bludgeon New York until it bleeds

(non)fiction piece up at Fill Me Up NYC

He doesn't / come to places like this & he can't / come back to Hartford

Went to see Columbians Timothy Donnelly and Sam Amadon read at Real Art Ways in Hartford tonight. A spacially appropriate reading commemorating the launch of Amadon's collection The Hartford Book, and what a cool abandoned-warehouse-next-to-a-probable-crack-den space it was. Donnelly read from The Cloud Corporation and I got dizzy. Amadon's poems were rad (a ceiling light burst during one of them) and I can't wait to break into his book and snort up all of them tonight. During a discussion about process and the artist's decision to remain amoral (which, duh, is why you become an artist or at least so you can have an excuse for stumbling around drunk breaking things), Donnelly explained that "it's my job to try on thoughts," which pretty much sums up everything. I almost drove home after hearing that. Later, I briefly thought about discussing buying drugs in Hartford with Amadon but settled on mentioning Richard Howard's impeccable eyewear and he looked at me like I was insane but at least he signed my copy of his book. A smoking hot girl with dreads who was a hipster version the chick from The Big Bang Theory (of which I've seen 45 seconds) gave me a free Harpoon IPA. That was nice. I looked at her like she was crazy. 

http://www.restaurantsct.com/blog/an-iberian-evening-at-real-art-ways-and-costa-del-sol/

sad clown story excerpt

Walking out of Taco Bell towards the sun-baked parking lot, Gilbert aka Giggles the Magnificent came to the sudden and very uncomfortable conclusion that the shit had come back to bite him. Not the shit he had just taken – that (as far as Taco Bell shits go) had been rather pleasant. A swift exit, minimal wiping, had even given him enough time to fix some inconsistencies in his powder base and rouge lip liner in the mirror before the rhino-ankled fellow in the other stall squeezed out enough toilet children to make room for the most meager soft taco, let alone the multiple Beefy 7-Layer Burritos a man of his impressive girth would undoubtedly crave.

No, these feces were metaphorical, but stunk no less than partially digested Mexican fare from the gut of a type-2 diabetic.

The police (or maybe a concerned diner) had taken the girls, their hair and exposed breasts smeared with white and red face paint, from his car and laid them shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the adjacent parking spot. An officer was recording them with a camcorder while another dusted the passenger-side door of Gilbert’s neon-yellow and ground-beef-pink hatchback with a forensic brush, under the decal that said CLOWNING AROUND HOME CIRCUS, LLC in a curly-cue sans serif. Gilbert stood frozen, deciding whether to retreat back to the bathroom or make a break for the costume shop at the other end of the strip mall, when he noticed the terror-stricken expression of a little boy staring up at him a few feet away, clutching an Incredible Hulk blanket.

This naked, eye-bulging terror Gilbert knew all too well.

“Mo-mo-mommy…” the kid started to blubber. Automatic reflex, Gilbert reached into his pocket and squeezed the water bulb connected via hidden tube to the silk flower attached to his blue and green polka-dotted collar. The flower unleashed a formidable spray onto his face and he staggered back a little, gurgling for extra comedic effect. The kid’s fear appeared to increase and Gilbert realized in hindsight that the squirting flower trick – which was, in all likelihood, causing his lip liner to run down the entirety of his lower jaw, creating a look more cannibal-esque than child-friendly – was probably a bad idea.

“Hey little guy,” he whispered, “it’s only water. Nothing to worry about, see?” But it was too late. The kid screeched, “MOMMMMMMYYYYY!” at a decibel level that belied his stature and the kid’s mother, who’d been filming the crime scene with her phone, swiveled around, glaring, and when Gilbert tried to  demonstrate the flower’s harmlessness he accidentally squeezed his key fob, which caused the car alarm to activate and the cops to snap into defense mode, pistols drawn.

The girls’ bodies remained pale and rigid on the asphalt.

where dead texts go

rIgor mort.Us  

Wheelchair

the man arrives on roller skates with roses in his teeth, grinning bloody lips

EVERY LAUNDROMAT IN THE WORLD

by Mel Bosworth

Safety Third Enterpries, 2012

40 pages

Near the top of the list of reasons why I like my apartment of three+ years are the washer and dryer machines buzzing happily just a few steps from the front door. Not having to cart pounds of soiled underthings two blocks through rain/snow/piss/PCP addicts only to spend 90 minutes in a sauna-sticky Laundromat reeking of cats and drowned in the palpable-in-any-language cheese of  Mexican soap operas is a constant cause for celebration,  from which some would say I’ve never woken. A reminder that at-home amenities are, well, amenable. Then along comes Mel Bosworth’s Every Laundromat in the World and I’m forced to reconsider (leaving my apartment, not carrying bushels of laundry around the city like a clown). The chapbook’s quietly debilitating short poems provide a surprising and keen succession of small-town observational jabs, building with the subdued rhythmic furor of a double-loaded spin cycle. In a musically minimalist language, Bosworth juxtaposes swathes of superficially unrelated commonplace minutiae – a five-year-old photograph of a man with an ambiguous facial expression, the spontaneous singing of a ditty extolling Spam, a vague beep that sounds like a trash truck but can’t be – imbuing the moments with an appealing emotional newness that often gives way to a foreboding intensity. A calm rain forest evening belies thousands of years of unfortunate current events. A recycling bin invites sublime self-annihilation. Ryan Gosling becomes my and every other consumer’s worst nightmare. Seriously. There’s also a bunch of humorously lighter fare (“It’s always funnier when you / masturbate with your mouth / open”), which, if we’re still going with the extended laundry analogy, which we are, we might say Bosworth mixes all his colors and whites with just the right amount of bleeding. But most importantly, Every Laundromat in the World reminds us to look more deeply into the spiderweb forests of what we so unceremoniously have deemed “the everyday,” to give those webs a healthy twist, to see what happens. Don’t be sorry.