Naming Names

The MTV job is a fascinating thing. As I've said, I'm concocting a character who's got feelings about his feelings. It is surreal and excellent. It's also curious, as I've always loved writing about music.


I've developed some stellar classifications for music, as well. Notable among these is Bearskin Rock, which pertains to that particularly grotseque "laid back" seventies style, and is the exclusive purview of people that will get it on ONLY ON ANIMAL HIDES. Think Poco. Think Kenny Logout. Eww.
 
Gerund Rock is the subgenre of music on which I'm currently perseverating. A de facto gossamer for the obnoxious alloy of engineered poignancy & privileged mock-substance, gerund-object nomenclature made its debut (as far as I can tell, and correct me if I'm wrong) with Throwing Muses in the 1980s. (Monikers based upon well-worn/familiar phrases [Living Colour, Talking Heads, and the execrable Moving Pictures] don't count, so don't even try it.)


In any case, there was something novel about it, as there tended to be whenever assumptions about language were challenged; curiously, the group's name would sometimes reflect a beholder's confusion surrounding such trifling redefinition, with the surreptitious insertion of an article (usually, the) by some-or-other fuddy-duddy preceding the actual name.


This was all fine, and not even really noticeable, until Counting Crows happened to us, like a pungent dribble of piss from on high, in 199? (they were all the same years, when you think about it). 


Then, it became, like, the thing, you know, to do. These two are uniquely unsettling:
Flogging Molly
Breaking Benjamin


There are heaps of others, and it's become accepted practice:
Smoking Popes
Framing Hanley
Saving Abel
Racing Kites
Asking Alexandria


I like changing the names of existing groups to fit this formula:
Mounting Goats
Marilyng Manson
Hooting Blowfish


And thinking of orginals: 
Remaining Anonymous
Bering Strait
Curling Iron
Carrying Items
Eating Disorders
Failing Auditions
Hurling Epithets
Lansing Michigan

HERE ARE POEMS:


corners of june

waiting for warmth in a

salad of springtime i’m

wilting and verdant at

once and at length a col-

lapse at the starting gate

artless and slave to fate

delicate durable

gathering strength

so a line breaks but everybody’s got a thing what’s yours my

underwear is in bunches in knots but was stolen by my trousers and

doesn’t even remember my name

nobody’s ready (reluctance or something) i

know how they feel but i’ve made it my lot that it’s

nothing when vacant embraces are currency—

simply a symptom of nothing of note

what’s the story now let’s get

apt what’s anybody’s story i don’t want

to hear any more stories unless you can tell me

straight up that they’re not about glamour or romance or god

damned hollywood or however much you like the

parking or the ambience at whichever (whatever) stripmall

houses your fav-o-rite store what color

are your shoes? what color is

your skin? what color

suits me best? i’m dying to know because

surely it can’t possibly

feel good

or be good

unless it looks good.

after june will come another june dressed as july and it will

try to fool us by presenting itself as a warmer being but i and

ideally you can and will see very clearly indeed through that se-

ductive swelter sun and haze and all of the other excuses for

not wearing clothes, to the heart, which is rotting, of things.

neighbors and bedfellows

larger than sentences, smaller than words is the

void into which i see slip my conclusions.

choices make choices themselves without asking, like

ornery children set kitchens ablaze.

think of decisions as ornaments hanging on

christmas-tree people like all of us all—

withering constant, we yield to the ages and

give them permission to speak what we were.

i’m on a plane that’s descending to earth and i

try not to speculate; what does that make me?

the clouds are arranged in precise little rows in the

manner of crops—did they sprout from the sea?

people are more than the sums of their mysteries.

ask me a question and answer yourself.

I don’t like boston or people in college;

I want to be stupider, stupider still.

More of Them

oh my gosh i'm working i'm working 
it feels so good to finally be able to procrastinate in a merited manner
i'm joking but only as much as you'll find it amusing


Dig this: I'm doing pseudonymous writing for MTV as their Nerd Rock Correspondent. Thrilled am I. It's crazy. My name is 'Benjamin Daniels'; 'Daniel' is my middle name, and nobody saw fit to consider prior to application of said nom de plume that there just might be an erstwhile MTV personality named "Benjamin Daniels"—and there is! Life, I am frequently assured, is full of coincidental matter.


(Which reminds me—isn't coincidence in the temporal sense of the beholder? On past occasions of smoking cigarettes outdoors, before returning indoors, I would ask my companions, "Shall we coincide?")


Okay. I'm also editing manuscripts for a start-up publishing company. Aaaaaaaaand I'm still doing the freelance (a modest craze), which sort-of ensures that I am unlikely to ever feel stable. I was refused for disability, and they've threatened to take away my Medicaid (the total annual cost of my medicines exceeds $100,000 USD) and food supplement. But I haven't even been paid! And my tax return, due on Friday, is due also to be eaten, most thoughtlessly, by the watersewerelectricphoneinternetmortgagecomputer entities (I refuse to see them as being people) just as soon as it arrives. I am told that solvency is overrated, but it's been years since I've accepted that as a valid opinion.


The rain fell today, onto the snow, creating a town-sized puddle in which every pedestrian (however momentary the stint of their schlepping) was submerged well past their ankles. I call it "Soup of the Day." And now it's going to be March, and I would love a bona fide reason to be cheerful. I shouldn't say that, because I LOVE my family, but I'm hard-pressed to pretend that this current situation's anything other than absolute crap.


But I have to put some more old poems on here. I still don't have most of them, on account of my computer being in the shop, but that matters less than a whole lot else.


I'll start with a love poem. It's from 1998. I had been stunned into aliveness. The title came 5 years later, on the heels of torment that had been unfathomable.




5 years in every direction

i love you and you love yourself in

beams of freckled fringency, with

waves of subtle stringency, with

flat, distinctive englishness, your

landscapes pocked with canvas bare in

summer seas of stars and blood, a

lilted, spacious leavening – these

fruits with roots in heaven bring what’s

told in its unfolding.

(The font just changed, but that's because I've got a recalcitrant touchscreen.)

This next poem is old as shit, which means (in this case) that it's from 1995, when I was seventeen. I don't even think that I was sad when I wrote it, but there you are, and here we go:

Mean Either

fearing not sleep but a missed opportunity

free of diseases but free of immunity

scared and ensnared by a spurious unity

pleading despair to a jury of ghosts

scattered in dollops the reasons for everything

baked underwater i wait for the phone to ring

time that elapsed when i thought myself practicing

rose-tinted glasses proposing a toast

Now another, just 'cause it's a just cause. This is a poem about Molly, whom I adore. This is also old, but not that old (2003). When I met Molly, everything became very exciting very fast. It remains so, and all of my irascibility, so evident in this post, dissipates when I imagine her sleeping and the sound of her voice.

capital letters

it was helpful for me to remind my

self when starting to write this that it

doesn’t have to be new because well

everything was always here in its way

(rusted-out and lethal fire escapes/droppings

on windowsills and awnings/stubblefaced

dirtyshirt laundrysoon me/sink full of

dishes rinsed and unwashed/dying pen and

dead lighter/words and words used and used
/sealed bottle of vitamins /eight o'clock twilight
/hours-old coffee to go/obscenely mild june
/cars parked over crushed containers/people 
attired in various oblivions/sneezes and the 
odd blessing/lilac and refuse and swears in 
the wind/fingernails bitten beyond the quick

/floors and unpacked-box tabletops)—

but what no one would ever know to

look is that every moment that i am

alive is precious beyond prediction

and dizzy with its fullness of you


Thus refined (and in much-better mood), I'll attach a Deep Freeze Mice song onto this post. It's the opening track of their 4th record, The Gates of Lunch. 
"Red Light for the Greens"

Poems (the first of several installments)

One at a time, I'm posting these. Then I'll archive them into a separate area.

this is from 2003.

if you’re looking

check yourself first if

you’re looking for sense

in the city today, always

down the wrong avenue

or via some flawful ex-

press stratagem. where

is it or has it gone?

it’s moping and bored on a

windowsill, potentially.

it’s in every properly running

fridge and faucet, rumored

and pending substantiation.

it’s somewhere spayed

and then neutered and

suited up fancy, it

might be suggested.

it’s in a yesterday

cup of residue, cold and

colder just the same,

dreaming of spring,

somebody is certain.

it may or might be where

inert emotion’s settled

with the silt and the spit in a

disuseful subway station,

scary and sustaining

the roaches and the rats.

is it in a fleeting equity

that kisses each

creature with a last

heavy blink until

each tomorrow? it’s

possible. nothing is

not. nothing suffers

only to be seen so doing.

Haven't You Heard?

1/7/2011, 7:59 AM


Friday morning. Epiphanies are so yesterday.


Were I at the helm of a class, I would use my fescue apparatus on a wall-mounted calendar to signify that "Here  [THWACK!] is where we commence the vertiginous slide into sub-Arctic delirium." 


The storm windows are covered with frost; this saddens me, as I've got a 9:00 meeting, and it's outside of the house. I will adopt an apocryphal optimism that will sustain me for at least the first 5 outdoor steps that I take.


In any case, I've chosen to post a poem here. It's old, but we're all aging irreversibly. At least winter ends, although it won't leave until you're absolutely certain that it's your fate to suffer eternally beneath its frigid thumb. And it's short.


Oh, shit--it's trash day. I gotta go. But first, the poem. It's called "Haven't You Heard":

Haven't You Heard

My memoirs are three sentences long. 

At least they're not two.

At least they're not four.