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What then are the ends of poetry, in view of its recent technological empowerment? Once upon a time it mattered that not enough folks had access to poetry and not enough of it was being read, written, or thought about. Now, apparently, the opposite is the case (per David Alpaugh’s article). Let us say then, following Alpaugh’s discussion, that the poetry of today is being written in a gluttonous spirit of accretion, of interminable addition. The web allows us this luxury. Its content, inversely, will almost always deal with the opposite of addition: with elliptical subtraction or with layman eschatology (i.e. the death of poetry, death of punk, death of…) We here at Hydra are somehow involuntarily fascinated with endings, specifically the end of days. But also: the ends of things and their uses, because the end of something is inherent in its purpose, its telos. The poetry of representation seeks to define and finish with terms and their branches and derivations; but it also somehow manages to splice meanings and multiply them tenfold. [Read More]
Summer, 2009: At the far end of an island, I found myself pulled down, pulled to pieces, pulled in half. Should I stay or should I go I asked myself many times. And as many times, I had no answer. So I smoked and I drank and I began to work on my epic poem, Atlantis, thinking it, if nothing else, would satisfy as direction, religion and conviction. It started with a translation of Homer’s Neukia episode into Nahuatl–Pound’s Homer through Divus into the language of the Nahua. The structure of the project was imagined hence. But this article is not about that poem–it is about that moment; an article on that poem is forthcoming. I was at an island’s end, low on conviction, heavy on the passion that had brought me so far, wanting to return to it or–at least!–get rid of the DISTASTE for the professionalized HIGH DISREGARD of the artist, the maker, the poet as IS, by which I had been offended at that time. [Read More]
The poetry realm, with its current pressures of multiplicity, market-value, and massification, has devolved to a mathematics of representation. The representation urge stems from the google-culture we’ve helped build, nurture, and augment with voluntary aplomb. We are after all the chief preservationists of a web philosophy that labors to itemize and catalogue the alterity of our global existence, if only to document the sheer numerousness of class and culture types who share democratic access to the Internet. Words, documents, pictures and a googol of characters, files, pages, maps, and sites are stored and maintained in the cloud of our collective (un)knowing. (We know that what we don’t know is out there, on the web, known already.) [Read More]
I wanted to start off this post feigning nostalgia for Al Jarnow’s amazing films, but I admit in a rare act of self-effacing honesty that I have no childhood attachment to the experimental and educational filmmaker’s work. I didn’t grow up in the 70s watching Yaks bash into the screen on Sesame Street, nor did I ever park myself in front of “Cosmic Clock” on PBS’s 3-2-1 program in the 80s (videos incoming below jump). And while I did mature slightly in the late 80s (from a conglomeration of inanimate cells into a healthy snot-nosed kid), and could have feasibly seen reruns of these shorts and more, it never happened — or at least my memory fails me. But, I did just watch these videos on Youtube, and let me say, you don’t need any nostalgia to thoroughly enjoy Jarnow’s poignantly abstract yet immediately effective shorts. The Brooklyn-born filmmaker’s talent for reflecting on the nature of animation, stop-motion, and geometry in simple visual experiments is executed with stunning grace. Yes my friends, inspiring thought can be fun! [Read More]  I’m a Caveman / Your modern ways frighten and confuse me - El-P, “Deep Space 9mm“ 1877. Dr. Richard Gatling writes to a friend of his new invention: “a machine … which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.” 1910. Nicholas Roerich recounts to Igor Stravinsky his vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death before a circle of elders who offer her as a sacrifice to the god of Spring. 1882. The Gatling Gun is used at the Bombardment of Alexandria. The British Royal Navy successfully quashes the Urabi Revolt. A century later, Charles Taylor paraphrases Hilaire Belloc: “Whatever happens / we have got the Gatling gun / and they have not.”
I’ve been excited about the prospect of chess boxing ever since the Wu-Tang Clan rapped about “da’ mystery” back in 1993. Who knew it would become a certified sport — not just a lyrical meditation on physical and mental strategies of creativity and war? It was imagined and put into practice by a performance artist with a heart for getting his chops down on both chess and boxing, Iepe “the Joker” Rubingh. Yes, the first game in fact took place in an art gallery. The hybrid game combines the disciplines by starting on the board, alternating in a total 6 rounds of chess and 5 of boxing. Either a knockout or a checkmate wins the game. [Read More]
Watching a Sergei Parajanov film is an cinematic experience you are unlikely to forget. His work is akin to a tone-poem, a prism of evocative images that combines magic, folk-mythology, and alchemy. It offers the aesthetic dislocation of surrealism and conjoins it with the pageantry of poetry. Parajanov forces you to to enter a child’s lexicon of imagination, a sage’s vision of time and memory, and a painter’s feel for the composition of color.
When Shaquille O’Neal first entered the NBA, way back in ‘92, his reputation for aggressive hardwood domination and monstrous dunks preceded him from LSU. It seems that it is the same wherever he goes. Last Friday his debut as art curator through the Flag Art Foundation with the show Size Does Matter shows that Shaq Attack (or to Shaq attack or to attack like Shaq) continues to be a verb denoting unstoppable momentum on and off the court. [Read More]
I recently wrote a review on Gil Scott-Heron’s utterly compelling new effort, I’m New Here (XL Recordings) for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. It’s his first album in 16 years, produced and largely guided by the creative vision of UK rave music pioneer (surprised?) Richard Russell. While listening to the record and trying to summon the right words to circumnavigate something of its significance, I ran into an interpretive difficulty that continues to puzzle me. I’m New Here is primarily spoken, sung, and told in the first-person–and when it’s delivered in third-person, it feels as if Scott-Heron is looking at himself from afar. Interludes catching Scott-Heron off-guard in candid moments help to paint a picture of raw personal confession; I couldn’t help but attributing the statements to his own life, the man behind the music. It’s a typical hermeneutic problem in art criticism, or more basically and profoundly, in the experience of art. How do we distinguish between an autobiographic or a confessional performative work? What difference might that diagnosis make in our experience and interpretations of the art? [Read More] |
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