Minnesotans in New York

Tonight is another installment of Nora & Taya's Minne-apple in the Big Apple at LPR. I'm going to be DJ'ing - it'll be just like The Local Point but without Pockets, and with more than Paul, Colin, Eamonn, and Jake sitting in the studio drinking.

Post-Radio Happy Hour

So, Radio Happy Hour was yesterday. It went really well, and thank you for coming, if that is something you did.

And this is wonderful.

There are some great photos of yesterday's show here (these will probably be up on both the LPR and the RHH websites soon). Come again next month for Michael Showalter's guest appearance on Radio Happy Hour. It's sure to be humiliating for someone.

Ok, that's all. Enjoy the unicorn.

Free Stuff

I haven't really been posting anything I've been writing lately...or at all I suppose...but I've been doing a weekly "column" at F10 for a while now that highlights the best free downloads of the week. Not singles, usually, but full live session, albums, mixtapes, etc. I think it's pretty good. This week there is a live album from Jeffery Lewis & the Junkyard, White Rabbits live on WOXY, John Hardy & The Public's Randy Newman tribute EP, and some other stuff that is also good. You can see it here. It's always at the top of the main page on Mondays.

ok. bye.

ha. humbly.

InDigest Issue 11

Issue 11 is now up, and our contributors in the Narratives section find, through their fiction, new and interesting ways to deal with relationships gone south, and our Poetics section contributor expresses his joy at your appearance in that crown! We also bring you the beautiful work of Sougwen Chung in our Gallery, and welcome back our series InDialogue, where writers and artists talk to each other about, well, anything they want to talk to each other about. Here, two long-time members of the InDigest family, Meakin Armstrong and Sam Osterhout, discuss, among other things, the fate of the funny man, growing old, and why Meakin’s characters don’t have enough sense to get themselves out of the damn basement.

And remember, if you're in New York stop by (le) Poisson Rouge the first Wednesday of every month for the InDigest 1207 reading series, where in June we will be welcoming Stephen Burt, Angela Ball, Rodrigo Toscano, and Giao Buu (and later this summer, John Wray, Marlon James, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Geoff Herbach).


Narratives
Nicole Callihan's delightfully odd story about a man who sees his friends' relationship somewhat differently than they do.

"One Fish, Two Fish"

&

Peter Bognanni's wild ride into the mystical world of swords...and how they can spice up your love life.

"Historical Replicas Unlimited"


Poetics
Three poems by Michael Ogletree:

"Look at You in That Crown!"
"The Thread"
"Anything Goes, I Guess"


Gallery

Beautiful, swirling prints with muted colors and surprising depth by Sougwen Chung.


InDialogue

Past InDigest Narratives contributors Meakin Armstrong and Sam Osterhout InDialogue.

the 1967 animated Spider-Man TV show

The animation on this is beautiful. Almost a little Deco-ish. Great colors too.

Villaging

The Villager just published their list of the best things to be doing in The Village this summer. Among the list: Radio Happy Hour and The InDigest 1207 Reading Series. Hot damn. Makes me want to fillet a bear. Oh man, there are instructions below. This is my lucky day.

things you need to know

found at the bank last sunday

new show

I am involved in a new show (not performing or anything) but it's going to be great. Especially if you are a displaced Minnesotan living in New York, who happened to Love Electric Arc Radio. Sam and Geoff (the geniuses behind EARS) are starting a new radio show here in New York called Radio Happy Hour and it's going to be fantastic. The first show is on June 13 and the guest star is Norah Jones and we have tickets available here. We've also got a show with Andrew WK in August (and there is a show in July too).

those are all the things i know

Not Doing Much

So, it appears that I never post here any more. I am a manic poster. (as I have deduced from one of those little features I have chosen to stick to the right hand column here)

Population: 485

I just completed reading a book that has been one of those books for me. Sitting in my "to read" pile for far too long. And when this happens, more often than not, the book is returned to the shelf unread and is replaced by the most recent purchases from wherever it is that I'm buying books from this week.

The book, as you may have surmised from the title of this post, is Michael Perry's Population: 485. It's not really a new book, so this probably isn't news to anyone (though he does have a new book out, now at the top of my list). It does exactly what a good memoir should do: it shows the inherent paradoxes of living. The paradoxes we all face. Perry's great insight here is that he can see the paradoxes in his own life and is completely ok with these paradoxes (the trick being that even if you aren't ok with them - which most of us seem not to be - you're going to live with them anyway). He's more than willing to see the incompatibility of the varied lives every person inhabits (the public self, the working self, the private self), weigh out what it means to him, knowing that truth is subjective, and just roll with life as it comes.

I'm little biased here, to be sure, I grew up in a town neighboring his little hamlet of New Auburn, Wisconsin, where the majority of Population: 485 takes place. The book deals with him returning to the small town of his birth and trying to reintegrate himself to everyday life there. He's a writer and volunteer firefighter. His "career" doesn't place him in the mix of community life and, as he finds out, you don't just get accepted into a community (of any kind) just because you're standing nearby. The subtitle of the book, Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren At A Time, sums up the trajectory of what the book is getting at. Yet, the book does so much with so little. It deals with the desire for adventure and heroism, the desire for communal acceptance, what happens when the desire for acceptance isn't compatible with your lifestyle, the nature of watching death repeatedly and how that affects his life, of being someone that an entire community becomes dependent on.

In one passage in particular he digs into what death really means to a community, and looks at how we deal with death on a more personal level, and how we deal with the death we see all the time that doesn't necessarily directly involve our own lives. He sees some old women discussing the recent death of a girl in the community at a cafe. They don't appear to have known the girl very well, if at all. This passage is just beautiful:

Names sand-blasted into the polished Bangalore marble of the Vietnam Memorial, notes left at Ground Zero in New York, the white rose on the folding chair [left in memory of the girl in question at the graduation she would have attended], these are commemorations, but they are also attempts by the living to draw conclusions from the dead. A lot of it, I'm sure, comes from years of being steeped in Christianity, of being told Christ died for our sins. For something. Surely, we tell ourselves, we can't die just because we hit a patch of pebbles on a curve. Surely this is preordination in the pea gravel. We are creatures of myth, hungry for metaphor and allegory, but most of all, hungry for sense. Death-a stillness within the chaos, after all-serves these cravings. Death provides us the pretext and the context within which we may arrange and participate in out own symbolic mythology, to establish significance and import, to reassure ourselves that it all means something. Death is the ultimate passion play, and we want to be on the bill, if only as a member of the chorus.

Ultimately, he finds the redemptive value in this. He sees the paradox in how we deal with death. They grieve because it is part of a communal process, if that can't help the family in a tangible way, if they can't bring the girl back to life, they can try to join in the grieving and make it a communal moment. The flaws in the logic being obvious he praises our desire nonetheless, as humans - as animals, to come together over death.

I highly recommend reading this book. It looks as though it may be some sort of regional fare, a book about small town life. It is not. It is much more than that. It is one of the best memoirs I've probably ever read.

Name of the Year Contest

This is hilarious

Martin Brodeur wins 552nd game, is most winning goalie ever

Where are the new ideas we've been promised?

From the New York Times today:

The American International Group [AIG], which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

The company is claiming that they "have no choice," bonuses had already been promised in contracts. At what point does the government quit fearing the big businesses and lobbyists and say That's too fucking bad? If those bonuses have to be paid than AIG should figure out how they can fulfill those contracts outside of government money. 

The government's stance when it comes to the companies receiving bailout money who are doling out huge bonuses has been What can we do? They have the money already. There are contracts. There is plenty that can be done. Tax them for their bonuses. Hell, just take some back, all of the installments haven't been paid at this point. It's unacceptable. Obama's chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, said on ABC's "This Week" that the bonuses are "outrageous," but that's not good enough when the government continues to posture itself as helpless, they have all the leverage. Furthermore, they understood from the beginning how these companies have been using their bailout money, yet Congress refused to attach any strings to TARP. The administration's response to this news is leaving me feeling, like Jon Stewart said in his Jim Cramer interview, that they're all in on it, that the average American is providing the capital for their adventure. The notion that AIG can't break their contracts for CEOs bonuses is unbelievable. On two fronts we are already seeing that in a situation like this contracts are not always the most important thing. Auto-workers are letting the industry shred their contracts and create new terms for the unions, and the government is considering giving bankruptcy courts the power to shred contracts and re-negotiate homeowner mortgages. Why should bonuses for executives be exempt? 

Remember in January when John C. Hope III, chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, publicly talked about what his bank was going to do with the $300 million they received in bailout funds? "Make more loans? ... We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans." If this is how the banking industry and Wall St. feel then what was the point of giving them more money? Between CEO bonuses and banks, like Hope's, that are just storing the money away, it seems that there was no logical reason to bail them out. They could not have needed that money that bad if they aren't using it to sustain the business. And why does it continue to happen? At this point we should have realized that there is no trickle down. The only way the country is going to recover is by putting money in the hands of those who are actually struggling. $165 million could provide a whole lot of scholarships to people who might not be able to afford skyrocketing tuition, provide help to failing public schools, assist homeowners with failing mortgages, or help new businesses start up. 

The problem with these kinds of measures to revive the economy is it is putting faith in the exact same businesses and ideas that got America into this mess. There is an overwhelming lack of funding for new ideas right now. When the New Deal brought America out of the Great Depression there was an emphasis on new ideas. Reviving the economy through new businesses, new jobs, new public works. What we've seen so far is an attempt to get what has failed back on it's feet. The businesses that have received bailout money have shown no signs of planning on changing their methods. They should not receive a second or third chance. The executives who have put us in this situation should be given a cell right next to Madoff.

This notion of reviving what is already there instead of trying something new is part of the plan up and down. The NEA received funds to help ailing non-profit arts organizations. All of their new funding has to be distributed to organizations that have received NEA funding in the past. Again, why can't everyone apply on equal ground and give start ups a chance where they see fit. AIG is just one of many companies that is giving out bonuses to CEOs with taxpayer money, but take what their giving out alone - $165 million - how many non-profits could benefit from that? This is becoming a standard, we're investing in businesses that refuse to invest in America.

The government's refusal to fund new ideas, and to just accept that there is nothing that can be done about these big businesses whose back room bargains lead us to this financial crisis is mind-boggling. These CEOs have already been given a get-out-jail-free card, why just accept that they can squander the bailout money they received? If I cheat on my taxes I have to pay for it. If I steal from my place of employment, I get fired. If I steal from a customer at my place of business, I get fired. If I sign a contract that I can't pay I have to find a way to make good on it. If they steal from their business, and it's customers, I have to chip in, with the rest of the country, to ensure that they can continue to have a summer home.

Please Note:

If you have leeches crawling on you, you are either in water or you're with an apothecary.

not in it for the money

More Robert Bolano Discovered

It seems to me that Robert Bolano might be the most prolific dead author I've ever heard of. English translations of three novels and four collections of short stories are already slated to be released in 2001. Then there was the unveiling of a novel that was never published at a book fair (of sorts) in October. Now The Guardian is reporting that, while sorting through his piles and piles of notes et cetera at his estate in Spain they have discovered two more novels that were never published, and what they believe is the sixth part of the previously five part 2666. Add to that list that both 2666 and The Savage Detectives weren't translated into english until 2008 and 2007, respectively, and that makes for eight novels published posthumously in English (four were never released at all), four collections of short stories which were never published, and a possible epilogue to 2666 which was never published. Can't think of anyone who published more work after their death. Dickinson is a close analogy, but her body of work doesn't compare to this. Henry Darger didn't have any recognition until his death either, but, again, that's a little different. His work was epic, but there was really only one gigantic piece of work with art to accompany it. I really can't think of anyone else that compares. No real word on if these newly discovered novels and the sixth part of 2666 are going to be published, but Bolano's widow hired a new literary agent after his death and he's been pushing to get things published. Odds are they will be released at some point.

On Necessarily Skeptical Poetry Reviews

Jason Guriel has written a really great prelude to his reviews at the Poetry Foundation. The article, titled "Going Negative" highlights the importance of negative reviews of poetry and how those types of reviews are necessary for poetry. A small taste:

when a book of poetry receives a tough verdict we often label the review “negative” and speculate about the reviewer’s motives, the agenda behind the takedown. Indeed, behind words like “negative” and “agenda” and “takedown” lurks the sense that the reviewer is the one making the trouble, and the book of poetry—whether it deserved a kicking or not—is being bullied. We’re far less paranoid about motives when, say, a movie receives a tough review in the New Yorker or Slate or Rolling Stone, even when we disagree with the verdict—even when we’re so outraged we fire off an e-mail to some editor’s in-box. This is because negative reviews of movies (and LPs and TV shows, etc.) represent the norm, and aren’t usually labeled “negative.” Movie critics with whom we disagree are merely wrong; poetry critics (and politicians) go negative.

After all, how many volumes of new poetry published in the last calendar year will still be jarring us in five years? In one? Shouldn’t the negative review, if we’re honest and adult about it, be the norm? And if so, shouldn’t we retire the adjective “negative” in favor of something far more accurate, if a little awkward, like “necessarily skeptical,” as in, “Man, William Logan sure has gone necessarily skeptical on that poet?”

Bam

Bam bam-bam