
The actual poetry of Poetry seemed a
little more interesting than usual this month. Samuel Manashe contributes
3 short, pithy poems (Apotheosis: "Taut with longing / You must become /
The god you sought — / The only one"). Kathleen Halme III (which
name sounds more apt for a Pharoah than a poet) contributes some good licks
("Forget the cruelty / of April, February had fangs, / incisors of mini-daffs
and Daphne, "). Nice, dark sonnet by Martha McFerren ("His knees drawn up,
my husband lies asleep, / so like Tollund Man — the sacrifice / found pickled in
a bog. He sinks night-deep, / a similar repose upon his face."). An
odd, engaging piece by Teresa Leo (The World According to Narcissus: " ... /
With others, he measured potential, / their ability to slip from contemporary
cotton / into cocktail shooters, a brown sugar backstory"). A couple of
pretty damned funny poems by John Skoyles, this from I Dreamt I Went to Hell
with Charles Schwab: "Charles had the tender jowls / or a new senator, / no
rent worries ever pitched / their tents there,"). Short work by Lawrence
Joseph. An interesting, if not completely convincing interweaving of verse
lines and a 17th century transcript in Anne-Marie Cusac's The Ducking Stool.
Good work by John Rybicki (The Story: " .../ the blood bell gone again like
fading action, / the slug you moment in a story, then after / when the body hums
warm and electric / ..."). Tight form from R.S. Gwynn, and a diverting
play on the Letter K (shades of Sesame Street) from Mary Karr (Revelations in
the Key of K: "... / of the shadow of blank about to break / in half, my being
leans against my spinal K, / which props me up, broomstick straight, / a
strong bone in the crypt of meat I am."). Fable, by Tom Sleigh,
which certainly sounds like a rip on a Certain Current Administration.
Three poems by Talvikki Ansel, two with botanical titles (Xylem, Mycorrhizae).
Plenty of plainspeak from Edward Hirsch ("I wish I could find that skinny,
long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library.").
Nice domestic verse from Jill Osier ("You can't even buy a soda. You can
only / see these things, see a mother steer / her son to the car, his head
cocked / licking his ice cream."). Similarly plain poems by Linda
Gregerson, gussied up by spatial distribution.
Well, there you are. At the front cover
page with a palm-lined lake in sepia, punched with a passport stamp. More
tomorrow, when I take on the mountain of magazines that have piled up.
Posted by jbahr at 06:22 PM | Comments (5)
May 21, 2005
Like, Whatever
I haven't met my buddy, Tom Becker, for almost 40 years, since we had to stop
playing basketball together when his dad was transferred. He somehow
managed to find me again via the Internet, and has been sending frequently
hilarious emails since from his home in France, where he's lived for almost 3
decades. The emails often contain short movies, recent
Tom Tomorrow
comics, excerpts from Maureen Dowd articles, and other funny stuff, like these
Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays:
Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its
two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. / His thoughts tumbled in his
head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling
Free. / He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy
who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes
with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools
about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with
a pinhole in it. / She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was
room-temperature Canadian beef. / She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like
that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. / Her vocabulary was as bad as,
like, whatever. / He was as tall as a 6'3" tree. / The revelation that his
marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as
a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM. / The little
boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't. /
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with
vegetable soup. / From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an
eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and
Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30. / Her hair glistened in the rain
like a nose hair after a sneeze. / The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just
like maggots when you fry them in hot grease. / Long separated by cruel fate,
the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two
freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the
other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. / They lived in a typical
suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
/ John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also
never met. / He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the
East River. / Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap,
only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut. / Shots rang out,
as shots are wont to do. / The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But
unlike Phil, this plan just might work. / The young fighter had a hungry look,
the kind you get from not eating for a while. / "Oh, Jason, take me!" she
panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night. / He was
as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that
was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. / The
ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her,
like a dog at a fire hydrant. / It was an American tradition, like fathers
chasing kids around with power tools. / He was deeply in love. When she spoke,
he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up. / She was
as easy as the TV Guide crossword. / Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they
had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser. / She walked into my office like a
centipede with 98 missing legs. / It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you
accidentally staple it to the wall.
~~~~~~~
I got my contributor copies of Spoon River Poetry Review, in which I
was pleased to have three poems show up, including the
poem that
puts me in the Sigma Club along with CDY. I finally managed to order Victoria Chang's Circle, and while I was at
it, added Robin Behn's The Practice of Poetry, Richard Siken's
Crush and Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa for good measure.
I'll report back when I've received and read them. As a curious aside,
based upon my selection, Amazon responded with:
| Recommended for You: | Customers who bought items in your order also bought: | ||
 |
Door In The Mountain by Jean Valentine |
|
Voluntary Servitude by Mark Wunderlich |
 |
The Orchard (American Poets Continuum) by Brigit Pegeen Kelly |
 |
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced by Catherine Barnett |
 |
Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser |
 |
Citizen by Andrew Feld |
 |
Materialism (American Poetry Series) by Jorie Graham |
 |
Goldbeater's Skin (The Colorado Prize) by G. C. Waldrep |
 |
Eldest (Inheritance, Book 2) by Christopher Paolini |
 |
The Room Where I Was Born (The Brittingham Prize in Poetry) by Brian Teare |
Posted by jbahr at 09:19 AM | Comments (6)
May 19, 2005
Green. Supergreen.
Like CDY, my son attended the premiere of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith last
night (at midnight), after waiting in line half the day. Luckily, he has
finished with his university classes until the fall, and will be sleeping most
of today, I imagine. Speaking of Which Franchise, the WSJ ran an
article examining why so many die-hard fans keep buying mountains
of
SW Paraphernalia, while loathing the recent prequels (Phantom Menace and
Attack of the Clones). The article quotes Jeff Yankey saying that
Lucas made a lot of mistakes (e.g., casting a nine-year-old as the PM's
protagonist), but that doesn't stop Yankey from the following: he has over
200 SW action figures, and closets full of SW costumes, from the Royal Guard to
Slave Leia; he met his wife at a SW fan club, and had Imperial
Stormtroopers as groomsmen at their wedding. In other news: The
Federal Reserve is starting to worry about the rapid, continuing rise in house
prices, especially in the hot markets of Florida, California and New York
— where more and more people are buying
second and third homes for speculative gains on creative low-interest financing.
Americans hold Congress in the lowest regard since 1994. BMW and Mercedes
regained their slots in the JD Powers top-five quality scale, joining Lexus,
Jaguar and Cadillac. In a heated race, Antonio Villaraigosa beat James
Hahn to become Mayor of L.A, the first Latino mayor since 1872. Disney
paid $78 million for the rights to Kermit the Frog, whom they intend to promote
relentlessly in upcoming movies. There will be more band for the buck this
summer, as top bands charge much less (less-than-prime seats to The Eagles for
$25), hoping to avoid the concert disaster of 2004.
Posted by jbahr at 08:33 AM | Comments (1)
May 18, 2005
Hump Day
“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been
looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first
speech.
“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice
said with some severity; “it's very rude.”
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this;
but all he SAID was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I'm
glad they've begun asking riddles.—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer
to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare
went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I
mean what I say—that's the same thing, you know.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland,
Chapter 7
I've been reading Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander, and I have to admit
that there are moments in which I laugh, thinking back to Jim's
John Ashbunny
comic series. Reading Ashbery nowadays increasingly reminds me of
something, and I can't put my finger on it. It's diverting and articulate,
of course, and lurking behind the verse is The Man, an amalgam of truth and
mythology that includes his art criticism, life abroad, fluency in French,
shenanigans with the New York School poets, hand-picked winning of the Yale
Younger. His good looks, wonderful vocabulary, silky urbanity. Even
his sexual preference is interesting. I guess what I mean is that reading
Ashbery is like reading Lewis Lapham, the brilliant editor of Harper's.
They know all the right people and do all the most fascinating things. And
they can write their ass off, full steam ahead (stories abound that for decades,
all of Ashbery's works were first drafts, hot off the typewriter). Of
course, even Lapham fails to please fully, when he starts using the same
familiar editorial tactics and sentence structure. And, it doesn't help
that we're increasingly inured to the wholesale disjunction that drive JA's
poetry around like a bumper car in a Nebraska county fair. Ashbery is
America's Greatest Living Poet, if Bloom et al. are to be believed. And
he's clearly a brilliant man with a wide range of interests. Is he a
polymath for the ages, like Voltaire, Pascal or Eratosthenes? Perhaps not,
but I enjoy reading his work, and if enough people still do in 100 years, his great
gamble with words, one over which perhaps he had no conscious control, will have
paid off.
I've got a pile of magazines to synopsize, and three days of WSJ. Let's
start there: More inmates and fewer parole opportunities mean the prison
inmate population is dying off in greater numbers, swamping the prison
carpenters with orders for coffins. Hedge fund managers are really
into fine art, buying now hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mid-range
works, trading, promoting, dumping, just like the stock market. The
pork-heavy highway bill, $11 billion more than even Bush wanted, passed the
Senate by a vote of 89 to 11, making it virtually veto-proof. The
authoritarian Uzbekistan government says 137 terrorist were killed in a weekend
protest, while aid organizations say the number is between 500 and 1,000.
A survey of millionaires found that estate tax repeal isn't all that popular,
for various reasons. College tuition has been going up at 3 times the rate
of inflation for a decade, largely due to declining state budgets, ballooning
bureaucracies, pay for superstar professors and almost $14 billion in new
construction for facilities like Ohio University's new student center with a
food court, ballroom, 250-seat theater, and five-story atrium. TV ratings
are increasingly interested in the average income of viewers, leading
advertisers to reward the most affluent-attracting: West Wing,
The Apprentice 3, Boston Legal, The Office and (of all things)
Desperate Housewives. The war has begun among the new high-end game
systems: PlayStation 3 will have the baddest-ass graphics and the
ability to videoconference with fellow users, while Xbox 360 will connect
to music, photo, and movie libraries over home networks. Nintendo
will probably bring out another Zelda. The dollar keeps rallying, defying
traders' expectations for lower value. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
predicts a showdown when he brings conservative Federal judge nominees back for
confirmation who have already been denied appointment in prior Congressional
sessions. Newly ordained Pope Benedict XVI has put former pope John Paul
on the fast track for sainthood. After a couple of centuries of solid
performance, Lloyds of London struggles with practices that are "slapdash,
archaic and costly". Household debt, now averaging $80,000 per family, is
rising much faster than income or spending. Funeral directors who ship the
deceased on major airlines earn frequent flier miles. Kuwait's parliament
passed a law giving women the right to vote. The Supreme Court ruled that
states cannot prohibit the purchase of wine from other states (huzzah!), a
defeat for Florida, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Indiana and Ohio, all
of which were trying to protect their small local wine industries, and 15 more
states (such as Colorado) who just prohibit it for no reason at all.
Posted by jbahr at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2005
BlogWalking
So,
I received a notice from the Crab Orchard Open Competition that, alas, I didn't
win. Which was, frankly, no surprise as I've given up sending material to
them for their regular submissions, so why would I expect their screeners and
judge to have any different reaction to my poetry. What was a
little unusual was the letter, which said that my manuscript "A Battering of
Faces" had not won the book contest. The manuscript was titled "A
Bartering of Faces". I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
I was thinking "BlogWalking" and this tune came into my head, and after a
while, I realized it was the BeeGees, and it goes like:
It's just your jive talkin'
You're telling me lies, yeah
Jive
talkin'
You wear a disguise
Jive talkin'
So misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin'
You really no good
which I last heard in 1979, when I was playing the Saturday Night Live album
on auto-repeat, day after day, week after week, while I finished writing my PhD
dissertation. The album was vinyl and the dissertation was on Software
Testing Theory. But, as usual, I digress.
It occurs to me that I have been routinely
robot-dancing through the Usual Suspects (CDY,
Jim,
Jonathan,
Josh, ...) and it's time to visit
some of my other blogbrethren: Thomas Basbøll contrasts
philosophy and poetry, which he considers two art forms.
Joy read with Galway Kinnell and
Lawrence Ferlingetti yesterday on www.kclu.org.
Lovely dresses at Nada's (I don't
know if she buys them or makes them).
Stuart is a Cultural
Creative (so was Junie). Didi
announces Poetry At Sea with David Trinidad, Denise Duhamel, Nick Carbo, and
David Lehman. Kasey's reading in
Berkeley this weekend.
Greg gives his two cents on the Poetry Wars.
Professor Roy
critiques some
truly awful poetry. Ken reminds us that the
Carrboro Poetry Festival is
right around the corner. Good pic of
Rebecca playing the violin.
Heidi gets her book
reviewed by
Joyelle Sweeney. Ann's
a postmodernist (lots of poets are).
Peter's off to the
Possession Sound Writer's Conference.
Shanna discusses
The defrocking
Prufrock meme.
Chris reprints the Hot Ass Poem.
Soulmate Dominic is a poet and
programmer. Tricia's
Not-A-Finger is variously outrageous, bizarre, brilliant and
disturbing. I like that in a woman.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I was so stunned by the mangling of my manuscript's name, that I completely forgot to look who had won the Crab Orchard Open Competition. It was David Hernandez, for his book Always Danger. My apologies for not spilling the beans sooner, and congratulations, David.
Posted by jbahr at 07:13 AM | Comments (4)
May 14, 2005
Modernist Me
I, too, took the quiz that Jonathan pointed out (he ended up a PostModernist),
as did Catherine (another
PostModernist), and Reb
(an Existentialist). Here's the results:
 |
You scored as Modernist. Modernism represents the thought that science and reason are all we need to carry on. Religion is unnecessary and any sort of spirituality halts progress. You believe everything has a rational explanation. 50% of Americans share your world-view.
What is Your World View? |
My mail yesterday was the curious combination of the USC Trojan Family Magazine and CardPlayer: The Poker Authority, the latter of which I'm pretty sure I never ordered. Last week, I received the Johns Hopkins University and Pomona College magazines, as well. There may be karma in this combination, as I spent a lot of undergraduate time playing cards. When I arrived at Pomona College, I used my full National Merit Scholarship to pay for avoiding classes, attending anti-war rallies, driving with the other Norton Dormies to picket the grape growers, and playing hearts. The Norton Dorm RA maintained a giant scoreboard of current rankings, which was segregated into the National and American Leagues. We always played for money, and had developed a system whereby anyone who was a net winner on the board could collect from anyone who was a net loser. One year of Pomona was enough, however, and I transferred to The Johns Hopkins University. There we played poker and bridge almost constantly in the student cafeteria, taking breaks only long enough to order up a submarine sandwich, something that Baltimore is known for. Everyone had a game moniker (though I forget mine), including Mi Lai George, who was fresh back from Vietnam with a wound that got him out of the fray, and who still wore Airborne patches sewn onto his tennis shoes. I was saved from a life of complete sloth by discovering the Computer Science program, in which I became immersed until transferring to USC (I was getting good at hopping from one coast to another). At USC, the card action all took place in the Student Activity Center, the refuge for all the non-whites and other undesirables who couldn't get into a fraternity, myself included. There was a couple of poker games going almost all the time, and for relaxation we would play ping-pong — a game I was never very good at, but I did get to play against O.J. Simpson (one of the answers in Whim's Quiz), who had dropped by his alma mater to chat with some friends in the SAC. It seems like I spent a decade playing cards there, but somewhere along the way I got an undergraduate, master's, and PhD degree, changing majors from physics to economics to business more than once, while waiting for USC to introduce a Computer Science degree. I was a couple of credits away from a second master's (an MBA), when I decided to work in the computer industry. At that point, I had been an assistant professor in two different departments and was up for tenure and promotion to Associate in Computer Science. God knows, if I had stayed, I might still be living with Jonathan's curse of the "Associate Professor Malaise".
The May issue of Wired depicts Lucas wearing half a black helmet and asking if there's Life After Darth for George. Gary Wolf reports on the laughable inaccuracies of the three major credit agencies, and the expected legislative fallout from the loss of personal data by The Bank of America and Choicepoint. On July 4th, NASA's Deep Impact probe will drop a bomb on the comet Tempel 1, and photograph what is thought to be primordial star-stuff in its core. By 2007, the Marine Corps expects to deplay the Gladiator, a mobile battle station that looks like a lawnmower with weaponry, and can be navigated by hand-held controls from a distance. A Monaco-based shipbuilder has just debuted the 118 WallyPower (couldn't they think of a better name?) which, for only $26 million, gets you a superyacht that accommodates 8 passengers and can do 80 miles an hour. I don't know where Skyy Vodka gets these women for their ads, but they're uniformly gorgeous. Germs are everywhere, but seldom get you sick (it takes more than 100,000 E. Coli, for example), and the most germ-laden places, in order, are: kitchen dishrags and sponges (by a factor of 500), then shopping cart handles, plastic kitchen cutting boards, toilet handles, faucets, desk tops, and telephone receivers. The latest thing among Japanese teenage girls is inky, black contact lenses to make one's eyes as big as an anime character. The SureFire flashlight at $2,900 produces 120 times more light than a conventional one, and is neither bigger nor heavier. Bruce Sterling suggests 4 things that could wreck the most dysfunctional industry in America (health care), including medical tourism, simple-and-easy diagnostic clinics, and alternative medicines. Number 1 on The Wired 40 is the Apple iPowerhouse and number 2 is Google.
Posted by jbahr at 08:23 AM | Comments (3)
May 13, 2005
Swink is Swank
There's an elementary school just behind my back yard, and they're pouring a
new expanse of concrete, using one of those giant 3-story hose contraptions that
take the concrete from the truck to pump it where it's needed. When I was
a teenager, I worked summers in construction as a General Helper, which means I
basically did whatever they told me. The work was boring when it wasn't
remarkably dangerous, but that was in Northern Virginia in the late 60's, and
there were neither unions nor OSHA standards. One task that I got a lot
was pushing wheelbarrows filled with concrete over wooden planks set down
between apartment foundation forms and the surrounding dirt, then dumping the
concrete between the forms. The foreman always kept an eye on me, because
if I lost balance even a little, the weight of the slushy concrete tipped the
wheelbarrow over with a force impossible to stop. The foreman also liked
to put me on all-black crews, since the workplace was still largely segregated,
racism was rampant, and only the "college boys" had no problems taking orders
from black crew chiefs. One June, I spent every day putting in sidewalk
forms and raking the dirt smooth in preparation for the concrete pour. I
would bring a basket of my dad's home-grown strawberries every day and share
them with my crew at lunch. The black men would sit around at break,
eating strawberries and relating tales of their amazing sex lives. The rest of the summer, the crew boss called
me Strawberry, and didn't make me pick up the trash around the yard quite so
often. Times have certainly changed.
I received a copy of the new Swink yesterday, an impeccably organized
volume constructed by Editor-in-Chief Leelila Strogov. The poets in this
issue include Angela Ball, Rachel Dacus (way to go, Rachel!), Denise Duhamel,
Paul Guest, Kevin Prufer (poetry
editor of Pleiades), Thomas Lux, and Bob Hicok, among others. I did
a reading at the Swink bash during the Chicago AWP, and met Bob there.
I've never met anyone who looks so much like his bio picture. He was
wearing scruffy pants, a T-shirt with words so faded they were unreadable, and
tennies. I was wearing my red cowboy wedding shirt, and we made quite a
pair. In this Swink, Bob has contributed fiction (Matchbox),
and it's pretty damn fine. Leelila has included some interesting sections
to the edition, including Debut Poetry (which I presume are newly minted
poets), Damaged Darlings (which are blemished fiction works by one author
that another author fixes up), Memoir and Takes One To Know One.
Mark Strevick is this issue's winner of the Swink Literary Award in Poetry
with Burnt Bus: "Left in a lot, one where a building stood / or one
widely fenced and piled with odd iron, / one where the scrap man spits from his
tin shed, / left in these unruly lots is the bus, / burnt, or half-demolished,
propped up on blocks / but looking still in all this wilderness / like a bus
...". I love the final section where you will find an advertisement for
Fence and Stolichnaya Razberi vodka.
Today from the WSJ: Ex-HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, when
he's not sitting in his fraud/moneylaundering/conspiracy trial, has taken to
preaching at local fundamentalist churches, prompting the prosecution to opine
that he's trying to sway the largely conservative jury. The rich-poor gap
continues to widen in the U.S, and researchers find that upward mobility may
take much more than the 3 generations once believed. Microsoft released
its Xbox 360. Casinos are embedding micro-transmitters in
large-denomination betting chips to better track the tactics and habits of
high-rollers. The EPA reports that overall chemical pollution declined in
2003, but levels of mercury, dioxin, and PCBs rose. A federal judge struck
down Nebraska's gay-marriage bans. An FBI sting operation arrested 16
current and former police and military personnel, charged with taking bribes to
allow drugs to cross the Mexican border. John Bolton's nomination for UN
Ambassador finally made it out of committee on a strict party-line vote, but he
was not endorsed by the committee. The slumping market for SUV's is
killing Detroit, which makes virtually all its profit from them. Industry
analysts blame the poor box-office showing of Kingdom of Heaven on the matching
up of an R rating with Orlando Bloom, many of whose fans are young girls.
Three Afgans died in a riot sparked by disclosures that Quantanamo guards
descrecrated an inmate's Quran.
Posted by jbahr at 08:34 AM | Comments (1)
May 12, 2005
Not So Wild Wednesday
There has been a small flurry of commentary about
Jonathan Mayhew's admission
that he subscribes to the "blogger's code" — a
reticence on the part of our blogging community to speak ill of one another
and/or our artistic efforts. The quite regularly articulate, insightful
and entertaining
Tim Yu is one such example of flurry-making (not that Tim's blog isn't
interesting enough, just for his jousting with
Ron Silliman).
Personally, I have no problem supporting the art
of those who I have gotten to know through their weekly postings. I have long since gotten over
acid-testing each work of poetry as if it were a signal to be measured or a
titration to be performed. It's almost an Anti-Foetry kind of stance:
the more I get to know someone the more I like what they're up to. And how
are we to separate the artist from his art? Particularly in these times in
which 60% of poetry is in some sense confessional, even in the elliptical, even
in the outrageous? I have admitted many times an affinity for the work of
Billy Collins. I like Billy because I like the way his mind works, and the
fact that he got where he is without a lot of Academy schmoozing, the
exquisite care he took in undressing Ms. Dickinson, and the image of him walking
down the street listening to jazz on a Walkman. His poetry, seemingly
banal to many others here, becomes an eloquent shorthand describing a life that
I am happy someone is living. I have developed a similar attitude toward
Lyn Hejinian, Dean Young, and G.C. Waldrep. But, I digress from news
reporting.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Carl
Icahn has led a group of hedge funds to win board seats at Blockbuster, with an
eye to cutting costs and eliminating some of the company's innovations intended
to combat Internet rental companies (e.g., NetFlix). South Korea announced
that it's pulled 3 rods from its reactors which have the material for 3 nuclear
bombs, and Iran is widely expected to stop talks with the Europeans and go back
to enriching uranium. The Iraq civilian death toll of 400+ from insurgent
attacks is higher already in May than in all of April. Escapes from fish
farms have risen to the point that the World Wildlife Fund says that one quarter
of all Norwegian "wild" salmon are escapees. UAL is dumping $6 billion of
unfunded pension liability onto the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty
Corporation, which has $39 billion in assets and $62.3 billion in pension
liabilities already. China accounts for more pirated DVDs and CDs, but
Russian counterfeiters are rapidly catching up with the help of political
connections and non-enforcement of existing laws by the police. The
build-out of the high-speed Internet infrastructure was so extensive during the
dot.com years that 85% of all fiber lines are still unused.
This month's Rolling Stone (which my son calls
the geriatric version of Spin) sports a picture of Orlando Bloom, "Hollywood's
No. 1 Pretty Boy". Just to prove my son right, the initial pages are just
filled with old guys: DeNiro doing an AMEX ad, Sting playing on a college
tour, Springsteen out with Devils & Dust, Paul McCartney back on tour,
Neil Young just out of a hospital for a brain aneurysm, an interview with a
lined and haggard Robert Plant, and Elton John announcing his upcoming marriage
to long-time partner David Furnish. Garbage band members managed to
put aside their differences long enough to make Bleed Like Me, which has
hit the Top 10. Whoda thunk? Mariah Carey's new CD, The
Emancipation of Mimi, sold 600,000 copies in the first two weeks.
Good Vibrations, the Broadway musical based upon the Beach Boys catalog,
closed its 3-month run after savage reviews. Texas Republican state
senators, citing his objectionable fondness for marijuana and support for Kerry
in 2004, blocked legislation that would have named an Austin turnpike
after Willie Nelson. A picture of Ice T's wife Coco would lead almost
anyone to ask: Are those real? RS reports on the
Kentucky evangelical telecast, starring zillions of conservatives and Bill Frist,
in which born-again Watergater Chuck Colson compared the imposition of
conservative Christian views to Lincoln's freeing of the slaves. The
Quagmire, a particularly dark article on Our Iraq War, says things are only
getting worse (100,000 Iraqi civilians, 177 Allied troops, 1600 U.S. military,
and 229 private contractors dead), and it's going to get worser until we finally
leave and Iraq devolves into civil war. Also cited is the amazing
statistic that the Iraq War has now cost six times what the Vietnam War cost in
constant dollars. Condie Rice has eliminated data on worldwide terrorist
reports from the State Department's annual report, insisting that they are "not
relevant", to which Representative Henry Waxman said: "this is a ludicrous
position". After a downright scary decade or two of drugs, alcohol and
group sex, Mötley Crüe is pretty cleaned up, and each band member is pulling
down $500,000 a week on tour. Weezer's new CD, Make Believe, gets 4
stars, as does the Raveonettes' Pretty in Black, and Coldplay's Speed
of Sound.
Posted by jbahr at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
Hat Trick
I received one of those stealth mailings that looks like an acceptance, but
ends up being a request to subscribe to the litmag. This time it was from
Chelsea, a journal that I've always liked, and have been published in,
but which has no website. I'll send them a check, but I might have done so
quicker had they been web-ready. I almost subscribe online now-a-days,
even if it's filling out a form and sending a separate check by snailmail.
I can't imagine why Chelsea has no website. Grade schoolers have
websites. Prison inmates have websites. It's a little like Albert
Goldbarth's aversion to all things computer.
Jonathan pointed me to
The Hat, which appears to be jam-packed with
talent (Clover, Lehman, Halliday, Waldrep), including Jonathan and many other
past and current blogmates:
Drew Gardner,
Nada Gordon,
Henry Gould,
Kasey Mohammad,
Daniel Nester,
Michael Schiavo, Aaron Tieger,
Tony Tost and
Alli Warren. Speaking of
Jonathan, his talented daughter wrote a fine
sestina.
This morning's Wall Street Journal discusses a discovery by J.P.
Morgan Chase that the bank held slaves as assets between 1834 and 1861, in its
early years as the Citizens Bank of New Orleans. The research was
motivated by a new Chicago law that requires financial institutions to
investigate possible incidents of slaveholding in their past. Major
medical journals are beginning to tighten up standards for peer-reviewed
articles, to ensure that they full account for drug risks, and follow sound
research protocols — a move found to be necessary
as journal articles become increasingly used by drug companies in advertising
and promotion. Swedish scientists have found that gay men's brains respond
to sexual odors more like women's, adding more fuel to the gay nature-nurture
debate. You want to be a French utility worker. They get guaranteed
lifetime employment, retirement with 75% salary; free health care; subsidized
meals, housing, and vacations. The ethically-challenged Ahmed Chalabi,
once the Administration's favorite source of WMD allegations, is now the acting
Iraqi Deputy Premier and Oil Minister, and strident critic of U.S. occupation.
Iraqi President Talabani is negotiating with the King of Jordan to get Chalabi's
old conviction for bank fraud resolved. U.S. traffic congestion is up
again, now accounting for $63 billion in lost time (how DO they get numbers like
that?). The Senate wants to add another $11 billion to the already
pork-heavy highway bill, prompting a threat to veto it by Bush. The
hottest draw for new MBA's 5 years ago was Silicon Valley — now, it's China,
Singapore, and India. The National Association of Realtors is in
discussions with the Federal Trade Commission to head off an anti-trust suit
that would open up house listings to all realtors (even Internet-based ones),
and overturn many states' laws that require fixed commissions (usually 5 or 6
percent).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daisy Fried apparently plugged our
Submissions
Response Database in the online edition of
Poetry.
There are dozens of poets now contributing data that tracks the time it takes
for literary journals to respond, but we could always use more help.
Please email me if you'd like to add your submissions response numbers to the
database and I'll send you some user-friendly instructions.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Correction: James was kind enough to leave a comment, indicating that Chelsea DOES have a website now at: http://www.chelseamag.org/. I've update my Poetry Journal Database.
Posted by jbahr at 07:27 AM | Comments (1)
May 08, 2005
Sunday Morning
With my recent ridiculously hectic work schedule, posting to the blog has
seemed more and more like coming up for air. My poetry writing has taken a
hit, to be sure, from two poems a week, to one a week, to about one a month
recently. And, I've never had so little material out for submission.
It's probably a good thing that summer is coming and journals are shutting down
like so many bears with their hibernation cycles out of whack.
I got a standard rejection note from Ploughshares and, as usual, I was
curious who nailed me this time. It's iffy enough when you know who a
guest editor is going to be (or, for that matter, a contest judge), but
Ploughshares invites such a wide variety of guest poetry editors that
there's no point in guessing.
One thing I like about BusinessWeek is its ideological balance, which
is surprising to find in a business journal. In Safety Net Nation,
BW summarizes the mood of the public after Bush's 60-day blitz for
partial privatization of Social Security: they ain't buying it.
Studies show that we have reached our limit of personal risk, a trend that has
been increasing for two decades with the demolition of pensions, the advent of
401(k)s, and the slow transfer of medical costs from companies to individuals.
Bush is set to meet with China's President Hu Jintao to discuss what has been
called "the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century".
U.S. capital spending has been slowing, but it's still hot in business equipment
and software. Long-term bonds (and mortgages) continue their low yields
(i.e., interest rates) so the U.S. government is thinking about bringing back
30-year Treasury bonds to lock in low financing costs for our rather sizable
national debt. The next round of competition in gaming platforms will see
Microsoft's Xbox 360 raise its market share to 25%, Sony's PlayStation 3 drop to
65%, and Nintendo's Revolution slump to 10% (and I hope they release a new
Zelda). House Majority Leader Tom Delay has the unanimous public support
of his Republican colleagues, but behind the scenes his peers are jockeying to
take his job. Kim Jong Il may authorize the start of underground nuclear
testing, in a risky bid to negotiate from strength. Startup drug company
Curis is working on a new drug to treat cancer and stop hair loss that is based
upon manipulating the Hedgehog signaling pathway, a complex network of proteins
that cells use to communicate. Corporate America has $450 billion in
unfunded pension liabilities (down from a $300 surplus in 1999), and Bush
Administration (uncharacteristically) wants to increase mandatory corporate
contributions to pension funds. Taiwan's future matters because the global
economy couldn't function without it. Taiwan is #1 in the world in
semiconductor chip foundries, notebook PC production, LCD monitors, and PDAs and
#2 in many other high-tech areas. Dreamworks is out to prove that their
animation talents extend beyond Shrek, and are building the buzz for
Madagascar, which will be going up against Star Wars III, Batman
Begins, War of the Worlds and Kingdom of Heaven this summer.
The newest thing is hand-held satellite radio players.
There's been some good news around the blogosphere.
Reb is recording for
Matt's radio show. Steve
got his manuscript picked up by Ghost Road Press.
Eduardo has decided
on Asleep Inside an Old Guitar for his first book, which was my favorite
when he was asking for opinions.
Suzanne points out that
horse less press is online.
Ivy's got a chapbook available. I agree with
Deborah that Time's pick of poetry
work was surprisingly eclectic. I don't know if
Josh coined the term avant
gardening, but I like it. CDY
should be playing baccarat right about now.
Eileen's
book,
I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved, should be out soon.
Katie expands her craft empire.
Paul gets another poem in Slate.
Great pic of a smiling Gabe
with ex-student. Paula
announces the newest Avatar
Review is out.
Posted by jbahr at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2005
SJC
My techie buds in San Jose likes to reminisce about the days when the airport
was as friendly as an In-and-Out drivethrough. You could park across the
street from the terminal, breeze through limited security screening, and run up
the portable stairways to a waiting jet. Now, you have to reserve an hour
or more, just like anywhere else.
On the plane, I read the latest Time, dedicated to All Thing Star Wars
and featuring Darth Vader's ugly mug on the cover. But, what's really
amazing is 7 Books of Poetry Worth Curling Up With, with blurbs and
recommendations for books by Laura Kasischke, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons
(R.I.P.), Donald Revell, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jorie Graham and Richard Wilbur.
Considering that Time has a circulation roughly 1,000 times that of
APR, not a bad plug, and it makes you wonder how they came up with the list.
Time has 10 Questions for Tony Hawk, the "legendary skateboard champ",
including whether skateboarding should be an Olympic event. Another one of
those incredibly dumb Microsoft Office ads, where everybody walks around with a
dinosaur head on. Gas won't get cheaper because we're either at or near "Hubbert's
Peak", the point where worldwide oil reserves are 50% depleted, and all the rest
is costly to extract. The Defense Department is buying a lot more planes,
helicopters, and armored vehicles from foreign suppliers. The large Star
Wars sections has a few scenes from Revenge of the Sith, and a handy Star
Wars Family Tree with all kinds of intramovie linkage to prove that Lucas wasn't
just making all this up as he went along.
~~~~~~~~~~~
I was relieved to find that Ron can't memorize poetry worth a damn either. I have honestly even read a few lines and thought "Hey, I liked that. I wonder if I wrote it."
Posted by jbahr at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)
May 04, 2005
Outta Heah
I'm flying on short notice back to San Jose today, so this will be short.
The new APR is out, that scurrilous toady of conventional verse, that
thinly veiled house organ for the well-connected.
Wait! I thought I was posting on Foetry.
On the other hand, we do see Donald Revell staring back at us with a smile
reminiscent of a cat with a canary in its mouth. He provides six poems,
including the long Thief of Strings. Because he co-edits Colorado
Review poetry with Jorie Graham, I'm always expecting Revell's verse to be more
elliptical. It's actually rather chatty, a sort of colloquial Carl
Phillips with conventional breaks: "Early. I was windows and
oranges. / Boys with white hair cut straight across their brows, / Girls in
white blouses. / Death is a girl in a white blouse, I'm telling you."
Michael Ryan is up next with poems that tend more to the narrative: "The
pain makes me tired, / as if I could fight it, / as if I can't not fight
it / every moment now even asleep / pulling myself up a mountain hand over
hand". Not coincidentally, David Rivard reviews Michael Ryan's New and
Selected Poems. Even when it's enjoyable, there's that staged sense to
APR, the way they jump on hot new poets with interesting stories (Hicok, Waldrep),
the almost predictable rotation of Major Poets throughout a year. I've
stopped submitting to APR because it just seems like a litmag that gives you a
ring when you're interesting enough, and not before. But, I digress.
There's an interesting poem by Marlys West, When the Coward Goes Out: "I
am eating the wing of a honeybee, my tepid life is a glass of tea. /
Remember the sound of the gold trombones." Dana Levin (whom, I believe was
an apprentice to Louise Glück) starts a 3-part
series on The Heroics of Style, in which Ms. Levin will "explore the
relationship between pressure — psychological, societal, aesthetic — and the
development of poetic style." Huh. And I thought you just found your
voice one day behind the sofa cushions. Pinsky talks about poetry work
habits, and Clayton Eshleman translates 14 poems by César Vallejo (does Clayton
speak Spanish?). Anne Marie Macari has a Poet's Photo that Jim will have
to comment on (JG chin on her fist, staring out into the space), and three poems
(As if the Body: "In the alleys below the heart, / a drain, as if
inside there's / a city, blood gathering / in a pool, a cistern"). Two
poems by Susan Wood, and a remarkably plainspoken piece by Brenda Marie Osbey
("your lips against me in the dark / expanse of face and shoulders / feel of
back and breastbone / nothing but what they / are / how when you look").
Four Bly poems by Bly. An interesting and weird poem, Dissayda Worl,
by Bill Stobb. Two long skinny poems by Eileen Myles. I stopped
reading there, because I have to finish packing, but there's also work by Steve
Healey and Lisa Beskin, and an interesting article by John Yau on the Poet as
Art Critic, with stories about the New York School-ers. Katie Ford
covers the back with Colosseum.
Posted by jbahr at 08:21 AM | Comments (2)
May 03, 2005
Back Again
I know. Reading this blog is beginning to seem like waiting for
The Onion to arrive every Wednesday.
Really, I've been just buried with work. One project is this amazing
— wait, I'm under Non-Disclosure Agreement on that
one and can't talk about it. OK, there is this cool product we're doing
the software for that — oh hell, I'm under NDA on that one, too. We're
porting Linux to a big new server product, and — oops, can't talk about that one
either. Well, anyway, you'd find all this stuff really interesting, if I could
talk about any of it.
As you can imagine, the periodicals have piled
up relentlessly in the past week. I've managed to cruise through most of
them on my way to Dreamland every evening, now that I've finished Life of Pi,
which, by the way, was pretty good. Interesting stuff from the Wall
Street Journal in the past couple of days includes: Jimmy Buffett and
Warren Buffett are good buddies, and suspect they have a common ancestor.
The North Koreans said they just can't work with Bush, and then fired a missile
into the Sea of Japan. Neiman-Marcus, the gonzo luxury store which has
seen sales climb almost 20% this year, will be purchased for $5 billion by a
private equity firm. John Ashcroft is forming a private consulting firm in
D.C., specializing in "strategy, security, and crisis counseling" (crisis
counseling?). Clear Channel says that its empire of radio
stations, billboards, and concert tours isn't working and expects to start
spinning off non-radio assets. "Hospital-acquired infections" rose 20%
from 2000 to 2003. Obesity is growing fastest among Americans earning more
than $60,000 annually (so much for the Reaganesque fat black welfare queen
theory). Companies are boosting their Internet advertising budgets at the
expense of traditional media. The Florida legislature passed a bill
requiring released child molesters to wear a device that can be tracked by
satellite. Allstate announced an insurance plan that lets you have "one
free accident", by paying 15% more on your premiums. The largest known
supply of untapped natural gas, enough for 5 years of U.S. needs, sits under the
city of Fort Worth. Microsoft's profits nearly doubled last quarter.
The cancellation of this year's NHL season has tripled the attendance of female
roller derby.
Harper's has some good pieces on
conservative Christian movements, including an article on America's Most
Powerful Megachurch, right here in Colorado. In case you haven't
heard, Colorado Springs is home to over 150 conservative Christian
organizations, including, for example, James Dobson's Focus On The Family
empire, which employs 1,300 souls. Lewis Lapham writes his usual
articulate editorial, at one point quoting Mark Twain: "An infinite God
ought to be able to protect himself, without going into partnership with State
Legislatures". Other facts from Harper's Index: 62% of
Republicans would vote for George Bush over George Washington. There are
as many mobile homes as there are houses in gated communities. 20 times as
many Mexicans die trying to cross the U.S. border as East Germans who died
trying to cross into West Berlin. The Boise city council recently banned
nudity in public unless it had "serious artistic merit", and one local strip
club started handing out sketch pads and pencils.
Smithsonian has a story and some good
pics on their Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit. One article on the search for life
on Mars, the controversy over a bacterial fossil purportedly found in a Martian
meteorite, and how we would recognize alien life if we found it. Fires are
raging in old coal mines from China to Pennsylvania, contributing to worldwide
pollution and global warming. There is fear that the 5-person Supreme
Court majority will help tear down New Deal programs — the year is 1936 and the
President is FDR. Nearly two-thirds of the Plains Indians were wiped out
by smallpox in the late 18th century.
Except for the hot lady in the HP printer ad,
there's not much to recommend in Fortune, except an article on wild pig
hunting. It turns out that the L.A. area (of all places) has the best
hunting grounds, filled with feral pigs with long hair and tusks that start
growing within a couple of generations. $400 a day gets you a guide and a
pack of dogs, and when you corner the pig, you can wade in and dispatch it with
a rifle, pistol, arrow, or hatchet (hatchet?).
Spin has Trent Reznor on the cover, and
an article on how he nearly killed himself with various excesses. Jack
White looks fat and creepy in the shot of him and Loretta Lynn at the Grammys.
A nine-year old Welsh boy awoke from a two-week long coma after his dad played
him Green Day's American Idiot. An absolutely inane McDonald's ad,
in which a leather-wristed guitarist hold a Big Mac under the caption "I'm Known
for Trashing Rooms". Spin notes that House of Wax won't be in 3D,
preventing us from finding out if Paris Hilton is actually two-dimensional.
Chuck Klosterman defines fringe genres, such as Musk Ox Rock, Grime, Rawk, and
Shoegaze. #1 on the Ten Best One-Album Bands are the Sex Pistols.
#1 on the Ten Worst Stage Names is Fatty Buster Bloodvessel. 13
groups have written songs about Winona Ryder. The hottest dance-music
label in the world is Kompakt out of Cologne, Germany.
Rolling Stone features The Weird World
of Weezer. You can't get tickets because high-tech scalpers are buying
up concert seats almost immediately, using special software and armies of
employees to circumvent the rules of Tickemaster. Green Day has
graduated to stadium shows. Beck is climbing the charts again. P.
Diddy and Justin Timberlake have joined U2 in the fight against AIDS and
poverty. Starbucks sells lots of music now, and there are rumors that Bob
Dylan will do a CD for them. 50 Cent has a new video game, Ghetto
Superman. Larry the Cable Guy is the new King of Comedy with lines like "I
was more pissed than a queer with lockjaw on Valentine's Day". Go figure.
This year's federal budget includes a 3-sentence provision, inserted by the Bush
Administration, for an 8-member "Sunset Commission", appointed by the President,
that could decide whether federal programs would continue (EPA, FDA, SEC, ...).
That same dumb McDonald's ad. Bruce Springsteen gets 4.5 stars for
Devils and Dust. Reggae star Ivy Queen is hot. Enron:
The Smartest Guys in the Room is deemed scarier than Amityville Horror.
OK, I've still got APR, BusinessWeek, Wired
and The Atlantic to cover tomorrow. See you then.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Poch, noted poet and poetry editor of 32 Poems, asked me to mention that the submission period is closed from May 15th to September 15th, contrary to what my Submissions Database used to say.
Posted by jbahr at 08:21 AM | Comments (3)