Sunday, February 20, 2011

Those Distant Sirens Down in the Valley Signal Great Hinges in the Lives of Strangers. A Phone Tree.



Joel is 51 today. He got out of MST3K when at it's best; I can't watch Mike episodes.

X has aged horribly to me, not the musicians but the music. Two of the better nights of my life involved X concerts, including one of the best nights in my life, so disclaimer, but there was a time when... Anyway, Billy Zoom is 63 today:







ALBANY

Ron Silliman

If the function of writing is to "express the world." My father withheld child support. forcing my mother to live with her parents. my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can't afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing "We shall not be moved." My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle. kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won't read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable1 though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the comer store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan's benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord's control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-ceIling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry's father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can't read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the harelip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison. a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus. cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and "in defense" the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.


12 comments:

  1. Maryland pigs.

    Shirley, this isn't going to help the goopers in Maryland?
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah MST3K! Totally agree about Joel vs Mike. But what about TV's Frank?

    ReplyDelete
  3. PS: Whenever I start thinking X aged poorly, I listen to Under the Big Black Sun. It's their most mature album. Wild Gift and LA are period-pieces, what's after UTBBS gets a bit poppy and has that Knitters influence which isn't bad but to me isn't really X.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Having spent much time lobbying and working on behalf of State Senators who support 'same sex' marriage (or just marriage for those of us who aren't homophobes) I'm pleased that it took the GOP so long to get around to griping. They thought Mike Miller had his finger in the dike.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh Sasha, you know that there are 3 parties in Maryland: Democratic (big), Republican (small) and Miller (decisive). If Senator Forever's finger isn't in the dike, its because the developers don't care about that dike. And, yes, that last sentence is ripe for punning, but Sasha started it.

    As for X --, what a band. Doh still has one of the best voices in rock and though they aren't what they once were, neither am I. So I do what I do with myself. I accept. Was it about 10 years ago that they came around on a reunion sort of thing? My wife said "let's go" and I said I can't watch another great memory explode in one of these tours. I went to bed. She came home ecstatic. I didn't miss the next one and I'm not sorry I went, stayed out 4 hours past mean bedtime and couldn't hear for 3 days. Yeah, this isn't 1980, but X is still better than most of it. And Billy Zoom is still the Chris Walken of rock and roll.

    drip

    ReplyDelete
  6. I saw the New World tour at Ontario Theater and they tore the fucking house down. Tore the fucking house down. Never saw or heard anything like it before or since. Those rare nights when you catch a band when everything and everyone is clicking. Kaboom!

    But the music just hasn't aged well for me. I remember it being fresh and urgent - it's like it had an expiration date. No doubt this is entirely on me.

    And I just might use the Chris Walken of rock and roll line, with full attribution, of course.

    And Alex Mooney, who I've met - accidentally, at a cocktail party of an acquaintance at Hilltop - is a motherfucking fat pig, and he's motherfucking proud of it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yeah that's great, Walken... good one drip! BDR there are lots of bands who have the same dropout-factor for me, they're not the same to me now as they were 30 yrs ago. A couple years ago I looked through an old box of cassettes that I used for driving back & forth to college and in my home stereo's tape deck... some of them made me feel sorry for the old me.

    ReplyDelete
  8. A lot of great lines in the Albany piece!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hey Man, I've got an extra copy of Silliman's Age of Huts. Send me an email I'll send you a book.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hey, isn't Billy Zoom dead?

    Oh, c'mon, someone's got to keep up the old ways around here.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I couldn't find your email address listed here.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Gah! Where'd it go?

    blckdgrd at gmail dot com.

    ReplyDelete