When You Sleep

There are situations we all live through that become compelling specifically because they never resolve. Situations that remain open sores. When I met Becky Hilliker for the first time in 2004, it was casual. It stayed casual, too, for the years I knew her. Yet there was always an underlying sense of unease, because I either knew, or thought I knew, that we had more business together than our shared surface suggested. When I wrote Becky Grace for Beams in the mid-Aughts, I was poking gentle fun at Becky being a Boston Brahmin princess. In retrospect, the moment, in the autumn of 2005, she sent me Catch and I placed it on a then-fledgling P.F.S. Post, a beneath-the-surface monster was created which began its appointed task of lumbering around looking for prey later. My life in 2005 was moving too rapidly, and I was still too young, to understand the full import, and potentiality, of Catch in the world. If the whole scenario makes me think of My Bloody Valentine, it's because I will always have had the suspicion that beneath the Brahmin-ite surface, Becky was torn apart, when she wrote Catch, by internal conflicts and internal imperatives not being fulfilled. Her life, thus, was not any easier than anyone else's. The whole Loveless scenario, in all its goriness, is also a Boston one too. 

Leave Me Alone

There is the fluidity through which theory and theoretical apparatuses tie-in to books; and, also, the fluidity through which theories tie-in to popular culture. The argument I make, in the new piece on the Jeffrey Side blog, for Mary Walker Graham, Stacy Blair, and Rebecca Hilliker, has to do with isolation. The poet is happy to put out a leave me alone vibe. A strong stance, even if it is a suffering stance, too. Stronger, I feel, then the standardized feminist stance-in-verse. More about a sense of earned entitlement owing to superior imagination, metaphoric daring, and the rest. The reason I tie the new piece, which I actually worked on for a very long time, to the final track on New Order's Power, Corruption, and Lies, is that the three poets do establish a new order within themselves. An order about self-containment, self-sufficiency, and self-possession. About a possible connection between the three and post-punk, as we have here, sort of. The sense that feminists do think of themselves as punks, but often grandstand and play to crowds and crowd formations, means putting post-punk in front of the three written-about names is not complete nonsense. I would also like to say that I am now a convert to the religion of Power, Corruption, and Lies, and understand that, if I missed New Order when I was younger, it would be foolhardy to so do now.

Feel (I saw) remix re-pub

Jamendo has re-pubbed a large cross-section of their site on archive. org. This includes Zenboy1955's Feel (I saw) remix, which reached #8 on Soundclick's Electronic Overall chart a few years back. The Feel (I saw) remix starts with the PennSound version of my long narrative poem Feel, written from mid-Aughts Philly, not published until X-Peri in 2018, by which time the dust had still not settled. All set up by the California site CC Mixter, which puts the vaunt in avant for serious music.

Promised You A Miracle

While we were growing up, no one promised Mary, Abby, or I a miracle. When we stumbled onto the miracle of the whole Live Forever period, we grasped onto it with both hands for as long as we could. Twenty years ago, in an interview setting, Canadian poet Todd Swift promised me a miracle, if I took the time to listen to Simple Minds in depth. Chris McCabe, who also spent time in Montreal, had a way of saying the same thing. And let's not forget the crystalline John Hughes vision of Ferris Bueller's bedroom, with a Simple Minds poster prominently displayed. So, the Live Forever vibe continues, as I delve into New Gold Dream and voyage to a new place I always should have been. The muse for this video looks so disturbingly like Mary Evelyn, and appears to be a visual artist to boot, that it seems providential, at this point in '26, to stumble onto it. Also because I get backed up with straight rock on here and forget the glories of post-punk. An important precursor, also, to Depeche Mode, and the Violator album Mary and I used to imbibe all the time. So, this one's for Chicago and Montreal, and the sense that the road, for those on it to see as many real sights as possible, never ends.  

Almost Blue

With all the exuberance in the air, the early Aughts in Philadelphia have their darkness, too. Even as I ran around Center City, and Mary, Abby, and I did our famous jaunts from Logan Square to West Philadelphia and back, I was a haunted man. The progress I was making as a writer was slow, and labored. All the fluency I'd manifested in my last year in State College (1998) was still taking its sweet time making a transition into being the something else I needed it to be. This, I have discussed on Art Recess 2. The blue-balled and/or Almost Blue scenario has to do with the Heavenly literary Muses. When bathed in the starlight of all of our nights together, Almost Blue didn't matter. But at odd moments, it caught up to me that my actual creative life was very slow. The Costello tune is funny to throw in, because the way being creative on high levels works as not contrapuntal to a kind of intercourse, sexual intercourse, is very real. Things did not really get Blue again until 2005. Rather than a Rimbaud persona, I developed a tangent textual face, generated from a congeries of avant-garde related influences: Deconstructionism, Language Poetry, Surrealism, while earlier touchstones remained. As of '05, I was on fire again. But it did take seven years of slopping around in the mud of textual insolvency to get there. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, I will never get those seven years back again, but I don't need to. There may be no murder in our cathedral. And the city that makes a religion of E.C. is: Los Angeles. 

Lady Midnight

Nights spent in a foreign country have a sense, sometimes, of counting more than nights spent on familiar turf, don't they? The days and nights of Mary and I in Montreal were purgatorial ones. Being alone in a foreign country, we had no recourse, cut off from our usual routines, but to face exactly who we were, to ourselves, and reciprocally, to each other. We also fulfilled a Manifest Destiny impulse to being ex-pats, albeit brief ex-pats. Montreal being half-French language, half- English language, we kept stumbling into situations that called for us to know more than we did. Saint Catherine Street, where we stayed in Montreal, is a rough equivalent to South Street in Philadelphia, or St. Mark's Place in Manhattan. Lots of action, but action which tends to be of a rough or raunchy variety. So it was no surprise that Mary and I witnessed an actual barroom brawl. I was non-plussed but also not moved, but Mary was very upset. A foreign country will expose delicate nerves. As I bothered to document on Art Recess 2, our purgatorial means out, that particular night, was a kinky one. The emergence, probably not for the first time, of the occult conferring benediction on Saint Catherine Street. Mary just missing the beckoning gesture of Lady Midnight, as Leonard Cohen assays here, who hovered over us in Montreal, with a distinct, mixed, enchantment/damnation vibe. May I say we also bothered to spend a few hours on the McGill campus, took some pictures there, and were rewarded by a sense of liberation past our personal Purgatorio, Dantean Double Dutch. When we arrived back in Philadelphia, we knew ourselves better. 

Shazam!

 Thanks to Falki Hoz and Hipsters, the KWH Ode on Jazz is planted on Shazam.