Matt's Four-Part Dream Project

In my dream last night Matt Timmons made an artwork that became several other works, some of them co-produced by other people. First he wrote a poem, which he made by taking an existing poem, dividing it into lines and then putting those lines in a new order, supplemented by lines of his own. I do not know who wrote the original poem. For each new line Matt added to the poem, he removed one line he did not like from the original poem, so the new poem was the same length as the original. The poem was long, and had a succession of images.

The next artwork was a series of photos documenting the series of images present in the poem. Due to the re-tooled nature of Matt’s poem, these images were in an intuitive order: the order of Matt’s poem. Matt and others took photos to document the images and then they were made into a photo album.

Next a film/video was made of the images in the photo album, splicing together actual close-up footage of the photo album with found footage and new footage that seemed to document the narrative that connected the images presented in the photo album. This phase was executed by a filmmaker or team of filmmakers, with only poetic supervision by Matt: he would comment on the significance of the lines in the original poem represented by the photos and video, but would not comment on the films or photos themselves. His comments were couched in a poetic language and mannerism meant to inspire the imagination of the filmmaker(s). It would be up to the filmmakers, ultimately, to figure out what the narrative told by the photos was.

Next (Phase 4) an essay was written, by a new participant in the project, about the meaning of the making of the video. This essay included both narrative retellings of the video that described the “plot” of it (or anyway, as much of a plot as the essayist could see/decipher) and quotations from the participants in phases One through Three about what they were doing, synthesized and analyzed by the essayist, and general theorizing and speculation about the meaning of the entire project, including the essay.

The essay was published, so I learned about the whole project through the essay. The essay included small amounts of documentation of the first three phases: some quotes from the poem (with analysis of what was inserted by Matt and why), some stills from the photo album, and some stills from the video.

All the phases had the same name, which I don’t remember. Each part told the story of the previous part, but the story that was told was the inner story of each previous part: that section of the previous part that contained information more appropriate in another medium. The photos told the story of the visual implications of the poem. The video told the story of the narrative implications of the series of pictures. The essay told the story of the theoretical implications of the video.

It’s interesting that film/video is situated as the narrative medium here, and poetry is situated as the source, the initiating medium. I suppose this says something about my assumptions.

So, Matt, will you be doing this?

!

WAMPA manifesto, page one

A Poem, In Order To Confront

A poem, in order to confront the world,
needs probably a lot of words in it.
Enough words to encircle, bludgeon,
entreat, beg, and finally wall off the world.

WAMPA poetry will permanently destroy polemic
by introducing the final forms of ideas.
WAMPA knows this has been done before,
and essentially represents a flanking maneuver:

The idea is that since they have the present,
we should get ahead of them and take over the future
while simultaneously using precedent to take over the past
and then we attack them on two fronts.

Everyone else is doing it too, yes:
The sky is a captive of our expectations, yes,
that one’s been done to death, yes
those rhetorical appeals are leaking wishful fluids, yes.

Let me reiterate:

A poem, in order to confront the world,
should get ahead of them and take over the future
and inform them this has been done before:
This victory began long ago and will be permanent!

Let me reiterate:

Everyone else is doing it too, yes:
The final forms of ideas are expecting, yes,
there will soon be a monstrous birth of wishful fluids:
Infants and dead men will attack them at once, yes

Gumming them on two fronts:
What could be easier than to defeat time
if you have every word in literary history
carrying a placard that says “WAMPA!”

The sandwiches of the future shall be wrapped in “WAMPA” paper,
this paper shall shine in the sun- and moonlight both,
words will learn how to do more work than ever:
The words of the lunch menu will become “WAMPA” words

The key is to teach people a new way of reading
until, eventually, you have written everything they read:
This is why manifestoes have been so important to the avant-garde
and that is how WAMPA will retroactively write all poems:

Pleasure = leisure and work = shirk
Responsibility = immobility
Robots = thoughts and right = uptight
Office = stop this

Memoirs of Bacteria

I like to study the pedigrees of literary works: what’s more delicious than the moment when the young internist runs down the hospital steps, hurrying across the city mind full of poetry, to the Petrol Bureau where he corrals his young friend. Then, rushing together now, they go to the young hotel, and a quick half-bottle of vino later begin to hurriedly transcribe in their notebook words that they do not yet understand (and yet which they believe will contain precious secrets dredged up from the automatic brain.) These pedigrees are usually more wonderful than the works themselves, and would make excellent films for young adults. The internist removes his blood-spattered gown. “The truth within the ramblings of the those most courageous soldiers, those who have abandoned society in favor of a loping nightmare. . . I intend to share their unique sensibility, for I too have been scarred by the unnecessary viciousness of life.” The intent is everything! Intention is the source of springtime! Life intends to rediscover its strength. Even the viruses and bacteria are strong again, digging trenches in the open wounds of veterans. . . Consciousness is more like the viruses and bacteria than it is like human beings. Consciousness is unkillable; even when beliefs and subjectivities are dead, consciousness still erupts new pus across the graves. Sculptures made of pus can sometimes mean as much as sculptures made of porcelain, and sometimes more. . . I love the pedigrees of literary works, especially those heroic stories of the mind becoming undisciplined, anti-disciplined. . . These young anti-disciples of culture with their endless aggravating chat that leads to no more than a new supply of oddball works to glut the oddball marketplace. The marketplace is too disciplined, and therefore the mind is too disciplined. The discipline of the present always takes the form of a call for more stupidity: stupidity is the strength and honor of genuine culture, that which distinguishes culture from experimentation. Experiments lack the stupidity essential for full-frontal marketplace penetration. I like to study the pedigrees of thrilling literary works: the thrilling memoirs behind the bland experiments. The best thing is to live the life of a rebel, quietly insisting on your own truth as the movie grinds to a realistic halt. The young internist explains his ideas via a series of resilient paradoxes that are still unimportant today, a hundred years too late. The art that inspires the biography is a benign tumor: the biography is the scalpel, and the life is the only thing that cannot be proven: rushing around inside a cloud, a yawn more vivid than a hundred books.

This week's Smell reading features:

Alli Warren
Brandon Brown
Anna Joy Springer

The Smell,
247 S. Main Street,
Downtown
Los Angeles,
Sun, January 28
6:30 pm,
$5.

Anna Joy Springer lives in San Diego where she makes graphic texts, teaches writing, and hosts a literary performance series of queers and Feminists called T.M.I. Ms. Springer has also performed in musical groups, written song lyrics, produced albums, and staged intermedia installations and performances.

Alli Warren is a poet from San Francisco, author of the chapbooks Cousins (Lame House Press), Schema (Housepress) and Hounds and the e-book The Yoke (Faux Press). Her weblog is at http://theingredient.blogspot.com and has been dishing out trenchant social commentary under a variety of names for several years (particularly notable was the period when Alli's blog became White Male Poet Blog, the ultimate expose of masculinist assumptions made in the cultural practices of modern "pale male" poetic practicioners.) An important new voice frequently described as "underpublished," Alli is an up-and-comer watched by many in the San Francisco poetry scene.

Brandon Brown is also a poet from San Francisco, author of two chapbooks: memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Cy Press) and 908 ­- 1078 (Transmission Press), the latter of which is a creative translation of the last 170 lines of the play The Persians by Aeschylus. The nervous humor and angry playfulness of Brown's work are also on-line in his weblog, My Autobiography Okay?, which is anything but. In poems like "I Remember the Challenger (Blown Up By Libyans)" Brown has developed a fascinating style of extrapolative satire through which both his anger and his sense of the absurdity of public discourse are expressed.

The front door of the Smell is in the alley called Harlem Court between Main Street and Spring Street. This alley can be entered from either 2nd or 3rd Street.

What Will Happen (WAMPA Apocalypse)

We try to make something happen.
Something big. Double-big!
And yet something human and normal
And intimate as spare time.

SPARE TIME looming over
The world where the people are
And now we are never, ever bored
Because we have a dream!

Lying around
Like a lump on a bump
On a stump
Has become
A spiritual destiny!

Oh, the future is boiling
Quiet like reluctant water.
Human beings are suffering, they want to sleep!
And when they’ve slept, they want to be awake!

They want to eat! They want to be excited!
And after the excitement,
They want to be very calm.
SPARE TIME is when the hour
Is without obstruction:

As if time itself
Has been filleted
Like a sad fish,
And the clock
No longer tocks.

The future will be very easy:
Just sit and the hours
Will pass and they will pass:
Time will filter through our pores
Osmotically!

This freedom from the clock
From schedule and rule
May come to seem
A torture.

We must try to make something happen!
To fill the immense boredom!
This is our destiny: first we battle on behalf
Of boredom, to make boredom absolute,
To make SPARE TIME loom over us
Wise as a monument!

Only once we all are bored
All equally and totally without a thing to do,
As if our very hands
And our chattering mouths
Were OUT ON STRIKE,

Only then
The true battle against boredom will begin:
With a new surge!
A burst of nervous energy!
A frantic rush of nervous trembling hands activity!

Let me review:
TODAY the battle is against work,
And when that battle is done
TOMORROW the battle will be against boredom,

And when that battle is done, we will speed
Out of the mouths of sloth like lucky missiles
And our identities will splash
Like spare parts of a clock across the wall!

And historians will look
Through the remains of our smunched identities
And say to themselves, “Tsk, they did so much.
If only they had wanted to do it,
How wonderful it would all have been!”

Instead,
Our lives have been affixed to us
Like 24 prosthetic hours a day
And freedom is hidden from us
Out there on the broad backside of time
Which turns away.

WAMPA's debut at BetaLevel

The people chanting WAMPA
WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA,
They are so wise.
I am among them chanting:
WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA,
Word to the wise!
Get wise to the WAMPA! The people chanting,
Whooping, WAMPAing it up!
Go people! Chant people!
I’m chanting too, I’m on your side,
WAMPA’s made us wise enough to raise our voices:
WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA,
It’s counter-snore and so much more.
People chanting WAMPA WAMPA
You’re with it and I’m with you.
Our pre-wise daze is finally through!

Last night members of the Work and Maddening Progress Association (WAMPA) debuted the WAMPA program for future art, literature, and society to a vast audience in a small basement in Chinatown. WAMPA members Lloyd Ducal and Roy Lanoy presented the tenets of WAMPA in a completely correct and yet highly entertaining manner; their performance was carefully calibrated to enable a fuller comprehension of the present social situation and the future possibilities. Audience members achieved fuller comprehension almost immediately and quickly (within one minute of commencement of the WAMPA program) began to chant “WAMPA WAMPA WAMPA.” The enthusiastic comprehension was a joy to behold. At the conclusion of the presentation, numerous audience members surged forward eager to apply for membership in WAMPA. Four qualified applicants were admitted into WAMPA on the spot: Michael Smoler, Mathew Timmons, Oliver Hall, and Christopher Russell. Welcome to WAMPA, friends! You will work hard in new and unspecified and yet delightful and relaxing ways for the rest of your days, as you recline more and more into the gentle and effusive perfection of the WAMPA program as it steam-rolls to fruition! May you never forget this glorious day! Roy Lanoy assures me that your first payment of WAMPA scrip will be forthcoming in a jiffy!

To learn more about the inspired and inevitable WAMPA program, you may now visit the WAMPA website. May you enjoy and learn!

The basement also featured several other performances. Marcus Civin symbolically unrolled blank butcher paper while we all listened to a recording of Emma Goldman denouncing imperialist war! Oliver Hall wore his Dylanesque harmonica-headpiece and sang about the great bohemian poet Paul Verlaine, whose failed attempt to escape bourgeois life is the stuff of which WAMPAesque legends are made. Darin Klein and friends, including myself, read a tragicomic play about the problems that occur when love, desire, and human beings mix. This rowdy and occasionally mildly obscene work aroused a great deal of laughter (from both the audience and the performers). Michael Smoler performed a Tarot card reading using his own very personal (and beautiful) cards; on this occasion, though, the readee turned out to be some sort of Tarot expert who insisted on reading his cards himself! Lastly, Emily Lacy performed beautifully, singing and fiddling in a good old neo-backwoods manner. Her voice is unusually haunting and reminded me of old recordings of Appalachian murder ballads, where the singers seem almost unearthly in their intense keening religiosity. Emily was excellent and received immense applause; furthermore, the social messages of several of her songs were entirely compatible with WAMPA values.

We thank the basement dwellers of Beta-Level for inviting WAMPA! Truly, it is the most socialist basement in Los Angeles, where no visitor was ever charged a cent!

Come see Conduction in the Catacombs this weekend

Will Alexander's play Conduction in the Catacombs will show at BetaLevel twice this weekend (Friday January 19 at 8 PM and again Sunday January 21 at 6 PM). This is the debut of the new theatre group Instantaneous Terrain. It's world-debut Reader's Theatre, underground (literally) in Chinatown.

More info is here, at the BetaLevel site.

The play is a window into the lives of two women outside of conventional society, one of whom orbits the other like a planet round a star!

The play stars Jenny Hodges (as Eurydice) and Stephanie Rioux (as Cortaenia)

With direction by Will Alexander, Mathew Timmons, and Stan Apps

Stage Managing, Sets and Lighting by Allison Carter and Mathew Timmons

Music by Jason Brown and Amarnath Ravva

We hope you can make it!

Directions to BetaLevel are here: http://betalevel.com/directions/

It always happens!

As always happens with New Year's Resolutions, today I failed in my resolution not to write any more Flarf. I guess I'm not that good at quitting things. For instance, even though I quit smoking "on an economic level" (meaning I don't buy cigarettes) I still "bum" cigarettes sometimes. Similarly, now I have a new flarf poem, much too scandalous to post here, and probably too scandalous for me to read it at next Tuesday's Late Night Snack either.

Actually, I'm planning to debut "WAMPA" to the world at the Snack. Get ready world!

We Piddle Along

Somebody’s got to give everyone jobs.
Let’s hear it for Somebody! Three Cheers!
Somebody’s got to realize that the lazy man deserves respect!
And the lazy woman needs a relaxing place to wait to get paid!
Somebody’s got to recognize all the Somebodies out there!
It’s the usual self-interest, raised to a higher power!
And Three Cheers for that! It’s about damn time!
It’s about damn time and it’s past time
And the time just keeps on coming round again!
The lazy man needs a shovel to lean on
So he won’t fall down if he falls asleep standing up!
I’m tired of all this right-wing big-ball-of-baloney!
There’s a very advanced person sitting in a cubicle,
A person of indeterminate age and indifferent gender
And s/he is drowsy, hir head is falling softly on
The keys on hir big old cuddly keyboard
And the weight of hir cheek is spelling out the word nnh,
And a little drool is pooling out, into the gap between “k” and “l”.
Somebody needs to be paid good money for this!
S/he could be home in a soft large bed being cuddled
Or s/he could be home in a soft large bed being stroked
Or s/he could be home in a soft large bed being sat on,
And all the wonderful furious things of home and bed are denied hir.
S/he has just got to be appropriately rewarded!
Men, women, and things have got to be given jobs and well paid
And left alone—no more workplace harassment!
Bosses may speak in only the quietest, most wheedling tones!
Every boss must get a PhD in Begging and Eloquence
So that s/he will have the skills s/he needs
To convince one worker to lift one piddly finger
And stroke one key
To activate the automated system
To make the future happen by itself
As we always dreamed
And every human being must have a calm lucrative job watching it
And waving and smiling at the business of the world as it gets done.
The hyperactive people, their scalps crawling with supplemental robots
Shall be paid no more nor less than any other human being
As they hurry through the valley of the indolent with steely hands
Smashing every flower that does not yield medicine
And checking every teat for milk.
The lazy shall beam forth from the sunny valley
Full of armchairs, couches and recliners.
In hir workspace ergonomic as a crib
The laborer of the future shall do time
Like a prisoner awaiting the end of the four-hour day:
4 idle and eternal hours
In which fits of sporadic labor punctuate the tedium:
Somebody will get something done just to have something to do.

5 Things People Might Not Know About Me

I'm responding to a tag by Mel Nichols

1. I originally planned to be a Journalism major in college, but changed majors to English as a result of the Journalism professor sending me to be interview the campus police chief, who asked me probing questions about some friends of mine who had recently committed a felony on campus. (I was aware of but had not participated in this felony, which was a robbery of college property.) After a first interview with the police chief, the Journalism professor, who was obviously in cahoots with the chief, asked me to go for a second time, and I responded by changing my major. This is sort of an unusual reason to major in English.

2. I lived in Jakarta for a while as a child, and I would often see young boys swimming and running around naked in the large fountains that are at many of the city’s intersections. I felt a sort of queasy envy for these kids, sitting in the back of a town car looking out at them. They were at risk of several diseases of course.

3. My aunt is a Buddhist and convinced me, when I was young, that there was no point in accumulating property, so for many years I would often go through my belongings and get rid of almost everything and I still let go of belongings easily. However, many years later my aunt told me she had been wrong and she now wished she had saved up a lot more cash and taken accumulation more seriously in general.

4. One of my step-fathers (I have had two) was the son of the founders of the Branch Davidian Church and once had a gun-fight with David Koresh (known as Vernon Howell then).

5. I love reading science-fiction novels and in fact they are one of my favorite types of novel. (I like science-fiction novels and other types of extrapolative novels much better than I like most novels that try to represent “reality.” My favorite types of novels are science fiction, successful satires and those few novels that have the liberty of language that I associate with my favorite poetry. The only satirical science fiction novel with language like poetry that I can think of is Trouble on Triton by Delany: yum!)

I am tagging Mike,, Steph, Samantha/Patrick, Jessi, and Phil

We Poke Along

Nowadays there are so many good people,
So many many many good good people,
There is a surplus of benevolence,
Bowing and blowing kisses
Kisses for cruelty, kisses on the cheeks of exploitation
Kisses for bigotry
So many many many good good people
The taste of food
Is influenced by environmental cues
So there were days when nothing tasted good
He came in with a bunch of roses
And handed the roses out to each of them
A rose for cruelty, a rose between the teeth of exploitation
A rose for bigotry
One rose apiece for each of them
A single rose, signaling romantic infatuation
How could he be so desirous of so many?
But it was easily done
It was done with a swooning heart
There is a surplus of desire
Bowing and proffering a solemn rose
Solemnity is the lover’s mark
It is as visible as a pimple fed on sweat and chocolate
It was easily seen
Cruelty turned up hir thin aquiline nose
Exploitation sniffed and hurried backwards
Exploitation took a step away from the thick scent of love
And another step, and another step
Bigotry tried to ignore the scent and continue heavy petting
It was too much; it was thick with a musk like homeless laundry
You could cut that scent with a knife and it would bleed just like a man
A thick horrendous scent like the sexual secretions of a saint
Too much
It was easily done: words flowed
As if the water-tap had been turned
There were those who were not afraid to drink the pouring water
The water that ran out of a vast gash torn in society’s side
The socialite sipping from that water said,
“Of course I am in favor of a new way of life
Nowadays there are so many good people
There is a surplus of desire
You could cut that scent with a knife and it would bleed just like a man
I’m drunk on it
I’m swooning and the blood of my convictions is a pool”
We bathed there
We’ve got guts

Ordinary Visionaries of the Future 4

I'm writing these again. . . The first three are here, here, and here.


Cory the Visionary Nature Lover
will be moving back to the city soon.
The piece of countryside which she has been repairing
is almost entirely healed now
and when it has been completely healed
there will be no more place in it for human habitation.
She’ll be going back to the city, where she can go to the great museums
and look at the countryside through monitors,
tiny unobtrusive monitors inserted in the bark of trees
or looking like a pebble on the bottom of a stream.
The museums allow you to manipulate your viewing room
to make it rather similar to the place that you are viewing,
to give you the illusion of being surrounded
by the beauty. She has worked so hard so that the beauty could
escape entirely from humans, who cannot be trusted there.

Observing the monitors makes Cory
a sort of virtual guardian angel of the untouched land,
performing spot checks that guarantee there is no human presence.
It’s lonely to be a guardian, but the compensation is
the serenity of righteousness, and of course the views
the perfectly detailed, impeccably rendered imagery
that can be zoomed in through to discover details deeper than the eye.

Cory likes the corner coffee shop in her neighborhood
and she likes each of the trees allotted by quota on her block.
There’s a tree she calls Diana that has a few little slogans ripped in her bark—
consider them like the tattoos of the urban trees—
one of which says, Treefuckers Uber Alles,
another of which says, B hearts C.
She agrees with all the graffiti, philosophically,
because of course human beings can say anything about a tree
and human beings will always believe themselves.
All a tree can do with language is accept it, become a canvas for it,
become a book. Cory is just like everyone else
interpreting the trees in the most personal and untrue way possible.
Her friendship for them is about herself, the desire to glorify self
through positive action. But on the other hand,
her friendship and love for the sights and sounds of nature
scoured of the contaminating subjectivity and corrosiveness of human presence
is so big for her—big like God would be big
if someone was really, really big into God.

Cory puts on okay clothes and walks around, looking.
All that’s left to do to this piece of countryside she’s fixed
is take away her yurt and reseed the little area where her equipment sat
and hike eleven miles to the monorail station.
Her equipment was picked up yesterday by a balloon.
She leaves behind a secret path
which she made by folding in two a few leaves
of selected bushes. The creased leaves
lead to a place where she had a special experience:
She had had her pants down peeing
and her flashlight was pointed straight up in the air
and the night air seemed to contain a complete quality of life,
an excellent feeling of having the very best of life, right there
contained in the crispness of the air and in the little sounds of leaves and bugs
as if she had considered all the options and chosen right
to be blessed by a life of service to that which cannot thank us.

I dreamed that Joseph Mosconi wrote a book called Thoughts in Black, and Walnut-Pink. It was partly art criticism, partly writing on poetics, and partly miscellaneous or experimental prose. Sounds a lot like my book of essays, actually, but with art crit thrown in. The Walnut-Pink in the title sounds vaguely Walter Pater-ish (I refuse to say “Paterian”), an adamantly artificial blend of colors, but one I can still somewhat imagine.

Such a book would be quite good, I'm sure. Recycle those blog-posts Joseph!

New Look for Timmons + review of Poirier

Matthew Timmons' blog has a new look (complete with a new url)

Also, Guillermo Parra wrote a review of Julien Poirier's Absurd Good News (which Matt and I published). Thanks for the good word, Guillermo!

A website where Julien's wonderful book can be ordered is under construction, and will soon have beautiful words and images.

They Finger-Plunge the Gun-Merged Chickens

Dada was the baby
rolling on the floor
through a glorious
summertime
of no motor control

whereas Surrealism
was an athlete
training hirself to roll
around like that.
Naturally the athlete rolls better

because human beings are
animals that need meaning
to give shape to
a motion
that salvages

history from the brutality.
I hope to be salvaged
from brutality
in some general transformation
that is to come.

Surrealism takes
the free meaninglessness of Dada
and hooks it up
to Romanticism
like an I.V. drip

of transcendental, revolutionary
relevance.
And yet Dada had tried so hard
to be free of all that
because ideas themselves were responsible

for the hideous World War I.
Ideas are a bloody desert
of ethical purity
shitting out all the waste products
of history, and then eating up

the legislated new perfection of
Replacement Earth.
That's why when the avant-garde
needs to re-invent itself (again,
again, again?)

it returns to Dada
because that's the fountain
of the useless pseudo-innocence,
infinite source
of the gushing faux-frivolity.