·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 26, 2009

No matter the political, sometimes love comes tumbling down
Brush stroke by brush stroke, morning whispers in the ear
No matter tax cut, or increase, something will transcend
The gory fear of losses everywhere - who cannot behold
the devastation, the dark dance upon the President’s attendant ear?
The dark orange tulips open, dewdrop petals
now falling down in the early morning, spring light:
Love broken open, entirely wanton, those dark interiors
loam to the eye, fertile to the heart.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 25, 2009

Bill Fontana’s sound-work installation inside the rotunda and under the dome of San Francisco’s City Hall. Spiraling prerecorded sounds of multiple kinds of birds, cable cars - each calibrated to scoot about the ‘inner’ landscape of the atrium. I sit on the bottom stair, pen in hand, catching a sense of richochet, a kind of wonderful, even gentle music (one that makes thing feel gentle), including shoes going up and down the staircase and the voices of City employees and visitor also rotating one echo atop another.

A beautiful transformation of space which brings up the deeper, not gentle at all, historical echo of the terrible assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by former Supervisor Dan White. I have never thought of sound scars. The sounds in which we are left with a permanent, never resolved scar.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 24, 2009

The President addresses a joint session of Congress on issues facing the Budget. In actuality he is taking on the whole, huge National Crisis. Many bricks have fallen - the Banks, the Car industry, Education and Health. His voice puts the whole rescue on the Nation’s back. With the modified tones and rhythms of a Minister at the Pulpit, he works to activate a flame, a sense of struggle and conquest into the Mission - affirming the potential realization of one goal after another. Stern but compassionate to his and the Nation’s new aims, he puts his slender shoulders, as well as urges everyone of us to put our own shoulders under the slanted braces of this broken House. To work, to rise up, to remake the House.

Economic, Community, Government and Institutional Disintegration have trumped the Nuclear threat. Will the President trump the Panic with an intelligence, voice and passion. Will a public so damaged by 8 years of misdirection by the former Regime and its media cheer leaders accept Obama’s leadership and pick up the required tools to resurrect the House. At least go out and pick up the shingles that have flown off the roof while leaving the rafters without augury nor the sight of angels. The President paints a huge picture in a big studio. Unlike the heroic efforts of the lone artist, the work will require much more than one worker. Not to sound metaphorically corny, it will be interesting and, at best, required that he and his Congress draw on the creative and liberating contributions of the country’s writers and artists. Otherwise we risk a dull canvas without color or compelling vision. We are going to require all of thatand more, if we are going to defeat a national and/or global foreclosure. The fate of slumdogs without millionaires.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 23, 2009

Intermittent showers rivet either soft or hard to the ear; the drawing pens are guided by a day in organizing and reading into the archives of Laura Ulewicz, poet (1931 - 2007): letters, journals, poems. Perhaps this piece is a map of sorts, a literal and emotional topography of early ’60’s travel: Laura in San Francisco, in London, in New York, in Rome, in Athens, in Istanbul, in Jamaica. Laura in love not in love; Laura receiving letters from others who are in or out of love, and the strange things that happen among those who so much want to love, who get so bruised not finding the one they want, while colliding with one mistake after another.

Laura was of a mid-century generation of both Beats and Bohemians that spent part of their traveling life collecting letters - or missing the one they wanted - at one American Express after another. A topography in which lines cloud, become luminous, interfere with one another, get lost, way lost, or recover into arcs that transcend or pass through one another, perpetual in their insistence on a right to the ecstatic. A provisional life, expensive in its debts, grateful, proud in its times and spaces of loving purchase.

[for the account of the Bok/Christian Reading scroll down to the entry, “OBAMA DAY 32]

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 22, 2009

It’s Sunday. I am in my mother’s home - in the ‘back room’ - listening to her voice over an audio-surveillance device. In between the sounds of an intense rain, she talks non-stop - a kind of unconscious monologue - while falling into an afternoon nap:

(for the account of the Bok/Zolf reading go down to “Obama Day 33″)

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 21, 2009

A late Saturday night listening to Radio Station KALW, Cory Stein’s program called Tangents, a weekly celebration of World Music. Tonight it’s Spanish Flamenco singers interpreting American Blues, in particular songs by B.B. King. Grieving unto grieving, stretching out long & resonant guitar string arcs of doleful sound, extending rhythmic scratch marks across the great divide: the loss that’s lost its horse, its guitar, but not the long, sweet melody of moan. That infinite sweep up from what is dwelling deep in the heart, chest, lungs. Whoa!

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http://stephenvincent.net/blog

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 21, 2009 (# 1)
Rachel Zolf, poet, reading at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco at CAA

Last night we in San Francisco had an invasion of two Canadian poets: Rachel Zolf (by way of New York), and Christian Bok. Unlike this past week’s meeting of President Obama and Canada’s Prime Minister - in which the advertised Obama intention was to give reassurances to our northern neighbor that a “Buy American” agenda will not destroy Canada’s economy - Bok and Zolf were enthusiastically received as poets with much strong work to offer the local poetry economy that is the audience of primarily poets in the Small Press Traffic audience. It was an intense evening that also partied late into the night at The Right Spot, the night club Bar at the corner of 17h & Folsom.

There is not time or space to blog on at length here. But. first off, Rachel Zolf’s work cuts right across the spectrum that constitutes coping with the internal contradictions of being Jewish and confronting Israel’s occupation, if not already the start of the decimation and/or removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. “De-Arabization” was her short hand for what has been initiated in Gaza. Or, to point in the opposite direction, in “a priori”, the opening poem, from a series conditional propositions she asks,
If Israel is not in Israel
As if not to dispose of the idea of Israel as a spiritual home & refuge, but to pose the idea that concept of Israel is not ‘geo-dependent’ but one with a fluid sense of location, and/or that its current geographic location is actually a counter-Israel.

The poem is from a beautifully produced new chapbook Shoot and Weep , (Nomados: Vancouver). Her language moves with the stinging velocity of a counter-Biblical, righteous sense of query, one that strips bare the ‘wire’ filled on-the-ground reality of asymmetrical moral and physical violence.

If the Sabbath is a form of constraint
If jihad is the first word we learn to spell
If Elie Wiesel is the Holocaust
If we must expropriate gently
If messianism licks at the edge of thought
If the truth does not lie in silence
If naf means self and brother
If the space between words can be bridged
If moderate physical pressure is acceptable…

Zolf’s language embraces, explores and is torn by the contradictions of the condition called Israel It’s brave and fearless work.
This work, among others in her reading, was part of other works that embed themselves in the ‘data’ condition of being global, corporate and modern. A person who has not yet chose an academic career, she has clearly worked as a writer in the ‘technical & training manual bowels’ of the corporate world. The poems navigate a space in which numbers co-opt words as transmitters of knowledge. It’s a space in which a human, bodily and psychological presence is not acknowledged. The poems wrestle, for example, with the numerical negations of sexuality, gender and difference. As so much begins to unravel - the demolition of the global Economy, including more and more Failed States - Zolf’s language - moving with the parodic speed of a computer computation - invokes the texture of an increasing world enfolding anxiety. In the manner of an Oppen vision, the poems read/perform as signals, the words and histories resisting and flashing on and off as from lights of shipwreck.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 21, 2009 (#2)
Christian Bok, poet, reading at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco at CAA

In an interesting way, without being openly political at all, Christian Bok’s sound poetry is also invested in the velocity of its body. With great dexterity, Bok’s voice takes and turns vowels and phrases into spatial launches that command the ear to listen and follow closely. Deeply practiced and mentored in European Futurist and Dadaist Sound poets, and, no doubt a child of Canada’s own great contributions to the tradition, i.e., The Four Horsemen Bok began his performance with on modernist poetry chestnuts (Rimbaud’s poem Voyelles) in its original French, then moved to his own ‘fay’ translation in which his voice, pushing and shoving against ‘the vowels’, re-energizes the original to make it fully alive to the present, while, at the same time, being counter-histrionic. He is, indeed, a quite astonishing, accomplished master of performance. In comparison to Rachel Zolof’s politically driven content - afterwords at the celebration in the Right Spot - some of us were trying to figure out whether or not Bok’s work had any political intent. Was it more similar to going to an opera where Bok, as a virtuouso, is giving the audience primarily an orchestra of sound? I don’t know if there is a ‘political’ answer to that question. Certainly, in a contemporary sense, his pieces, directly and indirectly, were loaded with a sense of post-modern cyber-tech and literary irony. He did, for example, perform a wonderful piece in which he took questions from Ron Silliman’s Sunset Debris and put them into a robot chat box. The Robot’s answer were chilling and maybe auguries of things to come in a robot laced economy - as well as a link back to Zolf’s use of numerical data feeds inner-mixed with the word equivalents provided by some huge Concordance that determines these things.
So, as much as it would be easy to consign Bok to an Art World audience, I do not think so. Similar to Zolf’s work, Bok’s performance is too edgy - with as much ear to the existing literature of poetry as it is to an interface with to a contemporary sense of things on the ground, in the air, etc. At least one hopes he’s is not gobbled up and spit out by the vultures who command the seductive powers to transform gifted poetry and performance careers into parody and consequent oblivion.

But best, party and all, of the evening, was the energy the readings got moving, and the way people were grappling with their import and implication.

Thank you, Canada.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 19, 2009

A working computer is much about memory, the distribution and redistribution of memory. I don’t know if there is actually such an object, memory. From all appearances, if it is a substance, it weighs little or nothing. At the computer repair shop yesterday the young Chinese technician hardly speaks English. Yet, he is both challenged and swift when it comes to tracking down the site, that is the container, the file that holds a stash of memory (in my case, that is saved emails under a now defunct Entourage email program). One day those emails totally vaporized and disappeared from access. It still took the technician awhile. The container file would not open. His finger tapping the keyboard took him back and forth to Microsoft’s now ancient operations history of the program. He had to give the container - in the form of an icon - a new identity, as well as recover, the old program. Finally, thank goodness, he made the memory visible with all of its little email ’subject’ headings, including the names of my recepients. There they were, all four years of them! Now, where I have not already done so, I can print out what remains valuable. Of course, this will take weeks and weeks. Yet, instead of memory floating around in some of computer ether, I will have the work in palpable form. I will put the printed sheets into manila envelopes. And, if I am further smart, the messages will be printed on acid free paper, including the manila envelopes. Then the work can endure and join some kind of ancestry - either among my children and grandchildren or into the archival chambers of a University Library. Now, in some sense, the printed memories will, at least, weigh as much as the paper on which they are printed! And, I must say, I like that kind of tangibility.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, February 18, 2009
After watching the Golden State Warriors play and come close to beating the Los Angeles Lakers, and listening to the Larry Kelp show on KPFA-FM, particularly the lament in Odetta’s voice singing Bob Dylan songs, and some wonderfully rhythmic vocal and drum pieces from Mali.

Somebody who lives in the countryside near the town of Sebastapol (about an hour north of San Francisco), well, she gave a box of one dozen, beautifully fresh brown eggs from her own chicken coop. Actually, when I gave the gift some thought, it was a sweet, if unconscious, symbolic exchange for consultation on the conceptual development of a book. However, as the box road with me in the front seat down Highway 101, I was having doubts about whether I and Sandy could ever eat a dozen eggs! In no matter what form, that’s a lot of eggs for us. So
I began to think of things I could do with eggs, performance type things. The egg outside a container, for certain, is a delicate thing. It’s also a symbol - Spring, fertility, birth and all of that. When I got back into the City I knew I would have to go to the Bank of America to deposit a check. And, I thought awhile about that crazy institution, particularly in the way it seems to take such delight in charging huge fees - given any opportunity. Say, for example, the $35 charge on any bounced check, or $19.95 to reprint a small batch of checks. They love to make profit, it seems, by skinning their customers. Now, these poor souls, this Bank of America, through apparent greed, malfeasance, and irresponsibility is going broke at a rapid rate. What is even more odd is that these Bankers are begging the Government to bail them out! So ironic, especially given the way managers turn a cold shoulder if you ask for forgiveness when you are overdrawn by $5 and do not think it’s at all inequitable to hit you with a $35 punishment for this minor infraction! They might even add a lecture on why this would not happen if you kept a balanced checkbook! I always love that one!

I don’t know why, but I thought, in the spirit of fertile forgiveness, I should walk into the bank and offer each employee one of the eggs. To imagine the manager, the assistant manager and each teller delicately holding and caring for the egg so that it would not crack in their hands, or be risk having one roll off a desk was tender thought. Indeed such a gift in this rough economic time might help take their minds off the current siege of financial losses that must be playing havoc with their spirits. Just one egg in their hands would get each one thinking creatively again, how they could work for the public’s benefit (say, preventing home foreclosures), rather than using us as fodder for those easy profit margins, or what some call greed at our personal expense.
Sadly, by the time I go back into the City “my” Bank of America Branch was closed. Through the front doors there was only the sad, barren sight of fluorescent white light cast down on empty desks, computers and counters. I turned around and, before returning to my car, briefly thought about offering them one by one to people on their way home from work. Sometimes delicate gifts, no matter their fertile input, are the hardest to comfortably give away!

Haptic: The First 101 Days of President Obama, February 17, 2009
Listening to Eric Friedlander cello & strum, his album, Black Ice and Propane.

A day of intensities, darkness & silences, then a volume with slices of shape. I am not sure this will mean anything in particular. The President prepares to reassure Canada. A job of reassurances that the National Car is not about to go off the cliff! Nobody can even see the road. A curious country this is that profiles its psychological state through the Stock market. If Dad can bring home the bacon, more and more bacon, that’s neat. As if the kids are waiting to go to a better summer camp. This is no summer vacation.The wallets have gone clam shell. Who needs to hear my version of this drill again? So sweet to hear music driven by the contours of passion, the rhythm of a deep intelligence, tones as if off brilliant shades of blue water.
Thank you, Eric Friedlander.