Producing on Saturday Night

Home-carni(val) is a place

Distracted by the overwhelming Here
and Now,
My place is easily dreamed,
forged from meat moods:
to tower and wavering;
or, too tired is soo trite for excusing;
able is relative.

This, evidenced at least for disrupting
Absence, and void avoidance.

Political Agency is to Tea Party as Art is to ...

Ethan Lipton & his orchestra | PRI's The World

http://www.theworld.org/2010/10/12/ethan-lipton/

This here's a 7 minute interview with my brother, Ethan Lipton, on PRI's "The World" (broadcast on 10/10/2010). Listen, as the interviewer works to unpack a historical cabaret context in Ethan's songs, Ethan continually shifts the discussion to exploring the significant role my guidance and support have had on his life decisions, his creative process and the quirky intellectualism of his musical stylings.
Bravo Bro!

A Doctor's Office Is Waiting

Hegemony In Action: Income Inequality Makes The Poor More Conservative

 

		Income Inequality Makes The Poor More Conservative
	Income inequality makes the poor more conservative -- more likely to support smaller government and actually to perpetuate income inequality, two academics argue in a...

 

(grafted from The Huffington Post, 10/07/10)

•

Spiritual Politics

HVAC Air Filters:
     20 x 24 x 1
     18 x 24 x 1
     12 x 12 x 1

Dishwasher detergent (green bottle)

Scented dryer sheets

Bulk toilet paper

Compassion and/or empathy

Light bulbs (swirly Xpensive kind)

Gratitude n' willingness

Scrub sponges (non-scratch)

Gravy mix (3 pks)

Mellon balls

Perspectival about Cloudlessness (an "Of&From")

Pew Study: Atheists, Agnostics Know The Most About Religion

 

		Atheists, Agnostics Know The Most About Religion
	A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major...

 

From The Huffington Post (09/28/2010)

Drafting Floral (addendum to "Synthetic")

Synthetic

is a rosebud 
long stemmed and vanity thorned
in a blue or glass vase posing
 
rose moan, trembles loafing,
its brown lipped petals forage
nostalgically, regrets for forgetting
 
the scars of artifice
defiant with a bruised swagger

there, right there, is a rose waiting
for you to compose it beautiful

here, on the front porch or balcony,
is a plastic rose placed careful,
pretending roseness is a perspective
about and abounds your willingness

when does a rose exact clarity
when are its ideas accidental

self-pitying is self imposed
for a self doubting rose in repose
 
it is an embarrassing occupation
this correcting of your memories

Cicada thrum and the drooped frame of the cowboy's mustache

To pass time, the cowboy’d climb
down from his reedy steed
To pick up empty soda cans and bottles
that verily litter the verdant plains, 
collecting them patiently
and postured purposeful
in a feed sack he’d pinched 
from a grocery loading dock
in one of the nameless and dying 
small towns he’d proved through
on his westward prowl.
 
Each day alone
(when the sun quits
it's quitting time/
noon is a boon
to napping under cool)
Necessarily lonelier
(rise and shine
for the promise of progress/
the time of your life
is now or never for the better)
Sculptural solitude settles in.
 
Chain smoking romantically
the cowboy eyes yonder nearby...
confides in his diary ...
stirs beans with a wooden spoon ...
darns holes in his undergarments ...
whittles n whistles to bore his insomnia ...
boot scrapes with a cedar branch
and whispers into a meaty breeze,
“damn, I am nature – too messsy for words”

He squints, he sits. 

The cowboy posed on a ridge between two great mesas: supposing the nearby distances with caustic ambivalence; inhales deep the prairie's dusky flatulent bloom; caroms between memories of loves that bound him fast and loves that led him to embrace lonesome.  He reckons himself attuned to his fears, sincerely, reflective and accepting of all he's done and the roles he's played in outcomes prior to his current circumstance. 
 
Inching towards, inching away ... baby stepping is a baby sometimes falling down ... mapping any ol next-frontier or out-of-box hankering. Certain like a man of steel weighed down by a coat with pockets full of broken magnets. 

Recalls a saloon floor's peanut-shelled clutter and the echo of floozie slurs. Card players, tall hatted even inside, and a cane barrel appropriated for branding iron on haunch anticipations. Prideful sniffs to catch her scent leaving through the buck and sway of flapping doors.
 
Cowboy pause to bed alongside the razzle dazzle of cacti thumbs  and respite from his dust tour of the great wide open. Giddy for the next day's roam and blanket skinned against the cold lonesome of occupancy under a billion stars, his eyes close meditating on the vast variety of choices that might birth his tomorrow. 
 

Sometimes I Have Nothing to Say

So I am quieter then
And now

The Machinery of Silence

I was caught today at the train crossing on my way to pick up the kids. Me and everyone else: Engines idling, thunderclaps spitting the leftover dribble from yesterday's storm, the gentle rocking lull of engine rumble. All of us on our way someplace else. All of us stuck in-between "there" and "here" together, waiting. Despite the roar and clang of boxcars brimming with granite pounding along over steel rails, my anticipation of the youthful squeal and complaint of tired and possibly ornery children that was soon to fill the car left me marveling and soothed by my current circumstance -- awash in the machinery of silence and quelled by the symphony of machines silencing the moment ...

Movie Review: MACHETE!

Robert Rodriguez new film, MACHETE, opened this week, and in talking about I don't want to give too much away or set the stage for too many expectation. Blood, guts, steel, subterfuge, redemption and heat. Women with smooth skin and men who hide behind their pores and scars. There, I've said enough -- probably too much.

With both kids ensconced at friend's homes for sleep overs, my wife and I headed out for some grownup fun. Thankfully, Rodriguez homage to 70's era socially critical exploitation films satisfies completely with daunting and delicious self-aware glee.

I'm usually not one to celebrate violence as a trope for social justice, but Rodriguez' use of satire as a political weapon is so carefully honed and cinematically honeyed that I was sucked in to even the film's most explicitly depicted death scenes. The good guys are really good, and the bad guys are really really bad in this bloody critique on American xenophobia. I even laughed out loud during several moments, and I never laugh out loud.

While the film won't garner any academy award nods for acting, the actors (big names and small) all make perfect sense in and of their roles. Further, it's always nice to see Austin, TX put to good use as the interesting and complicated small big-city that it is.

Fortunately for me, my wife also found the movie to be an awesome visual and visceral escape from our routine kid-centric forays in cinema. I highly recommend to those of you with a refined taste for satire, slaughter and revenge hewn justice.

Labor Day Weekend -- Yeah Workers!

ACLU: Sign the Pledge: Stand for Religious Freedom

http://action.aclu.org/site/PageNavigator/Religious_Freedom_Bloomberg?s_src=UNW100001ACT&s_subsrc=100902_religious_freedom_nonAT

A Song of Progress for You

you, you are a million years old today,
you sapiens:
bi-pedal and frontal lobed;
​big idea'd;
​maker and remaker of things.
 
but dates don’t matter
for a tool putterer like you.

your relatives are real,
really busy with their own lives:
wearing history;
machining sincerity;
connecting improvements:
​meticulous evaluators of the particular.
 
"happy birthday human"
the plains whisper,
"we admire your entrepreneurial spirit."

the seas and boneless sky sing,
"gosh, everything ours is yours,
we applaud your industriousness."

​the trees nag, “I remember when
​you leapt out my limbs,
that was no joke,
tree faller-outer."
 
the animals chorus,
"you began too thin spined to speak,
you knuckle dragged grunting, 
just wrecks of hair knot and gnat picking in small groups,
​loping and hoping to bend bronze
​or shake an acre."
 
the continents moan shifty,
"you are a big skull now,
all pulp filled up in the brain case.
you talker and detail preener:
efficient at key and lost sock finding;
weary of loneliness;
nervous at parties."

the wind chimes in,
"you know the story:
you read a lot of books;
act clever and practice emoting;
like to categorize understanding
and reflect on self-doubt.

happy birthday,
good luck."


*

Deja Vu Like

 
Weather is amazing and amassing. This heat and this moisture are teaching about feelings, about feeling more. Most people I know are too self-conscious to talk about their feelings, when you think about it. Even when you think too much. Every year I am surprised by the change in light that Fall brings. I am: first, surprised; secondly, I feel small and vulnerable and chaotic in comparison to the systemic rhythms of the universe; then, I still feel surprised, but I also feel hungry.  That butter clarity of Fall light is always nearly cliché. Who isn't experiencing embarrassment at rememorying our past is sleeping. In the afternoon a nap is a good place for dreams. For over two decades I’ve been susceptible to nostalgia about the seasons. This happens out of the blue. When those clouds smear across a sunset vista, afternoon’s blue is torn again and again. Marks the away-slipping of day. Ordinarily wonderful, again and again.



*

Forward Fur Positions

cat cry is a cat laughing maybe
cat song moans loafing

that purr apparatus seeks repair
reposed skeptically for claw lashing

peeks efforting fully
for a squint of scene

whiskers a door frame
paws unremorsefully at a heat source

calamity song crooner
blatant assumer of sleep

you ribald earner of greedy pats
wavering about a stretch

your extensions are completely
enormous compositions

*

My children look smaller than I anticipate the further away they go

How Standardized Testing Damages Education (from FairTest.org)

http://www.fairtest.org/facts/howharm.htm

In Texas, the majority of my children's education is framed through the TAKS tests. The entirety of their academic curriculum is structured to meassure how they and their peers perform on them. Maybe this isn't the best way to teach our student-citizens. Maybe we need more information on how these tests detemine or effect their own results of who is "exemplary," who is "good," and who is ... eh, bad(?).

*

New Dylan Recordings Unveiled (from THE DAILY BEAST)

New Dylan Recordings Unveiled

Today Columbia Records announced the release of two new sets of unreleased recordings, one of which shows how he changed songwriting and the other how his songs were meant to be heard—in mono.

View the full article

*

Illumistimulati: 11 Reasonable Places Your Stimulus Dollars Went

From the Huffington Post -- 08/26/2010:

 

		11 Reasonable Places Your Stimulus Dollars Went
	Republican leaders insist, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that President Obama's $800-billion-or-so stimulus package from last year hasn't accomplished anything. (This is driving...

 

Ancient for waiting

 
crocodile evidence 
is a gnashing party 
of teeth 
against bone
 
croc purposes a tearing machine
rents creek and flesh beautifully
 
elegant for stability 
crocodile ballet is slow motioned
     against evolutionary change
     agnostic regarding clocks
     tantric about concentration
 
a crown of serrated white scalpel
grins ragged and rapid
over delicate gums
 
runs like a toddler or toy duck
all parts raging
empathy for fellow flailers
 
croc patience buries in mud
parents skeptically for duty

croc school is lonelier
croc learning remedies
from missed opportunity
 
that furnace is a cold blooded killer
wears permanent stealth casually 
 
premonitions young boy fascinations 
for gun slinging and politics

Cartography for Moseying Cowboys

Some things about my awareness of time never change. It takes longer to get someplace than it does to get back. Waiting slows a clock down. Time flies when you're having fun. A watched pot never boils. Friends
always wait to arrive until after you've started looking for them out the window.

This chair is so comfortable. It seems the Platonic ideal of chairness. Everything about my body is consumed by it's conturs, it's leathery texture a second skin, it's seat cushions my worry. The chair devours time and place completely.

It is not a difficult decision, but rather, a choice to decide or not to. Sit or get up. Stay or go. Be or become. These are all actions, all arguments for motion in one direction or another. In the interm, deferment becomes a viable option.

Clouds thump wind visible

Parked cars boulder wait

Adjectival conversation elucidates

That fog is mysterious should come as no surprise

An alligator becomes tangled in a cotton patch

A brainstorm thunders, distantly authentic

Thanks to words
I can assert and salve
My fears (ours are real --
       consequential frequently).

A dandelion's blast
Makes all directions
Possible.





*

They remind me of what I've learned to forget [text follows pics]

Mumblings on the first day of school, sun-cooking, and about how my
intolerance is mine, all mine!

My kids started back to elementary school today. But it doesn’t feel like summer is over. The thermostat outside a storage facility read 104 degrees on the way to pick them up. Gaseous evaporation waves wafgled (wiggled & wafted) across the median and asphalt on South Lamar in mid-day. You could take a half-billion recalled salmonella laden eggs and make a giant inedible omelet on the streets of Austin on a day like this.


I have no tolerance for heat. My body doesn’t self-regulate temperature real well, and between that and my limbs that move like lumber, I struggle not to make everyone else as miserable about the heat as I am. Like most things that grind me down, I operate under the delusion that I can gift the folks around me with unrepercussive silence by refusing to share my suffering. This delusion is replete with crown and medals for stoic bravery and unbridled kindness.

I sat listening to an update on the “ground zero mosque” on NPR while waiting at a series of lights on my way to the school. It reminded me that, in addition to my intolerance of all meteorological phenomena that I disagree with, I also have no tolerance for other people’s failures to be tolerant. I’m a real Gandhi about accepting religious difference, a regular Albert Schweitzer about my fellow humans’ rights and liberty, a veritable Rich Little for echoing the multi-perspectival acceptance of relativism. However, I have no patience at all for other folks who flat out refuse an invitation to others for the same social privileges that they demand for themselves.

Rather than wait in the car, which quickly began to mimic a convection oven once the engine and AC was turned off, I entered my daughter’s second grade class. As if in some post-modern Deweyian mélange’ , I observed a quietly collaborative effort at clean-up being practiced by my daughter and her classmates, quickly followed by a few moments of Yoga to wind down from the day. The kids were awesome, unskeptical, eager and open to the newness of it all. My interpretive frame of intolerance seemed impossible to grok at that moment.

My son came bounding across the school’s lawn with the enthusiasm and swagger that only a fifth grader can evidence in a school that only goes through the fifth grade. The spastic sway of loopy arms cutting the atmospheric cauldron, the jangly shock of bounding wavy hair, and the broad smile on his face all worked to assure me that the day had gone well – that not only had he survived, but he had thrived and felt encouraged about his role in the universe. The car ride home involved a rushed verbal battle between the kids to please me with recounts of their many uniquely fascinating experiences at school, and specifically, examples of being in league with others learning.

While they both plugged into homework and snack, I returned to my earlier musings on intolerance. I’ve learned how to hate certain things. Stuff like heat and stoplights. Circumstances like waiting without a chair and standing in a check-out line. People who deny the science of climate change, stem-cell research and evolution. Groups who espouse cultural segregation and are satisfied with inequity in basic human and legislated civil rights. I’ve been a damn good student, given myself ribbons and trophies for “doing the right thing,” and gathering facts to avoid hypocrisy. Now, I really need to learn how to make sure my kids end up just like me, only way better.

Hello

& we are big-grinning summer in Texas
& we are sentimental & loud for your happiness
& wishing you nearby, we hope your health is well
& we implore the universe to shower you
with kindness
& laughter & landscapes & love

season's greetings
in every season

especialy for you
right away

sincerely

IMG_3564.JPG

(re)Imaging Family Folk to Memoir Mundane Moments

Llama Regarding Locale

long lashed neck craners gambol, 
fret petulant about pen ambiance.
   
those llamas lip wriggle a scheme
dreamy, view silky thru cartoon lenses.

llama days drift dystopically:
giggle at wannabe gentlemen farmers; wear curls naturally and more softer;
raise a fuss over dashed expectations;
cling nostalgic to barometric memories;
pose quizical to shifts in hemisphere. 

    Llamas work better together -
    Llama reunions are all drama -
    Llamas prefer slope -
    Llamas take stands on Terra firma -
    Llama posture is apolitical -

that llama is a tourist for snack time;
this llama pines for more florals;
here is a llama waiting impatiently;
there is a llama impervious to weather.

anytime llamas lean is a resting.

your llama quiet is creepier,
suspiciously more silent than soundless:
eager like leaves for wind.  

marketing llama is instructional,
invites paradigm transformation
for novices and other carnivors:
    chew eagerly with mouth wide open,
    sauté in heavy butter,
    sleeve lightly with salt to taste.



 
 

Museum Vs. Kids: an endeavor towards making Summer (more Visual/visible)

We bleat and clambour
Over all our eyes devour

Louder than they'd like us
From corner to corner

Our trust in color is industrious

This viewing is naked
Wide-open for seeing new

Location, Location, Location

 
A soul is awkwardly placed. Lovingly recollects and hoping about the unknown. Assumes use for amusing concerns about forever.
 
He built a house for his soul to visit. Left a key under a rock in case he needed to get in. For long periods he’d forget which rock the key was placed under in the garden. Sometimes he’d grow furious at his forgetting and spend hours lifting rocks and sieving through the yard for the key. Then, seemingly out-of-the-blue, he’d recall that the key was not under a rock, but rather, at the bottom of an empty planter in the corner of the front porch.
 
Henry Ford kept the wax-sealed jar he’d used to collect Edison’s last breath. The jar is carefully labeled and rests on a podium in the middle of a museum that also collects the progressive histories of washing machines, automobiles and office furniture.
 
For forty days and forty nights, the rain was falling. Each drop like mercury crashing, beautiful for destroying or a purification. 

For forty years wandering the desert, disappointed and hoping for gifts or clarifying explanations on how the past might make a sense of the future, presently, hoping each mirage might know a more fulfilling place. 

For all magician's stories end the same, the audience pleased at their own faith in the promise of mystery:  for ten years, missing between key events;  for rocks leapt up off of into heavens; for fat bellied smiles and celestial sized phallus pleased;  for pews and bended knee;  for davening under the weight of of memory and ritual, or water dipping away congenitally seized sins;  for soured grapes, special cups and sacred shawls; for colored sand mandalas, breath blown meticulously out of creation;  for sacrifice, admissions of self-doubt and point of view;  for prayer and the need or want that supposes the necessity of prayer;  and for the work of trying to figure it all out.

For we, together gathered disparate, are here and now. 

Headcold + iphone =

Being in a car, from place to place

The city and I
Exhalers and breathers-in
Broaden the scope of scene
Propell view discretely
Foraging for you

Sleep, Pain & Making Weakness Naked: Drafting an Explication on the State of My Unreadiness

I hate sleep more than you. This presumes you hate sleep, at least  some of the time. A faulty premise no doubt, but this is the place I start from -- that sleep is a thing to be feared, a realm of torture and disgrace, a hated necessary requirement of human beingness.

My imagination on the matter is bound to a perspective wrought through the discomfort of physical  circumstance, and thus, can only suppose that there are no other options but for one to hate sleep. So, hopefully, I hate sleep more than you. This  is a fact for people with chronic pain. At least it is my fact about  my pain and my sleep. Every thread count is frightening and serious. Every mattress a bed of nails. Every pillow smothers and fixes bones, sinew and muscle  together.

This body is mean for resting. Hungers begging against the weighty push of atmosphere. Wreaks toward dawn through the quicksand of prone  positioning. Is eager, yet ever disappointed, to report on "a good night's sleep" that never happens.

I was born with several discs in my neck fused together. Gravity and surgery and injections and therapies have all done the rest. Lots of consequences on the nervous system in situations like mine. Dramatic impacts on lymph, endocrine and hormonal systems too.  But the biggest consequence is pain. A pain in the neck. Sometimes it feels as though I have become a pain in the necks of those around me – "the pain in the neck" worn like a badge across my ridged brow.

There, right there if you imagine carefully, there is tiredness perched on my shoulders. Tired coiled round to tight my craning  spine;  tired's fist  pounding, shank thrusting into cord and disc grind;  tired slamming thorn stalks up from the ground into the soles of my feet:  tired always already lapping the seam of day's shore and night's sea.

Here is sleep, hack merchant of pain, distilling woe and cloning expectations of release, or relief,  or retreat. Sleep's promise nightly torn asunder by the circumstance of my body merely being. Sleep pillaging the lubrications of motion with stasis to concretize limbs that sing for ease uneasily. Sleep, here enemy-disguised as respite, as peaceful rejuvenating bounty of quiet:  bone wrencher  savaging for a pounce.

Where I sleep is material. "Where" explores the junction of pragmatic question regarding availability and the aesthetic concerns of style -- this bed wonders pain to babbling incoherence upon awakening; that bed is convenient for  folding, for seeming a secret; once- upon-a-time beds are magical for cushion, delicious for comforting. My neck nightly beds with apprehension. Neck kneading the body complex rigid and sopping in a seizured terror of gravity greeting surface with  hammering persistence.

When sleep sweeps sweet dreaming into orderly chaos our archetypes resemble  each other. Before movies, what were dreams "like"? When dreams seep  in to marvel all the details of everydayness; when sleep cement swells  loose into the liquidity of dream time; when tired finally finds the  vacuum of dreamness:  this, this when, is when I feel pain free. This is a  consolation, this dream time absent of pain a small booby-prize in  the feardom of my sleeping.

Otherwise, on awakening or awake ... well, it is what it is. To elaborate on this pain and sleep system feels self-indulgent and  embarrassing. To articulate a model of "my" sleep, "my" pain, "my"  fear risks veering into self-pity at every turn. Every body's pain is  relative, related through being wholly unwanted. Where else but  through addressing our pain do we act out a pedagogy of acceptance. How else but through baring witness to our fears do we act to contain them.