I still prefer the shadows…
I tend to find sustenance
navigating through darkness
I tend to find sustenance
navigating through darkness
Showing posts with label fruits are people too. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fruits are people too. Show all posts
Monday, October 11
Tuesday, April 13
SONG OF THE DAY: Watermelon Sugar (Slurred & Blurred)
My man dj_brilliant just sent me a whole new rar full of a concept he's cooked up, and as much as I hate the internet's effect on all our lives, I can't deny the beauty of finding long-term fringe community in certain ways. There's gotta be a fine line between finding shit on your own and having the algorithm try to push you towards shit to buy. At times I think the algorithm pushes too hard and ruins the experience, but it's a constant ebb and flow between people and mechanisms trying to pull shit back into capitalist place. Shit, I remember how it was following Ferguson on twitter before they post-BLMed the algorithms then so that organized shit like that couldn't pop off anymore. And it still pops off, in other ways. Humans adapt, always, and those adapting trying to corral us back into fences and sell us shit we don't need can never adapt as fast as those of us in need or extreme want of some shit the algorithm and structure and design is trying to refuse us. I hope you still bootleg music and torrent it and all that shit. Streaming is a trick. All of its a trick. Steal anything you can, for as long as you can. And when they don't have anything real left for you to steal, rip people off on the fake shit too.
Friday, June 28
VS3D T0 S1T TH3R3 L1ST3N1NG...
used to sit there listening
to the trees talk as a kid;
they quit since all humans snitch
Monday, April 25
internet reading list of late
(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)
How Green Was My Valley at Roads & Kingdoms
Roads & Kingdoms used to be one of my favorite sites because of the photo-heavy pieces on far-flung places, but it kind of morphed into this corny Anthony Bourdain wannabe where young writers write short pieces about drinking alcohol or eating fried shit in some city most of us can't afford to go to. If you are exposing me to something completely foreign to me - that's one thing; but drunken travel tips? Fuck that.
But good shit still flows through, and this piece on an old dude who seems somewhat obsessed with fruit trees in Tajikistan is pretty great. Some guy just tapped into fruit tree nature, to where he can't not think about it, so it becomes his life's purpose, that's some beautiful human interest type story I will read all the fucking time. But then again one time I got sexually aroused by picking cherries at peak ripe season off a tree on my land and was pretty sure the cherry tree was seducing me.
Farm-to-Fable by the food critic at a Tampa Bay newspaper
This made the internet rounds, but for good reason. I figure pretty much anywhere in America, if you started pulling the strings on claims like "farm to table" or even "organic" it'd all come unraveled, unless somebody in charge has paid the proper government organization for the proper government certification to be able to "legally" make the claim. So this expose is kind of like having John Stossel investigate whether pro wrestling is real or not. Still though, I appreciate the GOTCHA! effort, although there is a website mentioned in the article that's supposed to be where we the people can keep track of these things on our own, but I know a number of the local to me spots listed as kosher on that website are bastard places likely to be fake as fuck as well. Oh well, everything is fake now. The Age of Facade.
Godmother of Soul by somebody who writes for the New Yorker
My local library has a free magazine bin where you can put your old magazines in it for other people to take. Some kind folks always leave old New Yorkers there, but they're always from like 14 months ago, and I still end up getting them and bringing them home to flip through and get mad at the stupid poetry (unless it is Charles Simic) or read a profile of something I understand well but the thing is written from New Yorker perspective, which is always kinda weird but predictable to me. When I was a lowly housepainter, this one guy I worked for/with, we did a lot of work at this one place where the man of the house was some sort of editor or writer or some shit, allegedly connected to the New Yorker. They obviously had money because they had a Liberian lady raising their children and there were fancy paintings on the walls, like those big ass ones of old white people with little lights in the ceiling pointing at it just right. Sometimes we'd finish work early and go through the field to go kick it by their river access, and the electrified fence would always hit my sweaty naked back and shock the fuck out of me. But that guy had a writing building which is near the size of my family's house, but it was just an outbuilding in a field, yet really nice. To him, it was considered rustic and slummy and rootsy and real as fuck. Hahaha, oh man, this world is intersectional as fuck but we all ignore each other so easily.
Anyways, I got some good new New Yorkers (less than two months old) the other day, but read this online. This is a profile of Erykah Badu, and it made me love Badu all over again. I sort of stopped listening to her at all (we used to listen to a lot of Badu in this house, due to the ol' lady, but I'll be honest, I wasn't complaining), but this piece had me seeing what's actually survived a couple hard drive crashes and is still on our piecemeal absconded itunes. Not much newer stuff (which I'll have to abscond freshly I guess) but "Southern Girl" rip from my own vinyl still there, as well as the first album and the Live thing that came out, so I can call Tyrone to my heart's content until I find some unstale zippyshare links.
How Green Was My Valley at Roads & Kingdoms
Roads & Kingdoms used to be one of my favorite sites because of the photo-heavy pieces on far-flung places, but it kind of morphed into this corny Anthony Bourdain wannabe where young writers write short pieces about drinking alcohol or eating fried shit in some city most of us can't afford to go to. If you are exposing me to something completely foreign to me - that's one thing; but drunken travel tips? Fuck that.
But good shit still flows through, and this piece on an old dude who seems somewhat obsessed with fruit trees in Tajikistan is pretty great. Some guy just tapped into fruit tree nature, to where he can't not think about it, so it becomes his life's purpose, that's some beautiful human interest type story I will read all the fucking time. But then again one time I got sexually aroused by picking cherries at peak ripe season off a tree on my land and was pretty sure the cherry tree was seducing me.
Farm-to-Fable by the food critic at a Tampa Bay newspaper
This made the internet rounds, but for good reason. I figure pretty much anywhere in America, if you started pulling the strings on claims like "farm to table" or even "organic" it'd all come unraveled, unless somebody in charge has paid the proper government organization for the proper government certification to be able to "legally" make the claim. So this expose is kind of like having John Stossel investigate whether pro wrestling is real or not. Still though, I appreciate the GOTCHA! effort, although there is a website mentioned in the article that's supposed to be where we the people can keep track of these things on our own, but I know a number of the local to me spots listed as kosher on that website are bastard places likely to be fake as fuck as well. Oh well, everything is fake now. The Age of Facade.
Godmother of Soul by somebody who writes for the New Yorker
My local library has a free magazine bin where you can put your old magazines in it for other people to take. Some kind folks always leave old New Yorkers there, but they're always from like 14 months ago, and I still end up getting them and bringing them home to flip through and get mad at the stupid poetry (unless it is Charles Simic) or read a profile of something I understand well but the thing is written from New Yorker perspective, which is always kinda weird but predictable to me. When I was a lowly housepainter, this one guy I worked for/with, we did a lot of work at this one place where the man of the house was some sort of editor or writer or some shit, allegedly connected to the New Yorker. They obviously had money because they had a Liberian lady raising their children and there were fancy paintings on the walls, like those big ass ones of old white people with little lights in the ceiling pointing at it just right. Sometimes we'd finish work early and go through the field to go kick it by their river access, and the electrified fence would always hit my sweaty naked back and shock the fuck out of me. But that guy had a writing building which is near the size of my family's house, but it was just an outbuilding in a field, yet really nice. To him, it was considered rustic and slummy and rootsy and real as fuck. Hahaha, oh man, this world is intersectional as fuck but we all ignore each other so easily.
Anyways, I got some good new New Yorkers (less than two months old) the other day, but read this online. This is a profile of Erykah Badu, and it made me love Badu all over again. I sort of stopped listening to her at all (we used to listen to a lot of Badu in this house, due to the ol' lady, but I'll be honest, I wasn't complaining), but this piece had me seeing what's actually survived a couple hard drive crashes and is still on our piecemeal absconded itunes. Not much newer stuff (which I'll have to abscond freshly I guess) but "Southern Girl" rip from my own vinyl still there, as well as the first album and the Live thing that came out, so I can call Tyrone to my heart's content until I find some unstale zippyshare links.
Monday, February 1
2016 Royal Poetry Rumble: The Sixth Part
We have begun our third week of this Royal Poetry
Rumble, and half our field of 30 has already been knocked out in the following
order:
#30: Lucie Brock-Broido (eliminated by Angie
Estes)
#29: Terrance Hayes (eliminated by Laura
Kasischke)
#28: Marilyn Hacker (eliminated by Alan Shapiro)
#27: Alan Shapiro (eliminated by Nathaniel Mackey)
#26: Ross Gay (eliminated by Marie Ponsot)
#25: Lawrence Raab (eliminated by Juan Felipe
Herrera)
#24: Angie Estes (eliminated by Amy Gerstler)
#23: Ada Limon (eliminated by Dennis O’Driscoll)
#22: Rowan Ricardo Phillips (eliminated by Laura
Kasischke)
#21: A. Van Jordan (eliminated by Emily Fragos)
#20: Kevin Young (eliminated by Laura Kasischke)
#19: Dennis O’Driscoll (eliminated by Joy Harjo)
#18: Marie Ponsot (eliminated by Juan Felipe
Herrera)
#17: Nathaniel Mackey (eliminated by Alice Notley)
#16: Claudia Rankine (eliminated by Arthur Sze)
By the end of this week, we will have eliminated
another 9 poets, leaving the final six for next week’s last week. Eight names
have yet to even be pulled from the excel spreadsheet hat. WHO WILL START US
OUT TODAY?
#15: Juan Felipe Herrera (represented by “Tomorrow I Leave To El Paso, Texas”) vs. Joy Harjo (repped by “Equinox”)
Our beloved poet laureate, who has already knocked
out two competitors, with not even the most outstanding poems on his part,
stumbles back into the ring for this first encounter of today’s
non-festitivies. He faces Joy Harjo, who also has eliminated a person
previously, but only one.
Herrera works quick, and there seems to be a theme
of working through memories for this man who is our U.S. poet laureate, and
this thing about leaving El Paso, TX, is no different, and I enjoy it but it is
short and I don’t really love it because I do not feel filled up by it but it’s
a nice appetizer and I guess poetry couldn’t always be grand buffets of wild
game and sometimes has to be a side order of veggie dumplings from the Afghan
spot, and I’m gonna have to be okay with that. It feels alright.
But then holy fuck, Joy Harjo’s poem is a feast of
wild game, thick shit-talking in the mode of shit-talking that poetic types do,
but beyond the self-awareness of “Hey! I’m doing poetry!” to some serious ass
shit. I was contemplating quoting a couple lines (as I have done previously in
these things) but it’s hard to separate any of it – it’s all too thickly
muscled together. But she certainly is not fucking around here, and it kinda
makes a cute little dumpling of a poem seem weak in comparison.
THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: I admire the boldness that lies at the heart of "Tomorrow I Leave To El Paso, Texas" in that it the mere mention of El Paso cannot help but invoke the deep poesy of the Marty Robbins piece that just fvkkn owns El Paso forever; through no real fault of its own, though, it falls far short of "Equinox," which, in addition to its other virtues, is demonstrably kvlt. Like it goes from "I will find myself with a war club in my hand / and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun, / your nation dead beside you" to "from each drop of blood / springs up sons and daughters, trees, / a mountain of sorrows, of songs" to "Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have / broken through the frozen earth" to "I have buried the dead / and made songs of the blood, the marrow" and those are just tremendous things for poems to say and also call to mind some of the best parts of Margaret Atwood's "Journals of Susanna Moodie" which is maybe the best single poetry collection in English in the 1970s (come at me).WINNER: "Equinox"
Yeah. So Juan Felipe Herrera goes down at #15.
#14: Jane Hirshfield (repped by “A Person Protests to Fate”) vs. Robin Coste Lewis (repped by “The Mothers”)
Oh hai look, two of the undrawn eight names
remaining have been pulled here, and we have Jane Hirshfield (a long-lister for
the National Book Award for poetry last year) going up against Robin Coste
Lewis (winner of the National Book Award for poetry last year). Perhaps this a
grudge match over the National Book Award, and Robin Coste Lewis ultimately
will have her award (it’s a literal award, like a 4-foot tall trophy with
ribbons and shit, right?) ringside, and you just know Hirshfield is gonna end
up smashing Lewis with the trophy.
I kinda want to like what Hirshfield does in her
poem, but what she describes as being “during the long middle” is like a
thousand degrees different than my IRL experiences, so I’m put off to be
honest, and imagine Jane Hirshfield would feel a lot more comfortable trying to
find a list of only four items in your average Whole Foods than me. I bet she
might even peruse other things, and end up with more than four, unlike me who
will abandon mission before finding the third and after navigating the
complicated aisles and parking lot, would force myself to drive behind the old
strip mall with the K-Mart just to catch a glimpse of the homeless camp in the
woods and feel a little more at ease.
Holy shit, Robin Coste Lewis fuckin’ knocks this
one out. This “The Mothers” is fire, left and right, and yet also short, so a
quick piledriver of poetry. Women in a kitchen, sharing a job or duties or
what? I don’t know, but they are chill:
And democratic. A Lucky Strike each, we
Sponge each other off, while what’s grayed
In and gray slinks ashamed down the drain.
And then their “fingers garnished with fumes of
onions and garlic” and the other woman is reattaching stockings to a garter,
all while working, and despite our shitty lots in life, we are still sexual,
and fuck man this so-called civilized life is repressive as shit, isn’t it? I
mean, what the fuck are we doing here?
THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: "A Person Protests to Fate" is a good title and concept however to even want to train a cat to stay off a table is not only the merest folly but betrays deeper troubles as well. First, on folly: even if you can convince a cat that it is a better idea to not be on a table when you can see the cat doing that, do you really think that is going to keep a cat off a table when you're not there? Most of the time you are not going to be close enough to the table to make sure the cat is not involved in its situation, right? So how could this ever be meaningfully enforced? But to the much darker heart of the matter I would ask: why do you necessarily even want this? If you have a cat, you know that they are really very clean animals, but that, like the rest of us, sometimes it will put its butt on things; you accept that and build a life together. Why are you so afraid to be known, is I guess the question here really. I don't like "the penmanships love practices inside the body" aaaaat allllll either so let's see who gets the easy win here . . . ok it is "The Mothers" which is dedicated in part to Gwendolyn Brooks which is a pretty legit dedication, let's see where this goes. Yeah ok the image at the end where it goes "martyred / Rubber moons wavering at her garter" reveals this to be good enough to defeat far greater foes than it has been asked to contend with here.WINNER: "The Mothers"
I was really afraid there would be a difference of
opinion there for a second, so I am glad the kvlt scholar shares similar
sensibilities as me, which I might even consider calling universal
sensibilities. So gone at #14 is Jane Hirshfield.
#13: Amy Gerstler (repped by “Fruit Cocktail in Light Syrup”) vs. Laura Kasischke (repped by “Mushrooms”)
Both these women have battled in this Royal Poetry
Rumble so far, but Gerstler only once. Laura Kasischke has knocked three other
people out of this thing already, so despite being randomized by excel random
number function at a fairly high rate, she has been fucking people up thus far.
Preconceptions about a poem called “Fruit Cocktail in Light Syrup” certainly
don’t have me questioning whether she’ll do it yet again either.
This fruit cocktail poem is weird because
Gerstler’s basically riffing on “lol weird foods from my youth” but then gets
stuck on the fruit cocktail, and I think of my own 12-year-old daughter who has
a strange affinity for shit like fruit cocktails, and her own inherent sadness
(she is perfect in her own way) and then Gerstler’s poem’s narrator’s dad is
wadding up old newspapers and lighting a fire, and fuck man we heat our old ass
farmhouse with a woodstove, and though I don’t have strong feelings positive or
negative about this fruit cocktail poem, it’s made me feel pretty goddamned
melancholy and introspective too near a fault.
…masquerading as happy
appetizer, fruit cocktail insisted on pretending
everything was ok. Eating it meant you embraced
tastelessness. It meant you were easily fooled.
NO YOU! (She is speaking dark fears inside my
paternal head, so fuck this shit, I don’t have time for this so early in
another mundane work week.)
Thank the Universal Magnetics that Laura Kasischke’s
poem “Mushrooms” was next, because it’s probably not just the best poem in this
fucking thing so far but I would be tempted to tattoo this shit in its entirely
(maybe not the last stanza) on my thigh. Scope the supreme math of this first
stanza:
Like silent naked monks huddled
around an old tree stump, having
spun themselves in the night
out of thought and nothingness –
Fucking knock out right there.
THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: I reject the premise of "Fruit Cocktail in Light Syrup" because fruit cocktail in light syrup is good; it's just a good food that you can get from the store to have sometimes. The kind with fake sugars in them are beyond foul so don't get those, but beyond that, the notion that eating fruit cocktail meant "you might deny / that ghosts whirled throughout the house" is demonstrably bullshit because I would eat fruit cocktail right now if it were here and then talk to you about ghosts as seriously as you were willing to. Also it is worth noting that in addition to being a completely replacement-level sentiment, "harkening back to days /when humans grew, rather than manufactured, / food" is, like the rest of this one, just fvkkn prose, man, it's *prose*, and I like my poesy like I like my license: poetic as SHIT. "Mushrooms" is the complete opposite thing, a full-on poesy poem, treating mushrooms like monks (and, implicitly, monks like mushrooms) and hitting you with a jarring haiku-esuque juxtaposition at the end; this is a killer. I initially wrote "haku-esque" by mistake and that is not far off the mark in that were this poem to take human shape for a literal, non-poetic Royal Rumble, it might well turn into a Tongan rightly feared by all.WINNER: "Mushrooms"
No doubt. So not only is Laura Kasischke steady knocking fools out of this thing (four now) but she's doing it with the motherfuckin' poetic authority. Out at #16: Amy Gerstler. SEE YOU
WEDNESDAY MORNING, RANDOM DISCOVERERS PLUS PERHAPS REGULAR FOLLOWERS (by now) OF POETICALLY-BASED INTERNETTING NONSENSE.
Wednesday, October 28
TOP TEN CARVINGS INTO ROCKS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER
all I got's stories
but don't nobody got fucks
to give about those
!
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/okjKMYRLln
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
we went from oral
to written to emoji
mechanizing self
!?!
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/qkjHcgaEfo
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
weaponizing self
to attack inwardly like
wolf turned inside out
!.?.!
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/ftsabZeoRq
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
"data is freedom"
Daze of Tha Analytixxx
ppl iz 2nd
!..?..!
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/NV9jx7eduv
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
ppl iz all wayz
second (at least to the first)
(upper echelon)
!.-?-.!
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/bM686P3BII
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
crushed beneath abstract
stones of pyramid long cons
fogged finish to "mine"d
x?x
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/3IYQvPEl05
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
actions bear no fruit -
infertile philosophies
salt my consciousness
!..xoxox...!
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/BsfGWlKxaA
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
devilz & dirtgodz -
tha former makes monies; tha
latter makes messes
...!?!...
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/No85HoHcgN
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
masters make monies;
lessers take lessons in how
to better behave
<...!...>
#rojonekku https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/hyBDgSybrP
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
all I got is wordz -
scatter them in barren plots
of psychic gridlock
!
#rojonekku
----> https://t.co/cygeKMtUta pic.twitter.com/4ePZxHKkmQ
— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) October 28, 2015
#1: all I got's stories/but don't nobody got fucks/to give about those
#2: we went from oral/to written to emoji/mechanizing self
#3: weaponizing self/to attack inwardly like/wolf turned inside out
#4: "data is freedom"/Daze of Tha Analytixxx/ppl iz 2nd
#5: ppl iz all wayz/second (at least to the first)/(upper echelon)
#6: crushed beneath abstract/stones of pyramid long cons/fogged finish to "mine"d
#7: actions bear no fruit -/infertile philosophies/salt my consciousness
#8: devilz & dirtgodz -/tha former makes monies, tha/latter makes messes
#9: masters make monies;/lessers take lessons in how/to better behave
#10: all I got is wordz -/scatter them in barren plots/of psychic gridlockMonday, December 13
Monday, August 23
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