* (restored)
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p.s. Hey. ** Carsten, The rent on my LA pad isn’t bad, but I’ve ‘lived’ there since 1990, and they can only raise the rent yearly by millimetres. My place is in Los Feliz. Okay, cool, just send the post and we’ll sort it out if we need to. Thanks, man! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Of course my great pleasure. My head cold or whatever is a weirdo. It’s mostly in my ears, and I’m mostly just slightly dizzy, but not fall down on the ground dizzy. Your love picked a lovely blurb as well. Love inspiring a thrashing mosh pit wherever he goes today, G. ** jay, Excellent about the excellently delivered and received presentation! Now you can really luxuriate. No more baby steps. ** Misanthrope, Here it was just protests and dimmed storefronts. Kind of nice. Hm, I’ll try to think of any culinary wonder-style restaurants I hit on my last NYC trip. Next week, nice. And David is … presentable enough? ** Måns BT, Yeah, you seem wholly alert and fleet on your keyboard, so big thanks to your sturdy biology. Money absolutely comes and goes, that’s its vocation. Hope the book delighted you. No, no protesting, unfortunately. My neighbourhood isn’t a rebellious hot spot to say the least. Almost the weekend. What’s your agenda? ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too. I mean, me too re: in a theater not on a blog post. ** Darbz, Hey, buddy. You can get through this, just don’t accept what others’ definition of ‘getting through this’ means. Try to always remember you’re an original, and original people have to invent their own standards of what constitutes success. It’s a burden, but it’s also a gift. Trust the people who understand you or who want to at least. You can write anything you want here, my friend. I may not always know what to say in return that is genuinely insightful or helpful, but I read every word and think hard about it and appreciate it. I don’t know why I mentioned your mother. I figured the trip is all your doing. NYC … it’s huge, right? I like to look at art. I personally greatly prefer to hang out in the East Village and Lower East Side, which, despite their gentrification, are the still the most chill and interesting areas of Manhattan, I think. I don’t know, let me think of suggestions. It sounds like that trip is pretty precisely what you need right now. Lots of respect and international hugs to you. xo. ** Steeqhen, Haha, no, there’s actual meaning in the day. Man, don’t sweat what you worry isn’t in your work. I’m sure it’s a serious boon. Museum got relocated to today, so we’ll see. ** catachrestic, The entertainment industry’s increasingly lower and lower risk-tolerance is precisely what keeps the underground alive. I think people who use that term ‘underground’ tend to be very romantic about that term implies — secret societies and grubby artists experimenting in squats and stuff. There’s a ton of experimental work being made and appreciated and creating related scenes everywhere, pretty much. In LA alone, there are numerous places presenting experimental music and film and art and theater and writing with small fervent audiences attending and artists creating therein. Someday those scenes will be seen as very romantic, but right now they’re just part and parcel of the search to make and experience innovative work. Or I think so. Basically, what you said in so many words. My cold is sneaking around in my ears and it’s weird but doable. Thanks for watching ‘PGL’. Yeah, Benjamin (Roman) is extraordinary in the film. I don’t think a lot of people realise how difficult what he’s doing with the character is. Obviously I encourage you to make one, just be careful who you work with. Thanks, J! ** Dom Lyne, Malibu sounds like a nightmare. Rum and coconut are on my no way list. I can’t take sweet drinks. Even wine is hard. Haha, cue cards, nice. That psycho-seeming dude has a kind of Robert Blake in ‘Lost Highway’ quality in my admittedly overactive imagination. Don’t forget your mace. xo, me. ** Steve, Yes, you’re one of lucky proximate ones. And re: ‘Pavements’ too. I hope it plays here. Hard to tell. Right, it’s Bandcamp Friday, I’m going to shop there when I get back from my day’s IRL requirements. Happy launch. ** HaRpEr, Hey. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever read ‘Faust’. Isn’t that ridiculous? I think so. Hmmm. I think once you realise how funny Bernhard is, say courtesy of ‘Woodcutters’, then you start to pick up on how funny he is virtually all the time albeit with the humor resting at the bottom of the fiction’s ocean in some cases. Yes, I like Werner Schroeter. Here’s the Day I did about his work some years ago, if that’s useful. ** Okay. The old post I’ve resurrected today is kind of a cheapo thrill, but what’s wrong with that? Anyway, it had fallen into disrepair over the years, and I so rebuilt it just so you guys can have a cheap thrill if you get your cheap thrills from things like it. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hey Dennis,
Today’s the day… despite the fact I have it done and just need to like format it and such, I’m just terrified, I know I’m never gonna be fully satisfied, there’s always something I’m gonna wanna change or add. But I gotta just accept that how I perceive it, with my months of reading and writing and planning and thinking, is not how someone fresh to the dissertation will see it; they’ll only see what is actually there, and not the chaotic flux state that it is in my head. Decided on a name; Awful Bliss, after my favourite GbV song. I think the name fits the diss! Anyway thank you for all the support and help along the way, after today my comments will actually be centered around the posts!
And I’m finished!!! Feel like I could cry from happiness. I’ll send it to you on email once I get home. Thank you for all the support and help you’ve given me, man.
Amazing collection of mosh antics, Dennis. As someone who’s been going to metal and hardcore punk shows since the late 80s/early 90s, I’ve never gotten over the resemblance that circle pits / mosh pits have to shoals of fish. With the occasional anomaly suddenly swimming through, like a guy falling out of the ductwork in the ceiling.
Even at the height of my 90s teen gig-going days, I was never one to partake in mosh pits. Think my skinny frame would not be suited to the boisterous antics going on in those places. However their documentation via this blog does provide sufficient cheap thrills! It’s almost like I’m there getting my stomp on.
Hi!!
Mosh pits! It’s been a while since I was last at a show that truly inspired people to go all in. Interestingly (or at least unexpectedly, based on the music), the most brutal pit I’ve ever been – half-involuntarily – swept up in was at a Marching Church show. I came away with some serious bruises.
Love is probably attention grabbing but not necessarily well liked today, haha. Love finding it extremely difficult to make even the simplest decisions today, Od.
Some of those pit-scenes are genuinely hypnotizing. But I’m kind of a sucker for moments of polite society descending into animalistic frenzy & chaos. I guess it’s the closest the secular world gets these days to trance & ritual possession.
I’m going to see Iggy Pop here in Munich in June, but I doubt this is what awaits me. Both artist & crowd seem to have retired those antics.
I’ve always dug Los Feliz, but that one’s skyrocketed too from what I hear. Got another good friend living there, but he’s grandfathered in as well. Most of my LA friends have been forced to flee to the valley or even left the state entirely.
Dumb question maybe, but where do I send the ethnopoetics day? I don’t think I have your email.
Dennis, Oh, David ain’t going. No way on earth I can take him anywhere, at least not for an extended time. He’d start jonesin’ right away and be a mess. Too, he’s gotten really fat and hardly has any clothes that fit him. Those that do are overly large and full of holes from cigarettes burns when he drops his cigarette on himself when he nods off.
He even drop a cigarette in my lap while talking to me the other day and then knocked mine into my lap while reaching for his. Burnt a hole in my shorts. I was pissed.
But yeah, next week. Thursday through Sunday. Kayla and her friends are going up on Friday. Alex and I are staying around 23rd street on Lexington Avenue. Very close to a tube station and right across from Madison Square Park. Should be a lot of fun.
I hope your weekend is swell. Alex and I are going with a couple friends to see Thunderbolts tomorrow. It’s my friend DR, whom I’ve mentioned before (hell, we even did a day here about his high school writings that almost got him expelled, if you remember) and my friend from work Marie. Just a little group of us that goes and sees (generally) blockbusters. Really just an excuse to hang out.
Kayla might be coming over tonight for tacos and videogames.
Hi
I like Werner Schroeter. This poetic excess and madness delivered in words and image makes so much sense to me. I did my poem The rose king because of his film. We talked before about his regular actor Antonio Orlando (a hottie and good actor). Shout-out to some of his less famous films like Day of the idiots, Palermo oder Wolfsburg and King of Naples and Deux, one of his latest and second collaboration with Huppert which is just early 00s amazingness!
Is Loz Feliz so exotic and interesting as it sounds to me a guy that never did step his foot in America yet? What I would like there?
Dreaming is free so I can daydream I buy a house in a place there and everything else I want to dream ha ha
So today I saw another blue butterfly and took a great pic of it flying on my shadow’s shoulder like true pavement icons
hi from Crete with one day with stormy weather and cold and the next day summer
Huh, I don’t think today is such a cheapo thrill. It might be if it was just a one-sided celebration of the fun of moshing, but I think there’s some of the dark side as well, especially in the 23rd gif, where a (very handsome, I must say) long-haired guy punches someone else out cold for no clear reason. At least, I look at this stuff a little differently after the Astroworld Festival tragedy, the Travis Scott show where multiple people died in a crowd crush back in 2021. Did you ever see any of the videos of that? I went way down that rabbit hole at the time. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t look away from that terrible event.
Anyway, re: the “underground” stuff, you really hit a nerve. I spent ten years, my 20s really, being an organizers of the experimental music and art stuff in LA that attracts a small but fervent audience, as you put it. I will say, the greatest challenge for me ended up being less the logistics of any of it (coming up with an idea for a show, getting artists on board, winning a grant or raising money, securing a venue, in many cases literally being the person who does the logistics of transporting the works from the artist’s studio or wherever to the gallery, etc.), than the way that that stuff seems to go out into the world and just disappear or at least not leave much of any detectible traces indicating that it really did mean something to someone else.
I suppose it’s similar with publishing novels or poetry – I was just reading Richard Siren’s afterword to the new 20th anniversary edition of Crush, where he mentions that he only started seeing reactions to the book crop up after years of apparent silence/indifference. But in the end, all the volunteer curatorial work I did never ended up translating to a job in the field, which I’ll admit was a big disappointment for me. Then the pandemic tore up most of the social connections I had built and come to rely on for those endeavors, plus I picked up a different “side gig” with my teaching work that absorbs pretty much all the spare time I used to give to art.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t mostly feel like I failed at what I tried to do, and at times even proven susceptible to a certain bitterness around the whole experience. But one of the things I tell myself is that a lot of my former, I mean, “competitors” is not the right word, but people doing similar projects at a comparable scale, aren’t getting jobs for some non-profit or gallery either but have more of an ability to self-fund and keep things going that way. So, in hindsight, I might have put more attention into finding a more sustainable job when I was younger, but what can you do.
Anyway, it’s nice to think that it might all seem very romantic someday to some person far away in time. Though, one aspect that I think might have indeed changed things for the worse in terms of art is just the rising cost of living in cities. If you want to live in LA or New York, you can’t just work 20-25 hours a week like Philip Glass did back in the 60s and 70s and make rent while saving the rest of your time for your art. Obviously, that era had a host of problems of its own and wasn’t some golden age, but I can’t help but feel a twinge of envy when I read a memoir from that time period where the guy pulls into some town, easily finds a job, works for a week or two, and manages to save up enough money from that to go on a bender for a month (this is an episode from one of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s books, best known as the inspiration for “Dr. Gonzo” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).
* an organizer
* Richard Siken (fucking autocorrect, man)
Here’s a link to my new song “Saturday Afternoon”: https://callinamagician.bandcamp.com/track/saturday-afternoon
My Wi-fi has been cutting out constantly for the last week, which is a real pain. On Sunday, I have to go back to the store where I bought my router and exchange it.
I’ve recorded all the music for my next radio show. I plan to record the DJ breaks and edit them together tomorrow, then post the show Sunday.
Any weekend plans? It’s supposed to be beautiful Saturday, getting into the 80s.
Are you still working on a haunt, or has that taken a back burner to getting ROOM TEMPERATURE out into the world? Did anyone from the haunt community in Los Angeles come out to your screening?
I’ve had several music reviews published recently. For Artsfuse’s “Short Fuses” column, I wrote about the latest albums by the Ex and Water Damage: https://artsfuse.org/309727/may-short-fuses-materia-critica-5/. (Scroll down to “Rock.”) In Gay City News, I reviewed Model/Actriz and Fielded: https://gaycitynews.com/may-lgbtq-music-model-actriz-fielded-albums/
Hey. I do think you’d like ‘Faust’, part two mostly. It’s a closet drama, so it’s a play never intended to be performed, which is endlessly poetic as a concept. In part two there are more characters than a play can ever host, and randomly someone named as ‘the person who spat on Christ’s foot’ will appear for one line and never appear again. It’s unbelievably wild. I don’t think there’s any comparison in terms of experimentation when it comes to the early 1800s.
Yeah the humor in Bernhard is very much about the tone. The thing about ‘Woodcutters’ that makes me laugh is that it’s about this misanthropic guy who’s sworn off society and sits at this party eviscerating literally everyone who comes into his mind, but the irony is that he is in fact at the party too, and less different to the rest of the crowd than he’d like to think. The repetition as a device is very funny too, that he just doesn’t shut up. A lot of people hate that about Bernhard, but I obviously disagree.
There’s this photo of Bernhard as a young man that I’m really transfixed by. His tie appears to be cut away and he looks like a punk rocker. I couldn’t believe the photo was taken in the 50s for some reason.
https://dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net/2021/09/2019_51_bernhard_inside.jpg
That is a really wonderful Werner Schroeter post. I do think he embodies a lot of what I really gravitate towards. Taking kitsch to its natural extreme or something, or treating kitsch completely seriously. That’s one way of describing it, obviously, I don’t actually know how to succinctly describe what I gravitate towards.
I used to mosh, these days I don’t go to many rock shows. People hitting buttons on laptops and stuff and the pit sort of gyrates unpredictably, that’s more my crowd. Plus, depending on the audience, weird guys will feel you up – and I think I look undefensive or something. What sort of person are you at concerts? I like to dance so I’m somewhere in the middle, but away from the bar at the back. Though there is a strange kind of pleasure standing awkwardly at the back, nobody pushing into you, feeling like you’re an observer rather than a participant.
Oh, moshes are awesome. I agree with Carsten about these pit-scenes being very good mass-mania moments. From what I’ve seen, the Minecraft Movie (or “A Minecraft Movie”, I think) has been having a lot of problems with these spontaneous overflowings of excitement, way more than the usual kids movie anarchy.
I’ve been having a great time off, mostly just playing a videogame that’s based on poker called “Balatro” that I’ve had my eye on for ages. It’s like, pure brain drain entertainment, but perfect for making my brain spin down a little after a few weeks of intense focus. Hope all’s good on your end, good vibes from here.
Hey Dennis! It’s been a really long week, but I’m fully back (in what? not sure) now. I understand this is about mosh pits, but I’m thinking of actual pits. There’s this big pit near where I am and I really like it because a herd of deer grazes there at around 10 pm. Sometimes they host parties in there but those are too muddy for me. Lately I’ve been feeling this odd disquiet and an urge to do something, so we’ll see where I take that. Probably into another doomed research project. But I’m not sure doing something will help. Last night I read one of my essays out (after a week of doing other capital T Things) to a teeming amphitheatre and it felt like, if anything, the urge to do something grew even stronger. I wish there were some truly atheist ascetism that wasn’t just a secular repackaging of monkhood. Have you ever felt this way for a stretch at a time? How’d you get out of it? Also I am interested, as always, in whether you’d want to come here and speak in the fall. I know it’s probably not possible, but I’m allocating a speaker budget right now and it feels worth a try to ask.
Maybe the weather’s not gonna be great today? doesn’t rly make a difference to me, but should also be pretty open/flexible Sun/Mon/earlier Tue. Email and mobile, if either of those are easier: [email protected] +1 347.227.0046