your local listings

Posted on April 10, 2022 by istsfor manity

Time is a distillation

Coincidence is a construct

Check your local listings

What I’m Reading:

“Too late now to keep the polar cap from melting. Venice subsides; South America explodes.”

— John Barth / “Two Meditations”

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see for yourself

Posted on April 9, 2022 by istsfor manity

Cloud Enjambments

I’m the worst when it comes to fixing
Leaks, see for yourself.
I’ve seen maps with circular
Walls. I love color jet packs. But you’ll need paper
For a lively discussion with a white stripe
Down the middle of perception. Pointillist
Dots and washes create white swirls
Of cloud enjambments.
So why look at the moon?

What I’m Reading:

“Which snowflake triggers the avalanche? A house explodes; a star. In your spouse, so apparently resigned, murder twitches like a fetus.”

— John Barth / “Two Meditations”

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how to proceed

Posted on April 8, 2022 by istsfor manity

Algorithmically Filtered Prose Poem Farrago or: How ‘da Machine Reads My Handwriting

HAD I BECALE DE FANTASTICALLY LOST
MANCULE AVE BEEN LOST TOR SOME TIME – DECADE,• ACTUALLY – IN A LARAAINTA. MY OWN MAKING I DIDNT DEVE THIS MINATION IN SOME GREAT MASTO STROKE, LATTE DID I KON ThAT As I WHNDERED ute THAT I WAs BUILDING THIS FANTASTICALLY GABORATE TRAP.
I HAVE DES SULARMINGIN INTENDING TO DO SokEstNY My to contra re I GAMBOL ABET-6Ur 1 MEANIE ELUDES ME -大2NT DO ANYTANG BUT GRAPPLE ABINT AT tte ArR CHENGHING AT NOMINE.
ALL PROGNODLY ABSURD. I AN
PROFOUNDLY PERTURbED AI MY STATE. I KNON I All Last, But 4亿 UNSURE AS I ARRIVED AT MAS STATE – AND AT A LOSS AS TO How TO PROCEED. I’VE WALRED I’VE WALKED MYVELF INTO A CORNER AND CANT RANK OUT OR CLIMB UP NUT OF THIS SELF- INFEJED PRIVON. JAVEMY JeAT.

A: It’s my dream / S: I’m crushed

What I’m Reading:

“No one asks what Mozart means. Or an Indian raga or the little tripping dance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat. Forget about making things that are understood . . . All art comes from love — love of doing something.”

— Jerry Saltz / “Jerry Saltz’s 33 Rules for Being an Artist”

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echo of echoes

Posted on April 7, 2022 by istsfor manity
Press play to watch my short film glossolalia jacket (1:05)

Hear (haiku)

Ears color speckle
Parabolic sound resounds
Echo of echoes

What I’m Reading:

“Always, I hear a little oratorio
inside my head. Moths
have carried away my carpets,
like invisible pallbearers.”

— Henri Cole / “Free Dirt”

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of the shadow

Posted on April 6, 2022 by istsfor manity

The Death of Tane

Then there was the sickness—
So hot.
The vault of heaven darker,
Then darker still,
A black sun
At end.
It was succeeded by the shadow
Of the shadow—
Spreading
Nearer and nearer to the pin prick
Of light
Destroyed.
Distant,
To the west,
A white effluent—
Soft and yielding—
Fades.

What I’m Reading:

“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”

— Mieko Kawakami / Heaven

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you look better

Posted on April 5, 2022 by istsfor manity

A Conversation in the Time of Galamatias

Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots—
Not so much a salad, but a melange
Of weeds and thistles—
Indelicate things in our mouths.
Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal—
Awful offal.
The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards
The cups are off on a two week vacation in Marienbad.
We are mystified and malnourished.
Now I’ve had my wine…
And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago.
And you say:
The sky is a massive hole tonight—
My precious lucida is eating the universe:
Inside-out.
I can lay down and go to sleep.
The lights are receding
And the darkness is strangely pleasing.

What I’m Reading:

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.”

— Yuval Noah Harari / Sapiens

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two cotton balls

Posted on April 4, 2022 by istsfor manity

Like Glossolalia

Like a van garde avant. Like drinking tea filtered through a Russian soldier’s underwear. Like speaking through saxophone skronk. Like drying your back with nettles and swallowing a chaw of thistles. Like bored sawing through panel board. Like watching Window Water Baby Moving backwards. Like finding a nubbin of your desiccated umbilical cord pressed between two cotton balls thirty years later. Like finding a random head in your Tupperware Cake Taker. Like coming of age at 37. Like throat singing in Spanglish. Like pressing your ear close to an ambulance siren. Like walking off a pier because you hear the mermaids singing. Like, why would they be singing to you? Like, huh?

What I’m Reading:

“I write in the knowledge that there is nothing to lose by saying the difficult thing in common/uncommon ways, knowing that the beauty of a line lies in the alchemy of doubt, adrenalin and risk. Mainstream judgement of what is ‘good’ is based on elite opinion, curated over years. It is necessarily corrupt. I’d rather write an ‘ugly’ line, to such eyes.”

— Preti Taneja / “Notes on Craft”

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give me enough

Posted on April 3, 2022 by istsfor manity
Press play to watch my short film:
swing the heartache (1:27)

Swing the Heartache

Give ‘em enough rope.
Give me enough rope.
Rope.

Swing the heartache.
The heartache swing.
Swing.

Heartache.
Swing.
Rope.

What I’m Reading:

“In an unreasonable world, reason isn’t reasonable.”

— Kathy Acker / Empire of the Senseless

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yellow filaments bind

Posted on April 2, 2022 by istsfor manity

Silver Halide Crystals (Haiku)

Yellow filaments
Bind circles of confusion
To silver halide

What I’m Reading:

“Don’t think good or bad. Think useful, pleasurable, strange.”

— Jerry Saltz / How to Be an Artist

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images and text

Posted on April 1, 2022 by istsfor manity

April is the Cruellest…

This is what April will look like . . .
Easily digestible thoroughly detestable, or:

Make your own favorite artist inspired project:

You might glue colored papers into Sister Corita Kent style shapes and write aphoristic sentences to please your soul.

You might ink intricate line patterns and blocks on graph paper in DW’s Mountebank style and affix phrases cut-out of magazines around the figures.

You might layer words upon a short film.

You might paint a neat Ellsworth Kelly-like green blob as on the cover of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour.

You might make a book of Leanne Shapton-like images and text conflations.

You might gather pictures found at thrift / antique shops and mount them with fortune cookie fortunes affixed on the lower margin.

You might make “the easy project”—a series of atrocity exhibition pamphlets.

A: It’s my dream / S: What horror!

What I’m Reading:

“RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.”

— Sister Corita Kent / “Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules”

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