wrote a few new poems

beat-poetry alert - just don't say you haven't been warned
ps i think the middle one is the best what about you?

alone at beer

ruts rut that's what
they said in calgary
or was it tangierz
definitely the latter
the night
good night
written "nite" in order to rime with "brite" and "lite"
the nite, i was saying
that donald gave up his game of bricolage at last
not twisty enuff! that's what he was saying, but we didn't believe
no one believed
why bother?
twas all ruts and cabbage, a strange combination to be sure but not so surprising when you consider the natural order of the letters that lie in a 'eap and a 'taff around town.


at least i feel something

considering what eve was on
it's no surprise
that then before that for a split pea i saw there was nothing
nothing more
nothing more that need not rest in peas. but then
but then boredom got the better
as it ALWAYS DOES
which is when para and cata fight over lytic.
who's gonna come out a head?
it wasn't the reaction that led to the ice,
nor all those shooting streams and streaming flames and flaming shots
not them either
even as they blackened my lungs
and your lungs
and your lungs
thank you thank you thank you
no
unfortunately we are the very air we breathe
an apt meta for a dyslexicatastrofff
leaving only epitafffs
epithets?
leaving only epithets, at bottom, swill and grainy muck.


quoth the lion

if there's one thing the lion whispered in your ear
mouth hanging open
dribbling spit
stringy and whispy and waivering in the still breath of the lion
it's this:
"chchchhhhhhhhhhgggggchlachlachlahclachlahlcahlahhhhhhhchchchchggggggggBBBBBBBB"
but not to worry because i was there, I WAS THERE! and i can ahem translate.
My dear, my walnut
some ships are gray
some falcons search
from quiet quays' perch
for yesterday's taciturn
prey.
but only the quietest
heroines shriek
"chchchhhhhhhhhhgggggchlachlachlahclachlahlcahlahhhhhhhchchchchggggggggBBBBBBBB"

cow horns are not phallic

Do novu Do novo!!
yeah 3 year old gustavo's favorite phrase after spinning him around, making faces.
equally favorite chant of the gay bloco, hundreds of eyes gazing upward at an apartment balcony where two men lip-smack again, again, again, again

fat black man from the favella is king of carnaval, men are dressed as women (I am swooning from both androgyny and heat), carnaval cannibal, beautiful asses framed by explosive feathers. sacks of beer cans dragged around by children: the top are on the bottom and the bottom on the top but watery beer blurs the line, yeah the interstice, the rev-verve-sals

back to the farm tonight thank the saints of candomble. a hierarchy of skills instead of things. toucans and not fairies have wings.

fuck europe

for eating all of my money. fucking a.

this is an unimaginative post, it's just me sharing links. then i'll get off the screen and go to the barn.

Saturday evening in Pune someone bombed the German Bakery. Now the count is 9 dead, 60 injured. I wonder if the U of C will do a program there next year.. it's a funny city. I don't know why anyone would target the Pune German Bakery over any of the other ones in the country. Maybe proximity to the Osho Ashram? (AKA the Sex Ashram, it's an expensive place to go and very popular with western tourists. and they hang out at the german bakery a lot. it's a good place to meet creeps and drink kombucha and watermelon juice (mmmm), eat green hummus and really really good coffee-chocolate cake). I guess Headley (one of the main guys involved in planning the 26/11 attacks in Bombay last year) visited the Osho last year, scoped it out. so maybe... well anyway. this happened. feels weird.

completely unrelated to that
I've been listening to the radio because the CD player in my parents car is still broken from when justin, alonso and I went to Maine last december. 1) it's all gaga 2) if it's not gaga, it's me trying to figure out what magic is contained in the refrains of these three songs
Replay by Iyaz

Whatcha Say by Jason Derulo

Let's Hear it for New York by Jay Z and Alicia Keys

there's something in these refrains that makes me feel something. it comes from outside of me and i feel good or strong, or like driving faster, or like singing loudly and bouncing up and down. also present in the Kaskade Remix of Break the Ice by Britney (~50 seconds in). this sort of feeling I think is unique to pop. it feels contrived, dirty, manufactured. it's like the assholes who made that song "Tonight's Gonna Be a Good Night" knew they were gonna make it big.

i think it's that aaj kal (these days) I'm supersensitive to media. I feel like I'm overloading, I'm hyperstimulated. my mind's been whirling a mile a minute, even now when I'm alone with my dog in the house. I can't be quiet except when I went to the Quaker meeting house on sunday. i'm so excited and confused to be back and but i haven't yet given myself any responsibilities that come with home. whirr whirr whirring with activity and a low balance on my bank account. waahfladjklfa ca

but while we're on the topic of youtube,
check out Julia's Bad Romance video (julia is mine and justin's friend. she lives in Mass and made this video for something at her school. &she won!)

oh also wayyyyy to much gaga. i'm taking a break for a while. probably until j comes back. (a week)

today I looked down at my hands while sifting dried cow manuer to make seedbags, and lo woah ahhh ho ho inhale pffffffoooooooooohhhhhhh did I behold they were covered with

GLITTER.

dive into a cold waterfall and air-drying between growing a strong affection for the various phases of cow shit and for pain: (Seven blisters of different ages on my hands and a concrete piercing through my foot: they never tell you how weak you are in a city)

hard hard work and billions of joints. bananas eaten in every form imaginable.

they mine black gold in this region of brazil. a fool here mining for fool´s gold and if you´re lucky i´ll bring some back, melted down and woven into moments of meditation, thanks, and the color green.

repurposing my pen, my nosehairs, my skin

picture this: an eliot pokes its head out of a hole in the ground. the earth shakes a little (remniscent of a faraway quake in chicagoland near eliot's fellow creatures). at once, the eliot leaps out of the hole bearing a huge machete (all-purpose tool) and dirt flies everywhere, spattering blisters and waterfalls and guavas as it races into the bamboo trees. "i live in your dreams!" it screams with delight.

got through rio de janeiro safely, albeit a slight delay because we missed our bus...
now we're in rio pomba!
picked up from the bus station at 2a.m. by a man with a beau-ti-ful head of dreadlocks (you know wwoofing has turned out well when-) and a smaller man, both of them thin and tightly muscled. when you drive the 12km out to the farm, there are lots of monoculture fields of sugarcane, corn, coffee. and then once we arrived (the '86 volkswagen fixed with a pebble, the sky held up with a twig, the mountains eroding because there are no trees anymore to hold up the ground), we were met with something remniscent of a baohaus, rural-ized, in progress, partially roofed, made of cement blocks with ambitions of bioconstruction...the bath is a waterfall and the water, for once, is infinite.

cycles cycles which fit together as cleanly as wet adobe on a wall:
- humans eat fruit and vegetables, goats eat peels and compost, remains are perfect for plants; everyone is nourished.
- tree is cut for building, small pieces used for fire, dust and chips are used for compost toilet; forest thrives with increased light.
- cows eat grass, cow manure is sifted for soil to germinate delicate seeds, remains are used for plants; perhaps the cows are glad.
and in this light, everything begins to fit together: reverse or ignore the crumbling institutions which struggle to salvage ethical ways of living in this world and instead, instead, take a word from the permaculturists and anarchoprimitivists (ritual fits in to, comes easily in a place where the ground, i, and all inbetween are connected somehow).

the first day we were here, we mixed adobe and sand and dirt and grass and some sugar and made adobe, covered a wall of the house. since, az and i have continued to do work on the land (digging huge holes for banana circles, cutting bamboo forest and cleaning long stalks, sifting manure, cleaning found roof tiles) as well as having time-space to draw, paint, designar. my fingers are blistering and callusing but also rememememembering agility and i've been drawing yogic poses, psychedlic plants (oohhh! apparently mushies grow on cow pats here! pray for rain for me plzzz), designs, some rolling hills. artur asked if we could paint the side of the house, not sure i'm ready for that but working up to it.

saving saving saving my sexual energy, the one functionality of my body that, it seems, isn't in use these days.

this morning, i woke up and made a fire to make oatmeal
tonight, we go by bus back to the city
the cars, the smoke, the cops, the corruption and the favelas falling falling like shoeboxes from the top of your closet (or my glasses from my chicagobed)
i've harvested a few choice things from the forest for a carnaval costume...we'll see
i asked az if i should wear my strapon and she said "better not attract undue attention"
unlikely to become a guiding principle in my life, though it is something i am learning and navigating amidst my slowly slowly improving portuguese. (sometimes these moments of invisibility, along with the moments of sprawling distinct euphoria, make me long for the bao.)

oh also! i am sublimating my desire to pick scabs/bugbites into a habit of picking my nose (more). i think it's working!

love to all,
remember your dreams.

aramark, wexford, illinois corruption

this is an excerpt from a new book by a fellow burner whom i kind of know named Charles Shaw, Exile Nation. The link is to part 2 of chapter 3, and the parts before that are up for free on the same website as well. the paras below specifically have to do with aramark, which as we know is the company that manages almost all of the food on campus here at the university of chicago.

In 2004, amidst a rash of controversy, Wexford was granted a $114 million contract to provide health care to IDOC. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that this came about mere days after Wexford contributed $10,000 to then Governor Rod Blagojevich’s reelection campaign. In July 2007 former IDOC director Donald Snyder was indicted for allegedly taking $50,000 in illegal kickbacks to hand out state contracts to favored companies during the previous Administration of George Ryan, $30,000 of which came from Wexford lobbyist Larry Sims.

Krause complained about Rod Blagojevich, who, after becoming Governor of Illinois in 2002, unable to close any prisons, immediately slashed IDOC’s budget citing the $4 billion state deficit as his rationale. Krause claimed the food quality had taken a nose dive alongside health care. This was not surprising since Aramark, the international food service leviathan, held the contract.

Headquartered in Philadelphia, Aramark has approximately 240,000 employees serving clients in 18 countries. Publicly traded since 2001, they pulled in $12.4 billion in sales in 2007 from food and hospitality services for businesses, schools, stadiums, hotels and resorts, and senior assisted living. They also manage large facilities, provide a vast array of uniforms and work apparel, and have contracts for food, laundry, and uniforms at 475 correctional institutions. Aramark’s record is almost as scintillating as Wexford’s. For two health-based companies, the level of sickness attributed to their products and services is staggering.

The $10 million IDOC contract “awarded” to Aramark in 2000 was a sole-source, no-bid deal. Aramark has been accused of fraud and over-billing, driving up state budget deficits, poor service, and poor treatment of workers. Their worst transgression (considering the nature of the hand that feeds them) appears to be serving tainted food to schools and universities. On two occasions rodents and worms had been found in school lunches. Here in Illinois, Aramark paid more than $3 million to settle a 2004 class action suit charging they defrauded approximately 50 school districts in the state by accepting national school lunch program food donations from the USDA without reducing the cost for the schools, which was in violation of federal law and the district's food service contract.

If the food is bad in the schools, one can only imagine what it is like in the prisons. The list of Aramark’s prison indiscretions spans correctional systems in Illinois, Texas, Oregon, Tennessee, New Jersey, New York, Missouri, and Florida. However, tales of bad prison food shock no one, so it’s a waste of space to even make that a story point. What’s interesting is the number of scandals in which Aramark finds itself embroiled.

In the same case that brought indictments against former IDOC director Donald Synder, John J Robinson, a former lobbyist, Senior Vice President for Aramark, and Undersheriff of Cook County (take a moment to drink in all those luscious conflicts of interest), pled guilty in July of 2007 to federal charges of mail fraud relating to alleged kickbacks paid to Snyder. While Aramark contracts were not implicated in the indictment, Robinson did obtain correctional food service contracts for Aramark from Illinois state and local governments. Connecting the dots on that one does not take a Herculean measure of aptitude, and one is hard-pressed to differentiate between the criminals in prison blues shuffling around the yard, and those in business suits running the show.

A field guide to Jan-february

DIRECTIVE 1:

SHUN WELL-DESIGNED/AIRY/SPACIOUS PLACES IN FAVOR OF WARRENS. It is possible to live in tunnels and still see the sun. Trade normal bulbs for red ones, trade flashlights for maglights. All sources of light must give off a distinct color to produce a sense of chiaroscuro in all inhabitants of a room/cubby hole/bar table. Ask not what lighting design can do for you, but what you can do for lighting design.

DIRECTIVE 2:

AVOID THE TEMPTATION TO BECOME A MAGPIE. Or if you cannot resist this urge, indulge in it until you feel sick. Remember that time in the summer of 1973 when your mother worked at an ice cream store before going off to college (which meant moving across the Hudson and just above 14th street) and could not look at ice cream for six years after. 1979 was a funny year, after all. For Mom. Not for us, of course, we weren't alive yet.

DIRECTIVE 3:

MOVE SLOWLY AND METHODICALLY THROUGH ALL READING MATERIAL. Breathe as your read aloud. Pay attention to the punctuation. Listen to the author conducting your speech. Write out all your notes and do the review exercises. All other processes will fail you and result in poor grades and a reduction in your grade point average.

DIRECTIVE 4:

WELCOME WITH OPEN ARMS THE RESURGENCE OF NON-NARRATIVE DREAMS INTO YOUR LIFE. Things are returning to normal - you dream again that spiders have bred with cats and that Vlad can produce silk that looks more like gooey PVC that allows him dangle from the fan above your bed which sends you in terror tearing out of the house into the yellow summer light where a dusty pick up trucks waits that you get into and drive off in to go rob banks that are empty and you can simply take the money from. Things are as they should be.

DIRECTIVE 5:

IN THE QUIET MOMENTS, WHEN YOU HAVE PUT DOWN YOUR WORK, THINK OF YOUR DOTAGE. It will be a relief to grow old. Or not. Or possibly it will and it won't. You will be able to reminisce and think of the summer of 2009, when someone was not yet alive. Your bones will creak and the calcium build-up from old bruises will not go away. Possibly, you will become obsessed with restaurants and wine and dusty volumes like your grandfather. But you think not. After all, did he follow directives 1-4?

END TRANSMISSION. FOLLOW ORDERS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. BEEP BEEP BEEP! WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME?

food for thought i saw a putty catapult

i have a "midterm quiz" in art history this afternoon. 25 minutes, 8 pictures (3 minutes/picture which is also a SI unit called the "overhead rush", OR for short, that is to say every minute you spend staring desperately at a painting on an overhead trying to remember the nationality of its artist is 1 OR) and one of the artists is george grosz, who has an interesting quote:

My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society. -Grosz

lots of goodies on the baohaus calendar, which is to say, if you're at all bored in the next week, drop me a line.
love
lelz