RONA Fragment #2: Darkness & the Percocet In-Between

Darkness & the Percocet In-Between

a small sheet of plain white rectangular card stock

imperceptibly split edge reveals flat

faceted garnet, cut in the form of a lozenge

giving the appearance of the ace of spades

                        INCANTATION

            the apparatus proposed is the distinctive

            trademark of Enlightenment thought

            Empiricist & Idealist currents, Transcendentalism

            event inspired a cycle of struggles

            desires and needs cannot be translated

            into different contexts – so it happens potential

            revolutionaries around the world cannot

            invest in actions around the world

            Beijing

            Nablus

            Los Angeles

            Chiapas

            Paris

            Seoul

To clarify this relation it must be understood

that the class struggle is over the way

the capitalist class imposes the commodity form

on the bulk of the population by forcing people

to sell part of their lives as the commodity

“labor power” in order to survive –

            after choosing various points

            by examining the red strokes

            he held the engraving point vertically

            in his right hand and made

 seven superficial marks

linked together as a globally expanding chain

institutional, political, and scientific rhetorics

became absolute on this terrain

and every conceptual formation

came to be marked by it

it is not either/or

difference

hybridity

mobility

are not liberation, not in and of themselves

and neither are

truth

purity

stasis

real revolutionary practice

refers to the level of production

truth will not set us free

but taking control of the production of truth will

            diametrically across the earth

            always remaining visible amid vague

            geographical indications, descending

            a long way without deviating and

            ended, at a treble stave showing

            high C accompanied by three “f”s

            in the center a cluster of stars

            where the word “Nadir” is written

these struggles often fail to communicate context

lack even local communication

and burn out in a flash

the exclusive horizon of ideology

a hugely distended mouth

a vertical line of dots

a flash point

the formalization of politics

the instrumentalization of science and technique

for profit

the pacification of revolt

source texts: Hardt & Negri, Raymond Roussel, Harry Cleaver

RONA Fragment

it started like concern that nags

you every morning before you are even awake

          and evolves into something, Tony sez

          it’s the Ballard endtimes,

          the soft apocalypse

vines grow lush over concrete block & brick

powering over whole neighborhoods, swallowing

settlements as it grows, desert sands river-like slowly

flowing to reclaim the Vegas strip & beyond

dissolution, slow-motion disintegration, de-evolution –

the bourgeois anti-rapture where everything

rots in place, gently drifting away on yr front porch,

cold cocktail in hand, drifting bodily apart, atom by atom,

molecule by molecule, socially distanced into anti-social

non-being, less death than slow motion atomization

Clearing Out Some Notebooks

Bleeding Edge

check yrself, rebel

yr hangovers

& ironic haiku

do not qualify as praxis

Cop

He wants to be a cop.

He’s already afraid of everything.

He has, at last, begun to understand

there are times you don’t try

to explain the stars -n- bars.

His mustache is unironic.

Fucker’s going to shoot a black man,

there’s really no way around it.

Poets are Useful

because someone needs to tell stories

that don’t involve jets flying over stadiums

Original Sin

an ambulance driver

for the infernal machine

wakes up in the morning

complicit

an American

serving a class to which

there is no access for

those only complicit

to be washed in blood

spilled into the gutters

running in the shadows

of glass and concrete towers

to be done with the gods

& false prophets of capital

is to aspire

A Playlist for the Shut-Ins

You need something new to batter your brain just a little? Record stores all closed? Nothing around the casa that really displaces you at the moment? Me neither. Bandcamp has like a million new things (including my new solo record & my old Hoosier Pete record, on my new label), so that's a big help and a good place to start. I want to help out too, so here's a playlist to help to get you through. Two things: 1) if you have a profile on Spotify, you might want to follow this playlist, since I will probably be updating it; and 2) while I usually sequence my playlists, I did not do that here. Hit the shuffle function for best juxtapositions on this one. Enjoy!

Guitar: Pat Metheny's Journey into Noise

I am just finishing up a solo electric guitar album. During the process, I naturally dialed up some of the solo guitar records that caught my attention over the years. Today we're going to visit one of the more forgotten attempts, even if its progenitor is one of the better known of the guitarists I listened to.

There are several obvious solo electric guitar records: Neil Young's Dead Man, Sonny Sharrock's Guitar, Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, various electric guitar experiments in late period John Fahey, any one of a handful of Derek Bailey odysseys, etc. Of all the guitarists I listened, Pat Metheny is the highest profile (save Neil Young, of course). Yet, 1994's Zero Tolerance for Silence sunk almost as immediately as it surfaced, an anathema to both the hardcore fans of Metheny's light, cerebral jazz, and the growing legion of guitar noise aficionados spawned by the 80s NYC downtown scene. Way too noisy for Metheny's mainstream crowd, lacking of the extended techniques obsessed over by the new noise heads, Zero Tolerance fell into the cracks between.

Zero Tolerance is fairly simple: solid body electric guitar, humbucking pickups, high gain amp; no effects, no feedback, no oddball tunings, no "tabletop guitar" techniques . . . just Metheny shredding atonal improvs with his multi-tracked self. Technically, it's all rather straightforward, but the cumulative effect was compared by some to Lou Reed's notorious Metal Machine Music (though not by anyone who has actually listened to both records). It's understandable that Metheny's crowd wouldn't cotton to his self-described "2-dimensional" foray, but in spite of Thurston Moore's endorsement, it didn't catch on with the avant improv crowd either.

When this record came out, I was eight years into my avocation as a noise guitarist, living in Bloomington and working with two noisy rock improvising outfits, The Belgian Waffles! and The Catkillers, and many other inspiring friends and musicians, some of whom I still work with to this day. Like pretty much everyone else, I was at a loss on this one: in spite of the comparisons to Metal Machine Music, a record I was (and am) quite fond of, it very clearly was not trying to achieve the same thing. There were no kaleidoscopic phantoms hiding in the sheets of noise, there was no  annihilation of space like the burning of the oxygen in the air. Though almost as noisy at points as MMM, it never loses its pointillist articulation: unlike pretty much everything I was listening to at the time, you could easily imagine this scored and accurately reproduced by an acoustic string quartet. Noisy as it was, it had none of the touchpoints I looked for, no refusal of music as music, no refusal of guitar as guitar. And yet, I found it compelling, though perhaps not compelling enough to listen to on a regular basis.

25 years later, I am starting to get more of a vocabulary to deal with ZTFS. After years of neglect, I pulled it back out and loaded it into my changer with 5 other guitar discs. In the intervening time, I have delved deep into classical, avant garde and otherwise, as well as a lot of free improv with acoustic roots. Still, it doesn't quite grab me by the throat: it feels sterile - something that is perhaps intentional, as evidenced by Metheny's characterization of the music as "2 dimensional" - and tends to live in an uncomfortable abstract zone that fails in the way that many Jackson Pollock paintings fail. As far as my own interests go, I am not and never will be interested in the primarily technical problems he was probing, and the fact that he only explored this particular mode once ensures that any answers he found remain unarticulated, and that any development he could make remains arrested . . . if indeed he found anything compelling to work on in these sessions.

At the end, I still find this album interesting, if not exactly essential listening. It definitely has its moments; perhaps these moments will continue to reveal themselves to me in the future.

Below is the album in its entirety, since it obviously is meant to function as one piece with five movements. If you feel the need to only sample part of this, listen to part four, which has an almost funky quality to it in places. Or, get all five parts rolling at once to get that much closer to Metal Machine Music . . . actually, yeah, that's the way to listen to this. Gets a lot more fun.

That's it for now. More solo guitar discs sometime in the future.

Shut Up!

Work going on. Sometimes though, it's best to just step back and listen. Lots of stuff in the drafts, but need to get some weight here before I go back to Star Trek lists and old records. In the meantime, here's this summer's reading list:

Paul de Man Allegories of Reading

Jean-Paul Sartre Saint Genet

Raymond Roussel Locus Solus

Michel Foucault Death and the Labyrinth

Joseph Conrad Under Western Eyes

Harry Cleaver Reading Capital Politically

Terry Eagleton Exiles and Emigres 

J. G. Ballard The Complete Short Stories of J G Ballard

Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization

Jack Spicer My Vocabulary Did This to Me

Cornelius Cardew Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

Monique Wittig One Is Not Born a Woman

Emma Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays

More soon, hopefully by the end of August.

Humbly Submitted: Your Juneteenth Playlist

Allow me to offer a possible soundtrack to your Juneteenth celebrations.

And let me also observe that Google's spellcheck, like the US government, does not recognize Juneteenth.