Love Reign O'er Me

Because it took me a number of years to piece together what became Frequencies, it was a slow build-up to understand that, in Frequencies, I might have something extraordinary. The night, in the summer of 2005, was hot and black as ink, indeed. So much was to come from what happened that night, in so many directions, some straightforward, some bizarre, that I thought only The Who in full flight could do it justice. The Who, who emerge, over a long period of time, for many of us, as the undisputed champions of rock. You play this kind of music, you don't beat The Who. So much of what seems big in popular culture is just regional in the end. Understand the map, understand The Who. And back to New Hampshire, and a piece at least partially steeped in sex and sexuality, which The Who tend not to be. Just as there is no critique which can do justice to the transcendental sturm und drang of Roger Daltrey at Live Aid, how many ways the different crescendos which built up both Mary and I as individuals in the world can hardly be counted. In the end, all of it will only matter to people who care about writing and books. The Who do, indeed, reach more people. It's also arguable that if you don't know Parts of a Story, you cannot understand this story, either. But the most special reason to pimp out a Who Live Aid video, is just to say, as I do not often say, that here's something I've done that really is itself, special, and deserves special regard. The sweat of lovers. It was dramatic that this happened, and if Frequencies doesn't announce itself in a dramatic, Who-crescendo sort of way, then I did something wrong. The ricochet inheres— 1985 to 2005, then unevenly up to 2026. The sense of the uneven there is blessed. Something a priori built into the universe, and art at its best. And rock. 

Ardent EP re-pub

That our Philly scene was no stranger to Brett Anderson and the London Suede— that's one subtext of the Matt Stevenson-created Ardent cover. Mary was in on that too, without knowing it. So, here 'tis— the re-pubbed seven-song Ardent EP, un-stunted rock from the bowels of South Philadelphia. Shake off the jinx, let in the minx.

Bullett
El Goodo
Brown Eyes Like His
Ardent
Fortis Green
Streetlakes
4 Elliott

Mix Upload: Third/Sister Lovers

Feel (I saw) remix: Eris Temple lore

In 2008, Natalie Weyes Blood performed at the Eris Temple, where I'd recorded Feel. 

Acid Dropping EP

 

A keepsake of a time and a place, and of possibilities.

Acid Dropping EP is:

I. A Clangorous Din— Speck

II. Stone the Devil— Speck

III. Viaje entre las luces— Vince El Mejor

IV. Driving Home— MalreDeszik

V. Hipsters— Falki Hoz

VI. Feel (I saw) remix— Zenboy1955

Various Positions:

On the Soundclick Jazz Overall chart, A Clangorous Din reached #15, Stone the Devil #12, Viaje entre las luces #18, and Driving Home #29.

On the Soundclick Electronic Overall chart, Hipsters, a.k.a. Ode On Jazz (3, with Falki Hoz), reached #20. Feel (I saw) remix reached #8, making it a national hit. 

Featured on Things You Heard When You Were Dead (shane p).

All tracks feature spoken word by Adam Fieled, from (respectively) Opera Bufa, This Charming Lab, When You Bit..., Ode On Jazz, and Curiosities. 

From Funtime Records, and Jamendo.  

Produced/engineered by respective artists, Eris Temple, and the Kelly Writers House. 

A Clangorous Din re-pub

Speck, in Cali, took some of the nicer passages in Opera Bufa and went to town with them. This was in '21. A Clangorous Din made a top 15 showing in the Soundclick Jazz Overall chart, and a top 10 showing in hearthis.at Electronica. Here: Jamendo's re-pub. 

For Bloomsday. and Christmas

7 Chinese Brothers

Assimilating the spots of time we all live through, some people are lucky enough to spots of time that either are, or become, holy to them. I have a few. The spring of 1998 in State College, Pennsylvania was a holy time for me then, and remains one to me now. Odd, because I should’ve been graduating, and was not. Yet I was graduating— from a realm of confusion and discomfort, a perpetual inability to express myself in writing, into a new, expansive realm where I could take language and go wherever I wanted to with it. The French Symbolists were with me. I still had the Beats around. Eliot I was just starting to grok. Yeats and Romanticism were still in the future. But when I got picked up by a writing whirligig or virus, living in a bedsit flat in North Halls, a little slice of a room, I got dropped into a place where I felt the earth move with my pen. Clean was my first masterpiece. Absurdist, bizarre, but a masterpiece nonetheless. All brought on by extensive donning of black leather pants. Daddio. Don’t keep ‘em on for three months. Clean heralded a sense of absolute rebirth. Enhanced by the extremely intense, bewitching sense of earth magic in central Pennsylvania. Great weather, in the spring of ’98, Centre County. Seventy-five and sunny all the time. I moved into yet another South Atherton Street sublet. The daily writing jags were about a task I could do, from a sense of manhood earned. R.E.M. is, of course, perfect to hear in a little college town. Holy. And my choice for the spring of ’98 happened to be Reckoning. So that the best of my time in State College was always spent floating slightly above the ground. If you can earn that sense of floatation with serious creativity, you have gained religion.

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, and was thus a national hit. 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 facilitated by the California site CC Mixter.

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. 

Dangerous Type

Ricochets. Ricochets and chiasmus relationships. It should be obvious by now, that within the Aughts Philly posse I tend to stick to, which extends to Boston (where The Cars are from) and Chicago, if not Montreal and Central Pa, all kinds of similitude in dissimilitude raises its intriguing head and makes comparison-contrast a fun game. Like the issue of Jenny Kanzler-as-Temptress, as she appears here in P.F.S. Post, sashaying into a seduction steel-cage match with Hannah Miller. Both dangerous types. Quienes mas peligroso? An honest appraisal would throw me, Toonces-the-Driving-Cat like, over the cliff of understanding that Ms. Miller has a slight lead over Ms. Kanzler. Jenny is moored to the shore, as a painter, of a kind of wholesome earnestness about serious creation that offsets her kinkiness. Hannah, in the relevant days, was pure kink. Substitute politics for art to make the souffle, and up rises an absolute monster of seductive fluency. How about the seduction Carl Yastrzemski of Boston herself, enfranchised alongside The Cars? Same basic idea. Too rooted in the idea of Creation-not-Destruction, with something earnest to express. What Hannah expressed was inchoate, in whole, except to say that she played hardball even if the game was badminton. But back to the Divine Miss K, and the sense that in this piece, our two primordial Overlord Heroines have not been forgotten. Jenny (Diana), as can be seen, used kinkiness to try to teach them a lesson. Unfortunately, we were all too young and stoned to notice much but who was opped to pack the next bowl. Kids.  And a bunch of Dangerous Types, as it were. Worth remembering, in the end, because we did mean it about art. So there, Hannah.     

Gregg Foreman 1972-2026

 Someone else I knew in the mix. 

She's the One

After a hiatus, here it is— a new way to do Undulant. This time, a novel manner of backing up print, specifically Vlad Pogorelov's Monday Journal, on perma.cc. Of course, PennSound doesn't hurt, either. All to back up the unlikely chiasmus of Bruce Springsteen to Federico Garcia Lorca. Hear me out. This tune, one that's not been emphasized much, does a gut-level trick, or slug-in-the-guts trick, that consolidates a good amount of shock and awe. There's fear and trembling, joy and ecstasy all together, danger and safety, etc. Lorca names this assemblage of fiery passion the duende.  What I tie Lorca and Springsteen into is myself, and Undulant, also into Hannah Miller, the mid-Aughts, and the rest. Just something to know about Hannah: she was dangerous. She was wild. She meant danger. The night being described in the piece is June 16, 2005. Bloomsday, fer chrissakes. Hannah is Molly, who meant danger, too. The first night it was, of not too many nights, but nonetheless some of the most memorable nights of my life. Like a bullfight, touched for the very first time. And the crowning moment of the Aughts for me, who didn't even expect, until Hannah showed up, that the Aughts would or could be crowned. Philadelphia had the power to let it happen. 

The Core

So, then there's the idea of the partnership I had going with Mary H— as equals, as artists. That's the essential idea— we were partners. All the early Aughts ecstasy, as we see in Starlight, Ink Pantry and PennSound, was not just about finding kindred spirits, but precise kindred spirits. Another you, that just happens to be opposite sexed. That's why we were so at home, and all those nights could pass in a spirit, deeply felt, of all for one and one for all. Abby slots in the same way— as an equal, as an artist. A precise kindred spirit. Abby's a fucking Virgo— it better be precise. We were all perfect together enough that even Abby could accept, for a while. And when we could get the right starlit mood going, starting in West Philly, all of Philadelphia joined in with us. This, Manhattan can never do. The Clapton song thus works as a paean to me dialoging back and forth with Mary and Abby. The nights that went on and on, with everything in them, including the kitchen sink. We held nothing back at all. Our entire souls were allowed and encouraged to come to the surface and express themselves. All because the essential human pact was fulfilled— we were finally among people who were like us. At home. That's The Core. Amnesty from the stupid surface of things, forever, babes. 

Rock and Roll

At a key moment here, I'm not going to be afraid to call a spade a spade and name P.F.S. for what it was in the Aughts: a pagan scene. When I say pagan scene, I mean a scene about earth magic(k), in all its manifestations— no point belaboring them, y'all know what they are. Everything that was righteous among us was a pagan rite fulfilled, a pagan ritual fulfilled, even, at times, a pagan sacrifice fulfilled. What just went up on P.F.S. Post, and has been on PennSound for a while, is about Philadelphia getting in tune with the cosmos the right way, even after all the humiliations it suffered towards the end of the twentieth century. By pagan voodoo it was, and by any means necessary. Also, a triumph against oppression and potential oppressors by pure Joy of Earth. So: read the piece. And just come to an understanding, about our pagan scene, that religion was got, and religion was had. Starting with Mary, Abby, and I, and then out to Jenny, Hannah, Gaetan, and the rest. Philadelphia not a down place, but a get-down place. As we would ask: are you gonna fuck up, or are you gonna get down. So, Zeppelin might be rock's ultimate pagans, and may they be right there with us. Philly will always get real in the end. That's my prediction. Because it's been a long time since...