We Gotta Get You A Woman

As I just said in TAS, and as is also visible in the 2025 Buffalo 8 page: the book Equations was written by me, to attempt to answer a question. The question— whether our relationship to sex and sexuality is what makes us most human— is one that some find interesting, some don't. Why not God, for instance, rather than sex, or work? In any case, for all the sex prevalent in Aughts Philly, Philly is still, also, the City of Brotherly Love. The idea of friendship had to be huge, too. So, also for instance, Gaetan Spurgin's vaunted bros before hos refrain was one he carried around, for all occasions. It worked between me and my other Free School cohorts while that scene was going on, too. And, of course, it worked with Todd, who begins in Upper Darby, where lives, incidentally, the Trixie Belle character in Equations. Upper Darby, btw, is not all working class, as many would assume. Up close, it's half working class, half posh. Trixie Belle lived on the posh side of Upper Darby. And did leave me with sunken eyes, and full of sighs. As was duly noted by Mike Land... so that all the games could begin again. And again. 

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

Was In Rainbows the last great rock album? It's difficult, in 2026, not to think of rock as having decayed and decomposed, from supermarket tabloids on out, into nostalgia-land, rather than being a present-tense reality. My first listen, turns out, to In Rainbows, was an extremely memorable one. It was a car ride from Midway Airport in Chicago (after my first visit to Chicago, I avoided O'Hare) into the South Side of Chicago. Steve Halle's car. And we were going to visit the enfranchised, Eric Elshtain assembled bookstore on the U of Chicago campus, wacky poetry section and all. The time was January 2008. In Rainbows is a spectacular winter album. Memories are made of this. I had time to remember Chicago in the TAS interview that just came out, along with the sense that Chicago is an investment I don't regret. So it goes, that day, with In Rainbows hot off the press, there wasn't that much need yet to think that rock had kicked the bucket. It's Blitz held down the fort in 2009. But, from the Teens forward, pretty slim pickins for those raised on rock. Funny, that day, to note that Chicago's South Side mirrors Philadelphia's North Side. Where Temple University is. Memories are made of this. 

Kamera

Aughts Philly was long on glamour, indeed. Was the city glamour market necessarily cornered for that time period? Not from what I saw. Part of the attraction of Chicago in the Aughts was that you could see from a distance, right there online, all kinds of glamour bleeding out in different directions. So many presses, journals, reading series, so much dynamism, and the online presence was, indeed, immense. Once I got a taste of Aughts Chicago, I went slightly crazy with it. First, I was going to be there, then I was there. The second of four visits, in the summer of 2007, when I was still hitched to Mary H, was well documented. Mary H and Abby, as they had been in the early Aughts, had glamour-puss rivals in Simone and Kristy, as is seen here. The fact that Simone and Kristy were also powerful heads-of-state made it so that I could not not feel, that second visit, that I had securely arrived, even as I had done Myopic the first visit, met other heads-of-state. What do Philadelphia and Chicago have in common? They both happen to be big, real cities. That's a deceptively simple thing to say, but seasoned city-watchers will know what I mean. Through Wilco, Chi-Town also had an Aughts rock record of note, which Philly did not. I like to hear Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as Tweedy & Co's answer to Third/Sister Lovers. Decomposition and decay. Even as a walk down North Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park does something so Main Street Manayunk, and Bucktown does something so Roxborough, that people watching closely, about Philly-Chi-Town, would not be surprised that something had to give, and it did. Against decay.

More Than A Woman

So, the Bee Gees aren't supposed to be creepy, right? Yet, I've always heard & seen both Saturday Night Fever and the adjacent soundtrack as creepy. The songs are written ass-backwards, with all those loopy strings on them. Mid-Aughts Philly was also written ass-backwards, so to speak. Plenty of loopy strings, too. The sense that when Hannah Miller showed up, so many antes got upped among us, that we might as well all been hanging out, so to speak, and hanging loose, on the Verrazano Bridge. This, I documented in '24 on PennSound. Hannah Miller's Lady Godiva-ish sense of drama, and intensity, made everything around here pick up a macabre tinge. It was all life and death. That's why the political types she often ran with were, I felt, an odd choice for her. They affirmed her need for relevance, but denied the primordial sense that she needed to be dramatically backlit for intrigue and romance. The Saturday Night Fever level of the mid-Aughts was about fooling around on the Eternity version of the Verrazano Bridge. That's where Hannah and I did our dance. Within the sphere of danger. Also like Lorca's duende. And Hannah carried so much gut-level danger with her that everything she did and said could make your own guts drop. More than a woman to me, indeed. Even if it all had to happen hit-and-run style. The opposite, I would think, of the political. 

Drown

As may be a pressing question for interested parties: does State College bear out its existence from the heart of Pennsyltucky? Even more important: is Jen a Pennsyltucky Princess? The answer is no and yes. State College, like Philadelphia itself, subsists surrounded on all sides by Pennsyltucky territories. But the influx, in the small college town, of students and faculty from Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere renders the place cosmopolitan enough not to fall prey to Pennsyltucky syndromes. Where Jen was from, Liverpool, in the Harrisburg 'burbs, really is el primo Pennsyltucky real estate. Which means that, between being a city suburbs kid and being high as a kite on crack, I was destined for a big culture shock when I crashed there in '96. I felt strongly at the time: I could either channel Johnny Cash or Arthur Rimbaud. I chose Rimbaud. Back, also, to the Nineties. The cultural Nineties in America have a long and short version for me. In the compressed narrative form: the Nineties let popular culture get much more real than it usually does. This, I watched from State College. But The Pumpkins were a Zeitgeist band about the issue of real musical reality impinging on corporate third-world-ism and death-emphasis. With a soundtrack like The Pumpkins, it was easy to get transcendental. And ride the Nineties roller-coaster and appreciate it for all it was worth. 

Obscured

Springtime always makes me think of State College. Worth saying that, where writing is concerned, my years in State College were my apprentice years. Seriously creative people know— to get to the point where you can create what you want to create, years have to be ploughed through of churning out garbage. From 1994 until the spring, specifically, of 1998, I did, in fact, churn out my fair share of garbage in State College. I witnessed the Alternative Revolution tempest at the same time, from State College. The Pumpkins were, also in fact, demi-gods in State College. They were everywhere. Even the football guys. And when To Happy Valley appeared on PennSound in 2024, it got lost in the shuffle a little bit. It shouldn't have, because, in the spring of 1998, I had the most profound creative breakthrough I ever had, at least until Apparition Poems. Over a succession of days in April, I found myself using language to pierce through reality-holes in a way I never had before. The right forms appeared at the right times. My last increment of time in State College, April to Novemeber 1998, was thus, by far the happiest. I passed my own self-imposed Comp Exams. And this is a Pumpkins tune I heard at a party in someone's flat in May, that sent me into a paroxysm of ecstasy. Earth magic and rock magic together. The spring that arrives, and never really leaves. 

Jeepster

When Blazevox re-released the e-book Beams in 2025, I had no recourse but to revisit the fall of 2007, when the e-book initially appeared. I had just broken up with Mary H, again. Temple was Temple. At the Last Drop, Annie Daley, who appears as Dana Blasconi in Letters to Dead Masters, was documenting a bunch of heavy situations in a heavy-handed fashion. Thus, we had not only Electric Warrior, as is seen here, but Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and In the Court of the Crimson King. Records were never spun lightly at the Last Drop. You might or might not know the purpose, at any given time, but the not-casual approach to hipster-ism was their stock in trade. The moodiness, kinkiness, and sexiness of the T. Rex formed, as of the fall of 2007, a nice power block against the ogre stuff. Did the crowd notice I suddenly had books out? Some of them did. But the situation, me against an array of people in books, all in a line, was a congested one. It was a time when I relied on Chicago to really get my kicks, and feel like I was breaking new ground. The early and mid-Aughts were the really magical Philadelphia years. Even as the Last Drop remained a solid anchor-place, a place that mattered.