Destruction Myth

I ordered this today. You should too, whether you care about anything or nothing.

Poets in Denver

After helping Becca move to Ft. Collins, I headed down to Denver to visit Jules & Mathias and D'Count in their new home. This is their dog park.


Not satisfied to be so close to the mountains without venturing up a bit, Jules & I headed up into Rocky Mountain National Park this morning before I came back to the flatlands. This stream had wonderfully cold water to walk in.


Even D'Count tried it out, albeit puppy-hesitantly. Smart puppy! Water is fun! It was his first trip out of the city.

US Mail on the SF-NJ haul. Oh, Nebraskus.

Good Morning, Sunset Park

It was an early Saturday morning. I was going to do the Spring Fling ride, but my crew kinda fell through and it's cold and rainy. I was up, though, and so were a pack of poets in Brooklyn.


Despite what she may have feared, Jules will never look like a man to me. We also have similarly colored bedspreads, despite our distance.


Mathias got a little bit animated when we started discussing what train I should take to come over for breakfast. The I-80 isn't running express today. Then I made the first joke in history to combine big ups, Atlas, and Ayn Rand. It happened because I was illustrating all the mess I would be bringing with me to breakfast.

Mathias went to start assembling breakfast with Heather Green, and Cindy King showed up. We made lots of stump faces. Teeth, they're bitey.

Once I decided that the trek to Sunset Park was just too far south in Brooklyn, I found some more local fare with Conrad at Tina's, aka the Nascar cafe. I forgot my camera, though, so you'll just have to imagine how awesome it was. Afterward, we stopped at Cultiva for some excellent espresso and a few DVD purchases for me. It's going to be harder to motivate toward editing now that I have one of my broadcast monitors set up in the bedroom and One Day in September, Mi Vida Loca, Far From Heaven, and High Fidelity (yeah, ok, one guilty pleasure) to watch.

Dersbirf

I'm really happy about the poem Mathias and I wrote for Anders.

...



ANDERS PETERSON

by Elisabeth Reinkordt & Mathias Svalina

A is for AWESOME. You are awesome!

N is for NEATNESS. You are very neat (as in tidy).

D is for DEBONAIRE. You are well-dressed, sophisticated, and at ease, showing ease of manner, elegance, & sophistication

E is for EAGLET. You are fuzzy & cute & you eat half-digested raw meat, occasionally from roadkill, occasionally from D’Leons.

R is for ROOMMATE. Elisabeth can’t imagine what it would be like without you. Mathias has never been your roommate.

S is for SUNSHINE. You are like sunshine everyday, but without the cancer-causing, skin-burning agents.

R is for ARGYLE. We think you wear argyle socks.

E is for EW. We never say “ew” when thinking about you.

Y is for YENTL. You’ve always wanted to be a Jewish man & when you disguised yourself as one you got some very good reviews for the movie based on your life starring Barbara Streisand.

N is for NO VOMIT IN SINK. As far as we know you’ve never vomited in a sink & we’re pretty sure you will never do so in the future. Except maybe tonight.

O is for OUTLAW. You badboy, you.

L is for LOVE. Love love love love love.

D is for DOGCHARMER. Somehow you made Bird like you.

P is for POTATO. Potatoes are delicious.

E is for ECSTACY.

T is for TALL. You are a tall man, especially from the point of view of a fifth grader.

E is for EASY SHOT. You can interpret this one in many ways. You are like a delicious shooter drink. Also hanging out with you is like taking an easy shot, in the sense that it’s always a score!

R is for REVENGE. If we are murdered you will have to revenge our deaths. (Really avenge, but you know what we mean.)

S is for SALMONELLA. Did you get salmonella poisoning from that peanut butter? We hope not.

O is for OBSOLANGIUM. You don’t have this. Yet.

N is for NOSTRILS. We love the way they flare when you’re sitting in front of John McCain.

All of these things are what make you you & we love you you! Happy birfday. Or Dersday. Or Dersbirf. Etc, etc.

My Ultimate Influence?

Mathias sent me this link this morning.



I used to sing this song all the time when I was little. My parents had a strict no-commercial-television policy, so all I watched was PBS, with a heavy dose of Sesame Street. This bordered on addiction, and my parents had VHS tapes full of episodes for the days it wasn't on.



This song is unbearably catchy.

I have the realization that I would have been perfectly suited to making documentaries for this vintage of Sesame Street.



These women are so happy to be making crayons.



And then I realize that it is more likely that this is in fact the overriding influence in my media lexicon.



Funny, this was supposed to be education about very different worlds for the young children of Harlem & the Bronx. We put up hay in the summer to feed the cattle in the winter, too!



Why can't this be my job, to make these? Why must childrens' programming be so gaudy and terrible now?





There is such a wealth of these -- I could go on forever. But here's one more for you to spark a rabbit hole of YouTube related videos.



If we had more salutes and dances for fruit, perhaps we'd have healthier children?

Stars of the Lid

Friday night, Jules, Mathias and I left the far reaches of Sunset Park to see some Wordless Music at (le) Poisson Rouge. We practiced making angry faces on the train.



Stars of the Lid had some pretty incredible video projections going on, proving that Final Cut Pro's kaleidoscope filter can be put to good use. Especially slick use of this filter meant that they could almost perfectly line up the two projectors they were using to create one, seamless, stage-filling projection. Beautiful stuff, as more identifiable images meshed with more abstract imagescapes.

From DC to NYC

I left DC yesterday evening, spoiling myself a little with an Amtrak ticket instead of taking the bus. Good decision, especially since I got to spend a little time in Union Station.


When we passed through Baltimore, I looked for Omar and Snoop on the dark streets full of vacants. No dice.

I got to Mathias & Jules's place by 10:15 or so without making a single wrong turn all the way from Penn Station.


I know I'm home here when there's a mammoth in the window. I guess the plants were really huge in the time of mammoths, too.

This Needs to be Seen Again

Love to all who were involved in this project. To those who are no longer in Lincoln, I miss you.

Creation Myth

Creation Myth from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

New York Mathias Reading

Mathias Svalina, NoCoastFilm's most pimped poet, will be reading in Brooklyn tonight.

You really do owe it to yourself to be there. He likes wolves, and writes poems about them with Jules Cohen.

Kitchen Press & Cannibal Books
invite you to eat from the chopping block
w/

Erin Elizabeth Burke Run Down the Emphasis (Kitchen)
Thibault Raoult I'll Say I'm Only Visiting (Cannibal)
Mathias Svalina Why I Am White (Kitchen)

Friday, November 2nd, 8 PM
Unnameable Books
456 Bergen Street
btwn. 5th & Flatbush

Refreshments served, but you may also BYOB.
Kitchen Press and Cannibal Books products will be available for consumption.
Unnameable Books carries an excellent selection of poetry from independent presses.
This event is free for all.

This is how M. and I will look if you don't go.

Mathias Svalina & Zachary Schomburg

The Omaha Reader published a nice article by Avishay Artsy (of NET Radio News) on Zach, Mathias, the Clean Part reading series, Octopus Books, and contemporary poetry in general.

The Clean Part: This Saturday, October 27th, 7pm,

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery: Ana Bozicevic-Bowling, Julia Cohen & Ken Rumble

Theme: Fox Masks

Poetry Out Loud
Reading series brings in some of the nation’s best

by Avishay Artsy


Sometimes it takes free peanuts and pie to get people to listen to contemporary poetry.
When Mathias Svalina and Zachary Schomburg began directing The Clean Part Reading Series in 2005, audiences at Lincoln’s Tugboat Gallery cracked open peanuts and tossed shells on the floor. Raffle tickets were handed out for a pie, which sat in its box atop the lectern until just before the final reading. Then a lucky winner, usually a hapless undergraduate required to attend, would have his or her photo taken with the two beaming organizers.

“We don’t have pies anymore. It’s actually regressed,” Svalina said, laughing. “It used to be a lot cooler, apparently.”

Readings are now held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Featured poets are still taken out for post-reading pizza and beer. The two believe it’s a way to foster kinship between poetry enthusiasts in Lincoln and up-and-coming poets across the country.

The series quickly developed a positive reputation. Despite having no money to reimburse visiting poets, “literally, within two months, people were emailing us to see if they could travel here to read,” Svalina said.

The dozen Clean Part readings have attracted small, intimate crowds. Svalina and Schomburg acknowledge modern poetry’s limited appeal.

“It’s for 50 people. It’s not for the world. And that’s OK,” Svalina said. While poets might sell a handful of books at the readings, he said, “every single copy of that is going to be read more deeply, and better, than any copy of a Michael Crichton book is ever going to be read.”

Svalina and Schomburg are completing doctoral studies in creative writing at UNL, and teach undergraduate classes. The two publish Octopus Magazine, an online journal of poetry reviews and essays. They run the small press Octopus Books.

The set of 8 chapbooks from Octopus is, I hear, in very limited supply at this point.

Schomburg, 30, began the online magazine in 2003 with a friend, notable poet Tony Tost. After moving to Lincoln in the fall of 2005, Schomburg recognized Svalina’s name from the magazine’s rejection list, “because it was an interesting name. It was a name that I would have wanted on the page, because it looked good.” He asked Svalina, 32, to become co-editor.

“We had the same ideas about poetry, what poetry could do,” Schomburg explained. The book imprint and reading series soon followed.

This has been a year of firsts for them. Schomburg’s debut collection, The Man Suit, was published in April by Black Ocean Press. The cast of talking animals and dead presidents earned Schomburg an appraisal as “one of the sincerest surrealists around” from Publishers Weekly. Svalina’s first chapbook, Why I am White, was released in August by Kitchen Press. His second publication, Creation Myths, came out this month after winning New Michigan Press’s annual chapbook competition.

Seriously, there's no reason not to own these.

Both poets create highly imaginative alternate realities, in which action defies logic; and truth, as we understand it, is turned on its head. In Creation Myths, Svalina toys with the world’s genesis, imagining a pen that drew the world into existence, or a boy cutting the world out of colored paper. Other explanations involve hovercrafts, explosions, paper clips and a mummy.

Mythology figures into Schomburg’s poems, in which Abraham Lincoln shoots himself in the head and William McKinley plays piano while falling from the sky.

“I think that history is a lot more fun than the actual one that just happened,” Schomburg said, “so why not play with that?”

When Svalina writes “In the beginning people had cornfields rather than sex parts,” and when Schomburg writes, “At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut went as a lung,” both writers show that the perceived is more important than the actual.
“[William] Blake said, ‘the imagination is real.’ Blake’s right. What we imagine is true,” Svalina said.

In The Man Suit, Schomburg writes, “Let’s bring everything that’s inside, outside.”
Poets share a sometimes-obsessive need to communicate, and by offering poetry enthusiasts a venue for cutting-edge writing, the two hope to translate what Schomburg calls the “indefinable chaos” of the world into something that can be understood.

Yes, No Coast Films is currently pimping poetry like there's nothing else that matters. And while there are plenty of other things that matter, it's a fine time to be in such close proximity to such talented and networked contemporary poets. Respek.

Poetry! Video Art! Politics!

I went to this reading last night. It was quite simply excellent. Hawkey had me from his first words and I could hardly believe 45 minutes had gone by when he finished.



I won't do better than Mathias Svalina's review:

Christian Hawkey. Citizen Of. Wave Books, 2007.

Review by Mathias Svalina

Within a limited set of parameters, with a limited way of defining this & at the risk of courting hyperbole I want to tell you that Christian Hawkey is a superhero. Christian Hawkey can do things in poems that normal humans can not do. Witness:

…some creatures move
a few inches every time they blink
I opened my eyes you were my wife
hand a little lower on my spine
although always the smell of tire
burning through the night some creatures
move a few inches each time they flinch

Witness:

At night the jaws of turtles creak open
to collect rain, heat lightning
reflected in their wide, sad eyes.
A tear falls. A turtle tear! Two musk deer
shiver across a meadow, dusk
a brief firefight, our names
appear & disappear, like that.
Alison I stored in a bottle in the ground.
I'm standing on a love song. I can hear it tick.

Witness:

Then she removed
her Donald Duck

mask &
lay with me,

down, in the
field from which

my mind was waving
to her.

If you’re not Christian Hawkey you simply cannot do that. I know. I know that you think you can, but you can’t. I’m sorry. You do not have the super powers.

All three of these are dazzling displays of evocative leaping, yet they do not flail, no strings dangle from their seams. They are gemlike in their precise refraction of ecstatically wild associations. They create a world in which anything is possible, so long as it stays close to the skin & immediately accessible for an individual speaker.

But these are hardly isolated incidents of poetic heroics. Open Citizen Of to any page & randomly drop your finger down. You’ll find another one & it will clutch you & invite you to continue reading. It’s a bibliomantic divination process, but rather than auguring the future it ostends toward poetry that jumps off the page & squirms through your sheets.

Much of Hawkey’s surreal dazzle is predicated by the individual’s emotional experience. The sentimental functions as a tether to keep the surreal from clambering off to go roll around in something stinky. Yet this is a book that focuses us from the title to the role of the individual within a state. It is a book that refuses to ignore politics while at the same time remaining aesthetically unwilling to engage in a traditional kind of political debate.

Even The New Yorker's Briefly Noted took note:

The title of this collection serves as a challenge to readers in a political climate where alarmism seems to alternate with complacency. “Hour with One Hand Inserted in a Time of War” asks, “Should we / stand guard at the Level of One Hand Raised / to Block the Lemon Seed of the Sun / or should we push off, down the tunnels, / dig a hole in the side of a wall & wait?” Hawkey effectively conjures a contemporary scene that seems peaceful, even while “Landmines whisper sideways underground.” Everyone, he says, is “no longer / a crow’s nest but a cluster of nests, / urban, suburban, some with turbans.” Humor, stemming more from exasperation than from delight, eases immersion into the tight-knit poems, but amid the laughter a loud alarm rings: “At least the bird’s brain was focused / on something."

He read one poem that was a dialog between video and performance artists Vito Acconci and Ana Mendieta.

Acconci's Seedbed (1972), in which he had a false floor in the gallery whereunder he could crawl and masturbate during the art opening.

Mendieta, from the Tree of Life Series (1977), wherein the artist is plastered in bark and gesso, standing next to a tree.

Poetry! Video Art! Politics!

Go buy Christian's book, or see him read somewhere.

Monsters in Awe

Mathias Svalina reads from Dorothea Lasky's new book, AWE.



Monsters in Awe from nocoastfilms and Vimeo.

No Vampires

Mathias Svalina's poembook Why I Am White is now out from Kitchen Press. Get it. Mathias will be doing the book release reading in Brooklyn on November 2nd. I think poets need roadies, so I'm attempting to develop the Poet-Roadie persona between now and then.

Last night, Ande, Mathias and I made an excellent array of tapas. Mushrooms in sherry, mixed olive tapenade, pan y tomate, gazpacho, mahon, and plenty of bread, accompanied by sherry and wine. I consider it a distinct measure of success when 3 of 4 prepared dishes contain raw garlic.

Tomorrow is the Heatstroke 100 ride. Felice and I have received our uniforms, and shall be ready to go at 6:30 in the AM.

Rock Bombing

There are many reasons why I love Mathias and Nate. This is but one of them.

From Pride to Predator

This morning, walking in to work, I saw a woman step nonchalantly a foot out of her way to crush a roach, then pause a half-step back, posing in satisfaction.

Yesterday, Ben told me all about cheeseburgers. He could not eat them; his tongue felt like he imagined it would be like if he had a cat's tongue.

When I had to do the Gallup StrengthsFinder for work, I found out that I think a lot and that I'm kind of a demanding asshole because of it.

I'm better at admiring romance from afar and in works of fiction than appreciating it in reality. See also: I finished watching Pride and Prejudice with Mathias on Tuesday night. We talked about playing the Pride and Prejudice video game, wherein you are Miss Elizabeth Bennet and you have to keep as far away as possible from Mr. Darcy in any given room. The A and B buttons, when pressed, make you say "vexing" and "insufferable," respectively. We also discussed the remake, Pride and Predator
, wherein Mr. Darcy is CGI-replaced by the Predator, or wherein there is a full shot-for-shot remake with Mr. Darcy played by the Predator.

The live soundtrack that Man's Last Great Invention did for Predator was simply fantastic. This will be the start of an ongoing live soundtrack series at Lincoln's new State Theater. Couches, beers, and movies. Excellent.

I'm heading to New York 2 weeks from today.

My bike, according to FedEx tracking, is in Lincoln.

Kearney, Nebraska, Day One

I left Lincoln at approximately 6:30 this morning, slept though some Bonnie Prince Billy and This American Life episodes, and arrived at a video production workshop for school technology administrators at 9 AM. This, naturally, follows being up far too late with the likes of M. Gibson, B. McQuillan, and M. Svalina. Lovely time, yes.
Not a very enthralling time out here so far. The workshop is far from geared toward my skill level, but there is apparently no problem with me being online most of the day with an ear cocked toward interjecting a comment here and there on technique. Aside from that, there's time in a hotel room by myself, with my new iPod in tow, to catch up on some more internet. There is some delicious Thunderhead brew, and there is The Diamond Sea on WFMU.
And that, my friends, involved a much fraught-over and finally-achieved video chat with none other than Louis John Vassalotti III. This chat had nothing to do with the magic finger waving.