REASONS FOR LIVING: The Best Shit I Read, Watched or Heard in 2012

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

Medical Miracle Mile

I do not enjoy ambition.
I am learning to embrace my lack of ambition.
I have ambitions,
I just don’t want to work for them.
That would be too obvious.
Then they’d know I want them.
My ambition is to turn it all into a joke.
It’s all a joke anyway.
My conceptual art projects
remain purer if they stay conceptual.
That’s why I’m in the word business.
Words are almost purely conceptual.
At best, they’re vibrating air.
This is as close to being
a cloud as I can be.
The page is a crime scene
laced with black blood.
This sentence is as violent as I get.
I don’t want to know how to do anything
but nothing
and that’s perfectly alright with me.
I’ve come to terms with that.
How could somebody allow themself to write
a career of awful books while I maintain my perfect record
of unbegun masterpieces? Not even unwritten.
I won’t even begin to imagine them.
The idea of them is more than satisfying.
I dwell in possibility
and I’ll stay there.
I never want to know
who or how I’ll actually turn out to be.
The glorious, unending fruition of procrastination.
I have never been quite so dedicated or effective at anything
as I am at self-subterfuge and diversion.
I am most accomplished at delay and self-sabotage.
Look at all these words I’ve made out of it.
I take my money and finance my nothing habit with it.
After half-heartedly trying for a quarter of a century
I am owed my chance at uselessness.
My concept is to turn this evasion into an intent.
If I intend to be this lazy, well, I’m getting things done now, aren’t I?
What did I do in my 20s? Procrastinate them until my 30s.
I celebrate nothing, and actually nothing,
not the little nothings we are left with
after the dismantling if the big somethings
and so blow up
into new everything.
It’s almost impossible to get away with doing nothing these days.
Nothing is quite a thing to accomplish with your life these days.
The current of productivity is overpowering.
I’d like more money
I just can’t convince myself I like doing what I have to do to get it.
There’s nothing I want to buy but time
and I already get that for free.
Basically anything we try to do
is a kind of violence.

A Video of Me Reading My Poem "I Don't Want To"

I DON'T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO

Trix r 4 Kids

Being given away, credit cards in
cereal boxes, by a rabbit hugging
a dollar sign. Spoon your way to the win!
says the cartoon blissfully mugging,
who I've known longer than most of my friends,
and know well enough to ignore his tugging.
I peel a scab from the corner of
my face and flick the flake of flesh away.
I test the drip and more blood smears my thumb
than anticipated. I never pray
anymore. I am not waiting for love.
The rain stays perched in the clouds today.
I clot the cut with a paper towel
and can't help heed the cartoon rabbit's howl.

The Tape

    It felt like a buzzard was trapped in his side trying to chewing his way out. It’d been 15 years since his last drink when he went down to the State Liquor Agency using a 9-iron as a cane to get a bottle of Old Crow. He chugged enough to get the buzzard settled, hobbled home to the Winnebago and got back in bed. Thoughts started falling down on him. Thoughts he’d rather not have, about the girls, the gigs, all the bad things he’d done. He was too tired to fight them, figured it was time for reckoning. He thought about the boy. 
    He pulled himself outta the bunk and started rifling through the closet, the drawers, looking for the Cue and Review. He found it in the old shoebox full of tapes in the closet and got the guitar down from the overhead. He lifted his leg up to perch the guitar and the pain pierced his side. He winced and took a drink. The pain dulled and he sat down in the booth and strummed the guitar. The strings were rusty. They woulda sliced anybody else but they didn’t do much to him except leave a blue grime on the callouses at the end of his fingers. He tongued the grim. It tasted like an old penny.
    He pressed play on the recorder. A live recording of a song written by Buck Chipps called “Death Valley Rose” came tinkling out. He swished some Old Crow and listened for a minute. From the peddle-steel he guessed it was Mason-Dixon, a group he played with out of Winslow. Blalock was a helluva peddle-steel player. A flashy guitar fill burst outta nowhere. Starchy Johnston. What an asshole. Starchy always played like an asshole, all over everybody else. Course that’s what people went for.
    He popped the tape out, threw it back on the heap in the box. He leaned over and groaned and sifted through till he found a blank tape. He fed it into the deck and checked to make sure there was nothing on it. Everything hurt. Every little movement. He wanted to get back in bed and just go to sleep. He gulped some more Crow and put the guitar on his knee. He pressed “Play” and “Record”. The counter began to roll off the seconds.
    He didn’t have a name for the song, but he’d been playing it for nearly 40 years. It’d been with him longer than probably anything else in his life. He used to play it around the boy when he was young, wondered if he remembered it. He’d recorded it before, a lot of times, but the recordings all lost themselves somehow. That’d always been the way. Ever since he was a kid he’d been streamlined. The wind took everything that wasn’t tattooed onto his flesh. He’d lived in the Chieftain for the last five years but most everything else he kept like the breath in his lungs, taking it in and released it again without a thought.
    As he played he found himself surprised that, for maybe the first time since he was a 15 year old rookie studio player, he had some nerves. The voice in his head was walking along criticizing every note as he played it. The strings were thick and dead with rust, rattling clumsily against his fingers. He stuttered on a few phrases and reversed some of the arpeggios. It’d been along time since he last played, but after a few go rounds the song began to lift off. 
    He rewound it to listen. The pain bit hard into his side. He guzzled the rest of the Old Crow and the empty bottle toppled as he set it on the table. There was a large hiss of space in the recording. The way the tiny microphone sucked up the sound gave the guitar had a bright, twinkly sheen like a purse of coins dumped down a well. A truck wooshed by. The notes wobbled slightly between pitches like waves over hot blacktop. As the chorus climbed a gray cloud began to swell over his vision. He’d written dozens of verses and melodies for the song but none of them were any good so he hadn’t spoken or hummed or sung. There was nothing on the tape of himself save the ghosts of his fingers walking over the strings.
    He started to feeling dizzy, thought he might get sick. He stood from the booth, wobbling slightly, not quite able to keep his balance. He stumbled to the back and collapsed on the bed.
    8 or 10 years back Trace told him the boy’d snuck in her room and got his old guitar out from under the bed. Said it was taller than he was, he was playing it like a standup bass. The boy cried when she pawned it. She had to pawn it. He was proud as hell to find some of his own blood pumping through the boy’s heart. You can’t get rid of it. He knew that. Once it mixes in there you can’t get it out again.
    He could hear the tape faintly as it kept running. The last vibrations of the song dwindled. The tape kept playing, the counter clicking off the seconds, as it ran in silence.
   

Conversation

What is it that you love about me?

I don’t know.

See, you don’t even know.

Ok, why do you love me?

I love you because...

You can’t say either.

I guess that means...

We don't know each other.

No. It's better. It means we
don't need reasons.

The Apple

He bruises quick, the soft
flesh bared to the air's waft,
never ripening for you,
only for himself, yet his hue
undeniably advertises him.
His pale insides dim,
an old bulb rashed with brown,
stained over with teeth marks, a frown
sinking into itself. A stem points
happily from his scalp above joints
clipped like Venus' phantom arms.
He knows he can be done no harm
and dives down into the earth
to thrust his skeleton hand up in rebirth.