Cold Snap/Sunshine

Bill Withers on the stereo

a cold, dry November.

Just enough before work.

The coffee alcohol spectrum.

I miss everyone, but do not call.

It is okay for it to be okay

to be sad, I have convinced myself.

Time is running out before

I am legally required to smile.

It is dark inside and outside.

The lights are low because

brightness is ridiculous.

The song that played

over the credits of a fifteen

year old movie

about teenage awkwardness

makes its way before I do.

I can’t not care, and I’ve spent

so much of my life putting a premium

on detachment.

A stylized canoe hangs upside down

from the ceiling. I don’t even know

what this song

is  called.

Trains and Tall Buildings 2: Growth as a given?

So it's official. Seattle is the USA's fastest growing major city.* Bigger than Boston, DC or Denver, edging up on cities like Memphis and Detroit, which have traditionally been thought of as far more important, flagship metropolises, while lil' ole Seattle was content to corner away up near Canada, with its fish and its rain and odd bursts of quirky architecture.
At least, that's often  how it got sold to outsiders; there's always been an internal struggle in town; people in Seattle want it recognized as an incubator of culture and ideas, but also want it for their own; best-kept secret with arts and culture and food and on a comparable level to** New York or wherever, but . . . ours.
(This spreads to the rest of the Northwest, and you have your Olympias and Bellinghams and Anacortes and Centralias cultivating relationships with the rest of the state in ways roughly analagous to how Seattle's had it's will they/won't they affair with the U.S. and world)

I'll totally cop to completely mixed feelings about the growth. I'm glad I live somewhere where not every single college grad is trying to cut me out of my bartending gig*** because nothing else is available. I'm glad that some of Seattle's ideas around fair payment and environmentalism can't be held up as economic hindrances. I'm glad people have jobs, and frankly, I think tall buildings are cool.
There's been a sense of quiet optimism over the last 20 years, so it's hard to see the current building and growth frenzy as some sort of triumphant turn around. As long as I thought about it, Seattle was a cool place to be, city parts, nature parts, family parts, rock and roll parts, lakes and weird retrofuture architecture. It still is all that, but now it's way harder to pay rent.
That said, some of us remember, or have parents who remember when that wasn't always the case. Seattle's seen some lean times. The 1970s are well before my realm of memory, but in a global sense that's recent. That we're in a boom time is neither something to be taken for granted, nor something that will always be the case.
As such, it makes sense to me that some of the most vitriolic anti-growthers**** are transplants, often here well under ten years. They never got to see this sign every time they left and entered the city.

*not sure how they measure "majorness." I think that means a city over 100,000 people. There are plenty of small farm communities that through annexation and development have jumped from 2,000 to 25,000 all over the country.

**or you know, a cheaper, acceptable version of said things. 

***only every third college grad. I'm also a college grad, and that line does smack of hypocrisy. maybe I'll write the blog post about why I'm at least breaking from trying to thrust myself into academia. (hint: I can pay the bills better and I like the work just as much, if in a different way.)

****this post may make it seem like I enthusiastically welcome our new luxury-dwelling amazon programming overlords. Anyone who has walked with me through Capitol Hill knows this isn't true, but the things I think are bullshit, the ways to address this sort of crazy growth, the multiplicity of dualities, these are things for their own Trains and Tall Buildings posts.

Dinosaur knows your time is up.

Monday was the last day of Works In Progress at the Richard Hugo House. Monday was the last day of official excuses for two slices and 1-3 cans of discount Hamms at Big Mario's in a contained time frame before heading over to the RHH. It was time to let Robert P Kaye make like Jesus, and take the wheel. Kris and Bryan and Arlo and a bunch of folks who'd not been in a while mobbed down and I had the trusty Dinosaur Protector to watch hungrily as the night went on. Afterward we all (including Rachel's younger bro and his gf) went to the Cha Cha, Kris got enthused about Lords of the New Church and I got enthused about Mudhoney, respectively, as they drowned out conversation.

Dinosaur watches Steve Shue read from his laptop.

Previously, Sunday night, I hopped a bus to Capitol Hill (ALWAYS WITH THE CAPITOL HILL) and shared a laptop (and some Roses Bourbon) with Chelsea K, who hosts The Casserole, an online reading series (which I explained just one post ago.) I read to the forced silence of Ethan and Rachel E, while Emily Wittenhagen beamed in from Roslyn. I read some new poems, some reworked old poems and a handful of less-frequently read poems from FJGTPL. After she reads, we talk about Aliens, and Owls, and some vague things about forms of writing. Watch it below.



Tonight I am going to work, in about an hour and a half, after a day of largely editing/advising on other people's poetry. This is work I usually get paid for, but sometimes doing it completely for free feels more liberating. . .? That was a dumb sentence I just typed, but I'm leaving it there, because I meant it.

I'll leave you with the following: a list of bars poets can, or should, drink at, in case you'd not seen that before, and this post from Leigh Bell, who writes on artistic self-care in way that neither makes me want to puke, nor makes me suspect she's selling something. She's able to overcome the initial eye-roll I have at "The Artist's Way," to address issues that tend to be either pushed aside or can be overcome if you come to this new writer's retreat and conference and send away for a series of tapes. . . .
It's a relatively quick read for a fairly in-depth thought process, which is something she's pretty good at, as you'll see if you take on her prior posts.

See: The Way Things Start and End on Time.

See: Long Breakfast Coming
Sometime Sunday morning, afternoon, actually, the day after the final Greenwood Lit Crawl, eating a veggie breakfast burrito at a favorite Columbia City brunch spot, an hour and a half before working a crazy shift where I had to use both elbows to get through crowds of dancers (without spilling beer), on a recap-tip with Rachel, I still swam with half-thoughts and images. I thought about the writers group I started attending in Jr. High and loved, then grew completely frustrated with by the time I was 19; there was no exit point. I thought about getting kicked out of the UK about six months (at least) too soon and trying to scramble to put things in place so the stuff I started there would work. I thought about how I'd loved Bellingham, Washington, in November 2005, how I'd have not moved to stop a fullscale demolition in May of 2007.

See: Not to be Confused With a Swedish Rock Band
I was recapping the story of how Basement Poetry ended-- a 67 year old one-handed veteran reading an epic narrative about his father to about 20 people, four cop cars, three separate noise-violation tickets of $250-- to Rachel, who'd either not heard it, or felt I needed to feel like I was telling a new story. Either way, a once-storied thing I'd put together (not coincidentally, with two other friends, over beer) I'd apparently not even mentioned to my girlfriend. Buried? Blurred? (ask her, however, if she wants to hear about The Crunch again. . .)

See: Everything I do, I do for Love and a Suffocating Sense of Obligation.
There is no online recording of Lobster Manor, the Poem that,had I written later in my writing career/education, would have probably taken on a greater element of word collage. I was palpably bitter because I was twenty six and had enough fucked shit going on personally that I could afford to spread it around, and because me, Jake, Ryler had to live in that house for a year after the tickets, could barely even have people over ("If this happens again, you'll probably get evicted") and I, at least, had folks I barely knew coming up to me and guilting me for not risking my house and prosecution in order to keep having shows and readings. . .you know, FOR THE SCENE.

See: Getting to the Nostalgia At Hand
One year ago Saturday, we had the first Five Alarms Lit Crawl. Below you can watch my rambling, overexplanatory introduction and Eva Suter's set, which kicked off the whole shebang. You can also remember that sometimes I don't have a beard, and then there's my hair, solidly at the middle point between "terrible" and "decent" grahamhair.




I, Aaron, and Greg got better and briefer with the intros. Saw some fantastic readings, some readers stepping in at clutch time to fill a void and knocking it outta the part (larry, jesse, kris, erin), got love in the local press, love from our friends and got to know a lot of awesome folks that we'd not beforehand. I tend to think that curating is a delicate balance between sacrifice and selfishness; when you have respected writers getting on a mic and saying "This is one of the best/my favorite literary event series. . ."
well that may not be the reason you started (because that is a bad reason to expend so much effort) but it can help you keep going (perpetual motion machine. maybe we can top ourselves)
I think next to starting The Crunch, Five Alarms has been my consistent favorite curation experience. Merging the fun (drinking! crawling! socializing!) with a commitment to quality and challenging work (that line betwen crowd-accessible and experimental and confrontational) both nailed my personal aesthetic and helped to expand it. The energy, shifting vibe-- the crawls all had basic ingredients in common, but no two had the same atmosphere around them. This was huge for me.
For comprehensive video, photos, check out www.fivealarms.wordpress.com.
I was going to have a mini list of my own personal favorite moments, but that would be some saccharine bullshit.

See: All Good Things
So if you clicked his name, you know Greg is going to Cambodia. If you've talked to any of us in person, you know we somewhat arbitrarily set out to do 5, and that you are welcome to pick our brains if you want to pick up where we left off. There've been more than a few "Why are you stopping?" queries, but they've generally been unloaded; no guilt, no guff. Partly because I think it can actually be harder to stop a reading when it's struggling; it feels like a defeat, like no one will step up. I have no question that we would have gotten to that point if we'd tried to drag it on; there were many writers I'd have loved to see at a crawl, but you know what? I'm pretty sure the scene can take care of itself. There was a sense in the conversations I heard and was a part of that this can be a start, or a link, in Seattle's ongoing literary metamorphosis.
Ending like I started: On a personal note it's been so. good. for me to be involved in something that ended at the right moment.

OLDNESS ATTACK

Involuntaries

clings to the rail
then
skirts the edge,
sine-waving all over the sidewalk.

shudder. spasm.

clung-clung-clang on thin bridges
torso wants the ground
hair wants the five feet,
fifteen,
twenty,
fifty

arms want to clothesline strangers, teeth to dig into faces of nearleaning friends, legs the radials of 18 wheelers, throat clearing constant in libraries, the fuck-thefuck-thefuck, even reading a book, full-on engaged, hands reach for low hanging powerlines

intentions irrelevant
steps clipped
he begins to lean

Just More Victims of Seattle's Crisi-Proportion Budget Shortfall

the roadside raccoon is starting to stink.
the sidewalk grass unmowed on
this southend arterial, at first
passersby nodded or shook their
heads or took pictures of the
perfectly preserved, taxidermy-ready
fur, just half a block from the corner store
and you don't see that everyday.

now the bits of bone, orange
and black and flies and oh, geez
has something been eating it?

a block and a half down the new
bus stop with clean seats and
black and white photography
is dented and mangled and
shattered by a a swerving
night truck that also took
out most of the fence by the
mexican food store.

a quick repair or replacement
seems unlikely.

Stuff Happens 2: Brief Roundup-->

-->Went good. Crowd participation in non-invasive ways. Solid readings from everyone and a greater variety of writing and performance styles. Once Huw gets that noise onto disc we'll get it to the folks in London and start having some Content for When the Site Goes Live.
Thoroughly satisfying as my last curated event in Swansea, provided you don't count the going-away-type-event that I've scheduled so that people can't give me grief for not telling them exactly when I was leaving. I mean, it should be fun and everything, picnic and djs at Mozarts and lots of people (according to facebook-invite-responses) and stuff, but every minute I'm hanging out with people now is time I'm not finishing my packing.

If I feel like being a twat, I'm totally playing "wild horses."

Everything must run its course.

Today I went to Jen and Keiran's and Jen was like "let's get you a plane ticket." So a ticket is gotten. Summer prices are a bitch, but that's life. Second week of July I fly back to the States, meaning now that the next month+ will probably run by in a montage-like series of images, events and people while MGMT and possibly the Arcade Fire play in the background of every waking thought.


Big emotions, dude. Here's more sweet jams, varying levels of relevance to how I'm feeling these days.



these guys played Swansea yesterday and I missed it. I know. Part of the problem.




you and me both, Scott. . .


I'll bet these women are really nice grandmothers now who make doilies and have no idea they're in a sweet detroit rapper's video.


word.

Call it romantic predict-a-text*

*for best results, scroll to the video and press play. listen to song while reading the entry. this one is just a song; there's no video to go with it.

First-- A poem from January. You might remember it. This version is slightly edited.

Swansea,
I have met so many girls
with fast laughs and careful smiles
who've known you far too long
whose tired eyes would do
so much better
elsewhere.

This, we have in common.

T and I broke up yesterday. It started Wednesday morning when I was walking her to work and I made one of my brilliant "here'ssomethingcasualthatactuallymeanslots" comments about how I could, you know, really get used to this. Then Saturday night at Sin City (there's an entry coming about how all my relationships in Wales have seemed to start or end at Sin City) she writes me a note on her phone about "I think I'm falling for you way too fast."
I think Pantera's "Walk" was playing in the background at the time.
So she came over to mine yesrafternoon, dodged the crowds of baby-dedicators and we hashed things out in my room. It was either going to suck a lot now or suck a lot in a few months; selfishly enough I would have preferred the latter. Because then all the leaving-related-angst could be packed up into one misty-eyed suitcase, i could write a note on the airplane and mail it as soon as I got back. But the intervening months, helping me pack, scribble goodbyes, those would have been hell on her.

So I guess I'm taking this one in lumps.



long. fucking. sigh.

All this talk of leaving when it still feels so far away.

Today is a heavy internet day for me. So be it.

For Lent this year I'm going with the old standby of giving up booze. There've been the odd occasions in the past when (for lent or other reasons) I've given up booze where the fact that I really didn't want to meant I needed to; this time the fact that I'm not bothered about it means it's all just as well.


I mailed off my visa app yesterday. The weight off my shoulders is tremendous. I probably have about 2 -4 more months in Swansea now and I've got shit to do. Among the things I've got planned:

--> Help Theresa move forward with her plans; she sent off an application to Grad School in Cardiff yesterday and will be looking to move soon. I like our parallell trajectories in some ways; we're helping each other along. Also, do more fun stuff with her now that I'm not in perma-whinge mode.

--> Global Poetry System. On March 27th there's a workshop in London I go to (this may be one of the few notable Lent Exceptions I allow myself as long as its determined ahead of time) and we'll get some events nailed down. The idea being to schedule a series of events related to poetry found in unconventional places and presented in new and unusual ways. It's a UK-wide deal and I'm Swansea's guy for it.

--> Pare down my collection of books, clothes and CDs; when I do move I want to minimise shipping costs. Maybe get the odd new item to supplement; I can throw out five old T-shirts I never wear a lot easier if I have one new one I think is rad.

--> The Crunch. Get that shit official; talk to Academi and get funding so we can pay features from out of town. Find someone to host in my eventual absence. Keep the momentum we have.

--> I still owe a few people Letters from Wales. It's way more exciting (when you're in Seattlingporthamland) to receive Letters from Wales than from Stanwood.

--> Tunes with John. Demos at least. Something to remember the Unnamed Trio by.

--> I'm thinking of making an extended version of Swansea Morning Coming Down with 15-20 poems in it; mainly ones written since coming to Swansea. Maybe a few old standbys. It'd be a cool thing to have as a record of a specific time and place; plus I could schedule a few readings and sell them. I'm broke.

--> See more of Wales. Preferably the parts that weren't bombed to shit by the Luftwaffe and subsequently paved over.

--> Get a few more pictures of this town, country and my friends that aren't taken inside Mozart's Wine Bar or The Office. This will possibly be the most difficult.

These are the stories you won't tell the kids we never have

"Someone's bound to take offense, but you know, fuck 'em."--Ioan.


I'm pretty sure that could have been the theme of the night for everyone. The whole banner-tearing, sex-pistols singing, couple-swapping, crowd-surfing, public-snogging, tearful-confronting, goth-dancing, shot-taking, hey!-you're 86ed bit of it. And I got to watch.

Me and Punk John are shooting each other knowing looks across a Jess/John living room as crowded as I've ever seen it. Hi, thought I knew you, guess I did, but not as well as I could have.

In other news, apparently I have a thing for girls who still live with their ex-boyfriends with whom they are very good friends.

Beneath the Cathedral

beneath the cathedral-- 200+ years old
lie the white plastic tarps,
2+ weeks old by the look of it
with gnawed, holed trainers
sticking out from under,
and she, 24 years old
wants to poke it with a stick.

There are so many buildings here
older than my country, so many ghosts.
But the scariest thing I've seen
is a girl in black lipstick
clutching my arm and pulling me--
26 years old--
through weeds-ridden cobblestones

towards a tattered white plastic tarp
that doesn't seem to be moving.

New Poem For Old Plasters

"We don't talk about love,
we only want to get drunk."-- msp

so the Manics song—the one that could have been our story
if our story had been much longer—came on and I sat on my

underused balcony where you smoked in the rain and watched
Swansea’s skyline for the length of a song, long enough for a lump

to travel from my throat to my stomach and watched the august
mist-- it was November then-- and shook my head. it’s a shame, really.

that no one comes up here. It’s a good view but I need company to
enjoy it. so I've never quite done the deep-breath-in-and calm down

that a good view is supposed to give.

that’s what the cigarettes were supposed to do?
calm you down, right?
you went through so many packs in your yellow room with it’s

candles and liters of Strongbow I was happy to help you with but
ultimately the fags were on a long list of things that were going to

hurt you. I hesitate to put myself on that list; I wrote you a good
poem-- not this one-- and bought you breakfast and tried not to

ever let you see how scared I was, especially that night
when it was too late for nothing to happen and

we polished off two more cans and
you told me about the razors.

I know this song so well it seeps inside my brain

Finally delivering on long-ago made promises to people on both this and the other side of the atlantic, I've been spending my afternoon burning Jazz Records For Sale by Police Teeth; only I'm not sure my I-tunes is working properly on the burning front. Neither the mixes I sent to Lailey or to Bethany worked for them, so there are many a question mark as to whether this will work.

This has facilitated listening to the album again, which I haven't in a while. It doesn't have the same Bellingham-memory quotient that a lot of stuff does, partially because I actually got the masters copy mailed me here. It's still good and I'm sure that, should I finally wrangle the truth out of my laptop, my friends over here (the ones who like, you know, music) will enjoy it.

_______
the pub that I work at looks like this:
except that it doesn't lie on it's side.

it only lies on it's side in blog entries when I have
trouble figuring out how to edit newly uploaded pictures on my laptop.

I suggest turning your monitor on it's side for
maximum viewing pleasure.
anyway, yes. That's what it looks like. I'll be
there tonight reading out the questions to the
Pub Quiz and making many reference to the way
that my accent makes understanding me an
impediment and apologizing for my "clumsy
american tongue." Extrapolate the innuendoes if you must.
This is fine, save for the fact that it means I'm missing my supervisor (and previously mentioned/pictured Dave Beer) play in his band "A Kid Called Power," wherein they perform songs about "There Will Be Blood" and cover the Jesus Lizard.






If you've received paper corrospondences from me, chances are at least a portion of them were written from Mozart's, which accurately plays as a speakeasy, coffee shop, local pub and daytime cafe. I went in today for a delicious breakfast sandwich. Breakfast sandwiches are something I have a weakness for.

Tommorrow night Howard Webb is coming to town and crashing at my humble abode. This will facilitate a lot of cleaning on my part. Probably we'll see the insides of both pubs I've posted on here, as that seems to be the way. Close shop at the Rhyd and if one of us wants to Moz, pretty much all of us will.

"Hello. You have been invaded by the staff of a vastly inferior pub."-- Kieran.

Either way, it will be good to see Howard's smiling face.

I got a group e-mail from T. Keller to pretty much everyone who's been writing for Buddyhead as of late (there's not that many of us) talking about a site re-launch and re-organization. Asking basically "who's in?" More than that I probably can't say, but there's a good chance I'll be having musicky things to write about soon. I think this is good. And it not being a local thing would be good too--

too many nights could end up looking like this:

"call it."

Just saw No Country For Old Men. That'll do ya.

afterwards John and I arrived at Gerald and Jess had started The Virgin Suicides. Given what I'd just seen and a few other factors, I wasn't up to a soft-focus romantic look at suicide, so I hung out for a little while, but left before everyone was dead.

I think "leaving before everyone is dead" is a pretty good policy I'll try to stick to.