This is not a portuguese man of war

On getting out of debt and being young enough to feel my legs: Part One

2011-04-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

WE are debtors yes. But to this thing/institution/corporation/body made of people punching clocks and taking home tender/beneficent provider of funding for the unknowing, let our chains be broken. You and me, girl, let's loose the chains the bind. TD Jakes-style. All forceful and sweaty and with gold chains around chubby fingers.

We are not there yet. But we will be. and OH! the handsome Valley(OH!) that awaits. greener pastures for our grubby green hands.

I made a payment and 20,000 dollars on two accounts became zeros, one positive, one negative, now even. It was an easy moment built on a year or more of moments of another kind. It's an odd thing that paying for an education teaches so much more than the endsum of the education itself. Let me learn this lesson well so as to not tread lightly for you and our unborn children.

Let me be a debtor. A pickpocket is always a pickpocket, Fagin and the Artful Dodger attest. But let my debts be for treasures in the great beyond where my Father and brother and savior wait for me.

...
That's a heart that you made
That's a heart and the both of you made it
That's a heart that you made
And I won't rest until I break it
It’s the histoire de la family
It’s the histoire de la femme
It's the histoire de la family
And I won't rest until I forget about it
I won't rest until I don't care
I won't rest until I forget about it
I won't rest until I don't care

Je t’aime the valley
Je t’aime the valley OH!!!
Je t'aime the valley
I am an orphan de la valley
And I won’t rest until I forget about it
I won’t rest until I don’t care
And I won't rest until I forget about it
XIU XIU, I Luv the Valley, OH!

[clearer exposition will follow, someday]

IN RE: Bill Cassidy

2011-02-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

I’VE GOT 2 PLASTIC HELMETS. I USED TO HAVE 1

we roped pots & pans to our calves galloped
east then west mock trials we are guilty in
honesty we fall down crunked on some-
thing speedy & unpronounceable he’s jamican
not african i think of you constantly i stutter
in buffoonery boyhood forebear superintendent thighs

she knows my ticklish why I tote in I’s
panic attack during the matinee
we soak our officialdom in honey mustard
pigroll belly-up in it cheers to backwash
i pet the dog & the dog barks twice
my hands attach to arms that’s what they tell me
the lesbians blare big band across the street
peddle walkie talkies framed stamps of elvis
elvis slept w/ 1000 ladies before Pricilla. died.

i use street signs as monkey bars
undergarments tophats
i am merely putting on my pants

the contractor plows driveways
lifts shed with metal claw
thanks
cuticles pushed down the roof meat pens

i am in a corner
in the cornerstore
begging
saying hello

2010-11-20T19:39:00.001-08:00

It happened fifteen minutes ago. the waste of what we've created now outweighs the things we have left to make. In 2005 the United Nations commissioned a scale and we've all been waiting. they were even, their weights exactly the same, but only for a moment. Everyone held his breath and her breath, wondering which side would win. A pin prick could be felt and heard from kualalumpur to the muskox herds in the arctic. the arms of the great machine holding on like samson, blind in the temple courts, holding columns. Every one watching the scales, even.

I, knowingly but pretending unaware, emptied a candybar wrapper its contents and tossed it on the pile. At first a buzz as the levers of the great scale began to shift. then the creaking as it registered what we all knew would come. Our great inventions, every one, now only marked by the trash that their hands have made.

Now everyone knows my name. Now everyone knows my face.
That's him. He's the one who tipped the scales. I wonder if he knows his carbon footprint now? I couldn't imagine the kind of trash he's seen. And to not even care!
Never mind the candybar was free and I just finished first.

I am now him. The one who tipped the scales.

2010-10-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

YOU ARE a series of numbers, we all are.

that has been said before and by too many.
I am not, but I was once. only numbers, and only 1.
but now, no longer numbers, only a heart beating back and forth
back and forth from you and to you.
and we are no longer numbers, but
if they were to count us, we would equal one. all of our numbers
turned to flesh and bone. crackling and flowing viscous
from here to home and back again.
i run to you, but now on a treadmill.
and you're there too. my destination sleeps by my side.
and ours is in the clouds, a thousand miles off.

and now there is no longer planning
hoping
wishing
wanting.
there is only living. and what a living there is.

in the black room, the light
watch the seabird fall
real love it finds you somewhere
with your back to it
Beach House/real love

O LITTLE ONE

2010-09-07T19:37:00.000-07:00

the tiniest hand holding so many hearts.
and mine is there too.

2010-09-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

Every day is like today, six decades long
In a few years I will be yours completely
Have you not been mine already?
I have, but I will be. Wait until our skin, with needle and thread is tied up tightly as an umbrella and your hair and my hair are arms reaching for the ends of the

It was always going to end like this, you marrying me and me marrying you.
Every thing you say is a conversation with you, every single thing
And now a conversation with you, every nothing and everything said is to or for or at or with or around you.
Maybe he is an angel and every angel comes with a fold up lawn chair
And cigarettes.
And these spider legs inside my face are an itch scratching an itch waiting for you to wake up next to me and to grip the edge of a mattress putting your feet down to walk down our redbrick hallway to the place where our bodies grow
Every day is like today. Today is six decades long.

And babies wanting for food, a baby who did. My heart is broken for bellies smaller than mine.

maybe yes, maybe less?

2010-03-07T05:12:00.000-08:00

2010-01-19T08:39:00.001-08:00

I, with broken hand and bloodstained knuckle, wave. Pumping out coffeedrinks and laughing naive, unaware of what is going on in your numbers.
You, in all your requisite layers like marshmallows on a burning stick, wave. Smiling but holding it all in so that your young charge can take your energy again in the morning.
Do you know that i love you, i know that you love me. But is cheese the only way to hold your hand? What about the meantimes and the inbetweens, Where are you then? pumping coffeedrinks and telling people how to clean that shiny new machine? I'd hire you to work along yourside nine to five five days every seven.
Yes, i know. Or, whatever it is that I am to feel, I feel. And i know. And, yes. I know why you pump and show. I know.
And if it's love, then, yes. I do know and I do.

Can I lose myself on a tiny broom, can I sweep a ditch like I would clean my room?
Afternoon, mornings too. And toughts with humming, I am with you.
I am with you, with you, with you, I am with you.
Can I lose myself in a mighty tune? Can I keep a song inside my head in bloom? Night singing, daytime too. In thoughts with humming.
I am with you, with you, with you, I am with you, I am with you.
Can I lose myself on a tiny broom?
-kylefield

new.

2009-07-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

& back.

2009-03-03T21:24:00.000-08:00

uninteresting things in uninteresting places

2009-01-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

"In this story stalks the horror lurking in much Southern humor: the intensity of hatred within families, friendships, and communities; the defaced white Negro as externalized mask of blacker white passions; and existential nihilism no less powerful for being encased not in portentous Kafkaesque allegory but cheerfully Americanized into grisly practical joke"
David Grimsted, American Mobbing 1828-1861: Toward Civil War

are nonexistent things, everything is interesting and everywhere is interesting and Donaldjudd said "a work of art need only be interesting" and everything is a work of art and jumping jacks in frozen park plazas.
and I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness and running in their running shoes on frozen white streets in the dead of winter and everything I said fell frozen on deaf, dead ears blocked by ipodbuds blasting something about lollipops and hannahmontana and future copulation love sounds.
You are a microwave in the face of a thousand frozen bagelbites and no one can stand to see it. Cubed pepperoni bits on cubed processedcheeseproduct on top of hydrogenated tomato paste oils on top of non-bread bread preserves.
So i stopped talking and saying and those running shoes kept running. But all my movements are staccato and nothing fluid pulses through these legs. I will not join your running pack. I will breathe hot on those frozen streets, melt the ice and lay on the pavement, sun shines through. I'm with you in Rockland, just not moving.
Some notes and comments about this book: This is Truth. This is Life. Everything here is real. Everything inside this jacket tells you how to breathe and move and not die. Jesus is the Story, you are his subject. This is the Word of God. Note your context and note the name of the writer.

I'm not working. I'm not thinking. I'm not drawing. I'm barely writing. I'm barely moving. I'm barely breathing. I'm moving constantly. I'm missing the mark and you and everything else. Hyperbole.

"where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free "
Allen Ginsburg
Howl for Carl Solomon

2008-12-18T17:20:00.000-08:00

"& I will sit here and wait for a bridge to be built to cross this river."
"but the pylons have yet to be driven. what's more, they've yet to be built. you are 1,000 miles off."
"I will sit here until this river dries up."
"but the rains have just begun and the sun won't be seen for years. you are 1,000 miles off."
"I will sit here until the winds blow and I am carried to the other side."
"but the winds haven't been down these roads since the dustbowl and no one in this town has a fan. you are 1,000 miles off."
"I will sit here until a ferry comes my way."
"but the ferry sank and the shipyards have moved to the ocean's sides. you are 1,000 miles off."
"I will sit here until the river freezes and then I will walk to the other shore."
"but the water won't lay still enough to catch a cold. you are 1,000 miles off."
"I will sit here until you sit beside me."
"here I am. would you like some tea?"

blueberries &/in cheese sauce.

2008-12-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

goodnight, she said at the break of day and closed her eyes and opened her eyes and said, goodmorning.
you came by these doorjambs when the day was done and the cashregister had counted it's last, but i will lock the door behind you and you can turn the sign and not turn the lights out and tell me about the cracks in the sidewalks outside my picturewindows, he said. and she turned the sign and turned over letters and spelled every single word he had ever read, flipped the switch, and told him,
there are some cracks that would swallow your shoes and others that don't even know themselves. once i fell in up to my knees and my father threw me a rope and the rope turned into your arm and I held on tight and started flying.

goodnight, he said at the first of the morninglight and closed his eyes and opened his eyes and said goodmorning. a minute ago while i was dreaming, he said, i saw a thousand cracks and at the bottom of everysingleone there was a mirror and when i bent at the knee to look i did not see me, i saw you.
those were not mirrors, they were windows and behind those windows were portraits of me, and behind those portraits of me is where i sat, with answers. & waiting. i ate an oatmeal sandwich cut diagonally and drew a thousand pictures of my shoes not walking and not touching the ground.

and sometime afterall of this, he said, god, there are so many things in this life that are real and you are one and you have shown me another and this one has fingernails and eyeballs and is not hotwater.
and god said, son, there are. and there are things in this life that are more than real and i will show you one. and he did and there were a thousand colors in every single light and the air stopped moving and there were ripples on the backs of his hands and the bottoms of his shoes and, and.

and she turned to leave and she did not drive
and she turned to leave and she did not walk
and she turned to leave and she did not run
and she turned to leave and she did not crawl

and she turned to leave

and she flew.

The story of your life in 1000 words or less.

2008-11-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

OWCCCHS 2003 talentshow awards winner: people's choice, best props, overall winner.

2008-11-05T17:16:00.000-08:00

then get in your car and drive to me, she said. we will climb these mountain passes and see every single setting sun in the sky.

I will not drive, I will fly. passing through 65 thousand falling raindrops to the place where it never rains except for when you say hello.

then get in a plane and land somewhere near here, where the sun comes up and stays for days and days and a day and then for one more day.

all of my, he said, sleeping patterns are following all of our, he said, speaking patterns.

okay great. she said, I can tell you've not written this before. but, I like your punctuation.

{!}

shooting stars in all our hearts.

2008-10-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

we stood on a brooklynrooftop and aimed high. we shot the sun and watched it fall. a sad and holy glow streaming off of every single southern facade in the city made by men made by god. one hundred thousand steps from here to there, a thousand miles, a thousand faces, a million trees.

I returned to where they laid joseph's body. the coat from his father now the ground, every thread a tree and shining colors fit for a prince among twelve brothers.

what's your favorite thing about the holy scriptures? they asked in unison as foreign tongues and foreign feet beat the air and, and, ground above a flooded plaster ceiling.

that they are holy. and that you are asking.

and what about words you'll never say? which ones are those?

_____________, _____, _______, and, __________. I will never say these words.

It's snowing in westvirginia and the city that never sleeps is still never sleeping and the band that played the final note as Doug and I walked through those cardboard trees and linen art gallery leaves are back in their beds (SF and FL, respectively) and you are around bonfires and on the back porches of a snowy mountaintop and at home and at the other end of a telephone line and I will be home tomorrow or some day after that one.

Right now, I am a roaming.

2008-10-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

lordy rodriguez

Kentucky, 2005

upcoming tour dates:

wv 10/22 - 10/24

nyc 10/24 - 10/27

ky 10/27 - 2009

ca 11/14 - 11/17

ca 12/11 - 12/16

etc

Shimmera-tone forests & one thousand miles from Here to your Front Door: on westvirginia, pt. 2

2008-09-30T18:04:00.000-07:00

All summer I made friends with the creatures nearby --- they flowed through the fields and under the tent walls, or padded through the door, grinning through their many teeth, looking for seeds, suet, sugar; muttering and humming, opening the breadbox, happiest when there was milk and music. But once in the night I heard a sound outside the door, the canvas bulged slightly ---something was pressing inward at eye level. I watched, trembling, sure I had heard the click of claws, the smack of lips outside my gauzy house --- I imagined the red eyes, the broad tongue, the enormous lap. Would it be friendly too? Fear defeated me. And yet,not in faith and not in madness but with the courage I thought my dream deserved, I stepped outside. It was gone. Then I whirled at the sound of some shambling tonnage. Did I see a black haunch slipping back through the trees? Did I see the moonlight shining on it? Did I actually reach out my arms toward it, toward paradise falling, like the fading of the dearest, wildest hope --- the dark heart of the story that is all the reason for its telling?

-Mary Oliver, the chance to love everything.

The days are not longer here, they are the same. But the night comes quickly and the moon hangs low til morningtime. Mossytopped rocks and a hundred and 65 thousand leaves falling on the hour. 29 days ago, I walked into the woods, and some of me hasn't come back. He rests under treetop ceilings and with burbling stream radioes pounding in his ear. waiting for me to return and lead him on, or lead him home, or waiting for some green eyed someone to show him where the forest turns from tall trees to open meadows and where winding rivers cross these sometime broken doors. 65 pound packs and thunderstorms stopping on a crook in the arm of the MiddleFork River nine miles from the edge of the Cranberry Wilderness.

5 miles in and my eyeglasses all covered in steam and drops of water from six miles high, fallen through and off of oak leaves and sycamore trees and white pine needles and brown brow hairs. Glenn took a blue tarpaulin from his blue backpack and the world turned from wet and open to wet and closed, the flowers in the corners of my eyes and the rocks in front of my feet disappearing for some manmade sheet of plastic strands and metal eyelets on every corner. Did I hear your name in the rustle of the poison leaves, or are you still at the end of some wellworn path somewhere nowhere near here? Are you drops of water down my leg and flicking off the heel of these blistering shoes? Have you heard that we walk alone, or are you in some nowhere place where the sun comes up and stays overhead for days and days and days and then for one more day?

Now the world has changed, the trees are peaches and apples and tomatoes and one hundred million different shades of the same colors. All ripe for eyes to pick and hearts to eat, wide open skies for dessert and a thousand miles of black road turning grey under turning wheels for time and we're all just looking for the right way to say goodbye. From above, every single one running into each other, bouncing off and slowing down, then speeding for open spaces to find one hundred million have already come by and found the words to say goodbye. How many have crossed your paths and how many more will come to your door?

"there are no more. you are the last and you will climb these footpaths only one time."

You should see the air here. A thousand new clouds below your feet and houses peeking through the breaks. All of them, all of us, running up these mountain cliffs and hurling their selves to the sky. Will you bring rain or will you bring shade or will you brighten the sky, magnify a thousand sun beams, come close and return to the ground from which you came, for watering flowers and seeping under the cracks in these concrete foundations?

"ask me 'oh are you alright?'

chase stomachaches and feel uptight.

fall over you and onto the floor.

they ask again and pick me up."

That Ghost, when there is no one else to sing to you sing to yourself

2008-09-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

wrinkled oak leaf veins and a paper pulp heart.

2008-08-20T08:15:00.001-07:00

have you given up or are you just giving it time?

I have given neither, I take. breaths, steps, the air is different here, but it is the same. all connected and flowing from the bottom to the top of this sometime mountain. you cannot know where you've never been.

I know I've never been close.

Knowing is seeing, knowledge is power. you are blind and weak in the face of mountains you've not climbed and hands you've not held. cracks in cups and burnt milk in a stained steel pan. a mirrored jelly bean in a mirrored metropolis, a foreign tongue in a familiar mouth, i will build you a fire if you'll stand close enough to smell it.

I'm samson, blind but not weak, I have not seen you but I've felt your winds across these mountain passes. I'll clean your stained steel pan and turn your cracks to doors.

On The Assumption of Personal Identity in John Baldessari's Hitch-hiker (splattered blue)

2008-08-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

"The DVD spins, and the room vibrates with Wagner. We see a series of surreal images that combine violence with eerie placidity, like a Kubrick film. Robic's spotlit figure rides through the dark in the driving rain. Robic gasps come unheard plea to a stone-faced man in fatigues who's identified as his crew chief. Robic curls fetuslike on the pavement of a Pyrenean mountain road, having fallen asleep and simply tipped off his bike. Robic stalks the crossroads of a nameless French village at midnight, flailing his arms, screaming as his support crew. A baffled gendarmes hurries to the scene, asking, Quel est le probleme? I glance a Robic, and he's staring at the screen, too. "In race, everything inside me comes out," he says, shrugging. "Good, bad, everything. My mind, it begins to do things on its own. I do not like it, but this is the way I must go to win the race." "

-Daniel Coyle, "That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger"

there is no existentialism in the creation a work of art, there is only suspension.

in order to not see something, that some thing must exist. i have not yet seen you.

blindness is no condition if no one can see, it is only a definition inside a thousand thousand dictionary pages.

are you the bluesplattered paint and burberry picnic basket, or all the things underneath?

all greenbilled cap and black worn overcoat and cracked leather rucksack going to some nowhere place and to be covered up in orange.

or are you the telephone poles ringing down the road with a blueline horizon never getting closer?

or the dirtworn blacktop of a road with no cars and only an actor playing a splatteredblue hitch-hiker and a going-somewhere photographer documenting the supposed plight of our storied vfw's.

are you the barbedwire fence or the wheat ready for harvest or tin metal roof five miles off or the clouds covering up all the sky or just the one speck of blue paint, set alone by the flick of an old white man's wrist?

"i am none of these things, i am alive."

i, i am the dotted line

and you fill me in with whatever you like

and i, i am just going through the motions

and i, i need some old-fashioned potions

i've got to get some old recipes

deertick, art isn't real

touchdown city to the top of the world.

2008-08-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

rhythm in the trees and a beat in the streams: on westvirgina, pt. 1

2008-07-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

(for Katherinevalentine and everyone else)

If you have read this and are unaware, I am in westvirginia.

If you have read this and are unaware, I am in shock.

Every single day, driving and walking, is Caspar David Friedich, is Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, is Clyfford Still, is Andreas Gursky, is Hanna Liden, is so wide open and full that the days before are a thousand miles passed. Today there were mountains sandwiched between the clouds and below the road, the earth letting out a thousand puffs of smoke from the midnight drag. Fog and clouds rolling into one and the court house 45 miles off. Every day is sky and mountains and every night is stars and lights.

Saturday, Glenn and I walked on an old rail bed and in an older riverbed. Standing on rocktops in the middle of a three-way stream, only a friend in sight and god to know, I was amazed at how new this old, old world can be. This is not the only experience worth sharing, but it is the only experience worth sharing first. The trail starts two hundred yards from the riverbank and right next to the Cass water treatment ponds. The beginning would seem to promise little, if not for the 8 two-story whitewashed kit houses set just off the road before the start of the trail. Cass was a town once owned and operated by a long left lumber company, is now a ghosttownstatepark with rows of old worker's quarters all connected with wooden boardwalks and disconnected from everything else. These 8 houses, though, sit alone, outside the town proper, perhaps the prize resting places for foremen or those gifted few who fell an oak in just two strikes. They are the gravestones of sweat and blood pored and poured for the resources of this wealthy land. Covered by the mighty shade of oaks not touched by the hands once there inhabited, the roofs are empty nests and all the doors are nailed shut or rotted open. The whitewashed boards that have not yet fallen have been left wanting and the road passing through the middle of the ghostly outcropping has grown over, is now a meadow. "The only thing unsettling about those houses is that there are no ghosts," Glenn said as we parked the car and walked toward the beginning of the Greenbrier River Trail.

We walked for a mile or so and passed through 17 different climates. Asking ourselves, where are we? where have we gone? where are we going? We are in westvirginia, we are in vietnam, we are in mozambique, we are in the northwest territory, we are in northcarolina, we are in westvirginia. We saw all the foothills of all the world at the beginning of the trail, swampy and dry, huge white pines and tiny flowering shrubs. A mile in, we left the gravel path of the old rail bed and took to the small boulders of the river. The water was warmer than the cool waterfallshowers we had taken the week before, but made for easy entry and soon my toes and his shoes were under to not come up for the rest of the day. We saw a goose and her goslings and deer by herself cross the river. Nothing else. No people. No cars. No buildings. No planes. No lights. No naturalgas. No money. No terrible thing. Standing on rocktops in the middle of a three-way stream, I am amazed at how new this old, old world can be. and how smooth these hard, hard rocks can be. and how wonderful this only life can be.

we swam for a while, for smooth skin, for warm water, for large rocks on the other side, and went back to the top of the world where i got sick and have been for three days.

i'll be home thursday.

(photo: cass schoolhouse)

splitting the difference and coming up empty.

2008-06-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

"The weather was changing rapidly. The sea, so immense, so breathtakingly immense, was settling into a smooth and steady motion, with waves at heel; the wind was softening to a tuneful breeze; fluffy, radiantly white clouds were beginning to light up in a vast fathomless dome of delicate pale blue. It was dawn of a beautiful day in the Pacific Ocean."

Life of Pi.

father, what is the difference between living and not living? is it belief? or only acceptance? is it love? or is it just in breathing? is it in having someone there to see it? he asked, shirt soaked with sweat from neck to waistline and knees bleeding from walking without end

these are variations on a theme. he replied, his eyes showing no reflection. the difference between those that have lived and died and those who have not lived or died at all is only in the asking. those that are not living and not dead ask no questions. seek no answers. only exist.

existing isn't living? and what about love? am I wrong in seeking another for my living?

and eating isn't tasting, son. and another will bring no more life, only different colors. the father turned to his left and became a bench for resting legs.

" "

-Mono, The Sky Remains the Same as Ever

some things change. some things stay the same.

2008-06-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

golden throats

2008-05-19T04:54:00.000-07:00

Continental Divide

golden throats

Friends have to keep up. Distance, interstates, static on the other end of line and familiar faces fading. The static becomes the voice you knew. Distance bogs the memories down. A chasm is created. So my friend, Nathan, lodged on one part of the east coast, and I, perched on another, tried to fill this hole. A name was found and concepts were forged. Nathan played the music and I pushed out the words. This Continental Divide worked for a while. But people grow in different directions, trees arched in different angles. Nathan kept with the music and began to discover his own words, I shifted my focus to finish university. A first and final show was played to a small circle of friends in a backyard the last night of 2004. Covered in the crackle and dance of a firepit, we clumsily plowed through a medley of spontaneously written pop and pseudo-gospel collages and proceeded to file this memory and phase of our lives away to face future distances.

Nathan continued to work on his music and started to find even more words. Making his sweltering garage a studio of sorts (replete with ancient pianos, basic recording equipment, his mother's watercolors taped to the walls, and plenty of insects), he began to hone his songs into something with more focus than our first live foray. They warbled with a Rhodes piano and resonated with the glare of dusty cymbals. The direction the instruments took fell in line to Nathan's unassuming voice. It was much different than it is now. More unassuming, timid, but the timbre, its essence for lack of better words, has remained. He carved out a whole release in this manner. Hand-made in his back porch (with the help of his brother) and distributed at shows, he found a new cast of friends to help him fulfill the vision it contained. The shows played for this release and the times that ensued were stored away in memories for future distances this group of friends would face.

All the while, Nathan continued to send me songs. I continued to send him my thoughts and concepts. We attempted to brave the chasm between us. It was at this point that he began his collegiate career. His focus began to shift but he still clung to his music. In the year and half that followed, he managed to fill the remaining space in his head (the space not filled with literary analysis and linguistics) with the seeds for new ideas and new structures. He brought them back to the garage that he had left for dorm rooms and began work on the EP called Golden Throats. I would come back to my house to read email inbox filled with demos, lyrics from this or that song, parts that hadn't been finished but needed to be shared. I was able to watch them evolve and provided what I could to aid in his

Like the relationship I share with its creator, Continental Divide's music is chasms. Singing and echoing through and across the distance between quick turns of phrase and densely laid guitars and synthesizers, Nathan weaves into Golden Throats stories familiar with emotion and distant with metaphor and allusion. Four Scenes opens the EP with Pemberton's vocals echoing easily against a simple guitar melody that builds to include crashing drums and running glockenspiels. The ease of the vocal delivery carries throughout each song, but that ease is not for lack of effort or concern in Pemberton's voice. Indeed, admitting one's parents are shadows and pining to be forgotten are not conclusions easily gathered, but Continental Divide is content with allowing the implicit emotion of their lyrics to be filled by the force of crashing guitars and airy keyboards. The title track Golden Throat delivers on the promise of its surrounding numbers by employing the single-voice-single-instrument-building-to-the-brink-of-disarray structure used throughout the EP. Pemberton’s reverb-laden vocals keep the song from becoming too danceable or recognizably poppy as they fade in and out. The phrases seem to echo through a dense cloud of instruments building and collapsing onto and into one another, suspended like memories just beyond the brink of recognition. The desire for recognition surfaces again and again in the both lyrics and musicality in these songs as Pemberton yelps and groans and sings across the void of memory and emotion and loss and relationships. Continental Divide's music is chasms, but they are chasms filled to the brink.

--Bradley Speaks

www.myspace.com/continentaldivide

what you will see when I am with you

2008-05-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

one side

the other side.

living at the top of the world.

2008-04-25T17:19:00.001-07:00

"He was six feet five inches tall and he came into town a few years ago riding the afternoon stage. He wore a black broadcloth frock coat and carried a small valise. He stepped down from the stage, swept off his tall black hat, spread his arms and lifted his eyes to the snowcapped ridges beyond the town. When he had won every eye on the street he said, "I come to bring deliverance, and eternal life!" And then he crossed the street to the hotel, leaving the sound of his magnificent voice echoing against the false-fronted, unpainted buildings..."

Louis L'Amour, Elisha Comes to Red Horse, from the collected short stories of Louis L'Amour from the dresser drawer in the bedroom. an old picture, the opposite of outside my window.

Your light brown hair losing its color for silver grey in the 8 pm sunset. Your eyes wide, taking me in. The space between us a bright light, blocking our view with too much to see. I reach out for you, for the disappearance of the cool mountain air that separates and you bend your head. The mountains rise overhead as you move, the sun falls behind your shoulder, its campfire heat replaced by you, strong yet gentle, waiting.

Am I the only man you've known? or has there been another? or has there been another and another and another and another, all of them flying by like sports cars with outofstate license plates just passing through.

Are you quiet for lack of thought or are you silent because they are too loud, pulsing inside of you?

When my pupil meets yours, is your heart, smaller than my own, pounding into your ear with the wind rushing for the other side of this range?

I break the silence and the sky loses all its color, "will you come closer?"

your gaze does not break.

I step close and can feel you bristle. The clouds now carrying the last of daylight beckon and I step again.

You run.

You are a white tailed deer and I am left on top of the world with unexposed film rolls and chocolate-covered peanuts in the freezer.

no lyrics, only:

visit soon, the world is unbelievable.

something about oil & milkshakes.

2008-04-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

relational aesthetics.

2008-04-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

(an old drawing.)

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language show so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbor. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the east end because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the east end, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience may be the result of choice or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy... But we have to love our neighbor because he is there - a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

the weight of things. (or, veiled references because direct routes are too short)

2008-03-31T07:49:00.000-07:00

"It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at "abstract" or "nonobjective" art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.
But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God..."
Clement Greenberg, Avant Garde and Kitsch.
Graham Gillmore, 2004

he said god, are there things in this life that are real?
& god said, son, there are. I will show you one. and he did and there was a hole in a man lying in a bed wheezing for the world and for all the time he had spent wishing that he wasn't.
he said god, that's awful, but didn't he have it coming?
& god said, son, every single one has it coming, but for mercy. and I will show you another. and he did and there was a family taken from the inside out and a man lying alone with chemicals and only a sharpened knife to call his own.
he said god, that's more than awful and my hands are now heavy stones and my ears are ringing for the blood pulsing on the inside.

& god said son, there are things in this life that are real. the blood in your hands and the air in your laughter, they are both of them real. but they are not the same, are you my own or will you seek another?

"It's enough
I wear my garment so it shows
Now you know
Only love is all maroon
Gluey feathers on a flume
Sky is womb and she's the moon"
flume, bon iver.

i am wearing your tuxedo to my funeral

2008-03-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

"…instability, however, seems like a native condition to our cities. It is a reflection of a society that has embraced change and transformation, and which continues to fashion and refashion its surroundings. Mistakes will be made, as they have been in the past, technological change will continue to surprise us, and ambitions will frequently outstrip reality – and vice versa. But the expectations will continue to be, as they always were, urban. " p 235, City Life, Witold Rybczynski

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 8214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196 4428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273 724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609

"oh, despite my ruling stance I still get plenty of trouble

and dont forget i have back and i'd like to use my shovel

and those my last address was not cool or humble"

continental divide

all the two letter words I know.

2008-02-18T04:34:00.000-08:00

if I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.

off the coast of the ohio.

2008-01-10T19:10:00.000-08:00

Are you my Godot, or, Where are you, it's almost nighttime

2007-12-24T06:07:00.000-08:00

" 'Well, shall we go?'
'Yes, let's go.'
They do not move."

Let me tell you about this one. There's this guy and he's waiting. Waiting for the wind to not blow so hard. Waiting for the clouds in the distance to break apart further and see the horrors that lie beyond the crags to his right. Waiting for his horse to not be so heavy. Waiting for his ungloved hand to come down from waving to the sky. Waiting for his hair to grow and cover his steely, hardened glare. Waiting for the gunner at his back to leave the frame so he can be seen more clearly.

But none of these things have come, not one has happened. And he's been here for at least 22 years and a couple months. So he stays on his horse, too afraid and too courageous to fall off. That's the thing about fear and courage, you can't have them both or you'll never get anywhere. Or, they are the same thing and weren't going anywhere anyway. He's really just afraid of the courage in his shiny boots and flowing cape. Stuck in a green mountain range on a black and white horse with fire in its eyes. He waits, and thought the wind had stopped and thought the chill had begun to thaw and thought the hooves beneath his haunches had begun to push him forward. They didn't and he stands still on 50 percent of the legs available for use. But, g-d, look at that horse's mane and look at that horse's tail and look at that flowing red cape. He must really be something when you get too close.

Just don't get too close.

And rejoice. emmanuel has ransomed captive israel! heavy hearts and heavy souls sing and swipe their credit cards and everyone now in unison takes a step to the left.

and the right.

"Ski Mask spending next weeks cash, he fast
And I don't even need a G pass I'm pass that
I'm passing em out now and you can't have that
And my chain Toucan Sam
That tropical colors you can't match that
Gotta be abstract"
Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.

When they really get to know you they will run

2007-12-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

This is the story of my life in one thousand words or less.

2007-12-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

Sometime after you are born, I am going to kill you.

2007-12-04T15:07:00.000-08:00

"When his father dropped dead from a heart attack at forty-nine, Willy's sorrow was mitigated by a secret sense of relief. Already at twelve, just barely on the brink of adolescence, he had formulated his lifelong philosophy of embracing trouble wherever he could find it. The more wretched your life was, the closer you were to the truth, to the gritty nub of existence, and what could be more terrible than losing your old man six weeks after your twelfth birthday? It marked you as a tragic figure, disqualified you from the rat race of vain hopes and sentimental illusions, bestowed on you an aura of legitimate suffering. But the fact was that Willy didn't suffer much." Timbuktu, Paul Auster.
Theodore Gericault, Raft of Medusa.

I went Florida this weekend. I have never starved for a day except for under my own volition. But my art hurts.

I went to gather my things the next day and looked everyone in the eye but didn't say a word.
"I'm botching your handwriting here. Oh, do you want to talk about this?"
"No. I do not."
Because I didn't. But I would like to now. I smelled the ocean again and stood in the dark trying to see the horizon. You can't/I couldn't do it. But there were six highschoolers sitting on driftwood txting each other and smoking weed. I think that may have had something to do with it. Also, I stood without shoes and the water was warm and the sand was cold. I had twelve cups of coffee with my father.
I went to a wedding and I felt like I was on a raft, with silk flowers. Holding onto people who died when I knew them and now were falling into the water. I was holding my head and he, the groom, was waving toward the horizon (see above). Everything was beautiful until I started dancing and it started getting warm.

"Godzilla bankroll
Stones from Stilion
Yo I ain't got it all, that means I barely home
Trailblazer stay ballin
Revenge is my arts is crafty darts
While y'all stuck on Laffy Taffy"
-Ghostface

STOP! in the name of love.

2007-11-06T18:05:00.000-08:00

"I am a great enemy of written criticism, because I see these interpretations and these comparisons as an occasion to open a faucet of words. Every 50 years El Greco is revised and re-adapted more less to the taste of the day. It is the same with all works which survive, and this leads me to say that a work is made entirely by those who look at it or read it and make it survive through their acclamation or even their condemnation.
I refuse to think about the philosophical cliches renovated by each generation since Adam and Eve in all the corners of the planet I refuse to think of it and speak of it because I do not believe in language, which instead of expressing subconscious phenomena in reality creates thought by and after the word. (I willingly declare myself a nominalist, at least in the simplified form.)
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.' As a good nominalist, I propose the word patautology, which, after frequent repetition, will creat the concept of what I am trying to explain in this letter by these execrable means: subject, verb, object, etc." Marcel Duchamp, 1956.

Marcel, we're all just trying to protect ourselves. You are no different.

We are no different. It isn't winning a game we are concerned with, however, Monsieur, it is playing a part. Put up your violet water and take on a new author. There is only one way for your works to stand up to the battering ram of language: (or two)
1. don't make art
2. don't care

I will choose the second choice. I will make my art and not be concerned with language in any respect. My medium is language and my subject, verb, object etc. is you. Enjoy it. I will not tear down too many bricks, you will still be standing.

"Just picture me rollin
Flossin a Benz on rims that isn't stolen
My dreams is censored, my hopes are gone
I'm like a fiend that finally sees when all the dope is gone
My nerves is wrecked, heart beatin and my hands is swollen
thinkin of the G's I'll be holdin, picture me rollin"

They did not break the mold, but they stopped using staples.

2007-08-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

"to dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. one implies a presence, the other an absence. but the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not?" - baudrillard, simulacra and simulations

there hangs on the wall behind my desk two things; three things if you count egg shell latex paint. just above and directly behind my head is an cream-colored circle clock in a faux-marble frame with a second hand. to the clock's left and in a brushed aluminum frame is a print of jasper johns' american flag of 1954-55. jasper johns has always held things. in every painting there is something suspended, something familiar but covered in six feet of cemented pigment. a broom, a metal can, a dart board, numbers, letters, art. this image here, it holds nothing. there is no mark of his trowel gouged wax on cloth on board, there are no newspaper clippings, there is no symbolism. there is only the mark of an inkjet printer and a plexiglass cover that was scratched when it was hung on september 12, 2001. i often wonder if people count me patriotic when they get off the elevator - the busy receptionist marking time on his work day with an eye on the american prize. i do not feel patriotic. i do not feel like a symbol. i do not feel like a simulation. maybe that's because i have been endorsing checks for two hours. maybe that's because jasper wanted no musket shots fired across his "troweled ground" (ad reinhardt). or maybe it's because we close at 4 on tuesdays. whichever, i think that walter benjamin was right: in the battle of time and space and reproduction, the image is the ground and no one can stand to see it.

"i'm in the club posted up with some gangbangers, still pimpin' old school, candy cadillac on swingers."
-paul wall.

(timothy o'sullivan. a harvest of death, gettysburg, pennsylvania. july, 1863)

Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb

2007-08-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

FIX UP, LOOK Sharp.
or, a beginning.

"upon each side of the pequod's quarter-deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. his bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; captain ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. there was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. and not only that, but moody stricken ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." p 138 frank stella. enter ahab; to him, stubb. 1988

what happens when art sees itself in itself?
does its history reduce itself to an infinite causal regression?
what happens when infinite regressions become exhaustible, finite permutations?
does it die?
what happens when art dies and is put in the ground?
does it look for a savior?
what happens when its saviors are made of carbon and paperbacked books?
does it wallow and wait for something more or is it dust for the grass of an unseen field in central missouri?
we'll see.

"art in art is art-as-art (art as dogma, part iii)
...
the beginning of art is not the beginning.
the finishing of art is not the finishing.
the furnishing of art is not the furnishing.
the nothingness of art is not nothingness.
negation in art is not negation.
the absolute in art is absolute.
art-in-art is art
the of art is art-as-art.
the end of art is not the end."
-ad reinhardt.