Mix Upload: Third/Sister Lovers

Kelly Writers House: Consolidation

This offers the second installment of the Personal Mythologies series at KWH in 2003 (9-20).

Readers included Brian Freedman and Adam Fieled.

Standout pieces include:
Coca-Cola Dream
Proust and Love
Hamlet and the Last Drop
Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

This mp3 offers the entire This Charming Lab reading, held at Kelly Writers House in 2004 (3-27).

Featured readers included Brian Freedman and Adam Fieled.

Standout tracks include:
Ode On Jazz (2)
Dominique
Introduction: This Charming Lab

Love in Vein

 Proust and Love is another prose sound file from Personal Mythologies II. 

Get Yer Ya-Yas Out

Intro: This Charming Lab is a chestnut from a 2004 reading at Kelly Writers House. 

In Baudelaire's famous prose poem, The Generous Gambler, we follow the narrator, ostensibly Charlie B. himself, as he encounters a mysterious stranger on a Parisian boulevard. The stranger, lo and behold, turns out to be Lucifer himself. Baudelaire depicts him as a man of wealth and taste, who has, indeed, been around for many a long year, and stolen many a man's soul and faith. Of course, Baudelaire follows him. They get regally smashed, and the Devil reveals to him the secrets of the universe. For Baudelaire, stoning the devil means getting him stoned, wooing him, bringing him into the human fold for a little Dionysian sport. The problem with the Baudelairian method of Satan-handling is that you lose your soul. The Devil corrupts you to the point that right and wrong have no meaning; irony enters the blood and chills it; paradox becomes poison; everybody looks like a leper; and you can't feel anything. It helps to remember our good old read-it-in-seventh-grade friend Young Goodman Brown. His encounter with Beelzebub leaves him embittered, disenchanted, but at least he still has a soul (or, as much of a soul as a tee-totaling Puritan can have). Young Goodman Brown stones the devil by rejecting him out of hand. Stoning here means throwing stones: even if it be from the glass house of mortal ignorance.

So, somewhere between the Baudelairian and Hawthornian models of Lucifer-human relations, we may find an ideal solution. We can lure the Devil into drunkenness and then bash him over the head with a rock, or we can bash him over the head with a rock and then slip him a joint to ease the pain (mostly our pain, of course). The Devil, the epitome of imperviousness, will go on being the great professional Ironist he is (a bit like Frank Zappa). The reward of this balanced approach for us, as writers, is that we can lure the Devil close to us, just close enough to learn some of his simpler tricks, then send him on his way when he starts demanding blood. Muslims the world over "stone the Devil," but I fear their ritual lacks a certain subtlety and understanding of Satanic grandeur- how it can be harnessed, refined, made to serve human ends. The Devil, more than any other Being, understands the complexity of existence. I would guess that things are as complicated in Hell as they are here. In the end, what is a art but a testament to the complexity of life: manifold levels and layers, perpetually enclosing us in a wide web. One could make the argument that art is essentially ironic, in the sense that it posits unreachable worlds that we long for, but cannot touch. We must face it: art is a Devil's game. We're here to play, and we guarantee you it will be more fun than Yahtzee.

Nineties New York (Dominique)

Experiencing Nineties New York, my blonde-time, through the rigors of Dominique. 

So many stories are wrapped up in this next poem, some hilarious, some harrowing. It all revolves around a single woman and her phenomenal ability to enthrall men. Her name was, and is, Dominique, and I've never met anyone like her. When I met her, I was a high school junior and she was a freshman. She was stunningly beautiful, with a seductive, feline grace that suggested both Lolita and Liv Tyler. This alone wouldn't qualify her to play such an interesting part in my life and the lives of those around me; there were a lot of beautiful girls at Cheltenham (High School); but Dominique had something more. What do we call that ineffable IT, that compelling magnetism that certain people have? Is it merely beauty, or charisma, or youth? For me, Dominique's charm lay in all these things, and also in something extra- a certain mischievous glint in her eye, a certain toss of her head, that suggested a sort of supernatural ecstasy, as if she were walking around in a narcotic trance all the time (which, I was later to learn, she was). Dominique was, quite simply, the most compelling female I'd met up to that point. Oddly enough, I didn't fall hard for her at all. I was able to keep my distance because, to a certain extent, I saw a hollowness beneath the charisma, an unwillingness to dig beneath surfaces and live truly. Dominique for me was a sort of caricature of adolescent sexiness, and I loved her archly condescending smile, but it didn't pierce me to the bone.

My best friend at the time, however, was absolutely, unbelievably, and pitifully smitten. He hung on her every word as though she was Godhead incarnate, recorded every encounter in an especially prized notebook, and just basically made an idiot of himself whenever she was around. Then, Dominique started dating another one of my friends, simultaneously making me her "Man of the Month," and things started to get really messy. A fist fight for me outside math class; a death threat; notes for me in the mail inscribed with lipstick, reading "He finds a deep satisfaction in pain; for that pain comes from her"; and other such nonsense. Basically Chris, aka Mr. Smitten, never forgave me for going after Dominique when he was so desperately in love, while Adam, Mr. Better-Attack-Me-Outside-Math-Class, became contrite years later and started randomly showing up at my gigs, camera in hand.

Having given you this background, you'll probably understand why running into Dominique on a sultry night in the East Village was such a big deal for me. I was lonely as hell in New York, overwhelmed, numbing myself with huge quantities of pot and speed pills. Dominique, for all her cattiness, rose to the occasion and delivered a knock-out performance as supportive friend with benefits. Unsurprisingly, she supported her academic career at NYU by dealing drugs, and I thought it would be fair game to throw that in, seeing as it was honest. Formally, this piece is me trying my best to write like Keats, sort of the same thing William Carlos Williams was doing in his early twenties. For me, WCW's Keatsian poems aren't that good, probably because he didn't know Dominique. She's a Muse- a real, honest-to-God morsel of madness. Not that I've ever forgotten her implacable selfishness, remorseless narcissism and insufferable insularity; but it pays to remember what's best in her.

Dance Monkey Apps on mp3

The best of the Apparition Poems from Dance Monkey on mp3:

#2028
#2029
#2034
#2040
#2041
#2043
#2047

All recorded, copyrighted at Carriage Hill, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, 2023

Thirty Years

Precisely thirty years since Jennifer Strawser and I did our dance in State College.