BLCKDGRD

General or Particular, You Choose, Dear, I Have to Sit Down a Minute in the Wounded Operating Sound of This Breathing

The Gulf oil spill has delivered unto Earthgirl her obamapostasy. She is not cynical; she takes no pleasure in her anger and disillusionment like you and I do ours.

A Category 5 hurricane, the biggest, fiercest in recorded history, will surely strike the Gulf, its forty foot storm surges of raw crude destroying for a century the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, the sheer force of the storm toppling dozens of other oil rigs, releasing millions more barrels a day of crude to wait for the second Category 5 hurricane to finish off Mississippi and Alabama and Florida. We know this. We know someone will blow up a U-haul in New York and Obama will bomb women and children in Pakistan first and then Iran. We know those who profit from chaos, have insurance that rewards in the event of disasters, who call Obama a socialist for even suggesting their rights to create more chaos should be minutely more regulated, are creating more chaos.

Earthgirl does not believe this, but she doesn't not believe it now. What can we do, she asks.

As I write this first in tablet we're here

on a cliff above the Potomac ten miles from our house, fifteen miles upstream from DC, we've hiked three miles in and haven't seen another human. Click, yo.

Earthgirl is painting. I'm scribbling. It's the best I can do.

• Massacre.
• More.
• More.
• The reason for the slaughter.
• Fuckson Diehl in today's YFWP harangues Obama on Human Rights, doesn't mention Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
• UPDATE! Memorial Day.
• Memorial Day.
• UPDATE! How can I remember if you won't go away?
• One trillion dollars.
• What in the hell... is communization?
• The spaces in between.
• Do something, Superpresident!
• End of the world as we know it.
• Angry old white men. (h/t)
• Jeebusfuck, look what I dreamed about last night.
• Landru, reporting on the USMNT v Turkey game, w/photos, properly capitalizes a pronoun.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• The book to come in 2666.
• Does poetry have the power to change more peoples' lives than psychotherapy?
• Oates. I haven't read any new stuff since Middle Age: I'm not as interested in what she's fascinated by to work through the nuances any longer, but I've liked a bunch of her novels.
• Ths s Mmrl Dy Wknd nd 'm n f fw dps blggng, s I bnchd th lnks tgthr, k?

"NOTE THE WREATH OF HAIR AT WHICH THE BACK OF HER HEAD, WHICH THOUGH FASTENED BY A SPIRLA OF FELLETS, ESCAPES AT LAST AND FLIES LOOSE IN A SWEEPING CURVE"

    Cal Bedient

Water in its ruins I would surely sponge what I could.
But leaving out the differences on Friday there is some sense
     in that.
General or particular, you choose, dear, I have to sit down
     a minute
in the wounded operating sound of this breathing.

You ask, "Can you look into the eyes of a cornered rat
and listen to its chitter as you pick up a stone
without yourself becoming something small and terrified?"
Today, anyway, let me rest like metal strings softening to
     the rags

of a clavichord's bing   bung, so reminiscent, don't you think
of musical glasses, in their "plaintive, disembodied, melancholy"
     tones?
Yet even if breathing's a pile in sequence, like rain,
shouldn't one try to connect up extremes in a mention like
     sailing

when, suddenly, the mast leans down and gulps salt
water without considering a single person's feelings?
I have an ache of excellent bits of many things, like a letter
for all the family, also days when no boat approaches to signal

your particular beauty on a background so purely unbreathing.

Richard's comment Saturday reminded my of this band, which I unaccountably hadn't thought about in a year or so:

United 3, Chivas USA 2

Wowee, I needed that. I'm not going to count the ways, so briefly:

Credit Onalfo for benching Castillo and Morsink. I couldn't pick Stephen King out of a line-up, but his key asset is not being Kurt Morsink. And Andy Najar, who might turn out to be something, might be in Europe in two, three years, is a major upgrade over Christian Castillo.

And while whining about injuries is annoying it's often fair: Pontius and Quaranta brought width and speed United had been lacking.

But yes, Talley and Peña in central defense suck, though here is the significant difference in last night's game: for once their suck wasn't outsucked by the midfield, which had been, before last night, United's great flaw. Which is progress.

As is winning.

Oh, I watched the first 75 minutes of the USMNT v Turkey game: first 30 minutes USMNT thoroughly outclassed. Slow, mechanical, unimaginative. Introducing Findley for Feilhaber, dropping Dempsey behind the strikers, changed everything, as did removing Ricardo Clark for Jose Torres.

As for back line, Jonathan Spector and Jay DeMerit equals Rooney hat-trick. And while I don't like Landon Donovan for legacy reasons, I must admit I no longer hate him.

More, links, updates, edits later. Or not.

Weekend Soundtrack

Earthgirl has given me the ipod we bought her this past Giftmas (yes, I didn't have an ipod) and I'm loading it, starting with every single Sea and Cake album (I own them all) and every single Aphex Twin album (I own most if not all), and I'm going to listen to every single one of both this weekend and come out in a much better place than I started.

Your Colonization of the Infinite Is a Romantic Departure

This (wonderful x troubling) onset of not jonesing to hollar DUH! is not a sign that I am quieter or less opinionated, but it is a (welcome x disturbing) result of trying to give .06% less of a disproportional fuck about anything and everything I can't personally change.

Every day I'm discovering more things I can't personally change - though discovery is a lie, it's every day acknowledging things I've always known but didn't want to acknowledge. For instance, I've always known I'm not going to give up my job, my house, my car, my laptop, my season tickets in protest of jackshit. I'll yodel, sign facebook petitions, buy local and organic, donate to local foodbanks and cat rescues, and I will never give time or dimes or votes to another motherfucking Democrat ever fucking again, but give up my pension, the escrow in my house, my petroleum-fueled Toyota, my sweet new Dell laptop, my ticket to Section 232 Row X Seat X and devote all said monies and energy into efforts that won't fix a world my generation has made shittier? Sheeyit.

Anyway, anyone who's read this far I trust: aim me at new alternatives for ignoring the macro and improving the micro (within the demonstrated parameters of my awesome selfishness), and while I'll certainly return to hollaring about DUH!, if there's anyone in Blegsylvania who's creatively and entertainingly hollaring about DUH! you think I should be reading and sharing, use comments or dogmail.

Jeebus, I'm fucking obsolete.

• Obama is from Mars, Wall Street from Venus?
• In flight from reality.
• The tokenism of Barack Obama.
• UPDATE! On libertarianism and it's advocates and critics.
• Silencing the lawyers.
• The opacity of hope.
• UPDATE! Ask, Tell, Kill.
• War in ten minutes.
• Crises of consumerism.
• UPDATE! Age of Austerity.
• Wank!
• Liar or Actor? More.
• Anti-tax sentiment in the South. (h/t)
• UPDATE! Megan McArdle school of objectivist success.
• The meaning of David Cameron.
• The meaning of David Cameron.
• The meaning of David Cameron.

• Hey, Local NOVA readers, read THIS.
• CCT.
• Never happen in Kensington!
• Big-C sends along this photo from a Costco:

• A professional team folded in St Louis on Wednesday, leaving just one.
• Bethesda!
• East MOCO!
• I like Mourinho.
• Fuck City.

• Feel free to recommend a novel I should read too.
• Platonov. Want. Next paycheck.
• On Redburn.
• On your opinion about music.

• Wish I'd known about that a month ago. Doubt I would have gone, but I'd have thought about it.
• Away in search of Thin Places (Pliable should be on your daily rotation.)
• Wah-wah.
• Bobby Gentry.
• This corrosion.
• Coward.
• Morning Benders.
• S.
• The Purrs.
• Ceremony (is out of Frednecksburg VA).
• Mynabirds.
• Joy Formidable.
• Yo La Tengo.
• Tallest Man on Earth covers Paul Simon.
• Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp.

ALTERATION

Barbara Guest

In the sky a dilemma. Fountains rush by.
Home from the tournament beasts seek quiet.

Writing covers the desk.

                        Your colonization of the infinite
                        is a romantic departure.

I ask you to permit the image

                        and the alteration of time.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Fifty-Three Today

United 3, Milan 2

You have to click, yo, to see him, but that guy with a tomato for a head is the Milan stupidass mascot. 

Fun. Meaningless, mostly, but fun. Some guy named Avi Creditor (not Avi Buffalo) asks, "Think this can be a turning point for D.C.?" Um, no, though I'm sure remembering that soccer can be fun might give them a bounce early v Chivas USA this Saturday night. (I've two tickets for that game, yo - Landru (who provided the above photo) and Ilse (who was not felt up by Tomatohead, but who has been felt up by Talon) are going to Philly for the USMNT v Turkey game, so I've got claim on their tickets - use dogmail or dogcell if you want them.)

Four things:

1. A healthy Chris Pontius is a good thing.
2. Bill Hamid had a terrific first half, including one simply world class save in the 23rd minute.
3. Why the fuck are half of United wearing bright yellow boots?
4. Ronaldinho, farting-around with his farting-around teammates, demonstrated exactly what United's missing, someone who can find space and provide service. Someone half as good as a farting-around and washed-up Ronaldinho would be better than anyone United has.

Meaningless fun. Lordy, I needed that.

Everybody In That Theater Knows How Hard It Is To Get Raoul From The Hotel Room Into The Elevator

I'm almost there, mofos, reducing my belief in the -.06% less-shitty to -.006% to -.0006%, not from the bottom up but from the top down, the only way, after all, it could be approached. Forgive me, but there's an infinity of zeroes I'll need to add before reaching level.

This is not obamapology, but I bet on Obama the player, and suppose I was right? I apologize.

I never thought I'd say this: I cannot over-exaggerate how underwhelmed I am about tonight's United v Milan. It almost - almost - feels like work. Jeebusfuck, I can't wait for WC10, which I just jinxed. Sorry.

On the other hand, I'm hearing listening looking seeing reading thinking writing brighter than I ever recall. May my core illusions and soccer team suck ever hence, amen.

• Continuity.
• War criminal.
• Starving old people is fun!
• An honestly asked question: What could Obama do?
• What could possibly go wrong?
• Thomas Sowell, redux.
• Get Slavoj Žižek to Host SNL!

• Fredneck no more?
• Wouldn't affect me, but DC commuter tax?
• Leggettland.
• Flat fares?
• When the fuck did Mexico start wearing black?

• That's as pathetic as Maryland football wearing black.
• Six things we miss about The World Cup.
• When Bayern Munich loses, they win gingerbread?

 

• I cannot over-exaggerate how underwhelmed I am about tonight's United v Milan. It almost - almost - feels like work.
• Can't wait to see it:

• Mourinho weeps! He just coached the good Milan team to three trophies (Scudetto, Italian Cup, Champions League) despite the fixture clusterfuck.

• On A.A. Ammons' "A Coast of Trees."
• The future.
• As an aside to the poem below, notice how no one talks about Mark Strand anymore?
• This week's new releases, w/MP3.
• Why the fuck is Jack White on my radio?
• Shine.
• Darkblack's Monday Overnight.
• TLATLATLATLATLATLATLATLATLATLATLATLA

THE POLITICS OF NARRATIVE: WHY I AM A POET

Lynn Emanuel

 Jill's a good kid who's had some tough luck. But that's 
another story. It's a day when the smell of fish from Tib's hash 
house is so strong you could build a garage on it. We are sit-
ting in Izzy's where Carl has just built us a couple of solid 
highballs. He's okay, Carl is, if you don't count his Roamin' 
Hands and Rushin' Fingers. Then again, that should be the 
only trouble we have in this life. Anyway, Jill says, "Why 
don't you tell about it? Nobody ever gets the poet's point of 
view." I don't know, maybe she's right. Jill's just a kid, but 
she's been around; she knows what's what.
 So, I tell Jill, we are at Izzy's just like now when he 
comes in. And the first thing I notice is his hair, which has 
been Vitalis-ed into submission. But, honey, it won't work, 
and it gives him a kind of rumpled your-boudoir-or-mine look. 
I don't know why I noticed that before I noticed his face. 
Maybe it was just the highballs doing the looking. Anyway, 
then I see his face, and I'm telling you--I'm telling Jill--this is 
a masterpiece of a face.
 But--and this is the god's own truth--I'm tired of
beauty. Really. I know, given all that happened, this must 
sound kind of funny, but it made me tired just to look at him. 
That's how beautiful he was, and how much he spelled T-R-
O-U-B-L-E. So I threw him back. I mean, I didn't say it, I say 
to Jill, with my mouth. But I said it with my eyes and my 
shoulders. I said it with my heart. I said, Honey, I'm throwing 
you back. And looking back, that was the worst, I mean, the 
worst thing--bar none--that I could have done, because it
drew him like horseshit draws flies. I mean, he didn't walk
over and say, "Hello, girls; hey, you with the dark hair, your
indifference draws me like horseshit draws flies."
 But he said it with his eyes. And then he smiled. And
that smile was a gas station on a dark night. And as wearying
as all the rest of it. I am many things, but dumb isn't one of
them. And here is where I say to Jill, "I just can't go on." I
mean, how we get from the smile into the bedroom, how it all
happens, and what all happens, just bores me. I am a concep-
tual storyteller. In fact, I'm a conceptual liver. I prefer the
cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That's why I 
write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the 
reader and say, "Reader, you go on from here." And what I like
about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I 
mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They 
pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in 
a dark alley, I'd want it to be a poetry reader. They're not like
some people, who maybe do it right if you tell them, "Put this
foot down, and now put that one in front of the other, button
your coat, wipe your nose."
 So, really, I do it for the readers who work hard and, I 
feel, deserve something better than they're used to getting. I 
do it for the working stiff. And I write for people, like myself, 
who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where some-
body spends pages and pages on some fat book where every-
thing including the draperies, which happen to be burnt orange, 
are described, and, further, are some metaphor for something.
And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the 
form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the 
average reader likes ideas.
 "A sentence, unlike a line, is not a station of the cross." I 
said this to the poet Mark Strand. I said, "I could not stand to
write prose; I could not stand to have to write things like 'the 
draperies were burnt orange and the carpet was brown.'" And 
he said, "You could do it if that's all you did, if that was the 
beginning and the end of your novel." So please, don't ask me 
for a little trail of bread crumbs to get from the smile to the 
bedroom, and from the bedroom to the death at the end, al-
though you can ask me a lot about death. That's all I like, the 
very beginning and the very end. I haven't got the stomach for
the rest of it.
 I don't think many people do. But, like me, they're either 
too afraid or too polite to say so. That's why the movies are 
such a disaster. Now there's a form of popular culture that 
doesn't have a clue. Movies should be five minutes long. You 
should go in, see a couple of shots, maybe a room with orange 
draperies and a rug. A voice-over would say, "I'm having a 
hard time getting Raoul from the hotel room into the eleva-
tor." And, bang, that's the end. The lights come on, everybody 
walks out full of sympathy because this is a shared experi-
ence. Everybody in that theater knows how hard it is to get 
Raoul from the hotel room into the elevator. Everyone has had 
to do boring, dogged work. Everyone has lived a life that 
seems to inflict every vivid moment the smears, finger-
ings, and pawings of plot and feeling. Everyone has lived un-
der this oppression. In other words, everyone has had to eat 
shit--day after day, the endless meals they didn't want, those 
dark, half-gelatinous lakes of gravy that lay on the plate like 
an ugly rug and that wrinkled clump of reddish-orange roast 
beef that looks like it was dropped onto your plate from a 
great height. God what a horror: getting Raoul into the ele-
vator.
 And that's why I write poetry. In poetry, you don't do that kind
    of work.

Worlds in Collision

The Goat and I Walked On. It Was Getting Dark and We Were Beginning to Wonder Where We Would Spend the Night

There's an ad that's been running for about three weeks on local radio: the voice-over is in concerned emergency tone over a plaintive piano, he says, "The first time you realized clowns are kind of creepy, the first time you saw what your favorite DJ looks like, the first time you printer ran out of ink."

I heard it last evening: "The first time you saw your father try to shoot a basketball, the first time you saw what your favorite DJ looks like, the first time your printer ran out of ink."

It doesn't surprise you I notice and dwell on things like this. I turned to Earthgirl the first time I heard the original and said, That's pretty edgy for WTOP, clowns, creepy, and she said, What, I wasn't listening, so I have no witnesses.

Still, think why and how corporate let the first ad go out; daydream wistfully of the bloodletting as corporate assigned guilt and punishment; but consider mostly why corporate, to fix the fuck-up, chose to ridicule fathers rather than clowns.

O! The recital:

Planet was fine. Here's the thing:

I like D, Planet's teacher. More importantly, she loves Planet, Planet loves her.

In the late-middle of the recital, just before the older, better, pianists performed, D scheduled some nine-year old who strapped-on a harmonica and sat down at the piano and sang the single-worst song in motherfucking pop history not written by Elton Fucking John, Billy Fucking Joel's Piano Fucking Man, and the motherfucking parents, after this little turd finishes, they give this little turd a motherfucking standing ovation. Whoop! Bravo! Camera's whirling, clicking, as he bows!

Molly's next, a painfully shy and awkward fourteen-year-old, bangs out some Bach badly, rushing, trying not to cry, wanting to be anyplace else, wanting to be dead. The parents clap dutifully when she finishes.

It doesn't surprise you I said nothing to D, and won't unless she asks me, which she won't.

• When was the last time Obama had a presser?
• Things that....
• Capitalism.
• On Anarchism.
• Conceptual maps and the organization of power.
• Liberatarianism and its discontents.
• The end of the world as we know it...
• Well, these crackers are dead, but if taken alive, how many elected officials would have called for them to be stripped of their citizenship.
• What Obama said at West Point.
• Monday Morning Calumnies.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Food Movement, rising....
• Greatest hits.
• Miscellany.

• MOCO: Consequences of budget.
• UPDATE! THREE! Beltways! There will never be a bridge between the Legion and Point of Rocks. !wOOt!
• One motherfucking ambitious Virginia pig.
• A Hilltop tradition: 

• The university places a giant dumpster in the library parking lot near the adjacent dormitories, and students dump their junk, then poor Hispanics come and sift through the junk for salvage.
• Milan will be just as motivated as Juve.

• UPDATE! Delicious linkages.
• The rejection of closure.
• I'm just starting to read Chiasson.
• John Water's reading list.
• David Mitchell interview. I'm neither a zealot or a hater. I'll read the new one.
• Another Sunday NYTBR with nothing I want to read.
• Hobsbawn's days as a jazz critic.
• Scared song.
• Army dreamers.
• Barra barra.
• Waking the witch.
• The morning fog.
• John Cale covers LCD Soundsystem.

IT HAPPENS LIKE THIS

James Tate

I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory
smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me.
It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish
brown here and there. When I started to walk away,
it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered
what the laws were on this kind of thing. There's
a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People
smiled at me and admired the goat. "It's not my goat,"
I explained. "It's the town's goat. I'm just taking
my turn caring for it." "I didn't know we had a goat,"
one of them said. "I wonder when my turn is." "Soon,"
I said. "Be patient. Your time is coming." The goat
stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked
up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew
everything essential about me. We walked on. A police-
man on his beat looked us over. "That's a mighty
fine goat you got there," he said, stopping to admire.
"It's the town's goat," I said. "His family goes back
three-hundred years with us," I said, "from the beginning."
The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped
and looked up at me. "Mind if I pat him?" he asked.
"Touching this goat will change your life," I said.
"It's your decision." He thought real hard for a minute,
and then stood up and said, "What's his name?" "He's
called the Prince of Peace," I said. "God! This town
is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery 
and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers
forever. Please forgive me if I cry." "We forgive you,
Officer," I said. "And we understand why you, more than
anybody, should never touch the Prince." The goat and
I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning
to wonder where we would spend the night.

Houston 2, United 0

Mofos, the question needs asking: Is Kasper Payne truly this shitty an evaluator and signer of talent, or was Kasper Payne told to build the best team he could within the financial restraints an owner with a hopelessly dry well in Washington would impose if he were weighing either moving or selling the team?

The record is an accurate reflection of the talent.

Here is where I rag on Christian Castillo: in the 41st minute, Jaime has his breakaway run dead-ended when the Houston defense easily outpaces him, so Jaime slots the ball on an angle for Castillo who circles five yards out of the way to avoid possible but not probable contact with another Houston defender and never gets to where Jaime perfectly weighted the ball. Castillo's crosses suck. His free kicks suck. He can't get his corner kicks past the first defender. He won't crash the goal, he won't hustle to the far post. He's soft, he's a diver and a whiner and a referee-baiter. He's a shitty defender and a petulant and dirty puckassbitch about it. Castillo was Kasper Payne's key off-season acquisition. 

The rest of the players - who play hard and haven't quit and yadda - suck too. Pontius showed flashes of the form that was so encouraging last year (and Pontius would truly have to suck to not be an upgrade over Kurt STFU Morsink) but other than him and Clyde Simms, none of United's players would have cracked Houston's rather suckful line-up; it's questionable whether any would have made Houston's 18.

As for the opening question, the answer is surely: both. I'll say it for the umpth time: Chang is under no legal or moral obligation to lose money into perpetuity, and if he directed Kasper Payne to construct a team within a tight budget, that is his prerogative. Within that budget, Kasper Payne brought in Cristmen, Talley, Morsink, Peña, Emilio, and Castillo. Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck, and SUCK. I look forward this week to reading Kasper Payne tell us why it isn't his fault.

Four home games in the next two weeks, including the friendly this Wednesday versus a disinterested Milan and a USOC game the following Wednesday against Salt Lake. In two weeks time United could be 1-10 in the league and out of the cup. Who would bet against it?