Exile in Guyville

We all know the commonplace story about Liz Phair--that after her brilliant work on Exile in Guyville the quality of her work quickly dropped to nothing as her determination for fame grew--and I'm neither going to argue or agree with that story. Quite frankly, I've haven't heard a song off of any of her other albums that made me interested to listen to any of her other work. But Exile in Guyville has been re-released, and as I can't afford the album right now, I've gone looking for other ways to celebrate.

Below is that album as best as I could construct it, although a few songs don't exist in the land of You Tube. The songs remain beautiful and painful, even in some low-fi formats. It's especially wonderful to listen to "Fuck and Run" again--I forgot how tragic Phair's voice sounds as she strains beneath her vocal range into the awkward whisper of "I want a boyfriend/ I want a boyfriend."

We might never see this Liz Phair again, but let's remember here she was an artist to admire.


6'1"


Help Me Mary


Glory


Dace of the Seven Veils


Never Said


Explain It to Me


Canary


Mesmerizing


Fuck and Run


Girls! Girls! Girls!


Divorce Song


Flower


Stratford-on-Guy


Strange Loop

Peter, Bjorn & John

I'm enjoying these singles from Peter Bjorn & John:


Young Folks


Objects of My Affection

Taylor Mead

I'm crying quietly to myself because I'm in Las Vegas and this Friday (September 19), Warhol's film Lonesome Cowboys will be playing in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I've been dying to see the film for years, and it's shown practically nowhere. To make it all the more painful (or wonderful, if you can actually go), a discussion with Warhol Superstar and underground film legend Taylor Mead will follow the film.

So, in an attempt to pretend that I'm not envying the citizens of San Francisco, I've been watching a few You Tube videos of Taylor Mead this week. Highlights include...



Taylor Mead reading his poem "Song to Jake Gyllenhall" at The Bowery


Taylor Mead remembering Jackie, Candy, and Hollie. Apparently they all went to poetry readings back then. My week is made.


An interview with Taylor Mead.


A preview of Excavating Taylor Mead, a documentary about Taylor Mead that will be shown at the Yerba Buena Center on Sunday, September 21.

What Happens in a Poem

I recently found the You Tube videos from the Philoctetes Center--a series of multidiciplinary discussions about imagination, sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Although a number of the discussions look interesting, the one I'd like to point out is the roundtable discussion "What Happens in a Poem." The panel consists of Michael Braziller, Timothy Donnelly, Anne-Marie Levine, David Pollens, Alice Quinn, and David Shapiro, and each panelist presents a reading of a poet.

The poets who are read/discussed are Elizabeth Bishop, Cavafy, ee cummings, Wallace Stevens, Vincent Andres Estelles, and Frank O'Hara.

If you only have a few moments, fast forward to the beautiful discussion of Estelles--the contributions of the Catalonian Modernists remain painfully unaknowledge, by large--and Shapiro's tender reading of O'Hara's "To the Harbormaster."

The embedded video has been disabled by request, but the video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkF6JHwGbp0

BlazeVOX Raffle and Bake Sale

The small press publisher BlazeVOX needs your help! (And my help!) According to Geoffrey Gatza, their publisher, the press is $4000 in debt. And the solution? Bake sale and raffle!

BlazeVOX is a wonderful little press, and I would like to see them hang around. Let's say you and I go buy some food and raffle tickets: http://www.blazevox.org/bakesale.htm

Thomas Nozkowski

What to say about Thomas Nozkowski?

I found out about Nozkowski through John Yau's art criticism--Nozkowski is a painter Yau especially loves and a painter with whom Yau collaborated for the book Ing Gring. Nozkowski makes astounding abstract paintings. The paintings are usually small--neither the height nor the width of the two paintings below, for example, passes 30 inches--which Nozkowski has connected to political and economic reasons: the art market tends to see "major" works as large works, so Nozkowski explores the intimate, personal size that the market pushes aside.





And Nozkowski's method emphasizes a long ongoing process with the work. He keeps his unfinished painting in his studio, and over a period of years will work on each painting. He will take a painting out every now and then and find some way to "bring it into play," by adding a mark that doesn't work with what already exists in the painting, covering the existing painting with a wash, or some similar means to make the canvas active again. Over the years he will continue the process of bringing the painting into play and reworking it--until he intuitively feels that the work is done.



Nozkowski's method is one aspect of his work that interests me. I wonder what the work would look like if there were a record of it at each "finished" stage, each moment before the painting is reactivated. I imagine a narrative where each work shades the next work in the series, where each work is separate and waits to be marred so the next work can be built.

But the work, as it stands, astounds me. The strange shapes, the unresolved shifts between background and foreground, and the frequent refusal of balance gives these paintings a challenging, exciting rhythm. I try to imagine what can be done in abstract painting in the future and today that will still feel relevant. Often, it's difficult--much new abstraction I can find is stale, distant. But Thomas Nozkowski's work asserts the relevance of abstraction. His work is alive, vibrant, and intimate.

Monday Night Lit

My poem "Waves" has been published in issue 8 of Monday Night Lit. The website for Monday Night Lit can be found here, but issue 8 hasn't been put up on their site yet.