What's the Best Island Whisky

HOW AN IRISHMAN TAUGHT ME TO LOVE SCOTCH

In my early twenties, I moved from Hannover to Karlsruhe. Hannover is notorioulsy Germany's grayest city, so I moved to Germany's sunniest city. Supposedly, Karlsruhe was inspired by the sun's rays shining through branches as the prince napped beneath them. He woke up and planned "Sonnenstadt" setting up the streets to emanate from the palace like sunbeams. He called it Karl's rest, but many called it sun city and still do. Some even say it has ties to sun worship and the occult.

Karlsruhe 1721

There's a grave in the middle of the city that looks like a pyramid. Inside is the prince. It's one of those cities city planners, transit designers, and architects know about. I taught English around town and spent most evenings at a pub called Flynn's Inn.

Dave Flynn was a guy who traveled around the world opening Irish pubs for other people until he got sick of that and opened his own pub in Karlsruhe. Flynn's Inn was where every English-speaker in town congregated. It was home base. Dave was a whisky nut and had a secret stash from Kildare and other parts of Ireland he'd share with regulars and friends.

I think it's safe to say I knew almost nothing about whisky before knowing Dave Flynn.

One of the bartenders, Simon, a kind Irish poet, rented a room from me for a while. And even though I never had any money, Dave took good care of me and even let me take advantage of some whisky tastings. At one of those tastings I had a glass of my all-time favorite Scotch: Scapa 12-year.

It tasted like a little bit of peat mixed with the sea and grass of Scottland. I couldn't get enough. It transported me to windswept cliffs. I got really romantic about this Scotch. The host of the tasting told me they let Scapa Flow flood the distillery every year and do nothing about it. I can't find any evidence of this online, but I like the legend, so I'm going to keep repeating it until the distillers write me and tell me to stop.

My last night in Germany was spent in Flynn's Inn surrounded by friends I'd mostly never see again.

Stateside, I almost never found Scapa, but when I did I flipped out (I found it at the Franklin in Vegas and nearly drank them out of it). And when I was in Europe I usually sniffed some out. Their 12-year tasted like an 18 and brought me back to unknown shores. Little did I know Scapa produced no new juice from 1994 to 2004.

Now there's the Orcadian, widely available at least in the western states.

The Orcadian is a smooth and super-quaffable 16-year. It's all honey and salt and citrus, and so delicious it's hard to compare it to anything the same age. That seems to be the magic of this distillery: everything tastes much older than its age statement claims. That means it's a bargain because something of similar quality with an older statement is usually MUCH more expensive. Also, they claim that their angel's share is far less in comparison to other distilleries because of their location. Scapa is on the bank of Scapa Flow, and they're the second-most northern distillery in Scotland (Highland Park has them beat by half a mile).

The new packaging screaming for Americans to love them makes me think I'll be able to get this for a while into the future. And it's pretty and blue and has a little boat on it, and I love it. 

I miss their 12-year. That might be just my nostalgia. I love the Orcadian and want to drink more of it and tell my stories of my expatriate days when the only place I could speak English was with the other foreigners at Flynn's.

I don't know what happened to his spot in Karlsuhe, but Dave Flynn has a Flynn's Inn in Bonn now, and I hope to visit him some day. 

Have You Read Live Nude Girls?

LIVE NUDE GIRLS

Hope might be a trap. It might be what keeps us all going, but it might destroy you. Or it might just be what gets you on Oprah.

Kevin Postupack wrote this incredible novel ostensibly about a bisexual stripper with an overactive mind and who's maybe too much of an autodidact. She's a voracious reader with ADHD and an extreme imagination. But what the novel's really about is identity.

What's in a name?

Every character in the book has an alias, and you'd think this'd be a little confusing but it isn't. People are able to be two things at once, and rather than make this liminal space off-limits to the reader, Postupack invites you to inhabit it with Daphne and her assassin cat, Noodles. It's easy to do because the narrator is operating under the assumption that we all contain multitudes.

Like Schrödinger's cat, we're alive and dead at the same time, but rather than keep that proverbial box closed, Postupack spends his time ripping the tops off them like Cracker Jack boxes looking for prizes. Sometimes there's a prize, and sometimes you get a dead cat, but the courage to keep opening them is something worth celebrating, and I think Kevin Postupack's novel does that with aplomb.

Live Nude Girls is sexy without being crude, deep without being preachy, and hilarious without being corny. Those are all hard balancing acts.

There's even a Nazi-hunter, a self-declared goddess/restaurateur, and a Cuban strip-club-owner who claims to have prescient visions. The name of the strip club? Pandora's. You can't help but open that one.

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Prometheus could see the future, and Epimetheus could see the past. Epimetheus is often called the "foolish brother" but how could he be? Wouldn't an accurate and crystal clear remembrance of the past endow you with great wisdom? Wouldn't you almost be able to predict the future based on the events of the past? After all, that's how statistics work.

Anyway, the box: It was given to Pandora as a dowry after Hephaestus built her with beauty and cunning. But it was Zeus's plan to unleash plagues onto man via her box to take them down a notch. They'd recently been blessed with agriculture and fire. So out of her jar came disease and famine and hard work and all the other evil fates that befall men. . . but only one is mentioned by name. Elpis, hid under the lid, claiming instead to be the only palliative to assuage the plight of man. Elpis means Hope.

But I think Elpis was simply the most clever of the fates, endeavoring to stay close to us in order to inflict the most constant, enduring pain of all.

The Stuff of Nightmares

Chef Arshad is convinced Von Hagens is out there Berking people in order to obtain subjects for his art. It truly is the stuff of nightmares, but there is something in his work that is undeniably thought-provoking and interesting, something more than just a macabre attraction.

I went to an exhibition of Body Worlds Koerperwelten in Germany many years ago and was astonished and fascinated. It's a remarkable feat to plasticize and and arrange corpses into sometimes beautiful poses for eternity.

I also went to the permanent exhibit inside Luxor. It's worth checking out if you're in Vegas. I'm always curious how the artists get these bodies. I'm guessing most people are like Arshad and think they're murder victims. I doubt that. Most are donated by the people while they're alive, supposedly. (bwahahahahaha)

The corpses in sexual positions are particularly bizarre and haunting. They're challenging, as all artistic endeavors pushing the outside of our sexual more envelopes are. And if art is supposed to be dangerous and thought-provoking, Body Worlds and works like it definitely delivers.

Here's a cool article about it.

Will Iggy Destroy Hip Hop and All Art as We Know it?!

Iggy Azalea has been getting some stress from the likes of Q-Tip et al. There seems to be a weird idea floating out there that art is precious and fragile because it is a tool for social commentary and change. Well frankly, nothing can be further from the truth. The powerful thing about art as a game-changer is that it is resilient and poses as nothing more than entertainment. Art is an innocuous little novelty floating around our culture like an unmolested asp in Egyptian sands.

I understand why people like Q-Tip want to guard the genre as their own. White appropriation is as annoying as it is inevitable. And to want to keep something out of the hands of the hegemony is natural if you've been one of the most influential people in the genre for all of your adult life. And if you really love the art, you might want to study the history of that art. You might start to think that history is important in understanding the art. You might think understanding the art is important. But it isn't.

I wish I were less a student of art and more a passive bystander who said things like, "this is cool because it is." I'd love not to think critically about the things I love. Art does not ask you to think critically. Art does not require anything of you but to use your senses. It doesn't want to mean anything. It doesn't want to say anything. It certainly doesn't want to influence the way you feel about this or that issue. It is an artifact. The artist might have had delusions of art as a transcendent language that speaks to the soul. But the artist is dead. Art does not belong to the artist. It belongs to the audience.

That isn't to say that art doesn't sometimes do unexpected, interesting, revolutionary things. In fact, it is precisely because it is so useless every other time that it is so powerful a weapon in rare situations. But you can't expect everyone to desperately want to wield its fickle power. Sometimes its power is just to make people twerk. Not every artist requires a place in history or monuments to their contribution.

And if you think Iggy Azalea is the harbinger of the end of hip hop, if you think she's that influential, what a fragile thing hip hop must be. And if it's that fragile, it was never as powerful as you thought it was. We might see a time when hip hop needs a preservation society and grants to stay alive like that number our progenitors did on jazz. That's a quick way toward irrelevance. But I always thought it was too brazen, raw, and honest to fall.

Hip hop to me was a venting for the violent fantasies of those who felt held down. A white teenager can relate somehow to the frustrations of a black adult male who wants to say "fuck the man, I'm doing shit my own way." It was only a matter of time until people like me grew up on hip hop and started teaching their white kids it was a great art form. There was a whole episode of Friends about this. And when other cultures got  hold of it, what did you think was going to happen? Iggy is Australian, but you should take a look at German hip hop if you really want to rant about white appropriation. A white, english-speaking foreigner is now enjoying a world where hip hop and girls with big butts are acceptable and popular. Maybe she'll grow as an artist. Maybe she'll just shake her ass against Jennifer Lopez until we all tire of it.

But art. Art is nothing. It's a specter. You can't put it in a bottle and hope for it to thrive. You can't study it from every angle and claim more ownership. You can't protect it. It's playground sand. Build with it, throw it, eat it, cast it into the sky until the grains are stuck in the roots of your hair.

Pixies and Pump Up the Volume

When I was a kid, a movie came out called Pump Up the Volume. It was the best movie Christian Slater made, and it really spoke to me. I loved it so much, I had to have the soundtrack on this new thing called a CD. My mom must have bought it for me.

That CD came in one of those really huge cardboard boxes they were wrapped in in the beginning. And I put that CD into my little boombox in my room and maybe my whole life changed at that point.

I was already very much into music. I loved the Beastie Boys and Run D MC, and Guns n' Roses was definitely a mainstay in my ears. But I had never heard of Concrete Blonde, Leonard Cohen, the Pixies, or Cowboy Junkies. My life would be shit if I never heard of them, and I have this movie to thank.

My musical taste is broad. I often wonder how it got that way. It seems that I have one of those minds that isn't satisfied with the mere consumption of anything. I have to know everything's origin. I want to compare what's out now to what came before. I want to hear what's next because I'm so familiar with the tools and inspirations that will have brought the artists of the future to those brand-new things.

People who are older than I am are amazed I know their generation's music. I've read books about music to make that happen. I've checked CD's and records out of libraries. I've burned lamps to their ends in deep conversations with people who intensely love this or that genre or artist. I'm a vulture of culture and I'm voracious. I'm weird and intense like that.

Poetry and Cocktails

Last night I went to an open mic called the Human Experience. There was some poetry. I read some from the Murdercycle Diaries. The poetry reading was at the Beat, a cafe in downtown Las Vegas on Fremont Street. It's an interesting place filled with artists doing artistic things, and they had beer, some wine that had been open too long, and some spirits. I was surprised no local beer, but they had Magic Hat #9 and Dogfish Head 60 Min., so I had one each.

There was a lot of rapping, and slam, and some singer-songwriters, lovely women with guitars, a saxophone, and a guy who made 8-bit beats with his Gameboy. It was a loud room with loads of energy. I was entirely surprised when I read that the room fell silent, and everyone in it gave me their undivided attention. After I read, people came up to me and shook my hand and kind of gushed about how much they liked my work. I haven't received that kind of enthusiastic praise in a while at a reading. Las Vegas is a good place to be a poet, I think. But that might be premature, so give me time to investigate.

I met some new people at the reading, and one of them was a woman, so she and I went to one of my new favorite bars: Downtown Cocktail Room.

She's a beautiful middle-sized bar with a tricky door, which, even though I'd been there three times previously, I still paused before choosing to push the glass or the metal. They have an inspired list of seasonal cocktails, and I'll get around to trying more of them, but I had Fernet on the brain, so I ordered a drink I'd heard of online, 50/50 Fernet/Campari, which was OK, but they make impeccable Hanky-Panky's there, and I ended up drinking three of those.

My female companion was one of those lovely singer-songwriters, good guitar work, great voice, and a fair conversationalist. She was good company in that way women always are at dark bars late at night after poetry readings.

Here are a couple lists:

3 THINGS TO HELP YOU MAKE YOUR OPEN MIC A SUCCESS:

1. Never allow anyone to say "Let's give it up again for _______" It's a waste of time, annoying, and inconsiderate to your audience and other performers.
2. If someone goes over whatever time you've allotted them, have the courage to cut them off. If you told someone you would give them 3 dollars, and they grabbed 5, you'd be pissed. Time is precious.
3. If a performer isn't there when their name is called, too bad. They're off the roster.

3 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT DCR:

1. Their layout lets you choose to be intimate or open and part of the action.
2. Sophistication is the theme, but they somehow don't seem snobby about it.
3. Dark as fuck.

Jon Griffin Dies at the Age of 43

I didn't like Jon that much. He rolled with a crowd that I didn't fit into and didn't like me. But he was an artist and a dreamer. He was always into something artistic, showing up anywhere art was being done or sold, or late at night when streetlight people gathered at bars and lounges after the tourists were mostly gone. Everyone in town knew him.

His death saddens me. Yes, it's tragic to leave behind a toddling daughter, but that's not what I'm on about. It saddens me because here was this sensitive, artistic, dreaming, jerky soul that was snubbed out in America like he never had a chance. Too many people in my life have gone out like this. 

There's just no place for artists. They don't last long; they have too many natural predators. Heroin ended up getting Jon Griffin. This country has no patience for people with addiction. We treat it like a family secret, like a dark skeleton in the cellar who rattles inaudibly as we turn up the party music to drown out the racket. But I didn't even like Jon. I knew he was on the horse from time to time, but thought nothing of it and have no idea if anyone ever tried to help him. But I miss Jon Griffin.

A while back he started a gallery with some friends that quickly became a kind of all-ages, semi-illegal, underground rock club called GONE Studios. I didn't like GONE very much, but I ended up there from time to time, one of my best friends became an investor for a time, my band played there, and it helped spawn other art projects in town that were cool and interesting. My opinion always was, it's not for me, but I'm happy it exists. You need an underground art scene. You don't even know you need it, but you do. And it's going to be dirty, and smoky, and you're going to want to take a shower if you get into it for any length of time. Having lived in the underground art scene for huge chunks of my life, I didn't want to spend that much time with the people of GONE. Plus, there were drugs.

I've never been against drugs, but our attitude about them in this country is so myopic it's sickening. And maybe people like Jon wouldn't turn to them if there were a different attitude toward art in this country. Maybe Jon Griffin could have made ends meet if things were different. Maybe better access to grants, maybe cultural subsidies, maybe just a larger group of Americans who appreciate art and are willing to pay to support it. But who am I?

So you know how I felt about Jon while he lived, but I am deeply moved by his passing and filled with sorrow, too. And a lot of my friends loved him so much.  

Sketchup

A friend convinced me Sketchup is an important life skill.

I made this table in an early tutorial.

Just a roof tutorial I messed with for practice.

You know that big Apple fest where Steve Jobs used to give his keynotes? I was there when Jobs introduced the Apple TV. That was the first time I saw Sketchup. Google was there showing off all its cool new stuff. My friend Justin and I imagined a world where Google Earth would be tied to it and you could walk into any building in the world virtually because every building had been modeled in Sketchup. Well, it's hooked up with Google Earth now, and that's cool, but you still can't walk into every building in the world. How cool will that be though?

I got to mess around a little with Sketchup and was probably one of the first people to download it, but I put it on the back burner for a long time because I just feel more at home in Adobe.  I'd used other 3D software before and had a bad taste in my mouth (I used to sleep at my office waiting for things to render).

But things change and I thought I'd take another crack at it, and I love it. I'm devouring tutorials. I hope to recreate breweries in Sketchup and animate virtual tours about the brewing process. Brewing always has the same components from brewery to brewery, but they're all set up differently, and the way the liquid travels through physical space is really interesting to me. Brewers tell me all the time that if they had set up their breweries, they'd have done it differently. Wouldn't it be cool to check out what brewers are doing all over the world? There could be a whole new world of virtual collaborations that use Sketchup models. And fans of your beer could go in and take tours imagining they're there. And when they expand their operations, they could virtually create additions and reorganize their space. and, and, and,

And I'm still just a Sketchup n00b, but I hope to be making a model of my apartment soon, so I can make better use of my space. There's a lot of clutter at my place right now, and there's gotta be a better way.

Starr Hill Logo Rework

Sometimes it's fun to take a logo and redesign it in such a way that takes the branding in a completely new direction. I spend a lot of time thinking about brewery logos and branding, and I started thinking about Starr Hill's logo. It's a giant star that looks like a sheriff's badge from the wild west. I like it. It's simple, bold, immediately recognizable. I'm not trying to "improve" anything (just as a disclaimer). I'm a fan who wants to reimagine the corporate identity of one of my favorite breweries.

Anyway, here's what I was thinking: Blue Ridge, nighttime music festivals, soothing, modern, and military.
The star always looks a bit military to me. I used a camouflage swatch set to come up with the color motif. I want more than one star to give us the idea of a good night and even a little magic (think a sorcerer's cap). I kept all caps on the logo for strength, but I used Helvetica to make it simply modern. I think it's a good contrast with the rounded corners of the bounding box. It makes the beer look accessible and easy. It's also fine when it goes black and white with a little help.

I worked the golden mean a bit more than I usually do on this one. Also, I wanted it to be reminiscent of patriotism. . . I'm kind of dancing with the military thing a bit.

Just to restate: I am not criticizing Starr Hill's logo in ANY WAY. Think of this like you would Twilight fan fiction. I'm just a fan having fun with design.

Pissing Cherubs in Rome

When I was in Rome on my honeymoon with my wife, we went to a restaurant that was obsessed with pissing cherubs.

A Cartoon Elephant for Darjeeling Café

I drew an elephant girl for the Darjeeling Café. I wanted it to look very non-digital—what the kids call analogue these days. I think it's funny.

Floor Plan of the New Darjeeling Café

The Darjeeling Café is moving, in case you haven't heard. It's going to be bigger, better, and cozier than ever before. You are going to love it more than you have ever loved anything. You need a café to call your own, after all.
These are the preliminary floor plans, how we're laying out the space. Get ready for a full kitchen, people. It's going to be the best food you've ever put past your lips!

I made these at floorplanner.com if you're interested. It's a really good tool.

End of World Animals

Jerome bought my series of paintings called "End of World Animals" last year. They are acrylic on cardboard. He hung them up and took a picture of three of them. There are five altogether. Four are red and one is green. There's a crow, a bear, a rabbit, a squirrel, and a deer. I like the way my artwork looks on other people's walls.

A lot of people have been calling me legend lately. At first I kind of liked that. I am a legend in my own mind. Do you have to be dead to be a legend?

Jack Morgan = LEGEND ?

It's Hard Being Jack Morgan

Before Jack Morgan was the most bad-ass vegetarian poet in the world, there was a kid everyone called Skyler. He knew how to look happy and cute.
–––––––––––——————****I've been writing secret messages here again.
Yesterday, Jack Morgan won a fancy poetry award, so he took his friends out for a fancy dinner. No one took any pictures for some reason. I wish I had a photographer friend who wanted to document all of the crazy things we poets in the bay do. I skip so much of what happens; I can't put it all on this blog. Plussssss, pictures are the things they make books out of when we're all big and famous. I love looking at pictures of language poets when they were young and hot with all of their amazing haircuts and shirts. There are museums filled with pictures of the beats.

There aren't many pictures of me as a kid growing up, and I guess there won't be many pictures of my artistic rise. But I like pictures, and I wish there were more.

At first, I got a little depressed about winning the award. It's a lot of money, which is nice, but Cameron said I was selling out, and even though I know he was joking, it got me asking myself if I was. I take my integrity too seriously maybe. Luckily, I have never taken a class with any of the poets who could have been judging, and it would be utterly impossible for anyone to know those poems were mine. I don't want to win anything or get anything that I didn't earn. That sounds lame when I read that, but integrity is the only thing I have that's worth anything. It's hard to measure how talented or deserving a person is of accolades if you don't look at their integrity. If you don't have any of that, who are you? What are you worth?

Winning this one, the Judith Stronach award (I've won it twice now), means I will be reading at a reception at UCB on April 24th, and then at Lunch Poems (Robert Hass's series) in May.
One of them will be recorded and posted online.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\///Chad Vogler, I've been thinking about you. Everyone knows you won the Eisner award because GGOB edited your Harlem Hide-and-go-Seek poems. It isn't your fault that he has no moral compass, and I don't fault you but pity you and envy you at the same time. I wish I had won the Eisner, but not like that. I'm sure you'll get into whatever MFA program you want! Congratulations in advance on that.

Speaking of Ethics, have you ever noticed that Ivy Leagues keep having issues when it comes to ethics? Is there anyone in those east coast brick houses who isn't a liar, a plagiarist, or a rapist?
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I feel sorry for people who don't have good mentors. A person I don't like at all, a person who has hurt me, has a very bad mentor, who will get him far I suppose, but I feel bad for him because getting far isn't worth compromise. I am glad and eternally grateful for a great mentor and great friends who serve as constant reminders that you don't have to be a liar and a whore if you don't want to be.

My Blog is Me. I am a robot.

A while ago, I learned about Mia Rose. I didn't know that she was tremendously famous now. I think I like her. A lot of haters are around now, of course, because they think she was prepackaged. This happens quite a bit online. Things on the internet seem so real. . . like it's DYI or something.

I mean to say that blogs and vlogs and Youtube and Facebook seem for and by the people using them. The corporations own them, and we all agree to be advertised toward in exchange for use of their products, but we are real. We are us online. Naturally, it's only a piece of us, it's only an avatar, but no matter how much we try to hide our true selves with assumed voices or fake photos, what's valued in online personalities is authenticity. Users can usually spot a fake. They know when they're being spammed or scammed online. So when a corporation sends out a decoy like one of those wooden ducks we all land next to, it pisses people off because they've invaded a realm reserved for non-corporate bitches. No one likes a phony.

Mia Rose seems like a girl who likes to sing to a video camera online, but some people are saying her fame was generated by handlers who bumped up her numbers with dummy youtube accounts. That the whole thing was actually an orchestrated marketing campaign rather than just a young woman with a webcam.

My favorite blog is stolenpony. If I found out that Jennifer Best was some kind of corporate robot created to sell me things on Amazon.com or something, I would be rather upset because it ruins precisely that which I love about her blog: it's a real person talking about real things that evoke an emotional response. I do wish she'd proofread sometimes, but her little typos or weird grammatical stuff makes me sure that a robot isn't writing it. But what if a robot were writing it? Would it change my enjoyment of the blog? Yes. I would feel stupid to fall for a computer/corporation who knew that little mistakes in grammar and spelling make me think something is real. It's a betrayal of an unwritten code. . . online etiquette.

You know how when you listen to guitar music, you can hear the sound of the fingers dragging across the strings between frets? When you hear that, you know there's a person doing that. What if a machine could mimic that sound exactly. You wouldn't be able to tell it wasn't human. Let's say you loved that guitar player; would you feel bad when you found out it was a robot?

We should all know by now that it isn't hard to make a good fake, and we buy artifice because we love it. But when we become aware of artifice, we are outraged; think about how Oprah's book army attacked when they found about James Frey. They described him as brutally honest, which I don't think a book of any kind can really be. Can a blog be?

No. But we want it to be as real and honest as possible. We're vulnerable online, so we want others to be, too. My blog is me. Jack Morgan here is a lot like the Jack Morgan you'd meet in RL, but it's not exactly me. Sometimes I think things are funny online that I wouldn't find funny elsewhere. Sometimes I think about things on my blog that I don't think of when I'm not writing it. Sometimes it's an overflow of RL obsessions, and sometimes the thoughts I have here don't come into my real life at all. Sometimes my blog is more private than public, weirdly. Sometimes it's the only place I have to be honest with everyone. I risk a lot having this blog. People hate me because of it, and people love me because of it, but is it me they're loving? Is it the blog they love? I know that when people say mean things about my blog, I feel like they are being mean to my person, but I enjoy the line between the blog and me, too, and I hide behind it as much as I hide behind poetry and art.

What if I were a robot?

Slide or Die

One of my favorite artists for a while now has been Audrey Kawasaki. She has a show on right now in L.A., and I wish I could go to it. I just found out she has a Live Journal. I wish I could have one of her pieces. I wish I had money to buy art. All I have on my walls is my own stuff, and posters and postcards from art shows I've been to. I only have two pieces from artist friends. I wish Audrey Kawasaki were my friend. I would hang her paintings on my wall and buy her coffee and gin and I would go to her openings, and she would come to my readings, and everyone would think we were the coolest people in the world.
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Life is hard.

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I have a new fish. His name is Othello. He can't replace Dropsy, but it's nice to have a fish again. I am pretty bad with plants, but I have a good track record with pets. I need to have something living with me.

I just added another fish and named it Desdemona.
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You are special and important.
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A couple days ago, I read some K. Silem Mohammad in a class to people who had never heard of him or flarf. It's weird to me that there are people out there completely ignorant of poetry. These are people in a 20th century German poetry class. They obviously have interest. They all like poetry, but none of them are aware that people are still writing it. One kid in the class said he knows about New Yipes, but only went to the Grenier reading. I go to every reading I can because I am weird, but there are all sorts of people who are into poetry that have no idea that anything has gone on since the Beats. That would be like reading/watching Shakespeare and not knowing that plays are still things people write, read, and go to see.

It makes me angry.

From now on, if you don't know the name of a living poet, don't talk to me.

Abraham Lincoln

When I was asked to do the cover for Abraham Lincoln after having wanted to be asked for what seemed like a long time, I made the mistake of telling everyone I know. I was rather excited. But telling everyone about it put a lot of pressure on me. I started working on it right away, and I have been working on it for a much longer time than I usually take.

I think I'm done now. I might change little things before it goes to press, but I love putting things I've done here to find out what people think. It's one of my favorite things about having a blog, especially when it comes to poetry and graphics. People see things in both that the author is unaware of.

Abraham Lincoln is one of my favorite journals. It's new, but it is fantastic. I am honored to be a part of it. It makes me happy to be in the po-biz. I've always been lucky as an artist. I think it's because I really, truly dig it.

Down? Don't Be!

Downy
by Jack Morgan

But don't look so glum. Things are going to be OK!
It didn't go so well for Gelsomina.
Go and get your portrait painted.
Go and get your picture painted.

Go make friends with matrons of the arts,
who clown around with you in winter.
Smile into black coat collars.
Smile into black coat collars.

Go run round town making pictures
with your favorite favorite friend,
and it'll be OK. Fall's fallen.



So last night I got my portrait painted. It's still unfinished, but I like it very much.

Seriously, if you're feeling down, you should hang out with a girl who dresses up like Gelsomina and sit for a portrait with your best friend and at least four bottles of cheap wine. Then write poetry about it.
Fall is over, really, as far as can see today. And there are so many lovely people in the world, including Elizabeth Howe, who is the cupcake princess who is painting us into immortality. Why be a mopey dopey poet?
This is my recipe to a better life in the arts.

Do you know how many great bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon they have at Trader Joe's for under five bucks?
At least 4.

Monica Meza

I like Monica Meza. She was at Mama Buzz a little while ago. I like her artwork.

Poets and Artists this Wicked Week

Indeed, a great week for readings and events.

Found Magazine's thing was awesome.
Amiri Baraka was fantastic.
The Joshua Clover reading was spectacular.

Baraka is a performer. I wish that I could do what he does. I often try to keep politics out of my poetry, but he can't keep it out. It works for him, and he can sing and keep a beat on a podium

D.A. Powell: Why didn't anyone ever tell me how cool D.A. Powell is? I don't think I would get away with writing an ode to a crab louse, but he does. His poems were good, and he was a good reader, too.

Joshua Clover: Everyone already knows that I think Joshua Clover is one of the coolest poets out there. His new work is self-consciously intelligent and informed without sacrificing humor. Clover somehow inhabits that tiny space between pompousness and self-loathing. Some people think his poetry is elitist, but come on.

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Last night was Art Murmur in Oakland.
Everyone's favorite little bookseller, Isla Prieto, was displaying her artistic prowess at Mama Buzz Cafe with Kofie One, David P. Madson, Brooke Reidt, and the Duke of Windsor at a show called Jigsaw paws. It was a cool little show and one of two highlights.

The second highlight was a new place called Oakopolis. There was a show there that was all crafty and fibery and I liked the space so much I was green with envy, and I wish I could have a place like that to hang out and make art in.
I met one of the people who run it, Cory Gunter-Brown, and she was a really nice and happy person who showed us the stuff that she made and let us write on her typewriter. I think that place has a lot of promise, and it will be a permanent stop on our Art Murmur excursions from now on.

And happy Hallowe'en, All Saint's, and Day of the Dead.