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by eds
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BREAKING NEWS!!! EXQUISITE CORPSE ANNUAL #2 IN PRINT & ON SALE NOW!!! |  |
Ed in Chief Andrei Codrescu presents historic artwork by R. Crumb; the sizzling poetics of Hunter S. Thompson, Ed Sanders, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Bill Lavender, Elinor Nauen, Debra Di Blasi, Mike Topp, John Vanderslice; and the incandescent prose of Jan Kerouac, Steve Katz, Gerald Nicosia, Pat Nolan, Dave Brinks, Larry Betz, Hariette Surovell, Tryone Jaeger, Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Kevin PQ Phelan, Jared Schickling, Gretchen Henderson & Andrei Plesu!!!
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Rex Rose, Design Ed. Terry Wright, Associate Ed.
Mark Spitzer, Managing Ed.
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by Hariette Surovell
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INSIDIOUS MOVIE PRODUCT PLACEMENT TRENDS
| Television shows are sponsored by advertisers who really get bangs for their mega-bucks when the products promoted during commercial interruptions are also used as props in the show itself, or even more insidiously, written into the plot.
“Seinfeld”, brought to you by Snapple, created controversy by having its characters not only drink the beverage, but tell jokes about it. “Too fruity!” said the character Babu Bhatt in the episode, “The Visa.”
Another NBC hit, “30 Rock”, a television show about making a television show (it’s the updated Shakespearean concept) is also sponsored by Snapple. The discussion among the show’s staff in the episode “Jack-Tor” about how “Diet Snapple tastes just as good as regular Snapple” was followed by an actual Snapple ad in the subsequent commercial break.
“Mad Men”, the AMC cable series about a 1960’s Madison Avenue advertising firm, Sterling Cooper, is sponsored by Heineken. In the episode, “A Night to Remember”, Sterling Cooper takes on Heineken as a client. Coincidentally, Betty Draper, one of the executives’ wives, serves Heineken at a dinner party, unaware that her own husband had just talked up the virtues of introducing suburban housewives to exotic foreign beers. Betty’s menu causes much mirth among the dinner guests. Cut to a real commercial break for…what else? Heineken.
In Season Two of the F/X cable drama “Damages” starring Glenn Close, the show’s main sponsor was Cadillac, and a Cadillac Escalade became one of the most strategic “characters” in the plot. This Escalade, present in a bit role for most of the series, eventually became its true star. Glenn Close, cast as lawyer Patty Hewes, finally figured outthat the numbers on its dashboard held the key to unlocking a mystery and outsmarting her legal adversary. During commercial breaks, Close leaned suggestively against another Escalade, purring seductively like a pre-psychotic bunny-boiling Alex Forrest about what a superior car it was and promoting the accompanying F/X Cadillac Escalade sweepstakes. One could win a trip to, for no specified reason, Costa Rica, if, after watching the show on F/X, they segued to the network’s website, where a photo of an Escalade held essential entry information.
I watch one sur (reality) t.v. show, “The Real Housewives of Orange County” , basically because I keep wondering when someone, perhaps the show’s director or producer, will realize that one of these “housewives”, Vicki, has a full-time job and another, Gretchen, isn’t married. Despite Gretchen’s chronic acne, which no amount of industrial-strength “foundation” seems to conceal, she has developed, not a regimen of skin care products, but generic eye-shadows. Gretchen’s adventures creating, packaging and financing this enterprise is really pure advertisement, “disguised” as being part of the show’s “story.” During the commercial breaks, Gretchen seamlessly segues into appearing in a bona fide advertisement. Specifically, she does her taxes with “Turbo Tax.”
Not to be outdone is the magazine of pop culture--television, cable, music videos and major motion pictures-- “Entertainment Weekly.” Its pages have diminished so drastically that it should properly be called a pamphlet. Yet it has made room for a new feature, “Style Hunter” which brazenly pimps out items the stars wear onscreen. In the January 22, 2010 issue , a reader asked where she could buy the necklace Vera Farmiga sported in “Up in the Air.” Details on its exact make and model were provided and readers learned where to purchase it.
In my “Corpse” review of the movie “Precious,” I pointed out something no other critic seemed to have noticed (why not, for crissakes?)--rampant product placement and advertising actually written into the text of the script and also used in the set decorations.
“Precious” was produced by Tyler Perry and executive-produced by Oprah Winfrey. Oprah Winfrey’s television show was a subject of discussion in the script, with the characters extolling Oprah’s virtues and then actively watched her show, inspiring the title character, Precious, to buy a postcard of Oprah to decorate her bedroom with. Tyler Perry’s movie version of the 1976 stage play by Ntozake Shange, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Enuf” (sic) is now in pre-production and will be released in 2011. Although “Precious” was set in 1987, Precious’s teacher had a poster from Shange’s play hanging on her livingroom wall.
Most critics buried “The Lovely Bones” in that special toxic waste dump reserved for D movies, but none noticed how blatantly Peter Jackson, its director, used his position to advertise his movie trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings.” “Bones” is set in Morristown, PA, 1973, and, guess which literary box-set is advertised in the local mall's bookstore? Huge posters in vivid hues for "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (screenplay written, directed and produced by Peter Jackson in 2001)", "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (ditto by Jackson in 2002)" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Jackson again, 2003) “ are plastered all over its glass facade.
I did some double-checking, to see if any editions of any of these books were published in 1972-3, because if they were, it would be logical for bookstores in malls everywhere to be advertising them.
Here are the pub dates:
"The Lord of the Rings" was published in three volumes as "The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" in 1954, and then again in 1966, and finally, 1994. Why, then, would a Morristown mall be promoting the LOTR trilogy? Actually, it wouldn’t.
Since viewers have accepted the fact that the function of “art” is to promote capitalism, why should filmmakers and television show directors draw any lines whatsoever? Why not just let every plot be related to the products advertised, and every item of art direction be a visual reminder of the producer/director’s…hey why not the D.P.’s…past and future projects? To be totally pragmatic, we could eliminate any pretense of plot or story, making all creative content one long commercial!
Doesn’t it bother anyone else out there, no less almost everyone, that the 2008 Democratic National Convention was held in Denver’s Pepsi Center and that Obama and Biden accepted their nominations at Boulder’s Invesco Field? It’s disillusioning enough watching Eric Clapton, aka Slowhand (forget the “God” nickname!) do T-Mobile commercials for quick cash (does he really need it?), but am I the only ex-hippie who experienced a bad acid flashback upon hearing that his long-awaited reunion gig with Stevie Winwood occurred on the stage of the Nokia Theatre?
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by Tom Clark
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 | Market by Tom Clark | | The night is cold and there is a line of fifty, then sixty people waiting with their things in baskets in the checkout line, it is a large market but only the one line is open on a Saturday night and the line has stopped moving because at the head of it a woman has disputed the total the checkout clerk has charged her for her grocery things, the amount of money in dispute is inconsequential but the dispute continues, the clerk calls on a phone for a supervisor but no supervisor arrives, the arguing goes on, the people in line are fidgeting but no one says a thing, the dispute continues, the clerk continues to argue with the woman and to make calls but help does not arrive, one then two then three security guards arrive then leave again, the line grows longer, the clerk is trying to control her agitation but now the people in the line are growing visibly restive, some are leaving the line, fuming, muttering to themselves, one man says Enough of this and leaves his cart full of groceries where it stands and walks off, mumbling to himself, saying just loud enough to be heard the name of a much more expensive gourmet market a few blocks away, I don't care what it costs he says moving away, others are nodding their heads and now more people are leaving the line and simply walking off and leaving their goods in carts in this line which is now becoming a cemetery of purchases never to be made, the quarrel at the head of the line continues as the clerk and the woman, no longer concealing their anger, battle over the total on the long white slip of paper in the woman's hand, the clerk continues to make calls even while continuing to argue and now at length a supervisor shows up wearing a heavy parka, having just come in out of the cold rainy night to arbitrate the dispute and as she arrives the clerk suddenly and without another word throws her apron to the ground and walks out of the market in the wake of the growing stream of angry patrons, now the line of shopping carts is becoming a line of ghost carts without shoppers attached to them, but the supervisor somehow solves the dispute with the woman at the head of the line, giving in to her, and then strips off her parka and begins to check out the goods of other shoppers and now the line is moving again, those who have waited are rewarded for their patience, some have been standing in line for at least half an hour but the wisdom of having waited is now apparent to them, and they continue to wait, and in the fullness of time their goods will be checked out and they will leave the market and go out into the wet cold night that much the more aware of what sort of a time this is they are living through, monads, human objects with needs, which they may now proceed to begin to fill, once they have shifted the goods from the carts into their cars and steered their cars through the dark rainy streets to wherever it is their lives must go on in, perhaps they have friends or family waiting, perhaps not, perhaps they are alone, alone or not alone humans have needs and the night is long, here comes the night, here it comes. |
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by David Breithaupt
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 "Iacta alea est"Even in death, Faulkner was never far from a few beers |
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by Laurie Stone
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| Normal |
When I come home, there are six police cars outside. Things will be out in the open, now. I am 15, and I have not enjoyed clarinet practice today, because, let’s face it, I will never be a Benny Goodman, and in my family it’s all or nothing.
Mom is applying lipstick in the bedroom when Dad finds something wrong with her. She’s mulling over breakfast, maybe thinking the scrambled eggs turned out too soft. He likes them firm. He notices a drifty, thoughtful expression in her eyes, so he picks up the nearest thing and smashes her face with the phone. There’s a sickening crunch, and her teeth ping off the glass top of the vanity. Her mouth is open and red is streaming out, and he’s afraid he’ll be burned, so he gets a hammer and bashes her skull. She’s lying across the vanity, her lipsticks toppled over like toy soldiers, and he’s about to finish her off when he notices my brother in the door. My 14-year-old brother has broken into his parents’ bedroom, and my father hears the “uh oh” voice in his head and runs.
By the time I get home, my father’s sisters are outside, and they say, “Madeleine, you don’t want to go in the house.” But I do. I want to remember where I come from. They drive me to a Burger King where my brother is waiting, and I sit across from him and look into his large, brown eyes, which are the same shape and color as our father’s. They seem to be slipping down his face, and I want to catch them like little fish. I want to lick the ketchup off his top lip, which looks gory and clownish. “Someday we’ll laugh about this,” I say, because laughing is what we do when we don’t know what to say. We laugh out of embarrassment and because extravagance is our inheritance.
“I can laugh about it, now,” my brother says, the corners of his mouth curling up. “I mean, we live in a big house and go to a nice, quiet school, but our father tried to kill our mother, and he almost got it done. Nothing happened to set him off. It was a normal day.”
This is true. Normal for us is bleak and terrifying, and I begin to slide into self-pity but push it away. If this is our normal, what else, really, do we know? However much we’ve been marked by our experiences, the deed is done and we can only be who we are. My brother seems to have matured over night. Just yesterday at band practice, he shook his head like Ringo Starr and tickled Jennie Mitchell’s neck with a drum stick and chased her around when she tried to grab it away. Now, it seems we are orphans and that my brother is the older one. Watching him eat his Whopper, I feel hope in the way that condemned people enjoy a final meal. We are Hansel and Gretel, picking our way through the forest. We will say that our parents went mountain climbing and disappeared in an avalanche or fell over a cliff, and the thought of never seeing them at opposite ends of the table, planning our lives, is light past a thicket of trees.
What I can’t erase is the expression my mother wears as my father boasts of his business deals—then wrings his hands worrying his trust is misplaced. He is self-made, up from the streets of Brooklyn, and if he loses his money, who is he? My mother listens with a look of surpassing boredom that makes it seem a pod person or a zombie has taken up residence in her body. Such is marriage, for better or worse. I feel a chill. Why don’t I feel worse for her?
A few weeks later on Yom Kippur, my brother and I visit our father in the hospital in New York City. He’s on a bed, a mountain on a prairie—seemingly at rest but quietly stirring. I stare at the soles of his enormous feet, and I can see how he needs them for ballast. In order to avoid jail, he has walked into a mental hospital and given himself up. He’s crazy. No one is going to argue about that, and I think this calculation is brilliant, in that it suggests he is also sane. I feel a sense of family pride sneak back in. Unavoidable.
Our father is piecing himself together in one bed while our mother lies stitched up in another. She is going to live, even though her skull has been cracked. She is going to allow our father to return home, and she will not press charges. We don’t find this surprising, and I don’t wonder how my father will live with what he’s done. My parents will stay together because in their imaginations something is worse than what has already happened. Every pot has its lid, the saying goes, and inside every pot sit the children. My mother isn’t all that great at protecting her young if you use the lion for comparison.
Our father rises from his bed like a golem and says he needs to atone. This is his plan for the day, and one day is all he can manage. He’s a Jew, and it’s Yom Kippur, and he wants to take his kids to shul. He has been raised as a Jew, and he needs to pray and confess his crime. He needs to have his kids beside him, especially his boy. He needs to see something in his son’s eyes beside the smirk of amusement my brother has worn since he witnessed the open melon of our mother’s head. I try to imagine living past the experience of war and the spectacle of a mass grave of murdered corpses, something like that. I feel I should have these images in my head from now on, but I laugh at my father, asking forgiveness from a God he doesn’t believe in.
My father doesn’t look at me. This is normal. I’m not that visible. I scatter when he approaches or stand my ground and disappear in my head like an animal into a tree. On the street, other families pass us in slow motion. In terms of mood, they don’t look that different from us, and I wonder how we appear to them, a trio of giants with our heads in the clouds. I remember my father lifting me up when I was little, high above him, and I would look into his soft eyes, safe beneath his bulk. The light in those eyes has gone out either from the drugs he has taken in the hospital or the chemicals in his brain. He is at the mercy of his brain, the doctors have explained, and I try to understand this. He is poisoned by his brain as if by a bad piece of fish. For my mother I have one question: How will you share your life with your murderer? Am I about to do the same thing?
My father asks if we’re hungry, even though it’s Yom Kippur—the day when you are supposed to abstain from food. He smiles sheepishly, and I feel that if there are to be any consequences in life I am going to have to impose them. I wonder what my first rule should be, and I think: Don’t fall asleep. We find a street vendor selling soft pretzels, and my father buys three, and as he offers one to me, wrapped in waxed paper, he strokes my cheek. I remain in place, as I have trained myself to do, not wanting to anger or disappoint him, and I feel the soft pads of his fingertips against my skin, and they feel good, even as I wonder if he will erase my features and leave a blank where my face has been.
My father looks pained, maybe by the terror I reflect, or maybe I am smiling at the way he is encouraging us to eat rather than fast. Should I kill him? Suburban dad goes berserk with hammer. Daughter murders father.
I crunch the salt of my pretzel, wondering what I should atone for, and I think, this moment—the way I am already turning it into a story. I need to go on telling it, if only to myself, as if in this way I can make reparations for the fact of us. My brother pulls off pieces of pretzel and shoves them in his mouth, oblivious to the lawlessness of our acts or else sinking into it. My father looks ahead, sad and hungry as usual. And this is how we come to be walking on upper Broadway, my brother and I and our resurrected dad, this is how we came to be looking for a shul that will admit us to Yom Kippur service without tickets.
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When Dan called things off, I flew to California to give readings and stay in the house of a sadomasochist my friend Ruby was dating. I was thin and wondered how long it would last. Ruby arranged my bookings and housing. She was a good friend, although she once told me we had the same ferrety, Jewish faces. I was a little insulted by the comparison, although after that, whenever I looked in the mirror, I could see what she meant. I read at Beyond Baroque with a fiction writer who gave me a sweater for my birthday. It had a collar made of feathers, and I wore it for the softness. I hadn’t eaten much during the time I was with Dan because I was always worried he wouldn’t show up.
The sadomasochist went by the name Jaz. He was small and fretful with a closely cropped head and sad eyes. Ruby had met him online, and he lived in a house behind another house that faced the street. One of the rooms was locked, and I imagined it contained a dungeon, although it could as easily have been where he tossed his dirty clothes. The dungeon came to mind because I usually found such environments exciting, but now they reminded me too much of my relationship with Dan. I rented a car at the airport, and when I arrived at Jaz’s place he drilled me on the care of his belongings and cat. Like I was supposed to feel grateful for his sullen house and chipped plates! I thought I must have brought this on myself.
Ruby was in love with the sexual things Jaz did with her, but in time she found them comical. “Perhaps the drive to hurt the body always turned people on and religion and sacrifice were invented so we could keep doing it,” she said. This idea appealed to me because it made sex seem like something you weren’t responsible for. I was not at the laughing stage about Dan. I was still too attracted to him, or something. Jaz asked me to drive him to the airport. He was jittery in the car, not sexual or scary, and it felt like catching a magician out of costume. He taught people to make self-promotional videos in order to score job interviews. He was off to give a workshop in Texas. In the mornings, I’d tune in the financial news on his enormous TV and watch the numbers scroll along as if they were on their way to some place important. Most days, I had no destination, and Los Angeles was a good place for this, since I didn’t know how to drive from point A to point B.
At my last meeting with Dan, he came to my apartment with the things I’d given him. “Keep them,” I said, although I now miss my mug from the Soho Grand Hotel. I spent so much time looking at the ways he couldn’t love me, it was a job.
After Jaz returned from his trip, I stayed with Ruby in her stucco cottage perched on a hill that was slowly slipping to the road below. A glass wall looked out to a patio blooming with oleander and bougainvillea bushes. I slept in the little guest house lower down the slope where Jaz had once instructed Ruby to wait for him on her knees, naked over a bowl of ice cubes. He was driving to see her and wanted to imagine her in readiness, as if she had nothing better to do. Ruby was accommodating. It was one of the reasons I liked her, too. She was one of those people whose desires and personality were a good fit. We sat on her white bed, and she said that time was long and grief was like tricking with a stranger. This wasn’t my experience with grief, but I listened to her anyway. She said work was the center of our lives—that was the kind of women we were. I could feel the house slipping. Something was moving, and I saw that the loss of Dan was bigger than our relationship had been. Ruby said that love was Midsummer Night’s Dream; your demon lover always turned out to be an ass. I didn’t believe this in every case, but her words moved across me like affection and as her gaze rested softly on my red, puffy eyes I began to feel like eating.
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by Bob Rosenthal
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| A True Account of Talking to the Sun at the East River |
April 8, 2009 6:42 AM Birchat HaChama at East 10th Street
This very morning I
lie in my bed
not dreaming
not able to rise
the back of my hand
flows like a large wave on the ocean
under the covers
grazes over a half hemisphere
an hour out of Halifax
Isaac rises for coffee
& we tread East
to await her
Lower East Side
is no Russian dascha
no flimsy beach shack
now I stand
at the sun bleached rail
as the East River ebbs
in Brooklyn and Queens
several skeletal high-rise housing towers
are going up
twenty eight years now again
you won’t be able
to burn through them
only between them
now I see you
illuminating
highest cirrus threads
mauve glow
the ruddy buoy
leans with the ocean flow uptown
I didn’t think that you could find me
in the sixth floor walk-up dark room
you wouldn’t knock at me
through a hollow white door
the sun lifts her
skirts of wispy orange dolor
eases herself over
Petrol Tanks
Hello
she calls
I look up from my notebook
Yes I came to you!
Good I forgot your address.
The river bows in its center
to sing its tiny ululations to her fieriness
You are older than Vladimir and Frank were.
I thought you’d be younger!
I know -- I’ve been sleeping a long time.
I got up many times to look at you rise
but never before to talk to you
It’s cold here could you move
a little closer?
she grabs her hems and lumbers
over the low steepled skyline
Thanks -- that’s better
I am old now
I am colder too
that is until now
so can you tell me is it my turn?
no sleepy one --
you will wake and
you will sing
but you will only be heard
by the rippling water
the sun is lifting off
& rising enough to turn
warehouse windows deep red
streetlamps burn like candles in a lit room
this day is starting!
Wait Sun!
please tell me something
that I need to know
I might not be here
in twenty-eight years!
she smiles now I see
black sun spots on her teeth
Bob be you unnamed
& worthless
without ego enough
to kill yourself
I will send a gift
of light
through you
every day is the last day of creation
every day you will rise and gather
the beams
the rays
nature’s creations
and although your words are . . .
drops of fire scud over the water
what you breath
and they are also your shoes
the people you love
the Human Comedy you adore
and Me
the grand creator
We all say this is all beginnings
which have no endings!
lightly she rises into
pale blue sky
& starts cross-town |
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by Maggie Dubris & Elinor Nauen
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| Inaugurating the Corpse History Column:
The True Story of the KOFF Calendar | Elinor:
Rachel, Maggie and I were in the Grassroots bar after a reading. Paul Violi stood across the sawdust floor, gleaming like Apollo.
“How the hell do you get that man out of his clothes?” Rachel said.
“Let’s do a magazine,” I answered.
“No one buys poetry magazines,” Maggie said. “They’re boring.”
“They would buy it if Paul Violi was in it, naked,” Rachel said.
“Violi’s too classy,” I said. “He’d never do anything like that. Let’s ask Brodey. He’ll do anything.”
We staggered over to St. Mark’s books, where Brodey was stealing books, I mean working.
“Sure, girls,” he agreed.
“All right!” we said.
“For $40,” he added.
“Jesus, Jim, why buy a cow when the milk’s so cheap?” Maggie muttered. We skedaddled out of there.
Who else would do it? we asked ourselves.
“Ted’ll do it!” I said.
“Yeah,” Maggie said, “You just have to rub up against him a couple more times.”
But no matter how many times I rubbed up against him, we couldn’t get that man out of his clothes.
“Let’s ask Frank O’Hara,” said Maggie
“He’s dead!” Rachel said.
“He can’t be,” Maggie said. “Wait a minute. Is he really? Then who was that I slept with last night?”
We staggered back to the Grassroots and had a few more drinks. “Oh what the hey,” I said. “Let’s ask Violi.”
“Hey Violi, buy us a beer?”
We got busy writing down his measurements. “Paul Violi’s measurements are 15 1⁄2-40-32-35-10,” was how it read in the magazine. “His KOFF debut marks the first time he’s posed au naturel. ‘It was a little scary at first,’ he says, ‘but when I coughed it was wonderfully exciting. I felt like some watcher of the skies who coughs when a new planet swims into view.’ Paul is a nuclear physicist.”
Maggie:
It was amazing--we sold every single copy of KOFF Number 1! We were in the window of the 8th St. bookstore! We got written up in the Village Voice! We got readings! Our band got booked at the Mudd Club! It seemed there was no end to the amount of glory a naked poet could reflect onto us!
Of course, there was a down side. The men wouldn’t leave us alone. Rachel and I would be sitting in our apartment, doing some sort of artistic thing at two in the morning and brrring brrring brrring. Jeff Wright again, wondering who he had to fuck to get into KOFF 2. Then the doorbell would ring and in would breeze Simon Pettet with the new Sex Pistols single that he just happened to have an advance copy of, and it certainly had always been his dream to be a counterculture centerfold, not that he was trying to pressure anyone, mind you, but if he was deported it would be nice to have that to remember everything by, and somewhere around dawn, poor Elinor would show up, big rings around her eyes, totally exhausted from stepping over George Schneeman and Larry Rivers and various assorted male poets who littered her doorstep. Even Jim Brodey sent a conciliatory bottle of dexedrine, but we would never compromise our integrity in that way. We had bigger fish to fry. We split up the pills and tried to figure out how to bag Ted Berrigan. He had a heroic kind of joie de vivre that would be perfect for our elusive purposes. “My wife won’t let me,” was all he would say. It only made us want him more.
We knew there must be a family man we could corrupt.
“Didn’t you take Lewis Warsh’s workshop?” Elinor said. “He’s a snappy piece of cheese!”
Lewis was all too eager to oblige. Unfortunately, the picture he sent had a baby covering his most interesting aspect.
“Aw,” said Elinor.
“That’s so sweet,” I said.
Rachel nearly fell off her chair. “He sent this through the mail?! This is perverted! What’s he doing with that baby?”
The caption ended up as: Lewis Warsh, Mr KOFF Volume II Number 1, and young “friend.” We protected that baby with a great big black bar over her eyes.
Our glory was even greater. We got a grant from CCLM! Libraries asked for copies of our literary journal! I knew a MacArthur wasn’t far behind.
But it would probably be lost in our avalanche of mail--the pictures literally popped out of the envelopes. Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Jimmy Schuyler, Rod McKuen, Galway Kinnell, Ed Dorn, Jack Collom, Harris Schiff, Michael Brownstein, Ed Friedman, Yuki Hartman, Tony Towle. George Schneeman sent photos, paintings, collages, even a fresco. That’s when the post office gave us our own zip code.
“Nope,” said Rachel, cracking open a can of Coors.
“Nope,” I said, chugging suds as I tossed a man’s dream aside.
“Nope,” said Elinor, and burped. “On second thought, I’ll keep this one.”
Jim Brodey totally capitulated. He sent pictures two, three times a day. Jim Brodey on a horse. Jim Brodey in a hardhat. Jim Brodey dressed up like a lambchop, sitting in Janis Joplin’s lap, swinging a pickaxe buck naked in a coalmine, onstage at Max’s fondling a guitar.
“We need to maximize our assets,” Elinor announced.
Rachel nodded. “Why buy a cow when milk’s so cheap?”
The beer was making us philosophical.
“More is better,” I noted, “who can argue with that?”
And we stared at the pile of photos.
We’ll do a calendar! On shiny paper! It will be . . . our finest moment!
“Dear Mr. Bukowski, you are our favorite poet in the whole world. We would be honored if you would please send us a naked picture of yourself.”
“Dear Mr. Oppenheimer, you are our favorite poet in the whole world. We would be honored if you would please send us a naked picture of yourself.”
“Dear Mr. Berkson, you are our favorite poet in the whole world. We would be honored if you would please send us a naked picture of yourself.” |
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Read more...
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by Pat Nolan
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| LOST AND FOUND | Don’t worry about making it real
it’s all imaginary
windy and warm
a summer of days approaches
my leg is killing me
my arm is killing me
my head is killing me
my back is killing me
my foot is killing me
my hand is killing me
my gut is killing me
my butt is killing me
my etcetera is killing me
it’s enough to think
that there is a vast
conspiracy to kill me
by enlisting various
parts of my anatomy
sky scudding clouds
some bush league monomaniac
heat tsunami splashes me
with my own sweat
temps in the hundreds
the wilt factor
“wilt thou or won’t thou”
too hot to do anything
endure enforced leisure
I can’t deny I’m awake
though I’d rather still be sleeping
I’ve aged if only a dozen hours
subtly
who I am is not who I was
snatches from the music library
in my head of the tunes
about to play
as I insert the disc
I‘m remembering the future
and it’s disturbing
but that’s the nature of prophecy
throw on a shirt stride out the door
gray and tarnished leafed
dead tree like a column of smoke
against the mostly green hillside
workmen have spray painted
the dingy asphalt with lines and arrows
where they are soon to dig
(letter from the water company details all
not that I have to be happy about it
someone is feeding them infrastructure funds
I can already feel the cramp in my wallet)
joy can come in installments
a payment plan arranged by the senses
the burst of blossoms at the tip
of cane thick tendrils poking
through an otherwise well behaved
privet hedge the bees tiny
striped astronauts hover
over the radiating pistils
at the end of a long stretch
of shadow emerge into full light
past ivy clotted fence past where
someone has discarded a computer
monitor and a large luxury guzzler
blocks the driveway the many ways
thoughtlessness be made known
can it be my genius will become
the instrument of my destruction
that that
is its function
logic of the page violated
written down I often don’t
hear what I said
fresh faced into the morning breeze
language is as much
fiction as anything else
in one of those vague but exhilarating
Rousselian moments
it’s better if I don’t
pull back the drapes
on the verge of greatness
stubbed my toe numb
maybe that was
“snubbed by my toe”
the extremities always the first to leave
I may be getting better
“than what?”
mocks the echo |
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by Tom Bradley
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Interview with John-Ivan Palmer | 
| John-Ivan Palmer’s novel, Motels of Burning Madness, Confessions of a Male Stripper, has just been released by The Drill Press. Palmer, a stage hypnotist, has been an odd figure in the literary world, publishing fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and literary criticism often perceived as performances in the Devil’s Theater. But his approach is that of a pilgrim seeking salvation in self-discovery. He has just completed his latest non-fiction work, Wild Ruins of the Waking Sleep, Experiences in Stage Hypnotism, parts of which have appeared in this and other publications. The interview that follows took place on New Year’s Eve, with Palmer by cell phone en route to a night club engagement and Bradley in Japan.
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So you earn your living as a stage hypnotist making fools out of people.
It’s been said.
Are you a fool?
[pause] A fool for love, yes. And it’s gotten me into plenty of trouble.
How does being a hypnotist affect the kind of writer you are?
Whether I eat or starve depends on one thing: my vampiric capture of hypnotic subjects and sucking out the laughs. Not many writers live this kind of life. I may be the only one. I work casinos, clubs, fairs, schools, corporate banquets and take on earth-loads of raw humanity. Make them do stuff the wouldn’t ordinarily do. After a while you tend to see human traits that other people don’t. Billboards of inner secrets. Weak spots for manipulation. Like a carny, to me everyone in the world is in perpetual full body scan. I have to be correct in my assessments almost 100% of the time because the results are the ink on my paycheck. I approach characters in my fiction and subjects in my essays and articles with similar stealth.
Twenty five years ago when you researched Motels of Burning Madness, you were already a successful hypnotist in the banquet and college market with numerous TV appearances to your credit. What was it like to ignore all that and go undercover and work for tips as a dancer in sleazy bars?
Like easing into ice water at 3 a.m. on a chilly day. Contrary to what you might think, dancing naked for strange women was not fun. No entertainer is out there to please themselves. Jollities notwithstanding, you’re a whore, pure and simple. You may not have what they want, but the show must go on with a smile. I was a mediocre dancer, but had the stage smarts to connect with an audience. Other dancers may have been good at pulling one foot up behind their neck while hopping in for a tip, but I could work a crowd in a way they could not.
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