WHO WE BURNIN'? (April Playlist)

Transitory early spring ghosts. Disaster-suckling fault lines. Rain, rain, rain, snow away. Big '90s throwbacks because I said so. Covers because why not. A little country-rock, sloppy pop and crappy country in this slappy country. Second time around is sweatier. Bowie for good measure. Phish, too. Who we burnin' in effigy? Jam out to these bad, bad friends.

1.   "I Just Can't Take It Anymore" / The Lemonheads

2.   "Mykel and Carli" / Weezer

3.   "Ashes to Ashes" / David Bowie

4.   "Window Licker" / Aphex Twin

5.   "Mr. Dobalina" / Del The Funky Homosapien

6.   "Beastie Revolution" / Beastie Boys

7,   "Effigy"/ Uncle Tupelo

8.   "Monkey" / Bush

9.   "AC/DC Bag (7/12/91)" / Phish

10. "Glynis" / Smashing Pumpkins

11. "Awesome Sound" / Ween

12. "As Far As I Can See" / Phantogram

13. "Please Let That Be You" / The Rentals

14. "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" / Pavement

15. "Sexual Healing" / Soul Asylum

16. "New Style" / Beastie Boys

17. "Saturday Night" / Weezer

18. "Layin' With Linda" / The Lemonheads

19. "Waiting For My Ruca" / Sublime

20. "Hey Nineteen" / Steely Dan

21. "Salvation" / Rancid

22. "Fake Empire" / The National

23. "Out Of Touch" / Hall & Oates

24. "The Gaudy Side Of Town" / Gayngs

length: Waves, big waves.

piles of dirty iPod fingers

I've got two new poems, Postmodernism Isn't Fun Anymore and Emaciated Factbook, in the latest issue of Psychic Meatloaf. Definitely feels nice to be a small part of what looks like a gnarly and bizarre publication. Plus it's always nice to see your writing on dead trees instead of dead screens.

Bend. System. Collapse.

New story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly. Celebrate the end of the flu season. But the cold season's still here. Detox begins now.

a rare type of pomegranate

Got a new story up at Staccato Fiction called "Nobody Likes a Pragmatist." Look at it. Or don't. Anyway, I'm out of Budweisers. And Caroline Doty is hot. By the way, call me Chris from now on. You're not my mother. And if you are, hi mom. God bless Obamacare.

She needed to be, in one moment, destruction and restoration

Double-header: got a review of Wesley Stace's latest novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, up at The Brooklyn Rail, and a new story -- The Parents Were Made of Gas -- up at Short, Fast, and Deadly. Have to give a shout to my buddy and fellow future publishing magnate Garrett McDonough because I definitely stole the title from something he wrote. Sorry, Garrett!

Fan Appreciation

a single chimney-brick

pushed its way

out of the mortar

and fell

to stare at

my new kicks

He was an animal by his very savage upbringing

Homo Thug by Asante Kahari

Harlem Book Center, c. 2005

246 pages

I was walking home from the bar a couple weeks ago at 4am, post-work, McDonald's sack dripping with burger sweat that would serve either as delicious artery padding or as a handy talisman to thwart the occasional rabid subway creature, when I noticed a book protruding from one of the city's lovely sludge-gray snowbanks. No book, even something written by James Frey, should have to suffer this kind of rotten fate. So, risking bed bugs and/or hepatitis, I rescued the paperback from its filth-choked grave, much to the chagrin of a pair of Hudson River bound Vietnamese (or Thai?) trannies wearing translucent heels and a pleather Hello Kitty mini-skirt, respectively. These methed-out he-shes couldn't possibly understand how apropos their appearance was at this moment, reader, because the book I'd saved was none other than that classic coming-of-age tragedy of a young man gone wrong, a man whose circumstances force him to dabble in the most taboo and "unnatural" aspects of his psyche and his sexuality. As you might have guessed, I'm writing about Asante Kahari's tour de force, Homo Thug.

I'd often been intrigued by some of Harlem Book Center's other titles -- The Lesbian's Wife, Mandingo: The Golden Boy, The Streets of Harlem, Tamika: The struggle of a Jamaican Girl -- sold by street vendors on 125th Street and Malcolm X Ave (the scene of my weekly White Castle fix). Needless to say, Homo Thug did not disappoint. The novel rehashes the sordid young adulthood of Michael Fraser, a street tough whose abusive Caribbean-born mother, together with a childhood surrounded by the poisonous environment of New York City's projects, cause him to succumb to a life of crime. At 15, he is convicted for a "robbery gone bad," from which we can infer that murder was the case that they gave him. Instead of street code, Michael must now familiarize himself with the prison system, because he "had a long time and I wasn't about to live like a bitch being bartered out for goods and services by every swinging dick in the joint." In order to avoid getting his ass beat (or plowed) he joins a group of Muslims led by this dude Mustafa who will protect him as long as he remains celibate. But after a few too many trips to the showers, his hormones kick in...

...and that's as far as I got. Because as interesting as I found the book, as fascinating as I found Kahari's searing psychological portrait of a gangster ass boy-toy surviving the confines of his debilitating circumstances in the best way he knows how, I honestly had a lot of better shit to do (and read). However, I did skim through the novel's final 150 or so pages, and from what I can tell, Michael falls in love with a tranny named Dee Dee, who doesn't want to keep their love a secret. Mustafa puts a hit out on Michael but somehow he serves his sentence without getting injured and after having a lot of freaky sex with Dee Dee. When he's free he starts selling rock and that he'ron with his old crew, has sex with a lot of women and men before realizing his true calling as "Michelle." There's also a beef with another rap/drug-slinging crew named "G-unit" led by guys whose names are strangely familiar: Half Dolla, Stop the Bank and Young Gun. Hmm. Maybe I should have read the rest of the book.

 
I did manage to extract a bunch of great quotes that I've included below, as well as a few that were lovingly copied onto the book's back cover by an anonymous (most likely female) hand. Which leads to the question of why, if the book was seemingly so appreciated by its owner, did it end up rudely tossed into a snowbank in the West Village? Was it a conflict of ideologies? A forced rejection when the sheer homo-thuggery became too much? Maybe just an unfortunate misplacing. Maybe the trannies knew more than I did. Also, it's clearly evident that the fine people at Harlem Book Center wanted to maintain Homo Thug's authenticity, it's raw emotional gravity, it's "realness," so much that they felt it unnecessary to perform a basic spell check or employ a copyeditor. They're/their/there? Who gives a fuck, son? THIS SHIT IS HARD.

 --

 "I would jerk off so much that I would not have enough strength to make it through the rest of the day."

"I think he would have killed concrete for that little Spanish red pepper."

"Their rationale behind that is, why should I have to suffer when this mother is in here fresh to death and he can't hold his shit down?"

"Too add to that, she was a plump heifer and very unshapely, with her fowl odor."

"No one likes a n----- that falls from grace. All of the people you stepped on, on your way up will certainly be waiting for you on your way down either to kill you, or to use you."

"A secret can be agony on the soul, if allowed to swell up to the point that it blossoms on the spirit like a cancer."

 "Even though I wasn't thinking about no faggot shit, those fags made me feel a little uneasy, uneasy in the sense that I was getting hot flashes thinking about Dee Dee. That alone told me I needed to get the fuck out of there."

"Each passing day fueled my perversion, and I was increasingly becoming my own worst enemy. I felt like I was losing myself. The heavy burden of jerking off so much took a toll on my balls. They started to look disfigured and saggy. I had exhausted all of the semen from my testicles to the point that I was ejaculating blood. It was a truly sickening experience."

"My gums was as red as sugar cane."

"As soon as the door to her apartment opened I commenced to taking off her clothes like a reckless wild animal...I had to see if she would let me top the night off with a little ass shot." 

"I am sorry I had to lose two people to find that out. I am saying goodbye to Michael and hello to Michelle. See ya'll in Baltimore!"

**Also: Apparently Kahari's autobiographical first novel, The Birth of a Criminal, was based on a guy committing bank fraud and was actually used to convict the author for the same crime that he actually committed. Completely badass or dumbass depending on how you look at it. Funny nonetheless. More here.

And for more information about the Street Lit movement, here's an interesting article from PopMatters.

And a review by someone who actually read the book.

The Deadliest of the Deadliest of the Deadly

Short, Fast, and Deadly released its 2010 Anthology, "Deadlier Than Thou," a couple days ago. Edited by Joseph A. Quintela, it's an 88-page collection of the weekly e-mag's deadliest two pieces from each of its first 55 issues, as well as a poem and a story representing each month of the year. A story of mine snuck in, and I contributed the June poem. You should buy it. Seriously. Don't be a douche, support indie lit. Also, it makes a great roach swatter or 40 oz coaster.

I'll write a review of the other stuff in it besides my own (which is obviously awesome) when my copy comes in the mail. Hopefully Amelia in 1B won't be keeping it and not letting me know, as she's been doing with my rent checks (and probably the last 6 books I've ordered that mysteriously haven't arrived) for the last few months. NYC postal system is wack. This anthology isn't.

11 words makes a --

New super short poem at a handful of stones.

Dirty, Smelly, Devout Punks

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

Harper Perennial

Release date: February 8, 2011

256 pages

Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy slices deftly through a pop culture haze, extracting some of its juiciest vapors – extreme spirituality, politics, alienated youth – and congealing them into a gripping mosaic that is both monstrous and sublime. It is a beautifully dark first novel about the need for genuine connection, both human and holy, in an era that too often seems cold and sterile.

Set in pre-Y2K Gainesville, the book follows the listless exploits of David, a University of Florida dropout who works at a brain-numbing office job and trades Internet porn at night. A chance encounter with a group of local punks convinces him to abandon his old life and shack up with a coterie of neo-Luddite loafers and pseudo-cultist anarchists who get the inspiration for their anti-establishment lifestyle from a mysterious, recently disappeared former housemate named Parker.

The characters are not particularly groundbreaking or interesting in terms of the ideology they represent, as the young, grubby, hyper-opinionated libertine is by now somewhat of a clichéd persona. However, Taylor’s highly polished and deeply psychological prose breathes fascinating life into the heretofore familiar, revealing a dark and poignant yearning, a dire scream for transcendence in a McMansion wasteland and its always-tragic prospects. And while long segments devoted to the actual text of the “gospel” the punks worship seem a bit like overkill, the book remains impressive for instilling a paradoxically religious fervor in characters who have shrugged off the chains of all higher powers, both spiritual and secular. The reader is left with a profound respect for their earnestness in a fog of late 90s cynicism, for “how they give credence to ultimate concerns, the rhetoric a little windy, sure, but the passion undeniable, the attraction intense. They lived as if the fate of the very universe were perpetually at stake and in their hands.”

Yet Taylor’s greatest asset may be not only his ability to cannily craft a series of vivid, perfect post-postmodern moments, but also his power to imbue otherwise mundane scenery, this seen-it-before suburban milieu, with a somber weight of Biblical proportions. Half-finished housing developments, an unassuming pizza spot, frat bars and cul-de-sacs. To David, these are the totems of a Gomorrah fueled not by any devil’s pleasures, but by the brain-dead, Wonder Bread machinations of traditional American dogma. A sugar-dipped squalor that eventually becomes unbearable. Though the novel takes place before the true proliferation of the Internet and the ubiquitous cell phone explosion, images of technology’s potential for the perverse and the mind-numbing (pornographic pictures of an unknowing ex-girlfriend electronically traded by sleazy chat room voyeurs, the soul-crushing hospital glow of a telephone survey taker’s cubicle) are equally ghastly. Perhaps more so given the cultural developments of the last decade.

Ultimately, Taylor’s intense and thorough characterizations and his superior writing chops are what make The Gospel of Anarchy a timely and potent read.

The refrigerator's glow

New (depressing) story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly.

Naked and Honest

Naked Glances by Carl-Henrik Björck

Deadly Chaps

Pub date: August 2010?

34 pages

Carl-Henrik Björck’s debut collection of 29 micro-stories and poems condenses an impressive amount of the universal stockpile of post-postmodern “human-ness” – nostalgia, love and its inevitable demise, an eerie sangfroid in the midst of disaster – into a series of glaring snapshots that are captivating, revealing, and occasionally disturbing. It’s a stark sequence of images whose focal points are made more compelling by what’s left blurry beyond the edges.

A native Swede writing in English, Björck employs a crisp, direct prose and a simple straightforwardness that belies many of the stories’ complex, ghostly tension. These transitive “glances” offer the reader a glimpse at the middle of the photo album. We know things have happened, we know more things are going to happen. What we’re given is the pregnant glimmer, the crux of the affair. The most common theme in the collection is intense and gnawing remorse at the inability (of anyone, it seems) to maintain any sort of connection, romantic and otherwise, a fundamental miscommunication of the body and mind. A phone number not given. A fly stuck to a window. The girl in the shop who can’t utter what she wants to say. The unrequited echoes of an infinite number of squashed possibilities. This underlying current of intense emotion endows the most heretofore passing physical details – raindrops on a dead-end road, “a blue stone necklace hanging down deep”, the reflection of streetlight in a woman’s hair – with a bruising importance.

This is not to say that Naked Glances’ narrators are engaged in a constant attitude of passivity. The collection’s best stories benefit from wicked twists that are shocking not only for their unforeseen abruptness, but for the deadpan, nonchalant way in which they are described. A woman is crushed by a car moments after a happy rendezvous with a lover. The unanticipated insertion of a child’s plea at the critical moment of an argument between his parents. Each time, a bomb has been dropped. We don’t know why. All we can do is watch the second of impact and imagine what happens next. There is also a call to the future, death to sympathy and tradition, a need to forget and move on. My favorite example of this grit is also my favorite story in the collection, “Saturday Night”, which concerns an encounter with a smelly bum: “…he says that God will bless me if I help a blind man who has nothing to eat so I kick his can over and keep on walking and I hear the coins clink against the gutter and now that also belongs in the past.”

I will say that the majority of the book’s 10 poems didn’t do it for me. Many employed a loose ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme that I feel distracts the reader from the stark naked ironic realism Björck so skillfully conveys in his prose, and adds an unwelcome element of juvenilia to an otherwise sophisticated collection. Other major ish? This might be a little MFA workshoppy nitpicking, but the stories’ titles (McDougal Street, Wedding, Short Love Story) are often greatly outdistanced by the quality of the stories themselves. Maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it is. What is clearly evident, though, is that like that other finely crafted Swedish import, Björck has produced a durable, aesthetically sparse and pleasing, and emotionally charged piece of literary furniture. It’s a quick read that will stay with you long after you put it down.

I left it open

New poem up at a handful of stones.

A black hand clutching a bottle of el mundo!

New poem, Ticklish Yuppie, up at Clutching at Straws. Really cool site. Also, below, is a really cool tree.

You fell asleep being aliens.

New story, "Tonight is Losing Teeth," up at Snow Monkey. The story is creepy, like the above sweaters. Maybe more so. The holidays got weird this year.

...in the bombshine

New story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly in the "Revolution/Revelation" issue.

Look! a book review

Got a new review up on The Rumpus -- Mike Young's story collection Look! Look! Feathers. As much as I'm a writer and a reviewer or whatever, I'm hesitant to recommend anything for people to read. Maybe because most people only read books about vampires or zombies. Maybe because I'm one of the last pretentious dicks who thinks you should read poetry on a regular basis. Maybe I'm hungover. Definitely hungover. Anyways, if you read one book that's come out in 2010, read this book. It's awesome. It's funny. It's not about vampires. It captures the zeitgeist, whatever the fuck that means. That's my spiel, take it or leave it. Just take it.

Omne Vivum Ex Ovo

We got high and watched the morsel of tinned apricot sink between the broken recesses of heaven, the streaky clouds burning in golden veins. Actually, we were at Wendy’s. My brother didn’t like me. He was older and had a shitty case of acne, the only kid in our family who did. Because of this, his mind was untroubled by philosophy. He bathed in antifreeze. He ate lard like air. His girlfriend had scabies and he liked to “tongue-punch her meat wallet.” Seated across from me in the red pleather Wendy’s booth, he flicked that same tongue, hurled a dollop of Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger onto its wrapper and slid the wrapper toward me. “Piggy,” he said, “tell the scarecrow-assed bitch at the counter that this is cold.” I just sat there, staring at the gray, half-chewed glob. My brother tightened his knuckles, gave me that look. He knew what I wanted. I wanted to wriggle in it like a slug drowning in salt rain.

Hello, Small Awesome Book

Hello, Darkness by Howie Good

from Deadly Chaps

pub date: July 2010

33 pages

Though Howie Good’s recent chapbook, Hello, Darkness is advertised as a collection of both poetry and prose, the distinction is a superficial, almost pointless question for Form 101. Good is a poet, a damn nice one, and his book is no slouch either.

It’s a disturbing and sublime jaunt to the brain’s bleary edge, the spaces in between, those gaps in the synapses that are only illuminated by “the sort of stuff you think about late at night.” That dark, naked hour before the dreams set in. The book’s 31 pieces (ranging in size from a ten-word pebble to a Facebook update) drip with quiet tension and an Anthrax-dipped apprehension of all the random shit that might go down. Of what usually does.

Unforeseen happenings drown in the chaos of an anything-goes half-awake where the scope of what’s contemplated ranges from the pleasantly esoteric (the length of a pig orgasm, a circus strongman who quotes Kafka) to the paranormal (rabbis flying in mini-vans) to the incredibly eerie (a famous historical figure’s genitalia impaled by an arrow, a former student’s body is found because of the odor emanating from it). The specters that are supposed to remain along the edges have crept to the forefront of the heretofore familiar.

                                     

But the journey to darkness isn’t just a passive one. The book’s longer poems are possessed of a distinctly self-aware personality that plays the dual role of imaginative observer and deadly participant: “Down in the street, terrible dreams pass each other with a nod. I wouldn’t trust someone like me either.” To follow the voice is to entertain the possibility of an evil that may not be the lesser of two (or three), but one that surely offers the best chance at revelatory potential, a long look at the sun without glasses, at tasting what’s really behind the curtain. It could be worse. This glimmer of morbid clarity is summed up wonderfully in the concluding lines of “Dance of the Iron Shoes,” one of the collection’s best: “Sunlight clanged against the window. Flies crawled around inside my mouth. It was often like this back then, the sky brightening enough just for me to see what wasn’t there.” And enough for the reader to see what is.

Yet Good, in my opinion, excels most brilliantly on the smallest of canvases. That one super-packed moment, unsprung like a shockwave, a zen-slap to the spinal cord: “Bombs Kill 95 / the headline says / beside the sunflowers / in a milk bottle”.

Hello, darkness. I think I’d like to hang out with you, too.

2010?

Got a new short story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly called "American Hubris." The theme for this week's issue is "The Year in Review." When I thought of 2010, three images came to mind. Oil, flashing computer screens, and people being self-centered dicks. Let's see if all that comes through. The dick part probably will.