Beach Ustream

                Jacob Steinberg and Spencer Madsen came together one Sunday night for poetry. Usually Sunday nights are dedicated to football. Poetry is better than football. Fuck football. On June 19^th we had the explicit pleasure of witnessing this New York duo read online. Jupiter, Florida was their location, specifically a house roughly six miles away from the beach. To make the occasion even more special Spencer quit his job in a dramatic fashion and high-tailed it down to Steinberg’s house. You know, because poetry ought to be this dramatic, especially on the beach. 

                Beach Poetry could become a possible genre. Spencer Madsen wrote poems on the beach, making them ‘beach poetry’ or, as Frank Hinton put it ‘shoretry’. As Spencer spent a great deal of time in Florida, he overheard children’s conversations. Florida conversations by children tend to be a bit ridiculous. Somehow the mixture of tacky culture alongside a lack of any intellectual rigor (as per Spencer, nobody cares about art in Miami) makes it one of the wealthiest pieces of trash in the entire country if not the world. 

                I like how Spencer and Jacob tore apart Miami artists. That was fantastic. Each one completed the other’s thought about the sheer uselessness of the artists there, particularly one such idiot who wanted to call his gallery “Formalism” as he thought that would be the most radical name for it. Personally I’m amazed artists even live in Miami. Usually I figure artists move to Miami, no actual art originates from that location. How both Spencer and Jacob manage to survive in such a hostile, difficult, and stupid environment is beyond me. At least those mediocre artists paid for this duo’s sushi. So they had some value: transferring money to worthy poets. 

                Spencer read a poem from “Let People Poems”. He welcomed us to his poem. After we had been brought into the poem’s space, he began. I’m a big fan of Let People Poems. Reading about a sad human feels realistic. What I hope is someday Spencer finds ‘true love’. Or at the very least that he gets to ride his bike with someone sweet. 

                “Porn” Jackson Nieuwland’s chapbook received attention. For his poem Jackson focused on the importance of cuddling. Cuddling is a lost art form. As Jackson often focuses on the fantastic-ness of the world this feels like a logical place for him to explore. I’m amazed he managed to send his chapbook all the way to Mr. Steinberg’s address in Florida. Guess porn moves quickly. Jacob read it with his characteristic swag. As a bonus, he read his poems on “NewWaveVomit” as well. That was not all he needed to let out.

                Upon Jacob showing off his pink underwear and one rib, Spencer began reading. They had a ‘relay race’ poetry reading. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” interested Spencer. As these were small pieces it fit in nicely to the poetry selections. David Foster Wallace wrote this book, a collection of 23 short stories. I miss him and feel a bit strange that “The Pale King” even got published as it is a bit of an ‘incomplete’ book of his. 

                I liked the focus on Julio Cortazar. Jacob translated these poems along with reading them. Apparently no one has bothered to translate his work into English, or precious little of it. Both Jacob Steinberg and Stephen Tully Dierks happen to be huge fans of this writer. Hopefully I can find more of it at some point, it is fantastic. 

                To show they were open to more experimental forms of prose they read “TLC’s” song “Waterfalls”. Or rather, Jacob did not read this, he felt it. I remember where I was when I first heard “Waterfalls”. For me, this song spoke volumes to me. Grade school suddenly became comprehensible with the help of this magnificent group. Suddenly everything in my life gained meaning thanks to TLC and this song in particular. 

                “Thought Catalog” came up. Spencer read his rejected article. “How to want to quit your Job” was the name of his article. In it he described in vivid detail about the dread of facing your job. Each bit mentioned the alarm clock, shower, train, bus, and thinking about the difference between you at home versus you at your workplace. Hearing him mention the tiniest of details convinces me people may be interested in the anguish of a workplace. Somehow I made it through five years with trepidation about such uncomfortable conversations with bosses.  

                Spencer will be coming out with a book. 95% of everything he’s ever written on the internet shall be removed. All of a sudden he’ll restart his brand (known as ‘rebranding’ by Impossible Mike) and become a new internet person. I think this is great idea. The book (entitled ‘A Million Bears’) will bring Spencer Madsen the poetry groupies he’s always wanted. 

                Carolyn DeCarlo had her poem read. This gets extremely explicit. While I’d like to explain what happens in the poem, I don’t want to ruin it. Details help build the scene and contribute to the mood of the poem. Eventually the focus shifts away from the individual’s perspective on pleasure to helping others. 

                “Goldfish” talked about the stupidity of fish. Jacob thought the Goldfish had it easy. They don’t remember anything. Instead of engaging or remembering things they manage to live in the moment, not experiencing pain. Love can copy this fleeting moment. Having these intense emotions means you often forget about the past and hope for the best future. 

                We watched as Spencer and Jacob bore their very souls at the end. Seeing the two of them bond at the end helped me understand how important words can be. These two were brought together by a love of the word. Now I hope to see them do future ustreams as this unstoppable poetic force. Perhaps they might even bring some semblance of intelligence to the most vapid state in the union but that may be asking too much.

Stranger than Paradise ***Warning Spoilers***

It takes a certain amount of confidence to dedicate an entire movie to nothing. Jim Jarmusch made it happen in the culturally bare 80s. Parts of the movie feel so naked I get worried. The characters act so natural it seems like voyeurism, as if I’m spying on them from my position of privilege. 

A few things are added in that make the appeal to me a little more personal. For one, Eva’s lack of interest in nearly anything is amazing. I simply adore her deadpan delivery on everything. Perhaps I can relate to some degree, since I’ve been told that I lack emotion in how I speak (I talk to you in monotone) so kudos for that.

“I put a spell on you” has to be the strangest reoccurring joke in a movie. There’s no purpose to it, besides Eva being interested in it. Whenever she’s bored, she simply has a tape recorder right next to her to keep her entertained. I wish I had the guts to just carry around a tape recorder with me, but I don’t even travel with an IPOD, or listen to music when I’m driving (whenever that rarely happens). 

The black and white looks glorious. Devoid of color, you get to focus on the truly crummy details of their surroundings. Willie’s apartment looks like total trash. Cleveland doesn’t appear to be much different. Everywhere is the same indeed, Eddie even states so himself. 

Bored with stealing from other people (something that lets Willie and Eva bond) they go to Florida for no real reason. Nothing happens. They look cool in sunglasses. Willie and Eddie gamble while Eva is left lonesome. Annoyed at being left alone, she steals a hat (as she usually does, she’s a kleptomaniac) and gets mistaken for a drug dealer. Given a huge amount of money by Rammellzee (Far Rockaway represent!), she leaves some for the two of them and goes to the airport.

What’s funny is how unwilling she is to go back to her home country. Apparently that’s the only flight she can still make, and she finds that very annoying. I guess she takes up their advice that it is the same all over, and waits for the flight the next day. Willie boards the Budapest bound flight to look for her and leaves. 

 The Cleveland parts are the best. Parts of the dialogue read like how I speak with people, which freaked me out. How they act as they intrude on her boring date and steal his popcorn. How they mock her geeky boyfriend. All of it works for reasons that aren’t easily explained. 

Casual films bore me most of the time, but this one did it for me. There’s something more underneath all that monotonous landscape, a real honestly and heart that you don’t find in movies very often. 

Start Watching: Here

The City Mouse

                 Christian, one-time child actor and retired MTA employee, gazes longingly at all the young kids waiting for the L train. Oh, how youth is wasted on the young, he says to no one in particular. It is Friday night, they’re all probably going to their cool parties to do cool things, things I can’t do anymore.

                I tried my best. My kids moved out, found new places to live. Yet here I am, still living in the Big Apple, wondering why I’m doing it. Williamsburg wasn’t always like this, it used to be tougher. Now Duane Reade’s moving in. That park hosts free Flaming Lips and other relevant bands, but I don’t listen to that stuff. Nah, back in my day I listened to progressive rock and hippie freak-out music. 

                That’s how I met my wife. Man, we have to get out of New York. Move to somewhere warmer, somewhere that won’t tax my city pension. Hold on, I have to scurry underneath the platform, the train’s coming. Look at that, a cute out of town person pointed at me. I feel important, appreciated, terrifying for no obvious reason. 

                All my kids moved down south. Maybe I need to do that, go to North Carolina; they wouldn’t tax my pension there. Some of our friends, people I worked with at the MTA say North Carolina’s great, especially Asheville. The jerks I worked with went to Florida, so I can’t go there. I don’t want to be an old New York mouse going down to Florida’s, that’s like where New York mice go to die. Either that way or freaked out people throwing shoes at them, shrieking hysterically.

                 We have to get the rat hole in order, get it on the market. Yeah, the housing market isn’t doing that well, but we have an ideal location. That counts for a lot, perhaps some young yuppie couple into yoga or Whole Foods might like it. I don’t know, I eat most garbage people drop on the ground, but that’s not for all mice. Some prefer eating only organic food found on the ground. Each Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review section, looking for books about mice, but there are usually gross misrepresentations of what we’re all about. I mean, we’re not monsters. If anything, humans are monsters. They are bigger, louder, and much more intoxicated, at least around these parts.

                Bummer, I have to help move all this stuff into storage. We got a sweet spot to store our stuff to make the rat hole appear bigger. I spent the past week repainting it to an inoffensive shade of white and beige. Neither one of us knows what’s trendy right now, so we went with a full wood look. Sadly we don’t have brick exposures or hardwood floors, those things are hot right now.

                 Guess I’ll steal some of the leftover bits of pizza the kids dropped. It is time to get some sleep, watch repeats of stand-up routines on Comedy Central and dream of the warm pure North Carolina sun. A rat can dream, a rat can dream.

Origin Story Number Three:

I'm too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts.

Growing up in Fidel Castro’s Cuba was hard. Because of the strict rules against being cool, I understood that my love of culture was forbidden. Upon the release of Radiohead’s seminal album “Ok Computer” I stated to my friend how cool I thought they were. He stated that Fuck’s “Pardon My French” was the better album, and that I was an ‘entry-level’ kid. The SDE (Cuban Secret Police) later took him away and asked him to identify all the cool kids. Many young children were thrown into prison, but I was spared. Perhaps he decided not to reveal my coolness, or that I hadn’t reached a level considered ‘troublesome’ enough.

Upon seeing the movie “Rushmore” in an illegal underground cinema, I knew the authorities would be after me. Max’s mannerisms fit mine so perfectly, I could relate to the character so well. Yet I had to keep this cool knowledge to myself, for fear of exposing myself and others to danger. A plan began to appear in my head, of escaping this retro country to the Promised Land, America, which had bountiful amounts of independent music and cinema, a place where I might become an “authentic” consumer of haute culture.

Each night I played a flute for various stingrays. Training them to carry large objects, I earned their trust by taking good care of them. Stingrays are well-known in Cuba for being faithful servants, but few had tried what I wanted to do. My goal was to float away from the island not on a raft, but in a 57 Chevy so I could be protected from the elements and sharks.

I talked to my family about leaving. They agreed it would be for the best. Late at night, after the electricity got turned off to save gas, I scurried out at night with my Chevy. Starting to play my flute, I heard a car fast approaching. Apparently I had become indie enough for the authorities to capture me. Finally, I thought happily to myself, all that talk about music and movies wasn’t for naught. People really understood that I was cool enough to present a threat to the government. 

As they approached, I drove my car into the water and sailed on top of the mighty stingrays. What I didn’t realize was how slowly stingrays move. Though I escaped from Cuba, I suffered another fate. Floating on these creatures might be safe, but you need enough supplies of water and food to survive. 

The day I ran out of water ended up being a turning point in my life. Realizing that I was nowhere near the Florida coast, I felt defeated. Maybe I should’ve stayed in Cuba, with the malevolent dictatorship. Perhaps listening to the Macarena wasn’t that bad, and I should just become a mainstreamer. Delusion started to set in. No, I screamed to myself, I was too attractive and likable to become that.

Heading towards the edge of the car, I looked at the vast sea surrounding me. All this water, and not a drop to drink, I thought bitterly to myself. Suddenly I felt an urge to urinate as I munched on my Shredded Wheat, ready to become fully dehydrated. But an idea, a brilliant idea, popped into my head and helped me to survive.

Quickly I pulled down my pants and urinated into the bowl of cereal. Thinking that this was the lowest I’d ever go, I began to eat the urinate-soaked cereal. Drinking my own urinate saved my life. Plus, it tasted pretty good. Mixing it with shredded wheat gave it a nice edge it otherwise wouldn’t have had. 

Finally, I saw land. Thankful to my stingray companions, I promised to send those alternative CDs once I had gotten myself settled into the new country. Driving my car across a beach, blasting my Rushmore soundtrack, I got yelled at. That behavior, a well-tanned person explained to me, earned me the insult ‘entry-level’. I screamed back “Sorry, I just left a brutal communist regime. I’ll read a couple of blogs and get back to you asshole.”

Lacking any marketable skills, I feared I would fail in this new and strange land. Slowly I learned that I could sell myself to people in exchange for money. I could earn a living this way, a scantily clad woman informed me. Thanking her tremendously and almost hugging her (but then thinking twice about it) I set forth on my new business adventure.

Whoring myself out to retired Jewish Grandmothers, I learned that Florida was not the cultural center of the United States. Asking them politely after they were done smoking, they informed me that all cool people lived in New York and then moved down to Florida when they were ready to die. I earned enough money to move up to the big city, but could only afford a small place in Brooklyn, a neighborhood called Williamsburg. I wondered whether or not Williamsburg would attract the cool kids, or perhaps I should move to Queens. Asking around Manhattan (which appeared to be filled with rich people) they told me Queens was where people settled down, and Brooklyn was for pretentious indie dicks.

I enjoyed living in Brooklyn. Never before had I seen so many relevant record stores. Hoping my family was still alive in Cuba, I sent them a Doobie Brothers album, since they were apparently all the rage around that time. People listened to the Doobie Brothers in Brooklyn, I learned, but only ‘ironically’. 

For a while, I tried selling myself, like I did in Florida, but the grandparents in New York already had male prostitutes. Worrying about my future, I began writing blurbs in papers for various bands I enjoyed; along with pictures of people I thought looked cool or lame. The column ended up being a smash hit at Northsix, and someone told me to write for Vice Magazine.

Hoping to impress my future boss, I wore a suit and tie. Eating my morning breakfast of urine and shredded wheat, I looked forward to meeting the kind-hearted soul named Gavin McInnes. Those I asked about Gavin stated he was a soft-spoken and caring man who yearned to give back to the community which had done so much for him.

Entering his office, I saw him having intercourse with a woman painted like a Cat while she made a smoothie using a half-dead squirrel and Wintergreen Altoids. Seeing my face, he welcomed me into his office. First he asked me if I liked Pat Buchanan, and I said yes, since that guy hated communism, a force I had only recently escaped. Liking this answer, he smiled and nodded. He said my breath reeked of urine. I said that made sense, since I drank my urine on a regular basis, now believing it to help boost my immune system. Curious, he asked what I ate with my urine. Unsure of where this was going, I said shredded wheat. Angrily he told me to get the fuck out of his face. 

Dejected, I walked out of the office. Standing on the street, Gavin came toward me. Almost out of breath, he said I got the job. Explaining he needed to weed out the fake urine drinkers, I became a member of the Vice Magazine staff. 

Over the next several years, I learned how to mock others with wit and grace. My accent became more distinctly “New York” in feel. Even when my mentor Gavin left Vice Magazine in 2007, I continued to partake in writing many album reviews. I remained in close contact with Gavin, and he ate a bowl of cereal soaked in his own urine as a tribute to my greatness.

2010 ruined everything. I met a girl. Her name was Bethany Cosentino. After falling madly in love with her, I wrote a glowing review in Vice Magazine about her band Best Coast. But the love ended up being only a ruse. Nathan Williams, some pothead, ended up being her actual boyfriend. To add further embarrassment, she wrote about it on her blog. My career in snarky commentary was over. Vice Magazine tolerated many things, but genuine emotion wasn’t one of them.

At my favorite bar, a kid named Jordan Castro came up to me to try and interview me about it. Since I was on heavy psychedelics, I thought he was a spy from Cuba here to take away my freedom. Viciously I attacked him, and three people twitted about it. In his Tumblr, he called me a “worthless asshole”. That didn’t hurt so much, since nobody knew who he was.

Depression bit me hard. Worried about losing the last shreds of credibility, I tried to get in touch with the Jewish Grandmothers in Florida, to restart my life down there again. I learned most of them had died, but one was still sort of alive. The sort of alive grandmother told me I was the coolest person she could remember and when she passed away, she left me a pair of used underwear and $650,000.

The money gave me a second chance. Speaking to my mentor Gavin, he suggested rebuilding my street cred with a blog. A blog from the heart dedicated to those stingrays whose sloth-like movement inched me towards my current freedom. That is why so many of these posts reveal my inner most thoughts. I’m trying to mend my heart. Thanks for the hugs.