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June 29, 2005
Week 16 Would be Candy But for the Tardiness
We mean so, so much better. How poorly we treat you, our lovely and loyal reader. Are those new shoes? How very nice. Yeah, I can see they do go so well with your eyes. Won't you stay for dinner? Aww, you always say that.
All jokes aside that image there is a detail from a paiting by Lauren Bender whom we've loved here before.
What else do you have for us Candyman? Glad you asked, I thought we should prepare for the 4th with a little Teddy K. filtered through Grau, or maybe it is the other way around?
Dig on it and don't go blowing your hand off.
Week 16 Contents
more from Unabomber Haiku by Mike Grau
Posted by Rock Heals at 06:55 PM
still more from Unabomber Haiku
Mike Grau
1.
Its consequences
Have been a disaster
For the human race15.
To hate anything
Strong, good, successful
Hate America21.
The drive for power
Hostile or dogmatic terms
Take such an approach34.
Hypothetical
Case of a man who can have
Everything he wants36.
Goals result in death
Compatible survival
And in frustration43.
It is true that some
Either drive for power
Or satisfy it
Read the first installment of Unabomber Haiku >
Then read the second
Ed note: Mike's mission to reveal the power of the poetry locked inside the Unabomber Manifesto continues. Rock Heals looks forward to bringing you more pieces of the puzzle periodically.
Posted by Rock Heals at 06:50 PM
June 22, 2005
Week 15: Words + Pitchers = Love
It's summer. Let swampy drawers begin.
This week we bring you a short one and a long one from Rupert Wondolowski. Rupert has been running the Shattered Wig Review and the Shattered Wig nights in Baltimore since the closing days of the Civil War ("Recent Unpleasantness"). With the growing popularity of moving pictures many thought Rupert was "shit out of luck" (an expression from that time) -- but he and his folk persevered by doing it their way.
Sandwiched between them is a great bit of painting from Seth Adelsberger. Seth was just in New American Painting back in April. Homeboy's pants are on fire, yo.
More next week, you know the drill.
Week 15 Contents
2 plot devices, by Rupert Wondolowski
Jansen Acid Test Dictionary Painting, by Seth Adelsberger; and
Meditations in a Thrift Store, another from Rupert
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:50 AM
2 plot devices:
Rupert Wondolowski
1. Bloody kleenex in the
campsite bathroom (turns out
to be clay).
2. Driving along the highway, run
into traffic jam. Put on bird
costume and run up hill clowning
(gets shot).
+++
This fine fine poem is the opening shot in Rupert's "The Whispering of Ice Cubes: New and Selected Pieces." It is unlike any of the other equally fine pieces in that book -- find it here.
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:40 AM
Jansen Acid Test Dictionary Painting
Seth Adelsberger
72 inches x 120 inches, mixed media (2005)
Click the image to enlarge, silly.
Yeah, viewing a 6' by 10' painting at 72 dpi isn't quite the real thing, but we do what we can. Catch a gallery show of his sometime, he'll be coming to your town, no doubt.
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:30 AM
Meditations in a Thrift Store
Rupert Wondolowski
You are standing in front of a record display in a musty thrift store on the edge of the city. There is a drifting smell that moves on right before becoming disturbing. The wood pieces making up the record shelving seem massive and thick, like elementary school desks seemed to you as a child.
Next to you, feverishly flipping through the Ferrante and Teicher and polka albums is a thin nervous woman you once sort of knew almost twenty years ago. Little about her has changes. She still has that awkward but nervously energized adolescent-like presence that already felt too young for her all those years ago. She’s having a religious experience with these over-picked lps that feel like lifeless, dry taco shells to you at this time. You curse yourself for not having a coffee before coming in here or for coming in here at all. You suddenly feel the urge to be out in the woods away from all material goods, but the late winder sun is setting on slick gray streets outside and there’s always the Friday traffic to think about.
The store’s lighting has no personality, no nuances for you to gain some emotional traction with. It’s like a steady eye with no thought behind it, gazing and gazing at you.
The skittish woman next to you is now making gutteral moaning sounds and you see that she’s holding a Rick James album. Rick James, who was originally from Canada, was a R & B performer fairly big in the70s and 80s. It’s long been believed that the U.S. government unleashed him on American ghettos to spread the scourge of crack cocaine, processed hair and vile clothing, just as another Canadian performer, Leonard Cohen, was set upon the white hippies to deflate their revolutionary fervor and replace it with paralyzing romantic nihilism.
Even in the drab airless space of this culture graveyard, or maybe because of its drabness, Rick James’ processed hair jumps out from the record cover. It has a gellid, industrial squid presence that makes your stomach slide and your scalp itch. How did he maintain that chemical monstrosity through the day? How did it react to sweat? What foul marks did it leave on his coked-out lover’s pillow? Did it ever catch fire during a blurry marathon party, its burning smell like a cauldron of melted wax hobo feet?
A stevedore will tell you that the green bilge from the hold of a ship is the dirtiest substance on earth, that if it gets on your skin it crawls right through, but at this moment you picture the processed coils of hair gulping the bilge and sucking your flesh off at the same time, leaving you a quivering exo-skeleton.
It’s just as that earlier wrong smell starts to drift your way again and you start to wonder if it’s an olfactory hallucination connected to Rick James, that the nervous girl speaks to you. But when you turn to face her she has become that cute cheerleader from high school, the one from the other school in Howard County. She has the largest, most innocent eyes that shoot laser beams of goodness from behind large glasses that might have been at home on Wally Cox, voice of Underdog. She is holding an album of traditional Eskimo music and she asks you if you knew that Eskimos sing into each other’s throats. Your heart begins beating rapidly and when she turns to put the album back into the decaying wooden bin you notice she has the nicest ass you’ve ever seen. You blush, wondering if you’re evil for noticing such a thing about a young girl in a short, frilly pom pom outfit, but then you notice she’s around your age and that her smile indicates she can read your thoughts.
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
“Yes,” you answer. “I tried to eat at the Taco Bell earlier, but there was a huge fight going on about whose turn it was to the clean the toilet. It really brought me down.”
“Let’s go outside,” she says. “I’ve got something in my car.”
When you enter the battered VW buss there is a colorful spread of food waiting on the plaid couch covers, including steaks the size of catcher’s mitts and sparkling roasted vegetables.
As the two of you gorge on your feast you can see a carnival of red police lights flashing by outside and the bus sways as if on water whenever fire trucks come near.
Sometime during the double chocolate pudding the two of you decide that despite the over-chronicling of Paris in the 1920s, it was still the best place to be and that you would go there next.
“But first,” she says, ”there’s an out of control ice cream truck playing Grateful Dead music in Hampden about to crash into a backyard full of babies on blankets and I’ve got to stop it.”
+++
This piece first appeared in Shattered Wig Review #25. Learn how to get a copy.
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:10 AM
June 16, 2005
Week 14: Better Late Than Never
This week brings you another comic, as promised, from Mr. Ryan Nelson. Among the many Ryan is up to, he plays in The Routineers who are going to be at Fort Reno (in DC, sorry for the tease to my readers in Singapore) on June 30 w/The Evens. Consider that reason #101 re why you should go to Fort Reno more often.
Plus two great poems from Justin Sirois -- you may remember him and his work from Week 2 (oh we were so young then).
But wait there's more -- a quick morsel from D_, our paramedic in the field who keeps running across one-legged people. Read, enjoy, send us your own story about tthe one-legged folks in your life -- definitely the it genre for Summer 2005.
We won't be late next week. We won't be late next week. We won't be late next week.
Week 14 Contents
A second installment of Another Night in Jail from R. Carroll Nelson;
Two poems from Justin Sirois:
love prayers (see the real thing for the full title);
mister Cyclopes & the men I have grown to love; and
Air Jordan XX, another dispatch from D_, our paramedic in the field
And don't forget to check out all the goodness from previous weeks.
Posted by Rock Heals at 08:00 AM
more from Another Night In Jail
R. Carroll Nelson
Click the thumbnail to enlarge
And there's another from Ryan -- if you haven't been here in a while, or are new to our block.
Posted by Rock Heals at 07:00 AM
love prayers
love prayers {1
for you}
if I could give you all the love in the world, wrap it up in greasy butcher block paper & tie it tight with cable wire, put my ear to it & listen to the good bacteria breed like marmalade botulism. If I could hold the bundle of all the love in the world, the meat love & the organic vegetable love, the gentle panda & sizzling kidney napalm love, Bombay prostitute love & a new father’s love, it would swell like a sprinkler head & spasm like a bee without its dagger. I need to include the teenage vampire love, it’s a good kind I think. Holy Mary, Mother of Super Savings, I want a five hundred dollar stainless steal Japanese cutlery set, but can’t afford it with my current salary. Holy Harry, Father of High Fructose, please spare the ones who cannot read the ingredients on the sides of tractor trainers, the atom barbers who smash economies with nose hair scissors & bump reducing beard trimmers. If I could give you my real love instead of worrying about silent wars or smoking old cough ash alone in my boxers, if I could change the shape of my eye sockets by cracking these knuckles in a particular order, if the basketball brawl behind the sockets broke up & the punch drunk cameramen would strike, you would be on the top of the list, wayward & always wandering
Posted by Rock Heals at 05:00 AM
mister Cyclopes & the men I have grown to love
oh mister Cyclopes, big government is bad when you
watch TV all night, a cigarette is always a cigarette
no matter what happens to it. Sometimes I feel like
you’re the only real thing in my life, not (the
unchanging cigarette) just the kaleidoscope of
compliments & kisses you over night. Those swollen
tomahawks & talk show humorists, you smoking mini vans
& apache plagiarists, when does a riot cop decide to
write something intimidating on the front of his
helmet? He’s only been hit in the head a few times &
he hates it, this is a classified memo demanding that
you destroy the super flu samples, if the virus seeps
into our crown victoria we will all be turned into
headless vermin & they will use our little bodies to
mean streak red warnings of the apocalypse. A man is
always a man no matter what happens to it. The boy who
collects assault rifles is a worried boy, the girl who
uses the word frontline in conversation is a girl
whose calculus has been proven – now the can of
emergency drinking water has become a mushy slosh,
will you smooch him when we erupts like-
a busted spigot or a kevlar pig ready to kick heads?
Who is going to macromanage middle america? iPod One,
the little diction clipped to the president’s waist,
plays free downloaded pop, when I called the first
daughters blurry hurdy-gurdies I meant it like pretty
organ grinders, but I wasn’t talking about anyone
we’ve seen for real, just a singing photograph taped
to the cathode. Write to your congressman & ask them
how much a pound of hamburger costs, big government
means less freedom for the discounted calm diggers &
back to school items, we found her in the dvd bin, she
believed it to be a ball pit & sank down to lethal
weapons. Where do we fit into the remodeling success
story? He’s been hit in the soft drink a few times &
likes it
Posted by Rock Heals at 04:00 AM
Air Jordan XX
Ed note: Once again a (very brief) story from D_ that doesn't involve life on duty. But it does involve two topics we love: one-legged people and Air Jordans.
I was walking to the metro the other day on the way to work and passed by this homeless guy I always see out there.
He was asking for change -- didn't have any for him that morning -- and I come to notice he's wearing a brand new Air Jordan (Jordan XX, in this case the black ones) on his one foot. What?
It got better. Sitting next to him was the shoe that completed the pair, with a sign:
For Sale
Brand New
Never Worn
I was sorely tempted. Should have at least asked him how much. He'd have to throw in the sign in the deal.
Posted by Rock Heals at 03:00 AM
June 08, 2005
Week 13: Say It Ain't So
Avoiding the obvious to briefly show our love for Felix Gonzales-Torres
Comics again at last! R. Carroll Nelson (or Ryan Nelson as we know him -- or the former drummer of the much-missing Most Secret Method or the beloved-but-now-gone Dead Teenagers) brings us an installment of his ongoing "Another Night in Jail." It's been 10 weeks since we had comics people! Are you having trouble finding the address to submit your work
Also more Letters To Norm brought to you from the People's Peaceable Assembly Line. Last time around there was some confusion. Some of you thought the P-PAL was Rock Heals staff acting through a persona -- that is not the case. Through emails with P-PAL's Provost, I got the following description of the organization:
"We have no mission statement, no hierarchy. We are merely cowed and
terrified citizens acting as we see fit under the directive of the signs: Report Suspicious Activities."
Next week... We have another pagefrom Ryan, but we didn't want you to gorge yourself on comic goodness all at once! What else? Who knows.
On the horizon there is more work from Kevin Thurston; stuff to look at from Seth Adelsberger (don't know that name? You will, motherfucker, you will); more 911 Diaries; and much more. Dribble-drabbled all slow-like.
Week 13 Contents
Another Night In Jail from R. Carroll Nelson; and
Activity Report No. 1 from the People's Peaceable Assembly Line
If you don't know how to find the stuff from previous week's then you are hopeless. (No excuse for the ongoing lack of a good index 'round here.)
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:50 AM
Another Night in Jail
R. Carroll Nelson
Click image to enlarge.
[Ed note: Hey! Don't let your browser resize your shit -- view at full size (700px wide) to see the proper.]
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:40 AM
Activity Report No. I
Operation TIPS
c/o Homeland Security
Dear Norm,
I drive under your Report Suspicious Activities signs frequently, and read them each time. I had thought, before the world changed, in the years those signs were erected over the highways, that it was a little bit suspicious to build those signs at all: ‘Congestion Ahead’ is not worth it, as everybody who drives here already knows it’s already true, the signs were thus merely infuriating, to those spending gas on the parking lot beneath them. But now I understand, that their installation, and the cameras, sprouting on poles of their own like metallic mushrooms, or clinging to lamps and bridge edges like barnacles, was prescient. A prescient precedent, set for a bellicose President. How was I to have known the world would change like that September morning changed it? Now, as I sit in the traffic, the TIPS-line flashing over the lanes, I realize that I am suspicious.
This is not to say that I suspect I’m a sleeper, though I sure can sleep, or that any of my own behaviors as witnessed by myself since that day have raised any doubts in my mind about my own loyalty to the Republic, its Constitution and its Emperor. No, indeed. I am not suspicious of myself, in that way (and trust those who read my e-mail to know when I should be designated a ‘person of interest’ better than I), but, well, I am sort of sensitive to language, ‘hyperlexic’ some call it, others, ‘infuriating literalness,’ but the effect is the same: I parse and parse, wringing every meaning I can from the presented syntax, like bureaucrats pun, by compulsion. So the question arises, which the signs already beg:
What is suspicious activity? The way it seems to be intended, suspicious activity is anything which could be construed as an ‘Islamist’ surveying or moving equipment or renting vans or buying fertilizer or aluminum tubes, PVC pipes, sheetrock or spongy vanilla confections, and such an ‘Islamist’ could be anybody but probably darker of skin than Dan Rather, and bearded. Or are they? Aren’t they swarthy, evildoing enemies of freedom, or do they look like Patriot McVeigh? Of course, it does not mean adherents of the docile and politically impotent religion of Islam, or Sikhs, not these.
But ‘suspicious activities’ might be those undertaken at the direction of a suspicious mind: following those dark men with the boxes; looking askance at the speakers of the tones of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi; watching the minarets; lurking, or even voicing incendiary ideology, on the discussion boards. The fact that the mind harbors suspicion, that harboring is such an activity.
Norm, I gotta tell ya, I’m suspicious. Suspicious of just about everything susceptible to interpretation. Suspicious of the text, the context, the subtext and the author. My suspicious activities consist in this interpretation, and reinterpretation, of the metrical assonance of the sound-bytes, and the framing programs, the curious repeating leitmotif of the severed head in the news, like a fugue, ‘Islamist’ snuff films in counterpoint to abortive decapitation strikes, the head- shots, the pot shots, and the talking heads. By the bankruptcy of the third estate, abdication of the first, and the scripted, juggernaut ascendancy of the second, all to the fanfares of the debauched and complicit press, who keep We the People informed, more like Hamilton suggested than Jefferson’s proscription. I’ve been suspicious all along, Norm, but I’ve kept quiet, because I’ve been busy. Busy being scared by the suspicious proliferation of American flag stickers and stick-pins on imported cars and Italian lapels—“love it or leave it” emblazoned in red, white on blue Chinese tee shirts by religious prisoners across the Pacific. I am suspicious because salaam now indicates evil, pacific stands for surprise attack, columbine (rhymes with combine, carbine) now a dove of death diving under desks, and the cradle of civilization is also the pyre on which civilization is toast, a holocaust to a god that drinks up the souls of those who die angry and scared, adrenalin concentrated in their brains and veins, briefly, before it flows with the blood, a god that speaks to us through a burning Bush, the oily scion and high-priest of his own oily sign of vincit omnia. Oh, I’m suspicious all right, Norm, all day, every day, sometimes more, as the headlines roll off the wires, the wires pull, prod, hobble and shock.
Now that I have reported on myself, identified myself as constitutionally suspicious, will you hire me to write propaganda for the Reich? Keep me close like Sun Tzu’s enemy.
Thank you, sincerely, for your time and consideration. I will await your knock at 0400, or any other time you need your propaganda parsed.
Yours,
Pére A. Gnoyde
++++
< Previously from The People’s Peaceable Assembly Line Next >
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:00 AM
June 01, 2005
Week 12: Speechless
If I had set up this photo shoot David LaChapelle would be sweating my nuts.
Last week we caught Ryan Walker over at Red Emma's in Baltimore as part of the Portable Reading series. Ryan is a tall man. It was a good time, and must admit that Ryan's work was unexpected.
What was so refreshing about was how "giving" his work was. Read aloud and on the page he offers up so many levels, and even if you miss a few (typical at a reading) there's plenty to walk away with. So dig.
Interupting Cow just put out Ryan's new chapbook, Enjoy Potion. It's like 6 bucks, don't sleep on it. Make the check out to Cathy Eisenhower (she runs the Cow)
Interrupting Cow
3355 16th Street NW #712
Washington DC 20010
Next week we are very excited to bring you comics from Ryan Nelson. We just got them today and of course they fucking rock. We love comics. Everyone send us awesome comics. Or, if your name is Ryan, send something our way, I'm sure we can keep this streak alive.
Week 12 Contents
All up in some Ryan Walker poetry
the Factory of Life and Consciousness
one year
hatch
I'm gonna get my act together with a real index soon... but start here.
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:50 AM
the Factory of Life and Consciousness
Ryan Walker
I’m tired of the whole idea of intense sex. I have to admit that cute sex or even boring sex has some appeal. Non-invasive or even non-noticeable sex seems worth trying. I’d like someone to tell me we had sex the other day, briefly, while I was distracted. -How was it? -It was ok. -Did I like it? -I think so. -Let’s do it again. -We already did. -Oh. How was it? -It was ok. In this way, we can have sex, if not constantly – which would be pointless – then at least frequently enough to restore wildness to the places where we send mail or refuse to purchase dry goods. …She’s mouthwateringly reasonable. I’m convinced there is a whole race of people in the cities and towns of this continent who simply are not aware of how reasonable she is, so they choose to go insane, not because of any romantic notion about incurring unnecessary risk or seeing across to the other side or living eternally in the final credits of a rockumentary, but rather because, in the wayward portions of our mutual instinct, the gritty monkeys that laze where the last inviolable toilet water flickers out, there the future conspires with fashion and our ideas are borned.
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:40 AM
one year
Ryan Walker
stop being a totem pole
a cloud moves, the sky brightens, a bird calls
my bird answers
shut up bird
you've ruined everything, sun
the sun ruined everything
and school ruined the rest
let me back in the sewer
the oxygen is chaffing my gills
I slit my last Tan-tan
in October, now I have nothing
if you ask what I'm wearing
Black Banana No. 4
I have many new feelings
necroflagelum
one of those little tails
dead people get
nice, yes, but she looked
like she'd just fallen
down the up escalator
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:30 AM
hatch
Ryan Walker
the part where I stop pretending
it's something I have volition over got edited
out of the halloween parade not by some
overzealous cinemetographer but by the gaping maw
that opened beneath me. I stand before you
a visitor from the overworld
where the light is kind
and yellow
and the tubas play
I can endorse the things I've purchased
I can be your parent
Posted by Rock Heals at 12:10 AM
