Let me tell you how to sequence your next record:

Set 1: Rules For Riding the King County Metro/Little Fear of Drowning/Neo Takes the Blue Pill

Set 2: You in Your Heyday/Like Taking Communion/Story Problem

^Show last night with Cristina Bautista & Gold Parts and Police Teeth. I started ordering whisky drinks thinking they were comped/drink ticketed and then received three tickets good for PBR. It was very hot in the rendezvous. I had lots of good advice for other people about how to run their businesses, bands, marriage.

Petty Pains of Modern Life and Why White Zombie are the Best Band Ever

Recent life in Bullet-List Form

>>> Brielle, youngest of the bio-sisters, is somewhere in the midwest (not colorado, har har) right now, highwaying her way closer to Chicago,



where she'll study art and writing at the Art Institute of Chicago. The absence there is palpable, rather than symbolic, as I've been living in the same house as her the last year and a half.

******> Soon that will change. Investigating (limited) housing options now. They include beacon hill, chinatown (ostensibly), capitol district (what I'm calling that space between Pine and Jefferson and 12th and 20th that is literally Central District but increasingly co-opted by 'hillsters) or probably places in suburbs that are affordable but far away from everyone i know and everything I want to do.

>work. have had little luck/fucked up my interviews for full-time jobs. stop that, brain. >still, some digging and pestering have yielded some freelance tutoring opps, some freelance blurb-writing opps that are still in-process.

in.
process.
this is the frustrating part; waiting for writing samples to be cleared, etc, before I can go full-bore. Things I would have been more confident in before a summer of job-hunting. Confidence is key. Irony.<<<<<<<<

(Not much to do but keep at it. Dig in. Make it part of you until it doesn't have to be. All sorts of mantras to make the demoralizing slog of Craigslist and numbing rigor of cover letters into some sort of arch-masculine chest-pound.)



!!!!Tonight, however, Jake Tucker and I will drown our respective (and very different "sorrows" in beer at various town-based places and then I do a gig with Cristina Bautista's new band and Police Teeth, whom have been mentioned here before as fine individuals and purveyors of good-time, rootsy folk music, which is the best type of music for humans to make. Here is them covering White Zombie and then playing their own song about trashing living rooms and jumping fences:



and the original:



so good.

also: anyone notice how the ads for Colombiana are basically "check out this hot chick killing shit?" or perhaps more specifically, "check out this hot south american chick killing shit?"

zabrecky makes himself disappear

or if you're taking over, then it's over

LA is a city that always dangles a carrot three feet away
from the noses of its citizens. this arrives to screen,
by phone, from my friend who holds microphones and wails
in an attempt to corral all the searing noise around him
into a cohesive statement. beat. riff. rhythm. anthem,
even rising to the sky, but stopped at last by smog.
songs try their best to find their way out of the city,
in the bumping trunks of riders, in the collapsing chanteuses
somewhere just outside hollywood, the bricked off lofts
of silverlake. I can't get back there. I can't get into it.
I can't even name a street that isn't already famous,
despite the hours behind the wheel of a twelve wheeler.
Someone tells me something about Bukowski, the city making
him what he was. About sleaze and punk and availability of
everything. i think about a poem I wrote ten years ago and
how I heard the subject turned to magic after a collection
of late 90s new wave songs failed to advance his neighborhood.
he is probably on stage tonight, somewhere on the second floor
of a tall building, wearing a funny hat and introducing
women in fancy underwear to a crowd who don't have shows that night.
_________________________________________________________

the opening quote is from Robert Lashley, of Scume Eating, etc, who are in LA right now, or leaving it, on their way to Spokane. The prompt was from Theresa Mitchell, from a while back, who told me to write about a musician who influenced me. I was ostensibly going to write about Rob Zabrecky, from Possum Dixon, a band I liked in High School, but obviously, I ended up writing about LA. As you can tell from the time of day and sloppy prose style, i wrote it at work.

Thursday Night

looked sort of like this:

"I haven't heard right since we started this band."-cg

"Noise" means a lot of things to a lot of people. A "noise band" could be basically a rock band that puts their guitars through lots of pedals and never muffles their feedback. To that end, you could describe almost half of Nirvana's catalog as "noise rock." To other people, noise is a nearly entirely electronic affair, a more ambient lull, etc.
last night i read poetry with three noise bands, two of which were an entirely improv-ed affair with shouted adlibbed lyrics, guitar destruction and a healthy sense of catharsis. I'd read with My Printer Broke, (comma is part of the title) when there were violins, keyboards and such involved (many destroyed by the end of the night) but I think they did just as well as a two piece, switching instruments, etc.

I did two sets, one after My Printer Broke and one after Scumeating. As such: set 1:Neo takes the blue pill/about last night/little fear of drowning/the most important meal/beneath the cathedral/isolation therapy The last two I performed with CG making creepy sounds on the guitar, which added a certain tension to otherwise fairly quiet pieces. Set 2:Bloodmoney/Our Favorite Radio Station/Paintings of Famous Satanists For "paintings" I was joined by the last band, Waiting for the Pagans, on noise. It's more challenging to read over two noising guitars, but it was a fun collab. When WFTP played, they turned their amps up all the way and proceeded to fuck their guitars up with hammers, boots, the floor and their own faces. It was unbearably loud, harsh and pretty damn riveting. As Fiona put it "Your set was marvelous. . . and completely terrifying."

Scumeating combine elements of noise, sound-collage, space-rock, punk and disco over driving backbeats, with Robert Lashley (award winning poet and playwright) howling lines like "GET YOR CRACKHEADFRIENDDS OUTTAMYHOUSE!" It isn't something with a direct comparison, but is pretty damn awesome.

Anyway, good night. Next up: I also do weddings.

You never saw me come, you'll never see me go (2 flashquicknesses)

discman
In times of such economic turmoil, political import and environmental uncertainty, sometimes I simply want to stand, 19 years old, watching a wall of department store tvs condense the whole thing into stupid, simplified sound bites, mewling mouths of anchors and beauty queens rashed out by headphoned metal. I could nod there until everything's dusty and blown away, or rebuilt and shiny, dependent only on the lead salesman to tell me when to move out of the way.

everything else becomes fiction

sometimes I sit on the edge of my southside porch,
drinking french-pressed coffee I bought with government
stamps and wonder how anything ever seems urgent.

then a cop car blazes past, at nine thirty a.m.,
sirens shrieking, lamenting. then a firetruck,
then an ambulance, then three more red-and-blues.
I am halfway into my book, about a young man who
grows older as he wanders around the world unfullfilled,
sleeping with lots of women,satisfying all but
the most wanton, admitting to some of his own flaws
but not others. the dustjacket describes it as
thought-provoking. the sentences are constructed immaculately.

the cop scanners crackle hard in my neighbor's truck.
coffee grounds take over my mouth. a fog, in august,
over the tree-line, and more sirens and two old ladies cross
in the middle of the street,one holding a safeway bag
bulging with onions. they cross in front of a bus,
without even looking. if there weren't raccoons, I don't know
what we'd do about the trash.
soon I will trip down the hill for my own reckoning like I've done daily
for a year and a half, all my life.

dongtan-hwaesong-suwon-seoul

humidity. the rain is part of the humidity. they aren't separate elements. the bus is underwater. schoolgirls giggle like schoolgirls at the athletes, the soccer players, the tennis instructors, imported from the united states. the run of water. the flow of traffic. diverted into. the disparate looks at a nation that refuses to be submerged. seoul burned, they tell me, it wasn't so tall then, but we rebuilt it. five teenage boys in a war memorial, making jokes at the simulated shooting experience. rushing soldiers overhead in stone. this is what the guns are here for, the 3-d movie and video games, to absorb the weight of jokes and float above them. we try to live peaceful now, but always watch.they remember macarthur. the minibikes speed quick between buses. outside faces condense with a thin film, like what we wrap our beef and sprouts in, this is japanese food, before, it was mongolian. fusion. shoes piled by the door, signs in english and korean and japanese survive bombs and land wars and taste like fusion.
___________________________________________
submitted to Hoarse, so may take it down in a bit, if they choose this and not the other, more ridiculous thing I sent them.

A unit of work:

Saturday was the zine release party for Erg: A Work Zine at Rainey and Jon's house in the CD. The zine is beautiful (and not online, so unlinkable) and the readings from Martha Reiner, Sierra Nelson, Jonathan Shapiro and Rainey Warren were rad. I did a set near the beginning that consisted of the following pieces: missing every day/isolation therapy/loft poem #3/bloodmoney/neo takes the blue pill

its nice sometimes to give older pieces that don't usually get out much a little air. after that we drank lots of wine and beer and ate oranges and started fires in fire pits and I wasn't the worst off there by any means. we made sure the fire was out before troddling home.