What's typical after three hours and forty minutes of late French new wave is to smoke a lot of cigarettes, but that option's no longer open to me. So instead, I let myself get picked up. Which, as the story unfolds, is as much like continuing along in a cafe scene as the smoking would have been. I'm not easy to pick up; or, I am, if I'm in exactly the right mood and you do exactly what this guy did. He was bold. He wasn't even fully in his seat before he was chatting me up, and after the film, although I turned my back to him, didn't make eye contact when he said goodbye, and took a very long time fixing up in the toilet, etc, he was waiting for me when I headed for the street, and straight asked me for a drink. I had an hour to kill before going to Brandon and Alli's for dinner. I suggested the House of Shields but he said the Pied Piper.

At the bar I ordered a beer and he had a Coke. Who drinks Coke outside of the French movies? He continued to be bold: He said he thought Veronika and Marie loved Alexandre in the same way, and for the same thing: Alexandre fucked them really well; then he said he himself had noticed this very problem: when he fucks a girl really well, and he means really well, he said, then the girl falls inordinately in love with him. This had the immediate intended effect of distracting me from the subject of the conversation to private considerations of whether or not he could fuck me really well, and he knew I was distracted, he knew what I was thinking about, and he asked me, what are you thinking about? Then he named Alexandre's primary charm with women as his smooth conviction about what he wanted with them. Except my Coke-drinking companion kept saying that Alexandre was "convicted". Really he was describing himself and his own bold manner. He talked about the knee socks I was wearing and this gave him the opportunity---which he made, and took---to put his hand on my calf, feel my leg and talk about it! Bold! More than bold! Offensive! I let him! We hadn't been in the bar 15 minutes. Isn't this amusing? But I know someone just like him, thank god; I am on to this game. And he had lots more to play before the hour was up. He analyzed and correctly conjectured my Meyers-Briggs. I asked a question and he told me I was going to have to earn that information. He made me laugh. He insulted me and he flattered me. As it always turns out in a city as small as a French new wave film where everyone shows up at the same cafe at the same time all the time, he's the ex-lover of someone I know by proxy.

At 8 o'clock I said it was time to go. When he told me he didn't have a job I told him he had to pay the tab. I let him walk me part-way to my dinner party. Very beautifully, however, just as in the best after-dark rain-and-Gauloise Paris street scene, the real narrative begins when I leave the street for the party, kiss my friends and tell them the story of the last hour. They know I'll never have another date with this man and they know why---something he could never guess, is aside from anything he did or said or didn't say or didn't do, and which information is the most basic first exchange you make with a new person: his name. If you know me well, you know what it was.

Oh, the film? The Mother and the Whore. It's playing next month at the PFA, definitely don't miss it.

hm. there's a lot to be said about this:

Action, yes

.............

and, new work here.

which means can't speak

photo: Alli Warren

Today's event/collaboration/intervention at the Presidio--- guerrilla poets theater staged invigoratingly under cloudy skies & light wind, afront a dry field surrounded by what could be barracks and under the sign of Army [Re]Education Center---the performance of Brandon Brown's The Persians by Aeschylus, a literal translation [caveat aplenty] of The Persians, by Aeschylus---was the moving, important, actually radical and radicalizing True Intervention I've been longing to encounter---all my life.

Arriving to the field for the performance [quickly resited from the original locale, bunker Battery Marcus Miller, when construction obstructed just access], Brandon, Alli, Sakkis, myself up the cement pathway could see crossing the long field in boots carrying provisions and looking [anti-]days of heaven Judith and Brazil, everything from that moment on looking somehow extra---wild, de-institutionalized, open, actual.

You who don't live in the Bay Area, do you know the difficulty in getting to the Presidio from any points not already Presidio? the war was Over There, and we collectively counter-pointed. All in attendance, the players and the audience of ---twenty-five?---so collected & by playing and listening having spoken! so fantastic.

Brandon, forgive me giving just the barest few of the opening lines here---[in today's event spoken by inimitable Dana Ward]---anyone not present deserves at least the tiniest taste of:

NARRATOR

'ts been a few years since we went
to fight with Persians. I meant to
fight with Greeks. No, I meant to say
t's been a few years since we went
to fight with Axes, since we're Allies.
If this is confusing, it's because I'm saying this to you in
Greek. In fact we're Greeks, because we're

speaking Greek. But isn't it as
if we were Persians, making this
speech about fighting with Greeks? All
the more rich I'd venture since we're
making the speech in Greek. That's what
Persians do after all in The
Persians. Speak in Greek 'bout fighting
with Greeks, or rather against them.

We, the Persians, speak Greek so well
we know that they, the Greeks, call us
"barbarians" so we go a-
head and call each other barbar-
ians, since we're speaking Greek, one
Persian to another. What will
we speak about? About fighting
Persians and Greeks. I meant Persians...


it continues gloriously for something. ie, not for naught. Poetry's for something! isn't it grand. Thank you Brandon for writing such a stunning play, leafy and intricate and dazzling without dazzling, in its melodic, disarming, suturing, painful rich & edible accuracy, and for casting it--uh, brilliantly--and to Judith for all her particular work organizing and logisticizing, & the nonsites collective for instigating and supporting--as Alli Warren once said to someone who loves her, 'it's great to be alive and to know you and to be eating this apple'

The Persians by Aeschylus, by Brandon Brown
Cast: Taylor Brady, Brent Cunningham, Tanya Hollis, Dan Fisher, Cynthia Sailers, John Sakkis, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward
Organizational Tactics & Action: Judith Goldman

More info, more resources: here.

When faced with a terrifying and daunting task ["literature"] I am fully capable of laying myself down and falling straight to sweaty, immediate sleep, which is what i did today, at 5 pm, for twenty-five deep, dreamful, sunny, luxurious, sultry minutes.

Walking around the lake earlier today at a pace designed to deliver me from my fears, I was reflecting on the motherfucking awfulness that next week I will have to return to my full-time job. I complain often about the awfulness of Being a Poet and Having a Full-Time [non-academic, okay?] Job, and it has not been lost on me that there are Some People who Don't Like It when they have to hear it. It is distasteful to suggest that one might prefer to stay home reading and thinking and writing all day, and even more impertinent to suggest that one should not only have to Wish To but should Get To! It was not implied, but stated directly to me once [by a friend with a trust fund and no day job] that perhaps I thought that jobs like the one I had were "beneath" me. Listen up people, I'm a poet! NOTHING is beneath me. Our labors are the lowest of the low, the lowliest.

I was the cleaning person for a stockbroker lady two years my junior for six months once, and it was more manageable in polite society to articulate the scrubbing of her toilets than it is to squeak up, "I'm a poet." But if you're reading this blog, you're a poet, and you're already on your hands and knees and you know it. You've written this post fifteen thousand ways come and from Sunday.

[But don't believe the hype! the heart is always right!]

WHO KNEW?

well, surely you did, but I've been so sweetly, safely in the sand.

this media feeds my already-considerable paranoia.


By the way, I had a new yoga teacher Saturday. He said advanced yogis can achieve miracles, such as be in two places at one time. POETS! Advanced yogis are poets!

I’m still trying to understand the blog form. Am working at it’s possible to not front in a flat space. Or the object as other than indicating/advertising apparatus. Which would be making the space porous, but I'm not so sure this is about comment boxes or link streams. A portal is a portal if it deepens the space.

this form allows you to stop anywhere and begin again anywhere It's all contingency and evaporation. it's news. which surely is news to no one but me. so the static elements are the parts most porous, they don't disintegrate, they remain. so tone remains. but not speech. to continue this thought, tomorrow, according to this form, is to erase it.

poets going away

[click to play]

I ride in the free car share every weekday morning. I walk two blocks down my street to a gas station where people and cars line up together. Three people makes a carpool, meaning faster access to the bridge and no tolls; everyone wins.

There are several usual approaches to the bridge from my car-share pickup spot and I have come to categorize driver personality and temperament based on choice of approach. No route is significantly or consistently faster or slower than any other, although sometimes one approach will bypass traffic whereas another one will not—but it’s not clear by pattern over my months of car-sharing which will be better on any particular morning based on what set of circumstance.

The most obvious and direct route to the 580 westbound toward San Francisco from Oakland is a right turn out of the gas station onto Grand, a right turn onto 27th, a right turn onto Harrison and a left onto the 580 ramp—this person has a lot of faith in the formal structures of the social to best provide fast no thinking timely arrival to the workplace, they believe this will always be the best way, it’s direct, and probably no one has ever shown them another route.

The less obvious but more popular method is for those who like to feel they’re the wiser, sneaking past others and getting ahead in a cutting sharp corners kind of way. They're in a hurry, they're fast, they're me-first. It's not unusual for a bossy passenger to enlighten a driver by directing them this way. It involves a double right out of the gas station up Perkins, & a couple of zigs & zags up and down some hills past a lot of apartment complexes, which residential streets then turn you out at exactly the same Harrison Street on-ramp the first method gets you to.These drivers show the same faith in main-highway mechanistics as the first group. They do shave about 40 seconds off their drive--as long as there aren’t too many other cars taking the back-door right onto Harrison at the same time.

The silliest way is to backtrack east on Grand to the Grand Avenue 580 entrance. The morning commute is not a go-east-in-order-to-get-west practice. These people need divorce lawyers.

There’s the straight shot, all-the-way-down-Grand-Avenue approach. It's grittier the further west you go on Grand, more abandoned, more dilapidated, more industrial, more shopping carts lying on their sides, more pedestrians likely to be enduring grueling hardship in their daily lives when it comes to those little luxuries we all take for granted, you know, the eating and sleeping kind. You have to deal with stoplights but not so much with other drivers. You take a Hwy 80 onramp straight onto the toll plaza. [Because this is my own favored route, I'm ill-equipped to comment on personality displays. Anyone care to diagnose?]

This brings me to the rarest and until today my least favorite of all methods of getting onto the San Francisco Bay Bridge heading west into the city. This one mimics the Grand-Avenue-all-the-way, but just a few blocks before the Grand Ave under/over pass swing onto the bridge the driver will suddenly make a left onto a wide quiet signless treeless mostly carless street, and drive a long long way through [south? west? southwest?] Oakland, finally arriving at the 880 north. The thing about this approach is that you have absolutely no indicators of the degree of bridge traffic, or accidents, or anarchy, or anything, not anywhere along the route, there's no sense of anyone rushing or even moving, and when you get up onto the 880 you're not only right on top of the maze and the toll booths, but you slide along next to and past all the other backed up traffic in your own private Hwy 880 carpool lane, right until and through the toll plaza. This driver is patient, stubborn, sure, doesn't have to see to know, has lots of faith, moves at a steady pace, and feels triumphant winning the game at the very last. They're the ones you want to fuck and love on, for sure.