The Iron & Wine show at the Ridglea in Fort Worth last night was great. We got there as doors were opening and bypassed the hundreds or so deep ticketing line to go straight to will-call and be one of the first thru the doors. The Ridglea is an interesting space - a large dance floor in front of the stage with theater style seating directly behind the dance floor, followed by bars and so on. Edith Frost opened - sort of a Mazzy Star shoegazer sound, nice lyrics, but not terribly precise on nailing the notes - too much scooping to the effect that she said "close enough" during the performance of one of her songs. Calexico from Tucson, AZ followed - I'd not heard of this band, except from Eduardo that they had just collaborated with Sam Beam. So their set came as a delightful surprise - Kort had dismissed them last week as sounding "Mexican", but the mariachi style trumpeteering which are only on a few of the songs reminded me a bit of the band James, but much more developed and drawing from the Mexican tradition - it is definitely the trademark of the band. During Calexico's set, projections of rodeos, horses, canyons and waterfalls were blasted on the wall behind the band. The images seemed to be timed to resonate with motifs in the music, though I wondered if the band actually rehearsed to the images to create the synchronicities. Iron & Wine gave a nice performance with some of the same images from Calexico recycled in the projections - though the backdrop projections also incorporated illustrations of fruit, flowers and stars. After a short set of songs drawn mostly from Woman King, Calexico joined Iron & Wine onstage for a few songs from their new collaborative album. We left after 2 songs to avoid the parking lot rush of traffic post-concert.

Ray Bianchi and Bill Allegrezza from Chicago were in town this week giving a reading for Chris at UT Arlington. Wasn't able to make the reading due to work schedule but headed over to the Lakewood Landing yesterday evening to meet and hang out with the poets. Ray runs the Chicago Postmodern Poetry website and Bill publishes a wonderful e-zine called Moria. It was good to hang out with Chicagoans, for me recalling Fall walks in Hyde Park looking for wild parrots in the tree tops (Bill sees them regularly!), 57th Street Books, and strolls through Osaka Garden. Ray tells me that the Chinatown on the Southside is booming and now borders Bridgeport. Having seen Chinatown in Boston and other cities get downsized and gentrified, this is happy and inspiring news - Chuimei Ho, wife of the curator of Asian arts at the Field Museum, is also building a museum for Chinese Americans and Nancy and Yuchia over at Columbia run the Center for Asian Arts and Media. What is it about Chicago that has allowed the success of the Chinese? I don't know, but I miss the city. And when is Joy Yee's coming to the rest of America?

Walker Buckner at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

Walker Buckner at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

My friend Walker is doing a show at Lori Bookstein which opens on November 10 (click on image for detail). Walker contributed the cover art to Equivalence and is an amazing landscape and figure painter - one of the finest human beings and artists I have ever had the pleasure of calling a friend. Every few years he has a big solo show in Manhattan. If you live in New York and art is your thing - either viewing it or collecting it, then go see this show. If it is like anything like Walker's past exhibitions, the paintings will get snapped up quickly.

Ayurvedic remedy for clearing of the energy field: Draw a warm bath, add juice from one lime and several sprinkles of turmeric powder, until your bathwater takes on a yellowish cast. Tried it on Tuesday night after class with my 15 grad students and felt and slept much better.

Thinking about the PhD program at Goldsmiths College in London. Anyone who knows anything, please back channel.

New issue of Coconut just launched.

Reading books that I have held on to for years and never read as we start moving things into storage. Cathy Song's Picture Bride includes a few ekphrastic pieces deserving of interest - poems on O'Keefe and Utamuro's woodblock prints. Anne Waldman's homage to Ted Berrigan Nice to See You - I haven't read that much of Ted's work, so this collection of friends and poets praising and imitating Berrigan didn't leave much of an impression on me. Going in the stack for Paperbacks Plus. Because I have been reading Margaret Gibson's work again, I was reminded to read her husband David McKain's memoir In God's Country about growing up in Bradford, Pennsylvania, the son of a Christian minister. A tender and sad narrative about the poverty of McKain's childhood and the dynamics of his family, shaped by his father's "spells", or epileptic fits. Leafing too through a copy of Haggard and Halloo, a poetry journal put out by Travis Catsull of Austin (formerly of the Pacific Northwest). Travis does all the collage and visual work for this publication, fantastic and surreal images standing out against a white background. My publisher sent me a couple of books on opera/music and performance several months back, and one of the books is a collection of interviews with artists like Yoko Ono, John Cage, Laurie Anderson and others. Cage has a series of mesostich pieces on mushrooms in this text and Ono assembles together lyrics from her songs and instruction poems. Browsed thru Denise Duhamel's libretto BEE OP as well. I realize that part of my resistance to working on the opera with G.P. was the focus on adapting G.X.'s text which seemed to leave little room for creativity/interpretation. Well, in actuality, there may be room for expansion and development because the characters will need songs and solos and while the protagonist of the play has a few monologues, other characters will need to be able to show off their gifts and abilities as well.

The poetry scene in Austin was amazing - warm and generous as Naropa. For my reading on Saturday with prose writer Rex Rose, 46 people (standing room only) came out to 12th Street Books for the 1st reading of the Skanky Possum season. Many talented and interesting poets in the audience, including Scott Pierce, Paul Foreman, Corinne Lee Grenier of Winnow Press, Susan Briante, Farid Matuk, and David Hadbawnik. Hoa and Dale are untiring in their energy and patience as loving parents of two very active and bright little boys. After the reading, folks gathered at Hoa and Dale's home in East Austin where conversations included giant squids and creative things you can do with apples. Lots of overlaps between the Austin, Naropa, and Bay area communities, poets coming and going. This felt like a good place to be - we missed the bats at sundown but perhaps on another trip - that and a swim at the Barton Springs aquifer which was a cool 68 degrees on this visit and a little too cold for my tastes. What was great about the group in Austin, the mingling of visual artists, musicians, and poets, friends getting together and supporting the work, the passing of the proverbial hat, everyone contributing to making the community the best it can be, a DIY attitude.

The new James Bond is no Pierce Brosnan. Daniel Craig is to be the first blond Bond. I must say that this news comes as a disappointment. It's hard to not associate Craig with his roles in Road to Perdition or Sylvia. Why not Ewan McGregor or Julian Sands or someone handsome and dashing?

Poetry Reading with Shin Yu Pai
Sponsored by Skanky Possum
Saturday, October 15, 7 p.m.
12th Street Books
827 W. 12th Street
Austin, TX 78701

Scott Pierce of effing press is making a broadside from my vispo poem "console" for this event. Stop by if you're in Austin.

And Saturday morning lecture at UTD for one of my grad student's classes of undergrad students. I hear they connect to the Equivalence poems - well, we'll see what they connect to after my talk....

The Story of the Weeping Camel
My friend Gao Ping told me about this documentary film about a year ago and it finally became available in the little video store in Southside's basement. The film is set in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and follows a nomadic family of herders. Daily life is portrayed - cooking in yurts, preparing for sandstorms, moving from place to place. The story centers on a brown camel who after a long and painful labor gives birth to a white colt which it rejects. Whenever the colt comes near its mother to suckle, she kicks and spits at it and does everything she can to avoid her little one. The herders milk the camel and feed the white colt thru a horn and also at times, tie the legs of the mother camel, forcing her to nurse her son. But the mother camel is unyielding and the colt is abandoned and sickly, its sad cries for its mother are plaintive and heart-breaking, contrasting with the intimate closeness of the herding family and the other camel mother and colt. So the herders send their two sons, Dude and Ugna, out on camelback to Aichen Center where they are told to purchase batteries for grandpa's radio and to hire the services of a violinist who can come and do a special ceremony that will break the mother camel's resistance. Dude and Ugna set off across the dessert, passing thru communities where the residents are obviously better off than the herders - with televisons in their homes, electricity and satellite dishes. The boys make it to Aichen Center where they are taken to the music school to speak to the master teacher who agrees to come. On the way out of town, they stop at markets and local stores for their grandfather's batteries, where they are the only people dressed in traditional Mongolian clothing. Dude, the older boy, buys his younger brother ice cream and an Adidas hat. Ugna longs for the TVs he sees in the stores. They return to their parents' encampment after a lengthy journey, followed by the master teacher who brings his 2 stringed instrument, what appears to be a traditional Chinese erhu (?) possibly. The musician ties the instrument to the mother camel by placing it across her hump. As the wind touches the strings, the instrument plays and both the mother camel and the other camels in the herd stand hypnotized. The musician removes the instrument and begins to play while the female herder, mother of Dude and Ugna, sings a beautiful tonal piece to the mother camel. A tear falls from the mother camel's eye and the white colt is brought over to suckle, at which point, the mother camel begins to weep, finally accepting her child. This is a strange and beautiful movie that had this quality of tearing the heart open. I thought about the connection between having the Mongolian mother sing to the camel and bringing the mother camel back to her basic goodness and essence - two mothers turning back to what they know. In the coda of the movie, Ugna gets his TV and his satellite dish.

I'm in between projects which means that I'm reading more heavily than usual as I try to figure out what the next project will be. Some microreviews/notes:

Silk
by Alessandro Baricco
A "novella" written in 1-2 page chapters, Silk tells the story of a French merchant who travels to Japan on multiple visits to purchase the country's famed silkworms and bring them back to his rural village which depends on the silk industry. Throughout the course of his exchanges, the merchant, who is married, falls in love with a young, mysterious woman in Hara Kei's retinue. She writes him a note on a scrap of paper that he has translated back in his native France by the Japanese madame who runs the local brothel. After which point he becomes even more obsessed with returning. But when he returns a fourth time, he finds a country at war. There are no silkworms to be purchased and Hara Kei, his once benevolent liaison, nearly kills him for scheming to have a relationship with his mistress. Soon after the merchant returns to France, a letter written in Japanese arrives. When the merchant develops the courage, he goes back to the Japanese madame to have the text translated. An erotic and passionate missive, the writer of the note makes love to the merchant on the page, then begs him to forget her. Herve lives out the rest of his mediocre days and his wife passes away. When visiting his wife's gravesite, he notices a wreath of blue flowers that he has come to associate with the Japanese madame who once helped him. He tracks her down and discovers that it was his deceased wife who asked the madame to copy out a note in Japanese which she had written - hoping that her husband would let go of his romantic fantasy. The book relies heavily on repetition of certain passages (the detailed journey from France to Japan) and creates a poetic rhythm to its narrative.

Feast of Love
by Charles Baxter
A former student in Boston gave me this book when I left town, and as with all gifted books (Silk was a 30th birthday gift), I feel compelled to read them - perhaps more so than the books that I personally accumulate, waiting to be read. This book was a finalist for a National Book Award, and I can't say that I can see why - there was one particularly powerful scene/confrontation in the book between 2 of the characters where a young woman almost gets raped by her father-in-law, but other than that, I found it a difficult book to sustain. The story is told thru the 1st person point of view of various characters - a bookstore manager, a barista, a philosopher who is neighbor to the bookstore manager, and the bookstore manager's 2 ex-wives. The bookstore manager is not particularly compelling - the first woman he marries becomes a lesbian and the 2nd woman he marries leaves him within a month to go back to the married lover she was with before and during her marriage to the bookstore manager. The barista and her lover have lots of sex throughout the book and have an empassioned relationship that ends when he abruptly dies of a heart condition while out on the football field. The father-in-law of the barista is a mad drunk who makes a play for her when she is pregnant. I totally couldn't relate to the characters in this book, nor did I find them terribly sympathetic. I almost entirely skipped over the passages narrated by the philosopher who held a great deal of guilt for his son's mental illness, too many high falutin' references to Kierkegaard and such.

a story that won't make
breaking news: 400 migratory birds
killed flying into television wires

I've been rereading Japanese Book-Binding by Kojiro Ikegami and thinking about structures which might be interesting to experiment with for the love hotel poems presentation.

There is a chapter in Ikegami's book on Japanese ledgers - the form used for traditional account books and guest registries for inns. They are typically "oblong books", wider they they are tall." There are also accordion style ledgers, and the daifuku cho is the form that is best known for its use in inns. These editions are typically strung together with a long cord so that "in case of fire, a common occurrence in crowded Japanese towns, they could be flung into a nearby well and later retrieved without damage to paper or ink." The history of these books is fascinating!

In thinking about the sort of form that the love hotels work might take, the ledger seemed like an interesting choice for its functional/traditional purpose.

Other ideas hashed around included a simple accordion, butterfly accordion, and an unbound structure which could be wrapped and "bound" in fabric, referential to Araki photographs/S&M and hand-stamped with the information on the press.