BLCKDGRD

Ningland 2, United 1

I mean, you saw it coming, after United only bagged one in that beautiful first half, a half that included beautiful passing up the middle, over the top, switched points of attack, give-and goes, a rocket that hit Jeff Larentowicz smack in the face (and out of the game) and another that reminded Pat Phelan of his jewels crushability, you knew, I knew, up 0-1 at half, United had already dropped at least two points, probably three, so holler all you want about a truly shitty PK call, who didn't see this result coming at half-time?

(Actually you knew it in the 43rd minute when Kevin Alston takes the ball just over the midfield line and RUNS through United's defense, especially Marc Burch's wussy wussy wussy olé, and dead shots right at Wicks.)

Fullback was too pissed to write. D called it a punch in the balls and Landru expands the point while Shatz floats (then rejects) the conspiracy theory that MLS is ordering refs to unfix ties, and yes it was one of the worse calls by an MLS ref in eleven years of deeply shitty MLS refereeing, but United lost this game because United is missing something, some intangible spark that separates and elevates above-average teams into good if not great teams.

I've no idea what's missing, though I've a glimmering it's the holding midfielders - Jacobson was a disappointment - but how much saying that is just my need to assess blame somewhere? United puts together some truly beautiful minutes of soccer to what effect, just over a point a game? I watch, I think, this team should get 1.8, 1.9 points per game, so much better do they look in stretches than their opponents, and United is sitting on 16 points after 12 games. That's mediocrity.

There's a hole at left back (no matter how much The Bowtie sings Burch's praises, Burch is a liability), there's a hole at holding mid (no matter how much I love Benny, when Benny on two broken axles is one of your two best holding mids, there's a hole), and there's the inability of certain front five players to play well with each other: Fred with Moreno, Fred with Gomez, Gomez with Emilio, Gomez with Quaranta. There's still a question at keeper.

There's this: maybe United's not as good as their moments of ineffectual beauty make me think they are; maybe what we're seeing are just results.

Updates, additions, links, edits later. Or not. UPDATE: Meet DCU Curmudgeon.

OH! for the few of you offended by this: 

I understand United thinks it a coup to have secured the Madrid game. I understand Madrid had all the leverage to call where and when and for how much. I understand United need come up with a million dollars just to pay Madrid to show up, much less whatever money United need fork over for the stadium et al. I understand United is my punching bag I can wallop as proxy for all things I want to wallop but can't, and lordy was I in a vile mood at things I can't punch when I made that post.

It's not the Madrid game itself, the Madrid game is metaphor. I think United could do a better job of rewarding the loyal and in doing so build a bigger camp of loyalists. Little, inexpensive things - don't make me stand in line in the dumbass VW garage for the crappiest season-ticket holder shirt EVER, for instance. I'm probably wrong.

Convergence of Aarghs

Fleabus Performs Rightwing Talking Points!

I have little joy, anger, insight, or any color of damn in the spic dyke fascist communist whore Hussein Obama unconstitutionally and dictatorially anointed as Czarina of Gulags, I mean, just buy me my pints now, though how honestly to judge Obama's gamesmanship, so shitty his opponents, though he can only play who's on the schedule goes the rubric.

Once upon a time, if a Puerto Rican-American woman up for SCOTUS had said

My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, -- pig intestines, patitas de cerdo con garbanzo -- pigs' feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs' tongue and ears.

causing the standard pigspew, I'd have glowed a mwrgful ruby, but (a) Agi's already there and (b) yawn and (c) jeebus, remember a year ago when I glowed ruby red about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign? What a fracking rube.

Still, compare and contrast:

Sopón de Garbanzos con Patas de Cerdo

Ann Margaret in baked beans

Politics, beotches.

*

• A roster of pigs nonetheless.
• I mean, Vichy Republicans?
• Pile up the sandbags and paint your windows white.
• The unbearable lightness of relative self-interest.
• Mistah Kurtz, not quite dead.
• UPDATE! Do this.
• Blast the beasts and children.
• I'll try this. It's not a new idea, but I'll try it.
• After the Apocalypse.
• In a previous bleglife I was offered by a chance by a good guy to write about music at Sequenza21 (which you should read daily), and this good guy (who you should read daily UPDATE! Sweetness, watch this, h/t and all) once posted on his bleg I was the "one of the most exciting new music bloggers," the dumbdumb. There's a reason Ishiguro resonates in me: plastic surgery, Lindy, opportunity turned down....
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

*

THE SWIMMING POOL

Thomas Lux

All around the apt. swimming pool
the boys stare at the girls
and the girls look everywhere but the opposite
or down or up. It is
as it was a thousand years ago: the fat
boy has it hardest, he
takes the sneers,
prefers the winter so he can wear
his heavy pants and sweater.
Today, he’s here with the others.
Better they are cruel to him in his presence
than out. Of the five here now (three boys,
two girls) one is fat, three cruel,
and one, a girl, wavers to the side,
all the world tearing at her.
As yet she has no breasts
(her friend does) and were it not
for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins
in taunting, she could not bear the terror,
which is the terror
of being him. Does it make her happy
that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,
of acting fool to salve
her loneliness? She doesn’t seem
so happy. She is like
the lower middle class, that fatal group
handed crumbs so they can drop a few
down lower to the poor, so they won’t kill
the rich. All around
the apt. swimming pool
there is what’s everywhere: forsakenness
and fear, a disdain for those beneath us
rather than a rage
against the ones above: the exploiters,
the oblivious and unabashedly cruel.

*

True:

Fifty-Two Today

autoblogography

Read Ishiguro's new story cycle *Nocturne.* He's always writing about my relationships with failure.

He did another of his sighs. "How would you understand, my friend, coming from where you do? But you've been kind to me tonight, so I'm gonna try and explain it. Fact is, I'm no longer the major name I was. Protest all you like, but where we come from, there's no getting round something like that. I'm no longer a major name. Now I could just accept that and fade away. Live on past glories. Or I could say, no, I'm not finished yet. In other words, my friend, I could make a comeback. Plenty have from my position and worse. But a comeback's no easy game. You have to be prepared to make a lot of changes, some of them hard ones. You change the way you are. You even change some things you love." (1)

and

I went into the room in a crouched posture, so as to see it from something like <the dog's> eyeline. Immediately, the glossy magazines piled up on the the coffee table revealed themselves an obvious target, and so I pushed them off the surface along a trajectory consistent with a shove from a rampant muzzle. The way the magazines landed on the floor looked satisfactorily authentic. Encouraged, I knelt down, opened one of the magazines and scrunched up a page in a manner, I hoped, would find an echo when eventually Emily came across the diary. But this time, the result was disappointing: too obviously the work of a human hand rather than canine teeth. I'd fallen into my earlier error again: I'd not merged sufficiently with <the dog>.

So I got on all fours, and lowering my head toward the same magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not at all unpleasant. I opened a second fallen magazine near its centre and began to repeat the procedure. The ideal technique, I began to gather, was not unlike the one needed in those fairground games where you try to bite an apple bobbing in water without using your hands. What worked best was a light, chewing motion, the jaws moving flexibly all the time: this would cause the pages to ruffle up and crease nicely. Too focused a bite, on the other hand, simply 'stapled' pages together to no great effect.

I think it was because I'd become so absorbed in these finer points that I didn't become aware sooner of Emily standing out in the hall, watching me from just beyond the doorway. Once I did realize she was there, my first feeling wasn't one of panic or embarrassment, but hurt that she should be standing there like that without having announced her arrival in some way. In fact, when I remembered how I'd gone to the trouble of calling her office only several minutes earlier precisely to pre-empt the sort of situation now engulfing me, I felt victim of a deliberate deception. (2/

and

Okay, I've told you before, I'm not stickler for artistic integrity. I play every kind of bubble-gum for pay. But this proposition was of another order, and I did have some pride left. Bradley was right about one thing: I was twice as talented as most other people in this town. But it seemed that didn't count for much these days. Because it has to do with image, marketability, being in magazines and on TV shows, about parties and who you ate lunch with. It all made me sick. I was a musician, why should I have to join in this game? Why couldn't I just play my music the best way I knew, and keep getting better, if only in my cubicle, and maybe some day, just maybe, genuine music lovers would hear me and appreciate what I was doing. What did I want with a plastic surgeon? (3)

I haven't laughed out loud so hard since first reading Elkin's Dick Gibson, the transcripts of the live broadcasts, Elkin a monster Ishiguro, Ishiguro an elfin Elkin, both obsessed and besmitten with failure, our fear of and desire for and denial of and comfort in, loud and quiet, yours and mine.

(1) Crooner, (2) Come Rain or Come Shine, (3) title story, Nocturne.

*

• You just thought David Brooks was the assclown's assclown: "Some people collect stamps, and others butterflies, but I have a thing for Brilliant Books."
• How to govern a bowl of jello?
• Pig fights, the intramurals.
  
• This is yesterday.
  
• Lesson in Racism: Fishing.
• Like boiling a frog.
• Like what you like.
• UPDATE! North Korea now a nucrear power.
• Bleg Debate!
• Thom Gunn's Selected reviewed.
• Armantrout's "Sway."
• UPDATE! I get email: Hello, I'm interested in buying advertisement on your site. I'm currently interested in buying a link from the site's homepage. What are the prices? Heh, what should a D-List Blegger charge if one was to charge? Hypothetical question. I guarantee.
• Contest! Worse Postmodern Lyric!
• On Clive James, fraud.
• Collected Seidel reviewed.
• Author websites, a consideration.
• UPDATE! This incident illustrates one reason for the paths of failure I've chosen. I have to go to a luncheon Thursday and sit at a table full of many other reasons.
• Great fiction not written by white people.
• Julian Barnes on Updike.
• Are you in? I might be. Or not.
• UPDATE! New short story from one of Earthgirl's favorite authors, Rose Tremain.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Sweet boatload of MP3s of this week's releases.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

Updates later. Or not.

*

THE HOUR

Frederick Seidel

They can't get close enough - there's no such thing.
Look. When they smile. Each rising like a tree
Inside the other, breathing quietly.
Two women start their hour by moistening.

The engine pulling them around the bend
Exposes irresistibly the train
They're on extending from them through the rain.
And then it's night. And it will never end.

They're in a limousine. The plane they're on
Is over water. Dawn reveals the two
Berlins become one. And now they knew
The time had come. And now the rain is gone.

Two passengers aboard their lives undress
Down to their hands. The lifelines touch. They stay
Behind their smiles. The guard comes in to say
The hour is over, and they tell her yes.

*

My head, your head

United 0, Salt Lake 0

So I'm writing a note to hand to Keillor during intermission for him to read on air, I write, Dear Earthgirl, I love you, thanks for the tickets, I wish I was at RFK, Vamos United! but Planet freaks and forbids me (I tell Earthgirl the story as we idle in the parking lot waiting for Wolftrap's rent-a-clowns to misdirect traffic, and she laughs, she asks Planet, why did you stop him?), but having watched the last 30 minutes live and the first sixty on the pc, if there was ever a home game to be missed, Earthgirl picked the right one. Wish I was there.

UPDATE: D's first impression continues the abuse I rightfully received for my absense last night.

Last week after the road Chivas tie I wrote:

I am curious about Soehn's rationale for not starting Fred and Gomez, not because I would disagree if both are fit and benched - I'd applaud - but if there is a fitness issue or if this is a strategy. I don't want to go nuts and praise Soehn too much two weeks in a row, but if he's deliberately withholding Fred and Gomez so that they are the change of pace (as opposed to starting and replacing them in 2nd half), I applaud.

Well, unfuck me, I disapplaud Soehn. I don't care if Salt Lake started ten defenders and a keeper and lined them up across the goal mouth and didn't move off the goal line for ninety minutes, United can't score against a bunkered team if Gomez and Moreno and Emilio (combined 297 in soccer years, combined rusty tricycle in speed) are on the field simultaneously (plus Fred and Quaranta don't play well with Gomez or Gomez with Emilio or Moreno with Quaranta or....). (Fullback asks, Why does Gomez + Moreno + Quaranta make Quaranta tentative?)

I would have started the front six that scored four goals in 26 minutes v Metros B-Team on Wednesday, but two of them - Khumalo and Barklage - weren't even in uniform. Soehn says after the game, "I thought we were flat." Start hungrier players, dumbfuck. If the kids play well, maybe the old farts, sitting on the bench, their meters expiring, remember hunger too, yes?

Here's Goff's player ratings:

Wicks 8; Namoff 7, Jakovic 7, Burch 7; Quaranta 5, Jacobson 6, Simms 6, Gomez 5, Fred 3; Moreno 5, Emilio 4. Subs: Pontius 6, Wallace 6, N'Silu 5.

OK, today United has a keeper. Let's see next week. (And yes, Crayton and his salary are gone in July - as are Emilio and Gomez and Moreno and Fred and their contracts end of season: can you imagine any of them back?)

Jakovic is terrific. He had one sliding body block on an open shot from top of the box in the 80s that Wicks was totally out of position for, saving the point. He and Namoff are 2/3rds of a very decent back line, and Burch was better than his normal mediocre self.

Fred. If he was half as good as he thinks he is that'd still be twice as good as he is. I understand needing to monitor the rookie mileage on Pontius and Wallace, but you got to start one of them over Fred, even Khumalo. Save Fred for the 70th, let him run around like a berserk top at a tired defense, maybe scramble a goal, but as a starter, Fred is a net minus.

Aargh. This one's on Soehn, though to be fair, maybe he thought the grandpas would be hungry after watching the kids in the Chivas and Metro games. If he's learned he cannot have all his grandpas on the field simultaneously and never does it again, this game will be a positive.

Updates, edits, links, later. Or not.

Blegsight!

!TEST! I will watch United v Salt Lake after I get home from the fvcking Prairie Home Companion show Earthgirl (generously, joyfully) thought a good giftmas present last December (I knew, I just knew, the nanosecond I heard I knew I'd be fvckd out of a home game) and do game write-up Sunday morning, but can I, in what I know will be one of the five shettiest bleg-ping weekends of the year, resist other blegging until Tuesday earliest, maybe lose complete bleggurge by Tuesday !O! please?

Keep ringing my ping to find out!

*

UPDATE!

STRAY

Wyatt Prunty

Only the very wise know how to sleep
In the sun, hunt in the dark, assume what's good
So with their claws they only knead, only purr
For those who, driven by that sun each day
And fearful of the following dark, barely
Consider dumb love's generous adoptions.

*

• Hmmm, the World's Turdiest Human accuses Obama of "contrived indignation and phony moralizing," and the next day the World's Shittiest Human says, "If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program," well, who's to argue?
• Hate Krauthammer FC.
  
• Obama is to Cheney as Carville is to Matalin?
• Read this.
• Read this. (h/t)
• UPDATE! Read this.
• Best games-player of his generation?
  
• Fuck. No, really.
• Titular Head.
• Bush's legacy.
• A message from Planet

• Time travel.
• Another fracking Yes song in my head.
  
• ICC: Here We Go!
• Up and down Wisconsin Ave.
• Exactly two of you will understand how this represents how truly fucking Olde Gaithersbleggers we are.
• Where we'd buy beer to and from the Appalachian Trail before, during, and after camp-outs.
• UPDATE! Star Trek Reviewed, Or: Ilse Allegedly Wrote Her Own Dialogue!
• Are kindle-bloggers Amazon's bitches? 
• Oddest Book Title Prize.
• This came yesterday (along with the Mantel). As soon as I finish Carpenter's Gothic, I'll flip a coin to see which goes first.
• UPDATE! Read this.
• New Carl Phillips reviewed.
• New Tortoise.
• No Eno Wave (and a new friend).
• Heh, a take down of Animal Collective (another in the series of "I Hate..."): "Animal Collective are not only a symptom, but an enabler of a contemporary American youth culture that is vapidly hedonist, politically uninterested, and libidinally solipsistic."
• An oral/visual history of Broken Social Scene.
• St. Vincent.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• And the greatest cover ever:

*

BOUNDEN DUTY

James Tate

    I got a call from the White House, from the
President himself, asking me if I'd do him a personal
favor. I like the President, so I said, "Sure, Mr.
President, anything you like." He said, "Just act
like nothing's going on. Act normal. That would
mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?" "Why,
sure, Mr. President, you've got it. Normal, that's
how I'm going to act. I won't let on, even if I'm
tortured," I said, immediately regretting that "tortured"
bit. He thanked me several times and hung up. I was
dying to tell someone that the President himself called
me, but I knew I couldn't. The sudden pressure to
act normal was killing me. And what was going on
anyway. I didn't know what was going on. I
saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking
hands with a farmer. What if it wasn't really a
farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly
I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on.
I looked "normal" to me, but maybe I looked more
like I was trying to be normal. That's pretty
suspicious. I opened the door and looked around.
What was going on? There was a car parked in front
of my car that I had never seen before, a car
that was trying to look normal, but I wasn't fooled.
If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise
people will think something's going on. I got into
my car and sped down the road. I could feel thos
little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush,
but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop
me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. "Hey, what's
going on, Leon?" she said. She had a very nice smile.
I hated to lie to her. "Nothing's going on. Just
getting milk for my cat," I said. "I didn't know
you had a cat," she said. "I meant to say coffee.
You're right, I don't have a cat. It's just a private
joke. Sorry," I said. "Are you alright," she
asked. "Nothing's going on, Kirsten. I promise
you. Everything is normal. The President shook
hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such
a big deal?" I said. "I saw that," she said, "and
that man was definitely not a farmer." "Yeah, I
know," I said, feeling better.

*

UPDATE!

The poem Hamster left in comments scans better here than there:

Malcolm Lowry

Success is like some horrible disaster
Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination
As the roof tree falls following each other faster
While you stand, the helpless witness to your damnation.

Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul
Exposing that you have worked for only this—
Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss
And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail.

Untitled, written after publication of Under the Volcano.

*

I don't know what ratio between yesterday's surprise email from an long ago love versus my compulsion to sabotage my music credentials now a few cool kids are reading me versus needing to ping brainchords only Kate Bush has ever pinged even after 30 freaking years of listening to everything I can since my loved one first played me Kate Bush, but... 

United 5, Metros 3

Most gorgeous night of the season so far, absolutely perfect weather, glorious twilight.

 

The Koolaid Pitcher was there!

 

Click all three, yo.

 

The game was a hoot too.

Would be silly to draw grand conclusions from a US Open Cup play-in game between United's reserves and Metro's reserves, though it can safely be asserted that Avery John (why do you need the A on your NOB, John?) is not the solution the back line needs and Boyzz Khulamo pushing Emilio for minutes is a good thing and Fred will be hard-pressed to ever !GACK! an open net so gacktacularly again, though never count Fred out. (In Fred's defense, after not gacking a second chance, he didn't make an ass out of himself celebrating, one hopes out of embarrassed humility.)

Here's Goff's player ratings:

Wicks 5; Namoff 5, Janicki 4, John 4.5; Barklage 7, McTavish 5, Pontius 8, Gomez 8, Fred 7; Khumalo 6.5, N'Silu 6. Subs: Jacobson 5, Wallace 6, DiRaimondo 5, Burch 5.

Wicks did nothing awful, the goals weren't on him, but he blew a chance to move up, and I have no more confidence he's any better than either of the other two options. Frankly, I say give it to Kocic to prove he doesn't suck.

Barklage has skills. Good tackler with a good first touch, always scrambling, seems to have a feel for the game and puts himself in good spots. He's moved ahead of McTavish (one hopes) as first or second midfield option of bench.

Gomez: odd how much better he looks when Emilio's not on the field, how much better he looks when Quaranta's not on the field. Granted, a truly crappy Metros defense gave Gomez acres in which to operate, but with Khumalo and N'Silu making wonderfully timed runs, Gomez put the ball on their feet in dead sprints. Absolutely beautiful passes, and his best CK of year went in off Pontius' head.

Janicki, oof, A. John (good thing the A, avoid confusion with United's other John... what, they don't have another....) oof. Backline, keepers, gonna ultimately bite United on the ass.

But a wonderful fun time. No place I'd rather have been.

Here's D's Only Impression. Here's Fullback. More if I see them. Or not.

UPDATE!

Victor MacFarlane, the San Francisco real estate executive who has spearheaded D.C. United's pursuit of a new stadium, has sold his stake in the MLS club to business partner Will Chang, team officials announced today.

More here.

My gut reaction is GOOD! only because Chang seems to be interested in the team and profit, McFarlane just in profit.

I thought about posting this earlier but didn't want to Fuck-Me-Jig the post of a happy night, but when entering RFK I came through the gates with a small traveling band of Metros fans and stood in line for a beer with a couple of them. After praising them for traveling, I said something snarky about the Metros suckitude, and one of them said, True, but we have a new stadium.

Still, sing! (tune = bridge of Camptown Races)

Not a fucking one.
Not a fucking one.
How many trophies have you won?
Not a fucking one.

UPDATE!

Chang talks:

"I'm not looking for a big real estate deal as part of a stadium project. I'm looking for a bread-and-butter stadium [without ancillary elements]. I'm not looking for a Poplar Point project [with mixed-use development]. I am just looking for a home for this team. I want to go to a place that wants a stadium and wants us."

"My first and foremost priority is to find a home in the D.C. area. I have not been approached by anyone in any official capacity from any other city. We want to stay here. Is there a sense of urgency to get something done here? Absolutely. But I am under no time pressure. If it takes a little longer to get it done right, that's okay. ... I would like to move to a permanent home. Obviously, the economics would be more favorable for us than where we are now with RFK."

UPDATE!

Video of the game highlights. At the :20 second mark, see if you can see me and this guy.

And fairness requires me say that Wicks did make a couple of good saves (and get a couple of good whacks at Metro players).

Obamabets: The Repsssting

 

This

But the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, seemed to ramp up the concerns of Congressional Democrats, insisting during a news conference that lawmakers would never allow the terror suspects to be released into the United States and suggesting that they would never allow them to be transferred to American prisons.

“Guantanamo makes us less safe,” Mr. Reid said. “However this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

and this

Michael Steele is on my tv and is telling me that Republicans are done apologizing and that now they are done being nice and that the honeymoon is over and they are going to go after Obama, which makes me wonder what exactly have they been doing for the past two years? Playing footsie? It has been nothing but vicious smears and insanity since he has been on the national scene.

and Obama's seemingly undiminished popularity are not coincidence.

I didn't bet pints Obama would be Pwogglejeebus, I didn't bet pints Obama wouldn't be exceptionally awful. I bet pints he'll kick ass in 2012 election.

A photogenic, charismatic, game-player extraordinaire with the best political skills and instincts of this generation, smart enough to position himself precisely between extraordinary pussies and extraordinary assholes? !sHAZAm!

Ask yourself, for giggle's sake, what if the Republican Party sucks this much on purpose? To put it another way, what if the elite that run the world have decided, let's encourage the mouth-breathers and christer-idiots burn their witches and heretics, nothing Obama's signaled suggests anyone seriously Left will be given senior policy-maker positions anyway, and the more the mouth-breathers gurgle and slobber, the more Obama can move to the right, yes?

!hEh! I made a funny. Double down on the already doubled-down pints you still owe me, yo?

*

• UPDATE: It needs asking, when white Uncle Power worries about Gitmo detainees proselytizing in maximum security U.S. prisons, whom do you think white Uncle Power thinks is imminently proselytize-able?
• So what, the real outrage was Obama speaking at Notre Dame.
• Speaking of assholes.
• Speaking of assholes.
• Cynicism we can believe in.
• Unexceptional Americans.
• Bad collateral.
• Yu Dum Fuk.
• Speaking of assholes, FUCKING FOBIN RICKER LOST!!!!!!
• So, how's that shithouse of an Eastern Shore? ("shithouse" courtesy of Melonhead).
• I know two people, one intimately, who can testify about PIA parents.
• Elric's last photos from Fukuoka.
• On Anita Brookner, who I haven't read in years.
• On Bobby Zimmerman's poem, Little Buddy.
• Tour of post-punk Liverpool?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Oh, Sonic Youth, continued.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

*

EVENING MAN

Frederick Seidel

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
Who does the things most people only dream about.
He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
You can't drink that much port and not have gout.

In point of fact, it is arthritis.
His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
To be a candidate for higher office,
You have to practice drastic openness.

You have to practice looking like thin air
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.

Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we're always headed.
Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.

Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless----
Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.

*

My head, your head

Theme Song May 2009

*

*

*