someone's selling all your heroes
and it seems such a shame


kirstiecat, Dean Wareham playing at the Museum of Contemporary Art superimposed with two shots of Andy Warhol's Paul America



The Couple in the Next Room
-- by John Ashbery

She liked the blue drapes. They made a star
At the angle. A boy in leather moved in.
Later they found names from the turn of the century
Coming home one evening. The whole of being
Unknown absorbed into the stalk. A free
Bride on the rails warning to notice other
Hers and the great graves that outwore them
Like faces on a building, the lightning rod
Of a name calibrated all their musing differences.

Another day. Deliberations are recessed
In an iron-blue chamber of that afternoon
On which we wore things and looked well at
A slab of business rising behind the stars.


Cheops’ Chaos
-- by Geoffrey Cruickshabnk-Hagenbuckle

I’ll believe all idols evil
Every Order false even
Our Father ordure
Preach fevered snakes

Or axe of fire—
How often golden oxen crow

Over drowning men
Again grown sick of love

Anger is a river bird
Consciousness is an emotion


Issues of Genius
-- by Tina Celona

She is competing in a race in which one runs across water in flippers, and sidestrokes with someone else holding on. She is the slowest. Afterwards one tries to buy supper but can only afford U-need-a Biscuits.

She is reading the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and learning about genius.

Every morning she gets up to see her husband off, then goes back to bed. She wakes up around lunchtime and eats. Then goes back to bed until dinner. Then goes back to bed.

Her friend writes to tell her that Nietszche said genius is a fiction forged by those who put it on a pedestal so they don’t have to measure themselves with it, and that she (her friend) has decided she does not believe in genius, nor is interested in the question of genius, that she has decided this recently, if not life would be unlivable.

Gertrude Stein has a thing for genius. She has met three geniuses in her lifetime: Alfred Whitehead, Pablo Picasso, and herself. That is pretty few!