In Joy your Spatial Dei

Assists relatives and patients in meeting no-one
Undertakes favourite smells to go with the stories
Responsible for right arm
Is guided by perforated globe
Occasional exposure to tempting salad bar
Requirement to use withering people

6penned Tonight

Redell Olsen and Piers Hugill are both reading at this event tonight. Emily Critchley, whose work I am only familiar with through the current issue of HOW2, is also reading. Should be a good one!

Bread Shortage

Funk dat Choir

Click here to watch some very smug people from Birmingham smirk at each other for being so very clever. It's the Complaints Choir of Birmingham, and they do precisely what you might expect - complain, in song. Yet this seems to be a decent idea half-baked and poured with such a degree of self-satisfaction that it's unbearable to watch from start to finish.

Smug 1

Smug 2

Smug 3

This man has just realised how smug his friends are:

Firstly, no actual effort to sing properly. This would have hiked up the credibility of such a concept. Instead, this becomes a lazy parody. 'Look at us! We're infusing the mundane into something highbrow!'

Secondly, no effort to write a decent tune nor write decent words through which to articulate the complaints.

Thirdly, even the complaints themselves are woolly. One song covers bus conductors, general PC crashes (the computer, not the police), general rubbish about Birmingham not being as nice as it used to be. Newsflash: it was never nice to begin with.

All of this drenched in the kind of ironic knowing wink which tells me these people find themselves hilarious for such an ironic gesture!

What about a seriously, well-crafted hymn opposing a piece of planning permission? Something specific, with real themes, real concerns? None of this "the traffic's always terrible"-style bullshit.

Here's how they could have done it, and I know which I prefer. Man, funk dat.

This is how I feel:

ñø∂é

MACHINIMARTYR

Military superjig one
burly Hodgson step one
paco trot regular ass become one
digital dater

unattached hypnobarry
white noise new guilty
disappearing-because-fucking
wage daddy

Chat with un chat

Marcel Broodthaers' interview with a cat.

Can anyone understand what the Frenchman is saying?

A Toast to the Queen of Hearts

This week's toast comes in the shapes of Princess Diana and the land of Eng (minus Cornwall).

Epigram for my Throbbing Left Eye

I guessed before she died too early for our reading
pleasure
mathematic composition - generative power? - fixture verse?
Pain from guesswork sure

"Toast! Toast! My Kingdom for a Toast!" [HENRY V]

This week's toastal service comes with a crafty typo. Can you spot it?

Bon ape tit.

Old piece, resurrected

I remembered today about an old piece I completed as part of my MA. It's called Paid Love, and experiments with the visual dissection of text in order to foreground its own defacement. This was pretty relevant since the content was taken from sources regarding the objectification, slavery and prostitution of women in eastern Europe. The idea was for the language to become fragmented to an extent which would erase a sure, authoritative voice and replace it with a distorted (literally) uncertain sense of reference.

This isn't the whole piece - I'd like to get that up some time when I have more time, because there are aesthetic variations and combinations of repeated texts, which was crucial in the maintenance of implied consistency throughout the fragmentations (this is a valuable notion which I took from Lyn Hejinian's The Rejection of Closure, [in which Hejinian cites her own Resistance work in terms of its repeated sentence structure underpinning its fragmented content] and I think this can be extended to apply to all forms of poetic artifice).

Shellac of You're a Terrible

I was just going through some old photos of the US Giddy Motors tour (I was the driver, not a band member) from 2003, trying to find a picture of a nasty motel for a friend. I also stumbled across the coolest photo of me I have ever had taken.

It's me with the band Shellac. Yes, I look like a star-struck dummy. Yes, despite being very amiable for the duration of our overnight stay, and in fact being very friendly, they probably thought I was a bit of a dick. Still, THEY don't have a picture of themselves with Shellac, do they? I win.

The photo captures Steve Albini judging just how phat my beats are. Pretty phat.

Toast in the Po(a)st, Week 2

Half way through marking my BA class's work

and I am so thankfully impressed. It didn't start off so well, a couple of people struggling - not irreparably - with things so far, but many of the portfolios are thoroughly well written, and have actively engaged in the research and experimentation, not merely copying or emulating but versioning procedure with a recognition of the social and political importance of their situation.

I think it means something when marking makes you forget the clock and you have enjoyed spending 30 minutes or more reading one person's work. And they're only 5 weeks into the course...