open letter

unaired fox news footage

2011-10-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

one of the more satisfying interviews from Occupy Wall Street!

unfortunately, but not surprisingly, never aired on TV....

"Something Has Started": Michael Moore on the Occupy Wall St. Protests That Could Spark a Movement

2011-09-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

This is worth watching. Today is day 12 of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. Haven't heard too much about it? That's because the corporate media is BARELY covering it. Democracy Now IS covering it, though, and amateur videos of the protest are all over YouTube.

Follow the link for video:

"Something Has Started": Michael Moore on the Occupy Wall St. Protests That Could Spark a Movement

friday anthems!

2011-09-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

the more she sneers, the more i love her !!!

"yeah. i'm not such a sweet thing. i want to do ev - er - y - thing. what a beautiful feeling"

sunshine

2011-06-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

oh god, rye rye is my girl!

i guess this came out last fall, but hell, this is my summer jam!!!!!! featuring the indelible MIA.

TO BAY AREA FOLKS: let's do some dance this weekend. bring yr tunes out...

---
IT IS NOW A LITTLE LATER: been listening to more rye rye, and have been fully affirmed. i'm hearing some of my fav lady girls from hip hop in "shake it to the ground", below....missy, salt and pepa, M.I.A, and even thought of ladytron, the electro band from a few years back. the styling and dancing is very "push it", updated 20-ish years...

shake. it. totheground.

Speaking and talking

2011-06-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

Brian Ang held an event on "gender" as part of his talk series this past weekend, in response to criticism around the perception that he hadn't invited women to participate. This opened a huge can of worms and I'd like to share my experience of the event, as well as the talk I wrote for the event. The first is an email to a group of women who had been discussing how to approach and if we should approach this event at all. I've edited out names of people who had responded in private email, while maintaining critiques of tactics or appreciation of their contributions. My talk is below the letter. I'm happy to hear anyone's thoughts and look forward to hearing about reactions in general.
Love,
Sara

Hi everyone,

I wanted to write you all and let you know that things went really well at Brian’s yesterday. I was sorry that many people did not show up for one reason or another, but I really want to share the success of what went down.

A group of us had strategized both on the phone and in person ahead of time about how we would intervene in the space and hold the discussion in way that was equitable and civilized, but also - and most importantly - firmly on our terms. I won’t speak for everyone who participated, but the people who I spoke with the most about this previous to the event were Jen Manzano, Lindsey Boldt and Jackqueline Frost. Per Jack’s suggestion, some of us brought texts with us, and some of us didn’t. I did bring a text, and I am sharing it both below in this email, and on my blog at www.sara-larsen.blogspot.com . There was also a lively discussion following the reading of prepared texts. The people who attended were me, Lindsey, Jackqueline, Jen, David Brazil, Wendy Trevino, Stephanie Young, Derrick Clemons, Zack Tuck, and Brian.

We decided to insist on an anarchist model of discussion, a discussion not “held” by Brian, but where a facilitator is elected by the group. There was some debate on this at first, but our demand was strong and collective, and this did end up being how things went down. We also insisted that the facilitator be a woman to begin with. We decided we were open to male facilitators later in the conversation, but as it happened, when we switched facilitators, it was again a woman. The job of the facilitator was to make sure that there was enough space for everyone to speak and that people weren’t emotionally talking over each other. This worked super-well. I was really, really happy about the form, and my only wish was that more people had showed up to the talk to witness and experience that the model for these kinds of things doesn’t have to be one of “drama”.

As I mentioned earlier, the only thing I found disappointing was the lack of attendance at this event. If, for one reason or another, you would have liked to have been there, but were otherwise engaged, I’m sorry you couldn’t make it – it would’ve have been great to have you as part of the discussion.

For those of you who stayed home as a “political action”, I respectfully disagree with your tactics. In my view, it’s a tactic that, in the end, gets nothing productive done. In terms of being on someone’s “turf”, I’d question when we do feel we are on “our own” or “neutral” turf. What constitutes “our own” turf? When is it neutral? And is it always productive for things to take place on so-called neutral turf? I think it is misguided to think that that is the only way to have a conversation, and I’m a proponent of intervention – if power does not cede space, sometimes you have to take it. And I think that yesterday we strategized ahead of time and then employed successful tactics to make that happen.

For those of you who wouldn’t attend because (as I heard throughout the weekend), you are concerned “only” with poetry and art or whatever, I would ask you if you think that poetry and art are not political? Or if the frames of discussion at talks, reading groups etc are just as important as the content of those discussions? If the frames are important, shouldn’t they be inclusive and intentional? For those of us in privileged positions in terms of discourse (white, male, straight, etc—and I admit that this can be very complicated, and this also should be openly reckoned with), are you content to chill in aesthetics….because you can? If the answer to that is yes, well, fine. But again, I find that I personally disagree with your position.

Brian was pretty open to the things that we talked about in general. I am not defending his past actions, but I thought his reactions to being “in the hot seat” were graceful. He did a lot of listening. He could’ve been a defensive asshole, but he wasn’t. He seemed to absorb and understand what we were saying, and eventually agreed that inclusive forms of curation and discussion are necessary, and that it’s important not to passively reproduce dominant sexist (or other –ist) models. While I felt that Brian’s talk series did need to be discussed, I wanted to emphasize MORE IMPORTANTLY that the behavior I’ve experienced in terms of underlying sexism in our community has been ongoing for a very long time, particularly the “who speaks” issue. A lot of people have recognized this previously, but it has never really come out into the open. On that note, I’m including my talk below, which discusses this further.

I’m open to all of your comments, either publically or privately. I’m posting my talk as well as a lot of this email (minus reference to specific people on this trail) on my blog, as well as sending it to other friends (in a separate email so as to respect this current email train as-is). I’d like people not included here, as well as the dudes in my life, to read this and be part of a discussion as well.

Thanks, and love, (talk copied below)

Sara

I do not want to talk to simply talk today about gender equality. I want to begin to practice it. It is only via disciplined, attentive practice that theories, abstractions and talk become manifest actions in the world.

At present, there are some underlying sexist behaviors in our community that need to be brought out into the open and dealt with directly. I insist that they begin to be dealt with today. I do not necessarily want to be here at Brian’s talk series in this context. I’d much rather have been invited here to discuss my work, or my thoughts around art and poetry. But since a group has been invited here in general to talk about the very large and complicated issue of gender (and it’s important to distinguish between gender and sex), I’m going to make use of the occasion to let you all know honestly and without reserve what some of the problems are. I’m not going to talk about gender per se. I’m going to talk about sexism.

I’m not going to pussyfoot around it. What I see is a talk series that has been pretty exciting, but at which so far no women have spoken. I’m also seeing that during discussions both at this talk series and at other talks, readings and reading groups in the past (AND I’D LIKE TO EMPHASIZE THAT THIS HAS BEEN ON ON-GOING, LONG-STANDING PROBLEM), women are also NOT SPEAKING or not speaking as much as men are. Is it coincidental that in these spaces women happen to have nothing to say? If you think that it is, how do you account for the coincidence? I’m asking you this seriously. I insist that you answer me. If it’s not simply a coincidence, and you cannot account for it, what else is at play here?

I resent that I am not here on account of the work that I am doing. I just had two chapbooks released. I have been making TRY magazine, along with David, for three years. I’ve curated or co-curated multiple reading series and events, including the Poetic Labor Conference. I’ve written and spoken about the wars, the ecosystem, feminism and labor continuously. I’m involved in radical reading groups, as well as an all day language free school that takes place on Sundays, and which I should be at right now, facilitating a Spanish class. I am an extremely active intellectual and cultural producer in this community. And I’m not the only one. Every woman in this room is an active intellectual and cultural producer in this community with their own laundry lists of what they COULD be here talking about. My point is not self aggrandizement but the fact that I am here and the other women in the room are here to talk about sexism creates an absence. It creates the absence of all the other things we could be here to speak about and that we should be here to speak about.

So why am I here? Why are WE here? You have to answer this question for me today. I’m holding you accountable for it. Why are we here in this room with this issue?

I look around the room and I see folks who are concerned with the overwhelming domination, repression, violence and inequity of the capitalist regime. Rightly so. Many people in our community have recently read the important book, Caliban and the Witch. This indispensible work by the Italian feminist marxist Silvia Federici tracks historically how the disempowerment and oppression of women in medieval Europe, particularly executed through the misogynist genocide of the witch hunts, was NECESSARY for the development and domination of capitalism as a global economic system of exploitation. Anyone who is reckoning with the misery of capitalism today, and I’m thankful that many of us are, should note that overwhelmingly those who suffer the most as a result of this system world-wide are women. Women and children. From now on, when you talk about capitalism or marxism or anything related, I want you to think of that. The people who suffer the most from the capitalist regime are WOMEN. I insist that you no longer be able to discuss these things abstractly without thinking about this reality.

What does this have to do with our poetry community? Everything.

We have never truly and meaningfully, publically, put on the table the thing that virtually everyone knows and what most women will tell you that they’ve experienced: and that has been a silencing. It may not have been done with malicious intent, but it has been done. And I’m sick of this subterranean sexism. It’s coming to the light of day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in intellectual or artistic conversations where the dudes, meaning to or not, just took over the conversation. Or worse, where women deferred to the dudes to “explain” something that they could explain very well themselves. Or where dudes were asked to talk about something that a woman could talk about with equal facility. This needs to be reckoned with, beginning today. You have now officially been told. And if things continue to proceed in the way that they have, you have no excuse. Everyone, women, men, trans, whatever identity, alike. We have to be conscious from here on out about how we curate, how we hold discussions, how we teach, etc. We need to think formally about how we talk, as well as think about the content of what we are saying.

Our community does not just reflect back onto itself. If it did, I probably wouldn’t want to be a part of it. It is active in the world and extends beyond its own scope, whether folks admit it or not. It is a place of creation – part of that creation is the creation of social activity and social norms. We like to think that we would not tolerate homophobia, transphobia or racism in this community. We strive not to tolerate these things. And we should not tolerate sexism either, whether explicit or implicit.

If this is uncomfortable for you, I hope we can work together to find a way to make it more comfortable – know that you will need to do work in making this happen. If you prefer to deny or ignore this, well, I guess after today I just feel like: fuck you. If you want to talk openly, honestly and in the spirit of community building, love, joy and equity, then I am totally with you, totally down, and I’m psyched to co-create a space and a conversation that benefits us all.

I’m looking forward to talking, but more importantly, I’m looking forward to the PRACTICE of equity.

angela davis

2011-06-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

last night, i went with lindsey, david, salem and john to see angela davis at la pena in berkeley. angela is truly amazing, inspirational, and still as radical and graceful as ever.

she was inducted in la pena's "hall of fame" and gave a talk on contemporary revolutionary movements, and covered ALOT of ground, including calling for worldwide support of palistine and the abolition of the prison system. if you haven't yet read her book "Are Prison's Obsolete", i would HIGHLY recommend it. angela also gave a very concise and understandable breakdown of marx, in answer to an audience question concerning the paradox of capitalist democracy, which was wonderful.

in the meantime, with love and thanks to angela davis, who continues to be part of some of the most important revolutionary thinking in this country, here is a talk that angela recently gave at uc davis, very worth watching or listening to, even if just in part.

she relates some of her experiences growing up in segregated birmingham. here is a bit...

"Now I relate this bit of personal history because it helps me to understand how important it is to transmit certain habits of perception, certain habits of imagination. Just as it was once possible to and important for people to imagine a world without slavery, a world beyond slavery, just as it was important for me personally to learn how as a child to imagine a world without racial segregation, and then later to imagine a world where women were not assumed to be inferior to men, it is now important to imagine a world without xenophobia, and the fenced-in borders that are designed to make us think of the people of the south as the enemy. It is important now to imagine a world in which binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation and association, and one in which violence is eradicated from state practices as well as from our intimate lives, regardless of how we position our sexuality….It is really important to work with your imagination, to use your imagination, to think beyond the moment. But it’s not enough simply to imagine a different future - we can walk around with these ideal words in our heads while everything crumbles around us. And so I would say that critical habits involve collective intervention as well."

pablo neruda wrote,

2011-06-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

“Poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”

girls to the front!

2011-05-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

so finally, FINALLY, i have my paws on Sara Marcus's history of the riot grrrl movement, "Girls to the Front", and i am here to tell you it is AMAZING.

i'm only halfway thru the book, but two things are immediately present in my mind:

the first is how deeply excited, inspired and even anxious i am in reading a book about a movement that i was part of and that essentially shaped my adolescence. having encountered bands like bikini kill, heavens to betsy, bratmobile, huggy bear, team dresch, just to name a few (and never forgetting the local bands that opened up for them and were equally as amazing - size queen and marmalade, if yr out there, i still listen to you!) starting in 1993, when i was 15 years old, it's not hyperbolic for me to say that it literally changed my life, and continues to inform the work i do today. it informs my poetics, my radical politics, my community projects (TRY, all of the house/community reading series i've done, the poetic labor project, lady group, etc...) in the 90's i was a teenage girl looking for a way to be strong in a world that basically wants to destroy me / control me in every way, and the open, growling, inclusive, unapologetic feminism of riot grrrl blew my world open. so i made zines, i exchanged mail nearly every day with other punks/grrrls across the country, i went to shows nearly every weekend, i talked to so many friends about art, feminism, queer politics (homocore was also big at the time), community, etc....most importantly, i learned about and participated in the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethics of the punk scene. for those not familiar, DIY is all about creating your world. don't wait for anyone to sign your band - start a label. put other bands in the world. start a zine. create your community. make it. it's yours. and we never, ever have to capitulate to the "capitalist ogre". never.

the second thing that strikes me while reading "Girls to the Front", is just how the riot grrrl movement (as well as the larger punk/indie scene) of the 90's mirrors that of the poetry scene today. that we meet at shows/readings - that being part of the community is not just what you yourself do (tho this is also very important), but what you do for others, how you enact your community.

there is alot more thinking for me around this second idea. how can our poetry scene, community, whatever, be (MORE) radicalized? how does our sub-culture work in terms of what it produces/ what is says semiotically? what is the status of art? what do we want it to do?

these are questions that OBSESS me. i'm thinking through them. i am thinking through them with you. it's the only way.

riot grrrl is a label and an idea and a movement of the past to some of the people who weren't part of it. for others, it is an inspiration and an impetus to action, even though they weren't there. and that is awesome. i love that. for me, it will always be an abiding part of who i am, how i was shaped. it was my introduction to a radical orientation that continues to grow. to an process of art-making and being in the world that implores me to take production into my own hands. it's about community, not commodity.

riot grrrl did something else too. it freed me. one of the most revolutionary things i ever heard was kathleen hanna scream, in the song "i like fucking":

"just because my world, sweet sister, is so fucking goddamn full of rape, does that mean my body must always be a source of pain??? NO, NO NO NO. NO. NO, NO NO!"

they can try to kill us. rape us. destroy us.
but we won't let them. whether it is a rapist or this devastating culture at large: we will fight back. fuck them!

"i'll resist with every inch and every breath
i'll resist this psychic death"

we will totally fight back.

heypaulheypaulheypaul let's have a ball

2011-05-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

the pixies are really making my morning today. does it get any better than "debaser", "gigantic" and "here comes your man"???? kisses for the weekend, homies....let's have a ball.

femexist in my hood

2011-04-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

friends: i am really excited because recently, walking around my neighborhood in north oakland/south berkeley, i'm seeing posters much like the ones below. they are guerrilla activist feminist posters by a

group called femexist. i checked out their blog, which only has pics of the posters (which i borrowed from for this post), but no names or contact info, understandably.

still, i'd love to know who these women (presumably? could be wrong, as many rad men would also join such a movement) are. basically, because i'd like to be their friends. i totally love and support this kind of activist community provocation (and i would say, education). fuck yes, femexist! check out more pictures at http://www.femexist.blogspot.com/

in the 90's, my best girlfriends and i did a similar campaign in philadelphia and south jersey. mostly our flyers stole lyrics from riot grrrl songs and we taped them up everywhere. now i can't even remember which lyrics we stole. but i do remember how empowering it felt. i really believed then, and still believe, that small efforts make a difference. and that you never know which things will arrive at just the right time (right kairos).

seeing these posters today in my hood excites me in a way that i can't explain. feminism seemed to have been subsumed into the academy...lovely in some ways, but dears, please, although it is great that those conversations are happening in universities (i love that too), let's remember not every person in the world reads university press books and not every person in the world speaks theory. femexist's postering campaign brings these issues firmly back into the immediate community, provocatively, and with a good deal of erudition and imagination....

i'm into it. and thought you'd like to know too.

love and more love, sara

on repeat:

2010-08-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

Labor Day 2010 !!!

2010-08-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

A last reminder to please join us in the Bay Area this Labor Day Weekend for a unique collaborative event!

Sunday, September 5, 1-7pm, Studio One, 365 45th Street, Oakland
Monday, September 6, 11am – 2pm, 21 Grand, 416 25th Street, Oakland

THIS EVENT IS FREE.
In an effort to include as many people as possible in this gathering, we are happy to announce that we will be posting audio files of the presentations to our blog shortly after each one is given. You'll be able to listen and participate no matter where you are.

A detailed schedule of participants and presentations is available on our blog: http://labday2010.blogspot.com/. As you'll see, there is an hour long break in the middle of the day. We won't be able to provide food but there is a lovely grassy area and patio out front, so we encourage you to pack a lunch! We will have coffee, tea, and water.

We still need your help!! There are several ways you can help. If you can host out of town attendees, furnish supplies for the potluck brunch, have video or other technical skills, or would like to pitch in and lend a hand facilitating the event itself, we would love to put you, uh, ‘to work’! Please send us an email at labday2010@gmail.com and tell us what you can offer.

Finally, this community event is open to all, and there will be no door charge. We would be quite grateful for help defraying costs of the event: for those who would like to contribute cash, we have set up a PayPal account. Money will go towards space rental costs, supplies, and tech.

Feel free to spread the news! We hope to see you there!  

Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Suzanne Stein, Alli Warren, David Brazil
http://www.labday2010.blogspot.com/

"Our lives have been one enormous, century-long oil spill, globally"

2010-08-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

from a story about the Gulf Spill, in the Huffington Post today:

One of the strangest things about our national discourse is that it doesn't sufficiently respect people who get things right. Indeed, particularly inside the Washington Beltway, it sometimes seems like the wronger you are about things, the more seriously you get taken.

And Steiner is used to getting punished, rather than rewarded, for his warnings -- even the ones that come true. He resigned from his tenured professorship at the Unversity of Alaska last year, to protest the university's decision to strip him of a NOAA grant because of his outspoken opposition to oil drilling in Alaska's Bristol Bay.

"I feel sick that people don't want to hear the truth about risk," he told me.

The risk Steiner talks about the most these days is the one posed by our continued use of carbon -- to the grave detriment of the planet. As Steiner told me for that first story I called him about, all that carbon spewed into the Gulf was headed into the planetary ecosystem anyway, through our tailpipes.

"Our lives have been one enormous, century-long oil spill, globally," Steiner said.

The U.S. alone uses some 20 million barrels of oil a day. Simply adopting tougher efficiency standards for power plants, cars and trucks, and electricity transmission could cut that amount in half, Steiner said. "We're wasting twice the amount of the entire Deepwater Horizon spill ever day."

Indeed, Steiner's biggest fear is not what will happen to the Gulf -- or even that drilling will begin again without sufficient safeguards. It's that this spill will fade into history without fundamentally changing the way people think about oil, and without accelerating the drive toward sustainable, low-carbon energy sources.

"We're not getting anywhere with that. That's the thing that really worries me," he said.

"The transcendent, take-home lesson from all of this is that we need to hasten our transition to sustainable energy. Some of the costs of oil become very clear in oil spills, but the real costs also include climate change, wars to secure oil supplies, health impacts from breathing atmospheric emissions, and supporting petro-dictators.

"We know we need to transition to sustainable, clean, low-carbon energy, and we know how. We know that the chronic, day-to-day degradation of our biosphere caused by our oil addiction -- global warming, ocean acidification, coral reef death, sea level rise, floods and droughts, crop failure, forest fires, ice melt, biodiversity loss -- is cumulatively more devastating than all the oil spills we can throw at ourselves."

why don't take your social regulations...

2010-08-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

this is one of my favorite beginnings to a song, ever. i just LOVE IT. the first 30 seconds just kill me. and it's punk, it's not complicated.

i love the bass, the "ow!", the "owowow!".

and one of my favorite dead kennedy's songs to boot...so for fun, here ya are:

Labor Day 2010 !!!

2010-08-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

Please join us in the Bay Area this Labor Day Weekend for a unique collaborative event.

Sunday, September 5, 1-7pm, Studio One, 365 45th Street, Oakland
Monday, September 6, 11am – 2pm, 21 Grand, 416 25th Street, Oakland

THIS EVENT IS FREE.

We are convening around the notion of labor and poetics. Because issues of labor and money are integral to so many of our lives as artists, we hope that gathering as presenters and participants will highlight the particularity of our struggle to “do two jobs,” that is, make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves. For the many of us who are not employed by the University, the occasions for speaking in and with a group concerned with poetics and politics in a formal way are rare. We think and hope this gathering will be a positive model for thinking cooperatively in the future.

Our participant-presenters:

George Albon (as deputized by Stacy Szymaszek),Chris Daniels (as deputized by Pamelu Lu), Steve Farmer, Samantha Giles (as deputized by CA Conrad), Andrew Joron, Kevin Killian, Lauren Levin, Dana Teen Lomax, Laura Moriarty, Jason Morris, Vanessa Place, and Cedar Sigo. We are also glad to be able to present short texts from Pamela Lu, and Rodrigo Toscano.

The gathering will include two events. On Sunday at Studio One we will have a day of presentations. On Monday (Labor Day), we will reconvene at 21 Grand Gallery for an open, informal, but hopefully rigorous conversation about issues and ideas raised in Sunday’s presentations and performances. This will be a potluck brunch at 11:00 a.m., with moderated conversation from 12:00pm to 2:00pm.

A detailed schedule of presentations will be available shortly before the event.

As we are organizing this in our "free time," we do of course need your help! There are several ways you can help. If you can host out of town attendees, furnish supplies for the potluck brunch, have video or other technical skills, or would like to pitch in and lend a hand facilitating the event itself, we would love to put you, uh, ‘to work’! Please send us an email at labday2010@gmail.com and tell us what you can offer.

Finally, this community event is open to all, and there will be no door charge. We would be quite grateful for help defraying costs of the event: for those who would like to contribute cash, we have set up a PayPal account. Money will go towards space rental costs, supplies, and tech.

Feel free to spread the news! We hope to see you there!  

David Brazil, Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Alli Warren

http://www.labday2010.blogspot.com/

53rd and 3rd

2010-07-28T10:51:00.001-07:00

hi, i haven't been here a while...

there is on my desk a
commando beam near the alchemist-gold phallus cactus:
a search for absolution
amor fata, booty-heat

the ramones in my earpiece.
the six floor conference room...
a greek muse with a lyre
ganesh
foam of a wave (invisibly, aphrodite)
this letter is religious? business, religious?
an absurd espirtu of keat's truth, beauty - unsheathed, inverted? i come
raw
organic
dancing my ass off
(later)

meantime, i'm obsessed with 53rd and 3rd today. i never listen when other people do this, but you will not regret listening to this.

oh, and michael cross kindly put up a little tidbit on my translation of dante's paradiso, canto one:
http://disinhibitor.blogspot.com/2010/07/s-lrsndantebeatrice.html

YAY!

crawfisher's appeal for the gulf of mexico

2010-07-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

thinking about...who isn't?

2010-07-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

oscar grant and his family

essential

2010-06-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

This is the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, adopted by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in Bolivia earlier this year. The Bolivian government has submitted it to the United Nations for consideration.

I don't think many people in the US have even HEARD about this, have they?

I consider this document ESSENTIAL for poets, writers, artists - anyone working to CREATE something else -- a vision that REPLACES the hallucinatory and destructive matrix of the capitalist regime.

Check it out, dear friends....

Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth

Preamble

We, the peoples and nations of Earth:

considering that we are all part of Mother Earth, an indivisible, living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with a common destiny;

gratefully acknowledging that Mother Earth is the source of life, nourishment and learning and provides everything we need to live well;

recognizing that the capitalist system and all forms of depredation, exploitation, abuse and contamination have caused great destruction, degradation and disruption of Mother Earth, putting life as we know it today at risk through phenomena such as climate change;

convinced that in an interdependent living community it is not possible to recognize the rights of only human beings without causing an imbalance within Mother Earth;

affirming that to guarantee human rights it is necessary to recognize and defend the rights of Mother Earth and all beings in her and that there are existing cultures, practices and laws that do so;

conscious of the urgency of taking decisive, collective action to transform structures and systems that cause climate change and other threats to Mother Earth;

proclaim this Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and call on the General Assembly of the United Nation to adopt it, as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations of the world, and to the end that every individual and institution takes responsibility for promoting through teaching, education, and consciousness raising, respect for the rights recognized in this Declaration and ensure through prompt and progressive measures and mechanisms, national and international, their universal and effective recognition and observance among all peoples and States in the world.

Article 1. Mother Earth

(1) Mother Earth is a living being.

(2) Mother Earth is a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings.

(3) Each being is defined by its relationships as an integral part of Mother Earth.

(4) The inherent rights of Mother Earth are inalienable in that they arise from the same source as existence.

(5) Mother Earth and all beings are entitled to all the inherent rights recognized in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings, species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status.

(6) Just as human beings have human rights, all other beings also have rights which are specific to their species or kind and appropriate for their role and function within the communities within which they exist.

(7) The rights of each being are limited by the rights of other beings and any conflict between their rights must be resolved in a way that maintains the integrity, balance and health of Mother Earth.

Article 2. Inherent Rights of Mother Earth

(1) Mother Earth and all beings of which she is composed have the following inherent rights:

(a) the right to life and to exist;

(b) the right to be respected;

(c) the right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue its vital cycles and processes free from human disruptions;

(d) the right to maintain its identity and integrity as a distinct, self-regulating and interrelated being;

(e) the right to water as a source of life;

(f) the right to clean air;

(g) the right to integral health;

(h) the right to be free from contamination, pollution and toxic or radioactive waste;

(i) the right to not have its genetic structure modified or disrupted in a manner that threatens it integrity or vital and healthy functioning;

(j) the right to full and prompt restoration the violation of the rights recognized in this Declaration caused by human activities;

(2) Each being has the right to a place and to play its role in Mother Earth for her harmonious functioning.

(3) Every being has the right to wellbeing and to live free from torture or cruel treatment by human beings.

Article 3. Obligations of human beings to Mother Earth

(1) Every human being is responsible for respecting and living in harmony with Mother Earth.

(2) Human beings, all States, and all public and private institutions must:

(a) act in accordance with the rights and obligations recognized in this Declaration;

(b) recognize and promote the full implementation and enforcement of the rights and obligations recognized in this Declaration;

(c) promote and participate in learning, analysis, interpretation and communication about how to live in harmony with Mother Earth in accordance with this Declaration;

(d) ensure that the pursuit of human wellbeing contributes to the wellbeing of Mother Earth, now and in the future;

(e) establish and apply effective norms and laws for the defence, protection and conservation of the rights of Mother Earth;

(f) respect, protect, conserve and where necessary, restore the integrity, of the vital ecological cycles, processes and balances of Mother Earth;

(g) guarantee that the damages caused by human violations of the inherent rights recognized in this Declaration are rectified and that those responsible are held accountable for restoring the integrity and health of Mother Earth;

(h) empower human beings and institutions to defend the rights of Mother Earth and of all beings;

(i) establish precautionary and restrictive measures to prevent human activities from causing species extinction, the destruction of ecosystems or the disruption of ecological cycles;

(j) guarantee peace and eliminate nuclear, chemical and biological weapons;

(k) promote and support practices of respect for Mother Earth and all beings, in accordance with their own cultures, traditions and customs;

(l) promote economic systems that are in harmony with Mother Earth and in accordance with the rights recognized in this Declaration.

Article 4. Definitions

(1) The term “being” includes ecosystems, natural communities, species and all other natural entities which exist as part of Mother Earth.

(2) Nothing in this Declaration restricts the recognition of other inherent rights of all beings or specified beings.

LABOR DAY 2010/CONVOCATION

2010-06-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Please join us in the Bay Area this Labor Day 2010 for a unique collaborative event.

Partly as a response to the form of the academic conference, in which invitees share the common condition of working in the academy, we are organizing a gathering in which poets who survive by other means are able to present in a formal structure that encourages conversation about poetics and social life.

The topic for this first convocation is therefore LABOR, and we have invited a number of poets and writers to prepare short presentations around how they earn a living.

Because issues of labor and money are integral to so many of our lives as artists, we are hoping that gathering as presenters and participants will highlight the particularity of our struggle to “do two jobs,” that is, make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves. Because we are not employed by the University, the occasions for speaking in and with a group concerned with poetics and politics in a formal way are rare. But we think this gathering will be a positive model for thinking cooperatively in the future.

Specific locations and exact times remain TBD, however the overall structure of the event looks like this: Sunday afternoon and leading into evening, we'll gather in the East Bay to hear the presentations. Afterwards, we'll have drinks and socially process the material from that day's event. On Monday (late) morning, we'll all convene again to have brunch. At brunch, the presenters along with the audience will have an open, informal, but hopefully rigorous conversation about issues and ideas raised in the performances of Sunday.

We would especially like to encourage attendance by as many of you from outside the Bay Area as might be interested in participating. Because we understand that out-of-pocket travel can be quite expensive and difficult, we will do everything we can to try and help find accommodation and defray the cost of meals. And the weather is usually quite perfect here around Labor Day, if that’s any more persuasive.

This event is open to everyone, and we hope to see as many of you here as possible. This is also something to share with others. Travel will be easier if done in pairs or small groups, and absolutely no one is discouraged from participating.

We'll also look into the possibility of Skype or other forms of broadcast, in order to include as many as might wish to engage.

Times, locations, and a list of presenters shortly forthcoming.

We hope to see you there!

David Brazil, Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Alli Warren

dig

2010-05-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Diggers and Winstanley

SF Diggers

making me happy:

2010-05-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

were you waiting at the bus stop all your life? or just to die by the hand of love?

as well as

then what do all the poor do with their lives
on judgement day with nothing to say
i've been beat up, i've been thrown down
but i'm not down, no i'm not down

Greece has a revolution. Kanellos the dog shows up.

2010-05-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

Kanellos is a stray dog living in Athens, who has shown up at almost every protest in that city in the past two years - of his own volition. No one takes him, he just shows up!

Here are some photos and a link about him and a link to a great photo essay on him in the Guardian UK.

The first photo below is from AP. The three photos following are from the Guardian UK.

Ojalá

2010-05-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

This song, Ojalá, by Silvio Rodriguez has been one of my favorites for a long time, and, listening to it multiple times recently, and hundreds of times in years past, I finally decided to translate and post it.

Silvio Rodriguez is one of the main figures of Nueva Trova, an explicitly political (most often anti-imperialist) folk music which emerged out of the Cuban Revolution and which followed on the tradition of traditional Trova. If you are familiar with the European troubadors, trova will look very familiar to you.

Ojalá is a spanish word that comes out of the Arabic وشاء الله (wa-šā’ allāh) ‘and may God will it’. put very simply, it means "i hope" -- but behind the "i hope" is a force of god, a call to god, a prayer.

i translated it this morning, and i couldn't think of an "i hope" in english that calls upon god. "i pray" doesn't seem quite right...the connotations in english are all wrong. does anyone know another word or phrase to denote this?

here is silvio's version of the song, which i really recommend you listen to up to the very end. and the lyrics in spanish, and then my translation in english.

the video is kind of cheesy but that's just youtube.

Ojalá que las hojas no te toquen el cuerpo cuando caigan
para que no las puedas convertir en cristal.
Ojalá que la lluvia deje de ser milagro que baja por tu cuerpo.
Ojalá que la luna pueda salir sin ti.
Ojalá que la tierra no te bese los pasos.

Ojalá se te acabe la mirada constante,
la palabra precisa, la sonrisa perfecta.
Ojalá pase algo que te borre de pronto:
una luz cegadora, un disparo de nieve.
Ojalá por lo menos que me lleve la muerte,
para no verte tanto, para no verte siempre
en todos los segundos, en todas las visiones:
ojalá que no pueda tocarte ni en canciones

Ojalá que la aurora no de gritos que caigan en mi espalda.
Ojalá que tu nombre se le olvide a esa voz.
Ojalá las paredes no retengan tu ruido de camino cansado.
Ojalá que el deseo se vaya tras de ti,
a tu viejo gobierno de difuntos y flores.

Ojalá se te acabe la mirada constante,
la palabra precisa, la sonrisa perfecta.
Ojalá pase algo que te borre de pronto:
una luz cegadora, un disparo de nieve.
Ojalá por lo menos que me lleve la muerte,
para no verte tanto, para no verte siempre
en todos los segundos, en todas las visiones:
ojalá que no pueda tocarte ni en canciones

Ojalá pase algo que te borre de pronto:
una luz cegadora, un disparo de nieve.
Ojalá por lo menos que me lleve la muerte,
para no verte tanto, para no verte siempre
en todos los segundos, en todas las visiones:
ojalá que no pueda tocarte ni en canciones

***
i hope the leaves do not touch your body when they fall
so that you cannot convert them to crystal glass.
i hope that the rain becomes a miracle that passes by your body.
i hope the moon is able to leave without you.
i hope that the earth will not kiss your footprints.

i hope it finishes you, the constant gaze
the precise word, the perfect smile
i hope something comes to erase you quick:
a blinding light, a shot of snow.
i hope at least that it brings me a death,
so i don't see you so much, so i don't see you constantly
in every second, in all of my visions:
i hope that i can't even touch you, not even in songs

i hope the dawn won't howl when it tumbles down my spine.
i hope your name is forgotten in that voice.
i hope the walls don't retain the noise of your exhausted walk.
i hope this prayer follows you,
to your decrepit government of death and flowers.

i hope it finishes you, the constant gaze
the precise word, the perfect smile
i hope something comes to erase you quick:
a blinding light, a shot of snow.
i hope at least that it brings me a death,
so i don't see you so much, so i don't see you constantly
in every second, in all of my visions:
i hope that i can't even touch you, not even in songs

i hope something comes to erase you quick:
a blinding light, a shot of snow.
i hope at least that it brings me a death,
so i don't see you so much, so i don't see you constantly
in every second, in all of my visions:
i hope that i can't even touch you, not even in songs

TRY interview on PhillySound !

2010-05-03T08:39:00.001-07:00

CA Conrad, in his incredible awesomeness, interviewed David and I about TRY and posted it on PhillySound!

Check it out HERE

the question

2010-05-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

"the question arises in a harbor of lies"

--kari edwards, bharat jiva

i think of this line, as i experience only what i could call a heartbreak of rage over the catastrophic BP oil spill that has choked out the lives of thousands upon thousands of animals in the gulf ecosystem. these animals are not OTHER. like us, they had their own lives, their own destinies.

so i'm enraged that they are literally choking on the devastation of this - i.e. oil greed profit war capitalist anti-living forces.

the question arises in a harbor of lies.

Cosmos of War

2010-04-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

Powerpoint "is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world."

this image is from the new york times, depicting "the complexity of american strategy in afghanistan." it is, of course, made by someone very adept in the ordering system that is powerpoint - a cosmos of war.

in similar news, the US government/corportate/military oligarchy COULD just get the fuck out.

the great turtle of light - an epistolary vocare and respondere with david brazil

2010-04-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

so, although we share the same abode, i recently sent david brazil a letter in the mail, emblazoned with "the great turtle of light" design on the envelope (see above...to which david typed in: " who can lift it?"). i wrote in 3 simple questions and let him know that i would post his answers in a blogpost. as expected, david's answers were unexpected and wonderfully illuminating. he responded by typing his answers, which you see photos of, attached. here is the transcription:

dear david, answer any way you like and thanks! love, sara april 11, 2010

~~why~~ daily writing?

Continuous acknowledgement of the nonknowledge of the use of what one is doing in the present time, i.e. that it will be for something else a something that we dont know what it is yet.

To preserve fugitive things in a human way. As an attempt at a continuous act of attention that honors creation and ourselves, even if we are sad.

("Attention is the natural prayer of the soul" says Celan in the Meridian address, quoting Benjamin quoting Malebranche.) (Responsibility)

~~why~~ greek?

As with the previous question, the WHY invites me to falsify what is essentially an operation of libidinality / contatus with the operation of a reason that would justify it, rigorously suspended. Because I'm interested.

(Continuous delving in the dark, beneath the WHY.)

If I had to say something definite I'd say that I believe we have our mooring in signs so that it is necessary to study the horizan of appearance, to understand ourselves. To historicize our ideas, to know what our words mean.

~~why~~ now?

Again, why closes more than it opens * i.e. it invites us to speak as though we know why - whereas I am much more interested in making clear that we (or I), do not ...) (consigned to the now). We are obliged to act in now according to our lights and without sufficient information. In fact all these questions come together. Because it's now or never. Now and never.

more peter, on the slum of the internet

2010-04-14T10:32:00.001-07:00

today my daytime studies, as you can tell, are constellated around peter...
the following excerpted from here:

AP: What's the potential for the activist strategy? Do you feel like it has a larger potential, not so much in a centralized way, but as a decentralized, rhizomatic reality?
PLW: The problem is that this 'rhizome' has now become the internet. This is the problem. This is why we must move on from the Deleuze and Guatarri model, I'm afraid.
AP: OK. What are your feelings on that specifically?
PLW: I think that the problem is, we mistook the internet for the rhizome. And what we've got now is a situation where we're all hostages in cyberspace. We're all held hostage in cyberspace, which is basically a haunted slum. It's the perfect mirror of capital. This is one of the reasons there's not a lot of money generate out of the internet but a lot of money goes around it and through it and in it, because it's not capitalism per se but it's a mirror of capital. Therefore its reverse and in some sense its image. So we're all sucked into this, and every radical group in America is essentially a website and nothing more.

peter lamborn wilson

2010-04-14T09:37:00.001-07:00

"Technology, the triumph of capital, what I call the technopathocracy, the rule of sick machinery, what looked like the absolute triumph of neo-conservative / neo-liberal global capitalism that suddenly, it was no longer possible to even criticize capitalism, suddenly this was just like water or air, now it’s to be a given in our society. And the internet, and other forms of modern communication technology, although most people seem to think that this increases community, in my view, it destroys it. Because community, to me, is based on physical reality, not on communication devices. And when I hear things about the internet community, it just makes me want to puke! It’s like talking about the law enforcement community, which is another favourite phrase of American journalism, as if these are all kindly neighbours lending cups of sugar to each other. This is a fucking armed occupation force! That we pay out of our own pockets — help the police, beat yourself up! And of course, America is at the forefront of this. We started the whole television-automobile-suburban culture, which its alienation, and the fact that you don’t know who you’re living next to. This is not society! This is the breakdown of society. This is atomization…"

where our taxes go

2010-04-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

if you are like me and paying hefty taxes this year, and just happen to be curious where it's all going, check out this link below. you can enter the amount you are paying into their calculator, and they will tell you approximately what percent is going where.

not surprisingly, MOST of our taxes are going to the military. the bank bailouts are included under "government". check it out:

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/taxday2010

i LISTEN to recommendations from great poet friends...

2010-04-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

begin of light with joy

2010-04-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

      sucking the honey of it's
                                     telepathy , every lightening itself

                is chambermaid

                                            i accept last of PAINES

(incarnadine)

promise an abrupt DAYLIGHT        (which i cannot keep)

            (emphasis on this special wreck)

part of the dream is to accept your

   waking life as a dream ,

      says Conrad ,

     this unnegotiable opera

a form of WORK    where cups for correct rent

overfill

   cast open the dental jam of   lords who have land

who i owe paper

of certain sort   but i am spacious in   transgression and the flicker

of mortality --

           the day is so young

contemporaneous

    to all our daily skin

NEWS THAT STAYS NEWS

2010-03-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

part of nero's domus aurea (or "golden house") collapsed today!

no news on the statue of the muse, here --->

the golden house is amazing. check it out, from wikipedia:

The Golden House was a party villa, as shown by the presence of 300 rooms without any sleeping quarter. Nero's own palace remained on the Quirinal Hill. Strangely, no kitchens or latrines have been discovered yet either.

Rooms sheathed in dazzling polished white marble were given richly varied floor plans, shaped with niches and exedras that concentrated or dispersed the daylight. There were pools in the floors and fountains splashing in the corridors. Nero took great interest in every detail of the project, according to Tacitus' Annals, and oversaw the engineer-architects, Celer and Severus, who were also responsible for the attempted navigable canal with which Nero hoped to link Misenum with Lake Avernus.[13]

The style of wall paintings in Domus Aurea inspired Raphael's Vatican Stanze and 18th-century Neoclassicism alike.Some of the extravagances of the Domus Aurea had repercussions for the future. The architects designed two of the principal dining rooms to flank an octagonal court, surmounted by a dome with a giant central oculus to let in light.[1] It was probably the first Roman use of a dome that was not in a temple dedicated to the gods, such as the Pantheon, and an early use of concrete construction. One innovation was destined to have an enormous influence on the art of the future: Nero placed mosaics, previously restricted to floors, in the vaulted ceilings. Only fragments have survived, but that technique was to be copied extensively, eventually ending up as a fundamental feature of Christian art: the apse mosaics that decorate so many churches in Rome, Ravenna, Sicily and Constantinople.

Celer and Severus also created an ingenious mechanism, cranked by slaves, that made the ceiling underneath the dome revolve like the heavens, while perfume was sprayed and rose petals were dropped on the assembled diners. According to some accounts, perhaps embellished by Nero's political enemies, on one occasion such quantities of rose petals were dropped that one unlucky guest was asphyxiated (a similar story is told of the emperor Elagabalus).

"Nero gave the best parties, ever," archaeologist Wallace-Hadrill told an interviewer when the Golden House was reopened to visitors in 1999 after being closed for years for restorations. "Three hundred years after his death, tokens bearing his head were still being given out at public spectacles - a memento of the greatest showman of them all." Nero, who was obsessed with his status as an artist, certainly regarded parties as works of art. His official party planner was Petronius.

Frescoes covered every surface that wasn't more richly finished. The main artist was one Famulus (or Fabulus according to some sources). Fresco technique, working on damp plaster, demands a speedy and sure touch: Famulus and his studio covered a spectacular amount of area. Pliny, in his Natural History, recounts how Famulus went for only a few hours each day to the Golden House, to work while the light was right. The swiftness of Famulus's execution gives a wonderful unity to his compositions and astonishing delicacy to their execution.

Pliny the Elder presents Amulius[14] as one of the principal painters of the domus aurea: "More recently, lived Amulius, a grave and serious personage, but a painter in the florid style. By this artist there was a Minerva, which had the appearance of always looking at the spectators, from whatever point it was viewed. He only painted a few hours each day, and then with the greatest gravity, for he always kept the toga on, even when in the midst of his implements. The Golden Palace of Nero was the prison-house of this artist's productions, and hence it is that there are so few of them to be seen elsewhere."

palm

2010-03-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

what some find as flaws i claim as divine rights

says a poem

that micah ballard wrote.

Mark 9:50

2010-03-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

david, jackie and i read the gospel of mark aloud last night, eating shortbread and chocolate and drinking tea. it was so good. but maybe we should have eaten something saltier?

50. Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it?

Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.

WE ARE 7

2010-03-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

this blog post from CA Conrad is absolutely the most important thing i've read today

my thursday through monday

2010-03-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

who i saw read

bruce boone
rob halpern
sally silvers
jules boykoff
bruce andrews
leslie scalapino
chris daniels
david abel
brandon downing

who i read in books

bruce boone
david abram
apollinaire
phillip lamantia

what i studied

greek alphabet

what time i went to bed each night approximately:

thursday 1:30 am
friday midnight
saturday 4:30 am
sunday 1:30 am
monday 12:30 am

today my mind lingers w/ bruce boone and apollinaire, and as every day now, the greek alphabet.

Afghanistan 9 years, Iraq 7 years.

2010-03-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
- Arundhati Roy (Left Curve no. 27)

IN TONIGHT'S SKY

2010-03-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

The fat waxing crescent Moon is located in the west against the stars of Aries the Ram just after sunset, looking quite like the big, bright smile of the Cheshire Cat from “Alice in Wonderland.”
from sfgate.com

i am learning the greek alphabet

2010-03-17T09:38:00.001-07:00

letters as a "spell" to the senses.

letters that are words that conjure images, thoughts, the ability to mentally jump through time, a kind of magic. these markings make another invisible mark that we can see, feel, experience.

that one "spells" a word with letters.

my ipod choices this week make a weird dialectic

2010-03-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

note how kathleen hanna samples "guns of brixton" at the end of this song. the repetition of "when they kick in your front door" just begs the question, "how you gonna come"...?

oh, and the sugary bravada of j.lo. yeah, my love won't cost you what you paid for your benz either... i heart it, though. this makes me strut on the way to work.

comment, ammended

2010-03-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

if our bodies are the animated sensory matter through which are AWARE, aware and experiencing of what we like to call "the real world", and also of our "dream world", and also of our "visioning world", and also of our "psychic world", and also of the intersubjectivity of ourselves and others, then the mean little words we might say about ourselves continue their cancerous life by EXPANDING outwards -- outwards from ourselves, from our personal subjectivity and inner world, into a flat-out evisceration of life - that is, LIFE-FORCE.

and the cultural rhetoric behind these mean words are constructed to do just that.

to disarm and disengage us. to distract us, politically for sure, but more broadly from dialogue with WHAT IS ALIVE. your friends. the earth. ourselves. etc.

last night CA Conrad brought some of this to bear for me, while i listened to his reading at Buuck's house. he had created a dusie press "book" that was a small scroll attached to an american flag in which most of the stars and one stripe were blacked out. the flag read "emily dickinson was punk rock". originally the flag had a small baggie of dirt from the yard at emily's house. this dirt was siezed at the airport. the sensual, SOMATIC connection to emily dickinson, to Conrad's scroll poem, to the piece as a whole - siezed by armed guards.
Conrad's reading is an example of what kind of work can be done around this. and it is one of the things i love -- that among the many threads that weave through his work, the power of the body is held up in it's rightful place as beautiful, revolutionary, connective, complicated.

said alphonso lingis at the poetics of healing talk

2010-03-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

SALT IS GRATITUDE

turtle shell

2010-03-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

There is no invisible matrix out there that explains our origin. Rather, for each life there is a universe, its own universe. According to biocentrism, each of us generates our own sphere of reality. We carry space and time around us like turtles with shells. The Universe is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, a mélange whose scope is breathtaking. Strikingly, anything you don't observe directly exists only as potential - or more mathematically speaking - as a haze of probability. "Nothing," said John Wheeler, the great physicist "exists until it is observed."

Since time doesn't exist on any level before observers, traditional pre-Earth explanations of the universe can't explain our origin. Think of the universe like one of those globes you see in the classroom - it's merely a tool that represents everything that's theoretically possible to experience. But like a CD, the music only leaps into reality when you play one of the songs. Instead of the Universe having an absolute beginning, imagine, instead, that existence is like a recording. Depending on where the needle is placed you hear a certain song. This is the present; the music, before and after is the past and future. All songs exist simultaneously, although we only experience them piece by piece.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/where-did-the-universe-co_b_480957.html
from robert lanza, md, biocentrism

2010-01-31T14:18:00.000-08:00

“the one thing we know how to do in this time of crisis is throw parties”
so said cedar sigo, at his reading at small press traffic last night. i thought that was great. that is what we NEED to do, in part – celebrate through all the muck of world. as emma goldman said, “if i can’t dance, i don't want to be part of your revolution." i believe this heartily and mightily, poetic and otherwise.

so there was this big, fat full moon out last night that it seemed everyone noticed. and the evening thereafter seemed magical, led by this strange moon.

cedar was wearing a white shirt with blue quarter inch sleeves. to me and alli warren, he said something to the effect of “i’m on genet’s baseball team” (total paraphrase).

i love this man. we must have met years ago somehow, though neither of us really remembers quite how or where. but it was about two years ago, when david and i were first dating, that we began to see each other more, double-dating with cedar and johnny. since then, cedar has been not only a good friend, but a total fucking inspiration.

so last night, before reading his own work, cedar extemporized on COMMUNITY, SPT’s theme of the evening, noting that this is the most vibrant and exciting time in the bay area poetry scene in 10 years. he went on to list what has been important to him, and to the community, including Bay Poetics Anthology, the earthworm reading series, as well as the bothboth reading series (“it seemed like when we were there we were almost encouraged to stay the night”), the artifact reading series, and TRY magazine.

cedar’s reading of his own work was typically incredible. he is one of these poets for whom poetry is a true VOCATION. in other words, cedar sigo is a real poet.

if you don’t know cedar’s work, repair that now by starting here
and here(scroll down for his sfmoma open space posts)

Cedar from Switchback:
When a poem becomes too long or crowded I begin to see I added its staircase and panels to the hallway (making it longer) out of pure desperation and wanting to sell. I have one of them removed in favor of a two-way mirror. When a poet reads a poem considered long & fat with self love it bores us. It ignores sadness, intensity and horror. If these aspects do not make you physically ill or forgotten I am forced to have the writer put down, horribly uneven parts, mirth, brilliance and luxury, not a single line added that is out of step with the band. When I have embarked on collaborations with other writers I find the cutting of the work is harsh and kept quick. What little is left on the page blinds both of us. It hated being buried even a second.

2010-01-24T14:21:00.000-08:00

the ground is sopping wet. andrew found some chimes on the street and hung them above our front stoop. they are ringing now.