12 mayo, 2008
HOLD THE PICKLES HOLD THE LETTUCE SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…
It was almost 30 yrs ago that the punk provocateurs first album came out, released by Warner Bros., & produced by Eno, after Eno & David Bowie had competed over who would produce this new band.
Devo were a bigger joke than the Ramones and equally as serious. (And ultimately Devo and the Ramones wound up with different franchises.)
People laughed and didn’t get it, or they laughed and got it.
And a few got the joke and got mad (cranky assholes afflicted with perception, like Robert Christgau).
The best, & most prophetic, lyric from that album was:
HOLD THE PICKLES / HOLD THE LETTUCE / SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY…
They firmly had their fingers on or up something of the emergent zeitgeist...the corpus politic…
Pulse, cock, asshole, whatever...
We were all bozos on this bus, all consumers in this shopping mall, and we were so determined to have it our way that the bourgeois individualists drifted apart...
& a true sign of the times was when public schools started removing social studies & history classes from the syllabus, hoping that college would pick up the slack (I had learned about the Hansiatic League in 5th. fucking grade)...
We have become so atomized & anathemized, that there are no common coins in the realm, no common references, no agreed-on map-coordinates.
A few years back and old friend died.
Her passing was mentioned on NPR, and on Salon, & in the Village Voice, and eventually in the New York Times.
She was an Afro-American science fiction writer and McArthur genius grantee. (And she was a better friend to me than I to her, even lending me money to attend a writing workshop and being gracious when I took years to pay her back; through the years we would get together for coffee when she was passing through town, and when appropriate she would give me the requisite son-of-a-bitch slap.)
I called a mutual friend to share the bad news, as this mutual friend was so against the wall as to not be able to afford internet access, not be able to afford the bus fair to the nearest library. (Absolutely tragic for a computer programmer.)
Even though he had been a friend of this decedent, he was much more upset over the death of an old radio-serial actor who had been in every sci-fi radio serial in the 40s and 50s.
He had met this person once, a long time ago.
Yet he did not want to hear about the death of an old friend, in her mid-50s, as he was still grieving over the death of this radio actor who he had only met once, an actor in his late 80s.
I know that there are elective affinities and that not every work of art will resonate with everyone.
Over a week ago I was greeted by an acquaintance who made an odd & sarky comment about Robert Rauschenberg dying.
At the time I thought he was kidding, making one his usual very bad jokes.
I went home and checked on-line.
Nothing in the Village Voice.
Later I found an item in the New York Times, and then on the Beeb…
I had been in a downtown gallery the week before and saw a very good Rauschenberg silk screen from the late 1970’s, a terrific knock-off.
And if it wasn’t Rauschenberg’s best, it was a very good self-parody.
And if an artist can’t rip themselves off from time to time, then who can they rip off?
Rauschenberg was a bridge between the abstract expressionism of de Kooning and the pop of Warhol and Jasper Johns, and he had obvious links to the surrealist and Dada couch boys. And he was king collagist…
Rauschenberg even co-designed an album cover for Talking Heads, a sort of sculptural jigsaw.
With Rauschenberg form not only followed function, but took notes and came back to take names and ask questions.
His work was a continually evolving demonstration of the William Carlos Williams axiom that the pure products of America go crazy.
And per L. Bangs or J. Feiffer, if anyone did a dance about architecture, it was Rauschenberg.
His work always had energy, a visceral and kinetic buzz that delights and informs the eye.
And it still does.
If you can’t get to a decent museum or gallery, then go to a few of these links.
guggenheim rauschenberg
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_133_0.html
rauschenberg link
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rauschenberg_robert.html
rauschenberg - erased de kooning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
4 aprilis 2008 - Part II
4 április, 2008
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE:
NORTHBOUND ON I-5,
PART II.
Elliott Bay Book Co. did a terrific calendar listing for their newsletter flyers & website: “The Elliott Bay Book Company / Seattle's legendary independent bookstore / R.V. BRANHAM & Friends / Friday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. / Various forms of fun will roll off the tongue no doubt, as a contingent of people arrive from the delightful, Portland-based, internationally-inclined literary journal, Gobshite Quarterly, in the presence of editor R.V. Branham and others, all to inform, educate (and entertain), with the newly released book, Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages (Soft Skull). Depending on where one is and under what circumstances, there is much that could prove quite handy. "Overflowing with invectives, curses and blasphemous belittlings, the book is more than a resource guide for becoming a multilingual potty mouth. This is a valuable book for bridging communication barriers, making it possible to say such important things as 'millananyawshanmi' - Quechua, for 'I feel like throwing up ...' - David Walker, Willamette Week.”
Channing had gone up to Seatac the night before ... he used to live there & has all sorts of ties, family & otherwise.
Channing would join us at the bookstore. Sarah, however, was studying for finals...
So twas just Moira & I.
We’ve been up to Seatac several times, usually for something at Elliott Bay, and have gone all the way up to Canada, & to Vancouver BC several more times. But we always stayed on I-5.
I am familiar enough with the highways & by-ways of Northern California & Oregon... & what problems could there be with Washington.
We loaded the icechest with tuarine energy drinks, lemonade, & proscuitto hoagies, & kettle chips, & mapquest quest maps, and left NE Portland at noon. (We live just south of the Columbia River, and a mile & a half east of I-5, so it was just a few miles to Washington State proppah.)
It was pouring, but I had just replaced the windsheild wipers, and the traffic on I-5 was not too insane. (What you have to worry about more than anything on I-5 are sudden fog banks, and their zero-visibility.)
We had to stop in Olympia & see someone at Evergreen College about some CURSE+BERATE related business.
This involved leaving I-5, & going onto 101, & entering the maze of Evergreen College.
Evergreen is one of those beautiful wooded campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, rendered truly hermetic by its physical isolation.
Once done, we asked about getting back to I-5, as our mapquest quest maps.
“Just take 101,” we were told. It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
At this point we were theoretically 60-70 miles from Seatac.
Theoretically.
One of the problems with natives of the Pacific Northwest is that they lack the gene for giving directions.
Things like north or south or left or right are not in the vocabulary, not even filed in the cortex, not available conceptually, ontologically, not on any level.
In Oregon they will say, “Just turn at the next Freddy’s...” (Fred Meyer stores are everywhere in Oregon, and as map references completely useless.)
In Washington they say, “It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
Remember, we were at this point theoretically an hour or so away from Seatac.
But we were heading west & then north, passing military bases we had not seen before, and then suddenly in a National Forest.
We saw a huge deer with huge antlers cross the road and then a moose. After the deer, the moose somehow seemed anti-climactic.
And we saw a body of water, a part of the great Puget Sound, or one of its canals. But it was to our right. And sometimes there was a rail, and sometimes not. But there were no shoulders.
The traffic was one-lane each way, and heavy, and the rain made the road look like a creek.
And clouds came down to the trees to scratch their backs.
And more deer, and more traffic snaking each way, wanting to exceed the 45 mph postings.
We began to feel like location scouts for McCABE & MRS. MILLER.
Eventually, near Port Townsend, we saw a utility truck by the side of the road.
The worker, originally from New York or Pennsylvania (by his accent) said we needed to either go up to Port Townsend, still 50 miles ahead or go 15 or 20 miles to the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, which would lead us to the Kingston Ferry, which would take us to Edmonds, 15 minutes north of Seattle via I-5.
After 12 miles, & no signs, we stopped at a café, & were given semi-coherent directions on the turnoff for the Hood Canal Floating Bridge.
A nearby gas station, where we spent $60 on gas & got even more muddled directions.
A customer gave yet another version on finding the turn-off.
By triangulating the directions, and thoroughly fucking them up, we actually managed to find the turn-off for the bridge.
The Hood Canal Floating Bridge was one of the most impressive bridges I’ve ever seen.
The rain got heavier once we got to the other side and we were passing mile after mile of bed & breakfast & antique shop.
We were now on a two-lane highway, and the traffic was Friday-afternoon-heavy.
Finally a sign, indicating Kingston & a ferry. There were seagulls everywhere...part of the local ferry seagulls guild. (They were very different from the seagulls we occasionally see on the Columbia, naot necessarilly a different species, but a different seagulls guild.)
We queued into a parking lot to a far-end lane. Another twenty minutes, and we were directed onto the boat, and parked on a second deck. We were able to get out of the car, and consider the cafeteria, the restrooms, the various large scale maps, the stacks of the Seattle Weekly & the Stranger (which had failed to list us, the bastards, the fascist mother fuckers) and the observation seats with their floatation devices stored beneath.
Moira photographed gulls & other ferries & our ferry’s wake.
Just when we were getting comfortable, we had crossed the sound, and were about to land in Edmunds. We were told that the main road from the ferry led straight to I-5, and that it would be easy as pie from then on. It was still raining, and indeed was overpowering the local storm drains, if the curb tsunamis were any indication. Eventually we got to I-5, and into Seatac, with its Tarkovsky-Solaris freeway, and of course we missed our turnoff because we were coming from the north instead of the south.
Having gotten lost in Seatac more than once, I know some of the side streets fairly well, so we took the first turnoff into the industrial zone and dog-tailed our way back to Elliott Bay Book Co.
Elliott Bay is on First Street, near the Alaska Viaduct (where there is lots of free parking). We had agreed to meet an hour before the event so we could rehearse and tighten the sequence.
Rick Simonson was our contact person, personable & enthusiastic about the book. I mentioned that The Stranger had failed to list us, despite press releases & phone calls & review copies. Rick was very apologetic, and had been a Stranger intern, and knew were the bodies were buried, & told us how The Stranger had failed to list their calendar for the coming week. (Apparently Constant or Frizelle managed to get us into their on-line calendar with a suitably cheeky & snarky & accurate listing.)
Channing was running late, & a couple of cell-phone calls revealed that he was caught on the freeway in Tacoma.
We began without him. I did a brief reading from my intro, and Moira improvised some comments, & read a brief something from Channing’s intro.
There was an okay turnout, including Channing’s girlfriend & her mom & another friend. (Yet no Channing.)
And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.
We were in the Q & A section when Channing arrived, so I had him read some of his favorite invective & insults, especially the Japanese & Gaelic bits.
& I asked the audience members what were their favorite swear words, in whatever language. We signed an immense stack of books, & then retired to a local bar to gossip with an old friend who now lives on Vashon Island, but works for a stock photo agency in Seatac.
But that is the batucada of another carnivale, so here endeth this account.
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE:
NORTHBOUND ON I-5,
PART II.
Elliott Bay Book Co. did a terrific calendar listing for their newsletter flyers & website: “The Elliott Bay Book Company / Seattle's legendary independent bookstore / R.V. BRANHAM & Friends / Friday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. / Various forms of fun will roll off the tongue no doubt, as a contingent of people arrive from the delightful, Portland-based, internationally-inclined literary journal, Gobshite Quarterly, in the presence of editor R.V. Branham and others, all to inform, educate (and entertain), with the newly released book, Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages (Soft Skull). Depending on where one is and under what circumstances, there is much that could prove quite handy. "Overflowing with invectives, curses and blasphemous belittlings, the book is more than a resource guide for becoming a multilingual potty mouth. This is a valuable book for bridging communication barriers, making it possible to say such important things as 'millananyawshanmi' - Quechua, for 'I feel like throwing up ...' - David Walker, Willamette Week.”
Channing had gone up to Seatac the night before ... he used to live there & has all sorts of ties, family & otherwise.
Channing would join us at the bookstore. Sarah, however, was studying for finals...
So twas just Moira & I.
We’ve been up to Seatac several times, usually for something at Elliott Bay, and have gone all the way up to Canada, & to Vancouver BC several more times. But we always stayed on I-5.
I am familiar enough with the highways & by-ways of Northern California & Oregon... & what problems could there be with Washington.
We loaded the icechest with tuarine energy drinks, lemonade, & proscuitto hoagies, & kettle chips, & mapquest quest maps, and left NE Portland at noon. (We live just south of the Columbia River, and a mile & a half east of I-5, so it was just a few miles to Washington State proppah.)
It was pouring, but I had just replaced the windsheild wipers, and the traffic on I-5 was not too insane. (What you have to worry about more than anything on I-5 are sudden fog banks, and their zero-visibility.)
We had to stop in Olympia & see someone at Evergreen College about some CURSE+BERATE related business.
This involved leaving I-5, & going onto 101, & entering the maze of Evergreen College.
Evergreen is one of those beautiful wooded campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, rendered truly hermetic by its physical isolation.
Once done, we asked about getting back to I-5, as our mapquest quest maps.
“Just take 101,” we were told. It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
At this point we were theoretically 60-70 miles from Seatac.
Theoretically.
One of the problems with natives of the Pacific Northwest is that they lack the gene for giving directions.
Things like north or south or left or right are not in the vocabulary, not even filed in the cortex, not available conceptually, ontologically, not on any level.
In Oregon they will say, “Just turn at the next Freddy’s...” (Fred Meyer stores are everywhere in Oregon, and as map references completely useless.)
In Washington they say, “It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
Remember, we were at this point theoretically an hour or so away from Seatac.
But we were heading west & then north, passing military bases we had not seen before, and then suddenly in a National Forest.
We saw a huge deer with huge antlers cross the road and then a moose. After the deer, the moose somehow seemed anti-climactic.
And we saw a body of water, a part of the great Puget Sound, or one of its canals. But it was to our right. And sometimes there was a rail, and sometimes not. But there were no shoulders.
The traffic was one-lane each way, and heavy, and the rain made the road look like a creek.
And clouds came down to the trees to scratch their backs.
And more deer, and more traffic snaking each way, wanting to exceed the 45 mph postings.
We began to feel like location scouts for McCABE & MRS. MILLER.
Eventually, near Port Townsend, we saw a utility truck by the side of the road.
The worker, originally from New York or Pennsylvania (by his accent) said we needed to either go up to Port Townsend, still 50 miles ahead or go 15 or 20 miles to the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, which would lead us to the Kingston Ferry, which would take us to Edmonds, 15 minutes north of Seattle via I-5.
After 12 miles, & no signs, we stopped at a café, & were given semi-coherent directions on the turnoff for the Hood Canal Floating Bridge.
A nearby gas station, where we spent $60 on gas & got even more muddled directions.
A customer gave yet another version on finding the turn-off.
By triangulating the directions, and thoroughly fucking them up, we actually managed to find the turn-off for the bridge.
The Hood Canal Floating Bridge was one of the most impressive bridges I’ve ever seen.
The rain got heavier once we got to the other side and we were passing mile after mile of bed & breakfast & antique shop.
We were now on a two-lane highway, and the traffic was Friday-afternoon-heavy.
Finally a sign, indicating Kingston & a ferry. There were seagulls everywhere...part of the local ferry seagulls guild. (They were very different from the seagulls we occasionally see on the Columbia, naot necessarilly a different species, but a different seagulls guild.)
We queued into a parking lot to a far-end lane. Another twenty minutes, and we were directed onto the boat, and parked on a second deck. We were able to get out of the car, and consider the cafeteria, the restrooms, the various large scale maps, the stacks of the Seattle Weekly & the Stranger (which had failed to list us, the bastards, the fascist mother fuckers) and the observation seats with their floatation devices stored beneath.
Moira photographed gulls & other ferries & our ferry’s wake.
Just when we were getting comfortable, we had crossed the sound, and were about to land in Edmunds. We were told that the main road from the ferry led straight to I-5, and that it would be easy as pie from then on. It was still raining, and indeed was overpowering the local storm drains, if the curb tsunamis were any indication. Eventually we got to I-5, and into Seatac, with its Tarkovsky-Solaris freeway, and of course we missed our turnoff because we were coming from the north instead of the south.
Having gotten lost in Seatac more than once, I know some of the side streets fairly well, so we took the first turnoff into the industrial zone and dog-tailed our way back to Elliott Bay Book Co.
Elliott Bay is on First Street, near the Alaska Viaduct (where there is lots of free parking). We had agreed to meet an hour before the event so we could rehearse and tighten the sequence.
Rick Simonson was our contact person, personable & enthusiastic about the book. I mentioned that The Stranger had failed to list us, despite press releases & phone calls & review copies. Rick was very apologetic, and had been a Stranger intern, and knew were the bodies were buried, & told us how The Stranger had failed to list their calendar for the coming week. (Apparently Constant or Frizelle managed to get us into their on-line calendar with a suitably cheeky & snarky & accurate listing.)
Channing was running late, & a couple of cell-phone calls revealed that he was caught on the freeway in Tacoma.
We began without him. I did a brief reading from my intro, and Moira improvised some comments, & read a brief something from Channing’s intro.
There was an okay turnout, including Channing’s girlfriend & her mom & another friend. (Yet no Channing.)
And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.
We were in the Q & A section when Channing arrived, so I had him read some of his favorite invective & insults, especially the Japanese & Gaelic bits.
& I asked the audience members what were their favorite swear words, in whatever language. We signed an immense stack of books, & then retired to a local bar to gossip with an old friend who now lives on Vashon Island, but works for a stock photo agency in Seatac.
But that is the batucada of another carnivale, so here endeth this account.
4 aprilie 2008 - Part I
4 abril, 2008
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE: NORTHBOUND ON I-5
PART I
We had done one CURSE-&-BERATE bookstore event, on 7 february, 2008, with Looking Glass Books.
Looking Glass Books is a venerable 30+ years old bookstore which had moved from its downtown location due to ridiculous rent increases and the never-ending tearing up of streets for public transport strangling small retail businesses in central downtown Portland … essentially s. w.
We have history with Looking Glass Books.
We launched Gobshite Quarterly, back in February 2002, and have done many other events there, including two with Luisa Valenzuela…one by long-distance speaker-phone, PDX to Buenos Aires, and another in the flesh.
It was a tough night, raining like hell, still winter.
We were completing against two other events, and one of the local hipster weeklies (Portland Mercury) had not run us in the events calendar.
And the turn-out was small.
Still the event had gone well.
I had considered setting up a font of holy water to see if it would boil over during the reading, but with all the preparations I simply did not have the time to “borrow” some holy water from a local Catholic Church.
I did a brief reading from my intro, and Channing did a brief reading from his. And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.
I essentially conducted, as well as reading the Spanish & the German & Croatian.
Channing handled the Japanese & the Portuguese & the Scots & Irish Gaelic...
Sarah Barrett did the Russian & Yiddish & Italian…& Polish, too, I think.
Moira handled the French & the Icelandic.
I forget who handled the delicate & indelicate Latin, somebody did…
I called out a page number & the language & someone read the entry & then I read the English translation, & then on to the next language, the next translation, the next page.
We did a Q & A, & signed a stack of books.
We all went back to our various quotidian shuffles. Channing to teaching & semi-finals for his Masters in Applied Linguistics… Sarah to finals at Reed College… & Moira & I to the various GobQ projects…
We were setting up other CURSE+BERATE events in Seattle to the north, & Eugene, Bend, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, & Venice to the south, but due to various factors (including the price of gasoline) we had only one other event on the calendar.
Elliott Bay Book Co. were enthusiastic, as the book had been a staff pick since its (informal) (pre-publication-publication?) publication in January, and the book was (& still is) prominently displayed near the front cash register.
[cont’d...]
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE: NORTHBOUND ON I-5
PART I
We had done one CURSE-&-BERATE bookstore event, on 7 february, 2008, with Looking Glass Books.
Looking Glass Books is a venerable 30+ years old bookstore which had moved from its downtown location due to ridiculous rent increases and the never-ending tearing up of streets for public transport strangling small retail businesses in central downtown Portland … essentially s. w.
We have history with Looking Glass Books.
We launched Gobshite Quarterly, back in February 2002, and have done many other events there, including two with Luisa Valenzuela…one by long-distance speaker-phone, PDX to Buenos Aires, and another in the flesh.
It was a tough night, raining like hell, still winter.
We were completing against two other events, and one of the local hipster weeklies (Portland Mercury) had not run us in the events calendar.
And the turn-out was small.
Still the event had gone well.
I had considered setting up a font of holy water to see if it would boil over during the reading, but with all the preparations I simply did not have the time to “borrow” some holy water from a local Catholic Church.
I did a brief reading from my intro, and Channing did a brief reading from his. And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.
I essentially conducted, as well as reading the Spanish & the German & Croatian.
Channing handled the Japanese & the Portuguese & the Scots & Irish Gaelic...
Sarah Barrett did the Russian & Yiddish & Italian…& Polish, too, I think.
Moira handled the French & the Icelandic.
I forget who handled the delicate & indelicate Latin, somebody did…
I called out a page number & the language & someone read the entry & then I read the English translation, & then on to the next language, the next translation, the next page.
We did a Q & A, & signed a stack of books.
We all went back to our various quotidian shuffles. Channing to teaching & semi-finals for his Masters in Applied Linguistics… Sarah to finals at Reed College… & Moira & I to the various GobQ projects…
We were setting up other CURSE+BERATE events in Seattle to the north, & Eugene, Bend, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, & Venice to the south, but due to various factors (including the price of gasoline) we had only one other event on the calendar.
Elliott Bay Book Co. were enthusiastic, as the book had been a staff pick since its (informal) (pre-publication-publication?) publication in January, and the book was (& still is) prominently displayed near the front cash register.
[cont’d...]
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