Her mind was dirty but her hands were clean
At the temple beautiful


Sofya Mirvis, 2009

* Dust Congress House Poet Klipschutz has a new book out, This Drawn & Quartered Moon. Buy it now! More Soon.....


Worn Words
-- W.S. Merwin

The late poems are the ones
I turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight

it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there
there is not a sound in the whole night


What I Understood
-- Katha Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I'll be
thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.


Mickey Mouse Build A House
-- Paul Beatty

don't you ever feel
like in the game of life

you was the last motherfucker to say

NOT IT!

The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my door
And I don't want to hear it anymore


Ann Sanfedele, 7th Street between 1st and 2nd NYC, early 1970s
(note that the egg shop on the right is only open Thursday)

* From Harper's June 2013:

-- Percentage change in the past twenty years in the Consumer Price Index: +41

-- In the price of beer: +40

-- Of Books: -1

-- Number of students currently attending the thirteen Washington, D.C. public schools expected to close this year: 2,633

-- Number of them who are white: 2

* You Become Better with Age.

* "A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do." --W. H. Auden

i wanna see the movies of my dreams


Cara Ober, Audrey Hepburn, 2008

* A 1986 conversation with William Gaddis, the day Carpenter's Gothic came out.

* what to drink when you listen to The Tyde.

* From a December 11, 1970 letter from Hunter S. Thompson to Rolling Stone editor John Lombardi:

..."But by 'music' I don't mean the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. If the Grateful Dead came to town, I'd beat my way in with a fucking tire iron, if necessary. I think Workingman's Dead is the heaviest thing since Highway 61 and 'Mr. Tambourine Man' (with the possible exception of the Stones' last two albums...and the definite exception of Herbie Mann's Memphis Underground, which may be the best album ever cut by anybody). And that might make a good feature: some kind of poll on the Best albums of the '60s... or 'Where it was at in the Rock Age.' Because the '60s are going to go down like a repeat, somehow, of the 1920s; the parallels are too gross for even historians to ignore.

"So, for whatever it's worth -- to either one of us, for that matter -- here's the list from Raoul Duke:

1. Herbie Mann's Memphis Underground
2. Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home
3. Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited
4. Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead
5. Rolling Stone's Let it Bleed
6. Buffalo Springfield's Buffalo Springfield
7. Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow
8. Jazz innovator Roland Kirk's albums in general
9. Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain
10. Sandy Bull's Inventions

"Jesus, what a hassle to even think quickly about a list like that. Even now I can think of 10 more I might have added... but what the fuck, its only a rude idea. But a good one, I think, and particularly for RS. The implications of the final list would vibrate far beyond the actual music... it would be a very heavy fucking document. You may want to give it some thought."

time is the enemy time is the guide


iri5, Bob Dylan, cassette tape on canvas, 2009

Three Poems by Klipschutz:

Nostradamus Does Debbie Does Dallas
With A Layover In Las Vegas
Where He Tries His Slow Hand At Haiku

There will be cheerleaders.
with leg warmers up to here,

slot machines in every stall
where you won’t get toilet paper
if you don’t win.

- for Higgins


"Justin Bieber’s Monkey Quarantined in German"

The Welt is his oyster
The Welt is a ghetto
The Welt has too many borders

and we’re starting to forget Michael Jackson
but thanks to this homage he’s in our thoughts.


Another Thing

I can’t understand
is why my cat
uses Bob Dylan’s face
for a scratching post.

how can one ever think anything's permanent?


Stanley Whitney, Bodyheat, 2012

* How William Eggleston would photograph a baseball game. (via). excerpt:

Eggleston grew up in Mississippi, but his home has long been Memphis. He was a Chilton family friend, using a studio behind their house, and he took some promotional pictures of Big Star. (A musician as well, he can be heard playing the piano on Chilton’s cover of “Nature Boy” on Third.) Eggleston was born ten years before Chilton, but Chilton erased the gap by finding early fame at age sixteen, when he sang “The Letter” for the Box Tops. The two Memphisians are said to have been somewhat competitive with one another—and they do share certain sensibilities: a lyricism leavened by an attraction to the mundane; an offhandedness that almost accidentally uncovers complexities; omnivorous, unpredictable aesthetics. Both are hugely influential but impossible to mimic. If you listen closely to those first two Big Star albums, you hear the same supersaturation and heightened sound definition (like the famous “bite” on Big Star’s guitars) the eye detects in Eggleston’s dye-transfer photos. “The sheer management of tremendous energy in the high end,” as recently deceased power-pop genius (and Big Star devotee) Scott Miller put it, owes much to Big Star’s engineer, John Fry. Fry pushed Ardent Studio’s recording equipment almost to the point of overheating in order to capture the band’s dynamics—the aural equivalent of dye-transfer printing, the sound as rich and alive as blood.

Likewise the crack of the bat as it hits the ear: how everything comes instantly, fully, deeply alive—“faster than I can see,” as Chilton sings on “Daisy Glaze”—how it shocks you every time. It makes sense, geometrically. A baseball field, unlike other sports playing areas, is a cone, not a rectangle: a sonic shape, with all the energy forced into and out of the vertex. (Eggleston once complained that “more people than I can imagine … can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it.”) The center of the baseball cone—the outfield grass somewhere beyond second base—is usually empty, just as most of “The Red Ceiling” is nothing but empty red, and as so much of the tension in Big Star’s songs comes from how much uncluttered space there is: notes waiting to be played.

* Needlessly Crunk. Do check it out.

* "What I’m perpetually trying to work out is the relationship between coincidence and plan.” —Margaret Drabble