Typically people do this in December, so people can read it during their downtime for the holidays, so they know what new shit to buy for X-mas, but I'm only getting around to it now. This is the best media I experienced during the year of our lord, 2012. The year the world didn't end.
Nebraska - Bruce Springsteen
The Branch Will Not Break, Shall We Gather at the River - James Wright
Travellers on the lost highway. Makes me think Springsteen should've never had a band. He should've made weird little tapes like this. The songs move slower, so they have more impact. They're not overwhelmed by the bravado of the band. The characters are alone, so the sound should be sparse. It reminded me of James Wright's poems. Poems of an abandoned landscape, an abandoned people, aimless, lost in a cold wind and a grey sky. Springsteen is an actor in every song. He's a serial killer, a highway patrolman, everybody's on the run. They don't know where they're headed. Probably nowhere. The glockenspiel makes it cosmic. It brings the stars, so high over our dirty, hard earth, and the delirious stupor of a living death. These characters have been pushed beyond hope, into the grace of helplessness, the same grace that one might experience as they fall after they've jumped from the ledge. They're almost like kids again in that they're not in control of their lives, at the mercy of some massive, unknown authority. They are beginning to enter the abyss. They've reverted to the cocoon of hypnotism. They've gone into a void, not heaven, but a few different kinds of hells. They will soon find out some answers to the mysteries. They are living in the night, the dark sky closing in, the same kind of dreaminess that one feels in the jaws of a leopard. The brain is releasing the dreamy narcotics to soften the bite of death.
Run With the Hunted - A Charles Bukowski Reader
This is an excellent retrospective of the man's work, culled from the span of his career and assembled into something of an autobiography. I'm not wild about the guy's poetry, but his prose is brave, and he's able to write about the darker impulses of man and granting us an understanding of them, rather than villifying or alienating us from them.
Adbusters - Issues 2009-Present
http://mentholmountains.blogspot.com/ - David Berman
I've always been a little bit reluctant/cheap to give an ear to anyone close to my age because of what I saw as a lack of sincerity or perhaps politcal conscience, but David Berman kind of eased me liking something resembling a more contemporary, "hipster" artist. He's something of an anomaly, an accessible and popular modern poet, and his music is clever and funny, although sonically it leaves a little bit to be desired. Now he's chosen blogging as a platform, collecting poems, articles, videos, songs all charged at renovating our modern mass consumer society and the cultural imperialism it wages on our consciousness, perhaps the rectify the sins of his father, who is a successful lobbyist in Washington for seemingly all of our worst habits and industries.
As for Adbusters, I was visiting my cousin a few weeks ago in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb on the South Side of Chicago where the Unibomber's from, and noticed a copy of Adbusters in his bathroom. I'd never read it before, but heard a little about it at OWS. He saw me looking through it and came in with a whole stack of them, every issue from the last three years. It being Chicago in January, we had a lot of time downtime indoors, which I spent reading every issue he had, cover to cover. He came in a few days later and said, "You doing okay in here, Kazcinski?"
Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes
I was sitting
Youth away in an office near Slough,
Morning and evening between Slough and Holborn,
Hoarding wage to fund a leap to freedom
And the other side of the earth -- a free-fall
To strip my chrysalis off me in the slipstream.
The Cruise - Bennett Miller, starring Timothy "Speed" Levitch
David Attenborough Documentaries -
These should be our biology classes in high school. I don't know how this guy gets his footage, but he's one of the greatest filmmakers in the world. Netflix has helped me discover a new love for documentaries. These movies show that the world outside of man, the world of nature, is beautiful and imaginative far behind any artistic capability we have. Watching these movies is a good way to gain a new consideration for the natural world, which is now being fatally overlooked, occupying little space in anyone's consciousness.
Shakespeare Behind Bars -
The greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare. Watch it on Netflix. An Othello monologue performed by a man doing life for killing his wife is as authentic emotionally as it gets. It's hard to picture, but Shakespeare writes about real people. These murders, rapes, betrayals, maneuvers, amputations, androgenies, these are real events, not fictions.
"Walking" - Henry David Thoreau
The Songlines, In Patagonia, On the Black Hill - Bruce Chatwin
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking". These guys are one or two. Werner Herzog is another.
Diaries of Anais Nin, Vol. 3 1939-1944
Wandering - Herman Hesse
"By Blue Ontario's Shores", "When Lilac's Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" - Walt Whitman
The Civil War - Ken Burns
I was taken by the eloquence and strength of even the young soldiers during this war. In this movie, we see the beginnings of modern warfare, and the horror evoked by it in those who were the first to witness what was being unleashed. You can feel the dignity of the whole world unraveling, and death taking over.
Black Coffee Blues - Henry Rollins
The funniest shit I've read in a long time. Rollins is the greatest. Here's an interesting website that argues that Bob Dylan's more recent albums have borrowed heavily from Rollins' books.
Residencia a la Tierra - Pablo Neruda
The Stepfathers set at the Del Close Marathon at the UCB Theatre, NYC.
Hello Lazer at the Magnet Theatre, NYC.
One of the advantages and beauties of improv is that it's theatre stripped to its most essential, and Hello Lazer performs with the logic of the dream. Probably my favorite improv group. The Stepfathers one word suggestion was "Rewind", and about 2/3s of the way through a funny set about a gang of saxophone players, Bailiff school, Chris Gethard steps out and says "and now we're going to rewind to the beginning of our set" and they proceed to perform the whole thing exactly as it happened IN REVERSE. We were all lucky to be there that night.
Truth in Comedy, Art by Committee - Del Close, Charna Halpern, Kim "Howard Johnson
Impro - Keith Johnstone
Mastery - George Burr Leonard
The War of Art - Steven Pressfield
Buck - Cindy Meehl
These books helped me a lot this year. The principles of Improv aren't just helpful to would-be improvisers, they're a pretty solid foundation for living well. Steven Pressfield's audio books are pretty hilarious, as he sounds like a grizzled survivor of "The War of Art". Impro by Keith Johnstone is a spooky, magic assessment of modern society and how to re-animate our spontanaiety and humanity.
The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry - Edited by Paul Auster
It's all there. Auster's introduction is stellar. I discovered Apollinaire, Artaud, Francis Ponge through this book.
"What People Say About Paris" - Kenneth Koch
People also say these things about NYC.
"The Exstacie" - John Donne
Duino Elegies - Rilke
Maybe my favorite poems.
They Live - John Carpenter starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper
The prophets Carpenter and Piper. The scene where they bulldoze the encampment is exactly what happened in Zuccotti Park.
Encounters at the End of the World - Werner Herzog
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