Life to Print

I spent the summer in the sun
happy
         drunk
                   stoned
                              brilliant
                                          goddamn iridescent
a blazing lightbulb with an infinite filament
fire in the heavens with the chain ripped clean out
no chance to shut myself off 

                                 Just the way I like it

I stumbled across Chicago subdivision reference lines
drove half-mad across state lines
hopped from jetliner to jetliner exploring the beautiful, friendly Yukon

Suckled the sweet nectar of sun-drenched smooches
             goddess after goddess
                                      Adonis to Adonis
      passions upon passions
                                                      ferocious
                     wild                                                   

                                           She bit through my lip
                                    I tasted my blood in her mouth
               I knew I was Alive                               I can never die
                                             At least, not yet 

I hear the beating of drums 
getting softer every day
       that beat
                     the awful beat
                                           sounds like the Beach Boys
                                                                                     sand in my mouth 
                                                                                                                 salt in my hair
                                                                                          sun in my eyes 
                                                           toasting me golden 
                                 to the awful beat 
                          time 
           is running 
   away 

Fall, on the horizon
Fall, into the horizon
Fall, off the ledge 
Fall, take the plunge
into piles of leaves
into cords and cardigans
into classes and clashes 
Fall away from the sweet lips of summer
and into the open mouth of autumn 

The beast with two backs bears a perpetual smile
If you read between the line
When you wipe away the sheets of sweat
Part the curtains
So to speak
Learn the authentic truth
Equal at last, behind closed doors
Sometimes equal spills onto the kitchen floor

The beast with two backs may end up with three or four more
Depends how many open their drawers
Just say yes to excess
The sex that breeds success
Say yes to ecstasy
To worries discarded through legal tender tubes
The nose knows nothing of neurotic nonsensicalities
Nothing more than how to get in the way
Stuffed up in tight spaces
Inhale, exhale
Inhale, exhale
Rinse, repeat, cliché
Take a hint from your facial tip
Just dive straightaway in
Buried deep to the hilt

The beast with two backs bleeds and bruises
Shatters and shutters
Bends but does not break
Just bend me, shape me, any way you want me
After all, no pain nets no gain
You might as well have never came
Never played the game
Raised your stakes
Without the scars to match
Stories quickly assumed as fake
The proof’s in the pudding
But the bowl’s licked clean
Covering your tracks, so it would seem
Momentary lapse, fatal overlook
Forgotten breadcrumb markers
Caressed by the stream of consciousness

A twenty-four hour broadcast cycle
Befuddled by static interference
As signal stasis whimpers, peaks, and dies
Floating, groping, searching the airwaves
For a single blip of self-conscious thought
Receptive light that flicker and gasp
But never stay dead enough
Unlike the bodies littering the shoreline
Piling up, trillion by trillion

As a world obsessed with monolithic structures,
Forged in the twin fires of degradation and exploitation
Blacksmiths with dolemite hammers and dead space hearts
Money lenders line the halls of temples to avarice almighty
While the mistaken faithfuls pay pittance upon meager pittance
To elevate those who dream to rape them
With a smiling view of a blood drenched moon
Turning out pockets and wallets for one final tithing
Before abandoning the foolishly faithful followers
Of their smoke screens and misdirections
On some forgotten interstate roadside

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but as a farce
A constant manipulation of oncoming tides
Platinum towers of dreck & drivel
Snuffing out the stars just because they can,
For an extra zero on the global electric bill
Because they want it
Because they need it
Because they simply can’t go on without
One more digit beside the holy dollar sign
The perfidy of milking the treasury 

But the beast with two backs knows better
Titan towers are doomed to fall
And all wealthy men will someday crawl
A chain reaction reoccurring
Since the dawn of the sprawl
Nature will simply ebb and flow
While man-made structures come and goDevoured by the ravenous vines of time

The beast has seen it all before
Stories retold since the dawn of time
Sweating salt at Sodom and Gomorrah
Braiding jezebel curls for the whores of grand Babylon
In the courtyard of so-called carnal sins
Too busy basking in the simple pleasure
Bestowed by grand Mother Gaia
To be bothered with burning empires

When the new day breaks
Through the smoky din
As the last crumpled million dollar bill
Is hidden below a dingy motel mattress
And the last great Wall Street Capitalist
Takes that running start
For a high-rise window pan flight to asphalt oblivion
The children of the beast flock to the forests

Nature reclaims all that was stolen
By steel beams and concrete streams

Those who received the message of simple truths
Tattooed with care on the welcoming trees
Will gather in sun-kissed meadow clearings
To celebrate the beast’s blessings
In a festival of shared pleasures
A congregation of many back joined as one
Countless heads flung backwards
Unified in the purest bliss
A sea of eyes
Wet with the tears of indescribable elation
The collective aura transcending
The barriers of individual physical self
Reaching apex in communal climax
An orgasm on a global scale
Signaling the coronation
Of a new age of interpersonal interconnectivity
The unbreakable bond of pure compassion
For every inch of Mother Gaia’s sublimity
And unbridled lust for their pleasure seekers-in-arms

The is the gospel of the hedonistas
We come in peace. 

Once upon a world

Before battlefields and love stories

Nailed their narratives and names

To the ceiling of the sky

With titles of totality

That the precious labored hands of time

Keep carrying forth

Eternally serving the sentence

Obediently, dutifully, sorrowfully

Before the world

Got locked inside the experiment of clocks

And captured in the caucus of colonial cartography

What if we…

Change the experiment

Create the key of royal inconvenience

Perform the necromancy of every silencing

Release every story and song

Bound by rigid beginnings and endings

Love and life and war and glory

Will have to share their territory

Transforming timelines and moving memories

Volcanic eruption

Inconvenient interruption

Puncture the ficticious fairy tale

That the kings and queens call history

Which have never ended with

Africa happily ever after

Locked inside the experiment of clock 

Captured in the caucus of colonial cartography

Bury them in a book! They say

With century sweeping sentences

Typed in Times New Roman fonts

Tiny black letters

Too neat and tidy

Too uniform

Too familiar and predictable

To cut this ancient atmosphere

With the sharp edge of those souls survived

Help us to wonder 

From an ocean and a half-day away

Who plays the blues for you?

Steadies the tempo of your continental heartbeat?

Inspires the shape and color of your slumber?

Teaches you to feel or heal?

Locked inside the experiment of clocks

Captured in the caucus of colonial cartography

Let us pray to the powers

Vested in the faces and flesh, self and fellows

Minds of morrow, global eyes

A call to all

To join the chorus of consciousness

For a rhapsodic revolution

To run through the rivers of reality

Into the water glass of the Western world

Let your song become our song, and

Sink into the scalding hot moonglow

Reading light of the muses

Penciller of mountains

Message melting

Into the morning breath of the galaxy

Locked inside the experiment of clocks

Captured in the caucus colonial cartography

This global body

Needs this rhapsodic revolution

A political orgasm

To release the poisonous pressures

Economic hegemonic heavy petty play platonic

Rearrange the current world order

With this philharmonic fantasy

Make way on the map for the

Manic messengers of modern monsters death

Can you hear it coming?

Thudding, bowing, rising

Not there yet

Catch the skeleton of melody

Liquid turning solid

Let’s dig into the frame of chaos

Perfect plane of possibility

Yea, that’s called art

Neverland notes, footprint postage

Fullgrown facts of the future

We’ll sing that African song

On every hollow banjo heart

Let the logic of liberating lyrics

Inspire every music note of a soul

Don’t tell me when it’s over

I want to keep singing

More than one note at a time

Until we fly so far into freedom

The clock can forget that neo-liberal non-sense

O, dear

We skipped an important part

There was a void

Somebody on Wall Street

(Incidentally originating as the wall slaves were chained)

Somebody on Wall Street

I’ll blame them, because they’re easy to blame

People spent money in general and were oppressed in specificity

Next chapter

Post-slave silver soul style

This book hasn’t been updated in awhile

Locked inside the experiment of clocks

Captured in the caucus of colonial cartography

Where can we dig up the folktale

That can whisper our mortal ear

The secret to sneaking into the patch sewn pocket of the past

So we can hear every prayer of the steamy spirits

That fuel the factories of false freedom

The manufacturing of men and minutes

Locked inside the experiment of clocks

Captured in the caucus of colonial cartography

Birds of thunder

Chorus of consciousness

Time to fly into the fire

Beckon the broken hearts and buried heroes

Beyond battlefields banks and bombs

No, no.  I’m mistaken

Through the battlefields banks and bombs

Evaporate the eternal stock of measured futures

Designated undemocratically for the experiment of clocks

Don’t shrug your shoulders

You ol’ rascal

Staring like a simple sir

Like nothing’s ever come along

To ring your raw brassy inner warrior

We can’t afford for you to be so catatonic

Let’s rattle that ol’ rusty bohemian birdcage

It’s been going on for years

Pass the hat

Your brassy inner beast is still yet to be seen

Copious casual introductory sentences begin with a “sometimes”.

Sometimes, it’s nothing more than lazy writing, idle hands refusing to once again navigate the dark corners and golden teeth of a pair of Levi’s. At a different sometimes, my ejaculate spills on to backlight lcd notebook paper.

Sometimes, there’s simply no less appropriate way to approach our abstract thought patterns besides transcription. sometimes, it becomes necessity, especially when the drugs we ingest to attain abstract thought render our mouths and bodies as useful as amish machinery. these sometimes are the sometimes where life manifests itself in never ending patterns of circles, much like the ones sometime drawn in midwestern kindergarden classrooms to indicate stormy weather at the windows, arbitrary events happening sometimes one moment and sometimes another, reappearing, reappropriating themselves like so many relics of 1995 in Brooklyn loft apartments, the mashable, malleable documentation of cyclical, stagnant lives.

Sometimes, the economic super-systems society built to sustain the cycle of sometimes ebb and flow like so many discarded waves crashing against beachfront property bought in prosperity sometimes and abandoned sometimes in a moment’s notice.

Sometimes never come to a stop. Sometimes continue rolling own an eternal hill, perpetual motion on a rotating equilateral triangle.

Sometimes the fate of the world around me is of the utmost importance.
Sometimes, I prefer to become a narcissist.

Sometimes, I am only a red-fading pair of smiling taillights flailing, fading into the distance.

Sometimes, I am in the countryside, and I am brilliant and exuberant. Sometimes, I climb concrete jungle vines and appear self-absorbed.

Sometimes, slender velvet hands part the golden teeth of my Levi’s.

Sometimes, 21 sometimes become one hundred three sometimes.

Sometimes, 21 sometimes becomes one time.

Sometimes, we will all fall at a loss for the right words.

John Storey’s article, Rockin’ Hegemony: West Coast Rock and Amerika’s War in Vietnam, focuses on the dual aspects of the 1960’s counterculture, those aspects being the political beliefs of the members of the counterculture, and the music tied to the movement. Using Gramsci’s theories on hegemony, Storey shows the formula that resulted in the movement’s failure, as well as subsequent rebirth to similar circumstances. He categorizes this argument that while good intentioned, the problem the counterculture faced was the structure of hegemony, and that within a capitalistic hegemony such as Amerika, the movement was just another adjustment that was assimilated and dealt with by the structure. Storey presents the argument in three sections: Counterculture, Resistance,and Incorporation.
Counterculture deals with the birth of the West Coast Counterculture, a sort of “alternative society” that conducted life outside the hegemonic structure of America. As a collective movement, they came together around large music festivals and public displays of political outrage. Storey addresses a common misconception about the distinctions between “hippies” and “protestors”, those who Storey said “preferred the peace sign to the clenched fist”. The uniting factor here is not a complete rejection of politics at all, but instead a rebellion against the structure of the country and society. Storey also notes that the main member makeup of the counterculture were from a middle class background, and were ranged in age from about eighteen to twenty five. This was mainly due to the large student population of America in the 1960, which had doubled from the previous decade. It is here the Storey presents his argument that the counterculture was doomed to failure, because within Gramsci’s hegemonic structure, that while a dominant group cannot completely assimilate a subordinate group in the hegemonic structure, but at the same time, cannot wholly withdraw from the hegemony. Thus, the fact that the counterculture was within the hegemony of America meant that it had to function in a capitalist society, therefore they can never truly break free.
In Resistance, Storey begins to flesh out his argument. He establishes that the second aspect of the counterculture was inherently tied to the music that resonated with the members of the culture, a community of musicians that followed in the footsteps of Bob Dylan’s transference to the electric guitar. In relation to Dylan, the mainstays of the counterculture’s music scene, bands like Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & The Fish, The Doors, The Grateful dead, and The Byrds, all had their start in the folk community, and moved on to rock. With that folk heritage came two main influences, those being a way of looking at society and the world around them that saw the significance of music in it all, and the belief that rather be a part of the “industry”, they belonged to an “alternative community”(90). This belief and accepting nature gave way to the forming of a culture around the music. The uniting factor between the counterculture and the music was a dual opposition to the Vietnam War. Beyond this, the culture, deeply entwined with the music and therefore the communal nature of the folk community, developed as an integrated society, where the relationship of between consumer and product was not the distanced relationship of capitalistic society, but rather a close-knit unit. At the music festivals, it wasn’t uncommon to see any member of the performing bands joining the crowd to enjoy another musician’s performance. How this all ties into Gramsci is that Storey modifies Gramsci’s formula to allow for “collective organic intellectuals”. Due to the genuine anti-war message of peace touted by the bands, who are functioning as the collective organic individuals, and this rang true blue with the members of the counterculture. This was not merely about fashion and trends. This was an “authentic” resistance culture.
Incorporation deals with the moment tied to the overall failure of the counterculture to break off from the hegemonic structure of capitalist America. Storey notes how rather than being organized in the traditional top-down fashion of say, the American music industry, it was built from the bottom up. However, they were still caught under the golden blanket of American capitalism, and like any sort of popular culture, it faced three fates, those being written into the margins of society and ignored, vanishing into the thin air, like water in the desert, or being incorporated into the capitalistic market. With the musicians beginning to crossover into popular American culture at large, it created divisions within the community by breaking the community bond of the musicians with the society they had helped build. The problem posed to the musicians was how to make records without having any money? They were forced by the limitations of the system to succumb to its influence. Due to their inclusion in the American capitalist economy, which was, of course, spending on the Vietnam War, the money that they were giving back to the government was then being spent on the war, which basically boiled down to the sad, ironic fact that the money brought in the proliferation of anti-capitalist, anti-war sentiment not only increased the profits for the capitalist music companies, but was spent by the government of the war. Further incorporation came with the first “commercialized” music festival, The Monterey Pop Festival, and even the counterculture’s shining star, Woodstock, were nothing more than shopping grounds for record execs. Within this, it was becoming apparent that the commercialization of the music was overshadowing the message. While crowds in excess of five hundred thousand showed up with beaming smiles for Woodstock, political rallies themselves, like the “Demokratic Death Conference”, were only able to bring out ten thousand tired bodies with enough spirit left to hold a sign. This was evident onstage, where activist Abbie Hoffman was ignored, and Country Joe McDonald had to almost plea with the audience to use their voices. Furthermore, things like the racial violence perpetrated at a Rolling Stones concert, as well as other counterculture gatherings (these were commonly tied to members of the Hell’s Angels biker gang, which had become associated with the counterculture due to their connections with writers/cultural figures in the movement, like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and Hunter S. Thompson), the arrest of the Charles Manson murders, and the implementation of the draft lottery tested the loyalty of the members of the community, as well as skewed public perception towards the negative.
Elsewhere, as the turn of the 1970s approached, another concept the Gramsci intrinsically tied to the dominance of hegemony, coercion, was making the rounds at political protests. Four students killed at Kent State by the National Guard. Twelve students at State University of New York were snuffed by shotgun spit. Another nine students at University of New Mexico met the end of a bayonet. The bodies were piling up, and the government had taken the gloves off, evidenced by Richard Nixon’s chilling words in reference to these slain students, “these bums, you know, blowing up campuses” (95). Hegemony was operating in full swing, and the structure was outlasting the fight of the counterculture. Thus came the collapse of the counterculture, and the reinforcement of Gramsci’s theory on hegemony for Storey.
Storey’s application of Gramsci’s theory to the rise and fall of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, sadly, holds true. Articulate in it’s interpretation on the history of the culture itself is the evidence that the system of American hegemony proved to be successful over this public outcry relating to politics and society. Whether the bubbles that rise to the surface of the hegemonic bubbles will ever be able to stand on their own is not the question posed here. Just the fact that, for now, the capitalist hegemony is here to stay.

Storey, John. ” Rockin’ Hegemony: West Coast Rock and Amerika’s War in Vietnam Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 13 (2009): 88-97.

The happiest bells and chimes
sunniest whistles and chirps
from the saddest man’s cinema soundtrack
trails the foot cadence
of jade pin-up shutters
in the sunlight of simpler times

So I can own you
i aspire to break you deep inside
so you will submit your beauty to me
for i crave carnal inspiration

Jade green eyes of spring bloom flowers
Send messages to invisible mailboxes,
Addresses you have yet to hand-scribe
Fountain pen drenched in the depths of trepedatious tyrants of your past
Moments of truth picking coins from the moat of backlit castle fountain
Smoking grass in the surreptitious seclusion of a Chicago public park
Enchanting chance encounters,
Stringing across strands of webbing to plant seeds in the streams of semi-permanence

Her intimate nature makes better promises than politicians
Promiscuity, intoxication, relaxation, semi-formal education
Slender tongue wrapped around throbbing genitals
Mouth caressing sweetest spots, previously unknown to her ownership
Napes of necks, cusps of collarbones, nook between thigh and nethers
Coitus bereft of trapping of American life in the fast lane unsatisfied youth
No trick of instantaneous gratification
Instead two lost in time souls entangled in daytrotter sessions

The insatiable loins of a nymphette,
Encompassed by the demure spirit of an alternative domestification
Apartments cleaned, floors swept, meals cooked and consumed,
Naked as the spring chicken in the oven
After dinner, mid-fornication,
Skin porcelain pure, like cannabis smoke transferred on intertwined lover’s tongues
Those lovers taken on kitchen countertops while the roast cools
Embracing the iridescent thrill of flesh in ache for pleasure touch against snow-tipped brick walls
Seclusive orgasms on cornhusker America backroads, as the airplanes land beneath our interwoven bodies
Her perfection hair like vines around fingers
Endless hours of saccharine exhilaration from her scent stuck in the rafters

She departs, as all the best must, in body
Leaving behind a snifter of her essence drunk in from memory
Her scent lingers in the air, the trail of smoke from cigarettes smoked in her absence
Rising like angels to ceiling fans
Yet, those jade lanterns hang from the wall
As your lips trace text
“A story is only kept real
When no ending is in sight”

I went to CVS on Thursday
I was trying to buy Mucinex
I have a cold, maybe the flu, the whole bit of business is rather nasty, unpleasant
I couldn’t find the medication at first
My eyes scanned up and down the shelves, left to right
I felt helpless because I couldn’t find it because I knew it was there and it’s just awful to know that you’re in the general vicinity of what you’re looking for, the goddamn object is in your direct line of sight, but you’re just too damn distracted by all the things you already have to let what you need cross into your visual path.
The shelves themselves are a cavalcade of self-medicatory awareness, lines upon lines of cold medication just ripe for overdosing, I mean, let’s be serious, you don’t recover from a sickness in the time you want to unless you take the path less traveled, although for “my type of people” we seem to enjoy such a path, although the footprints in the snow have a general wobbliness to them, probably because we have drank too much cold medicine or have consumed some other psychoactive substance and our footing is not as sincere as the counterparts of sober society. But where’s the fun of joining the suit and tie ranks? I wouldn’t be in this “art school community” if I was interested in wearing a tie unironically. Regaining hold of my thought pattern (cold medicine will do that to a person), I notice that it is still inherently impossible to locate the Mucinex, for in my conditional state, the shelves of deeply colored medicines are blending together and swirling like some sort of rainbow of self prescribed hallucination.
I asked the man at the pharmacy because I had to.
I hate making people do their “jobs”, because of how I always felt in a menial job
I know they resent everyone who walks through the revolving door, most especially those who are asking them questions
I bet they go home, or maybe just into the break room, and talk about how much they hate people, and I will be one of them because they watched me search the shelves for five minutes, and I was obviously too incompetent to see what is in front of me, and they will make fun of me. I feel ashamed.
In all honesty, I detest people; they strike me as uninteresting, unaware of highly bloggable mp3s and pseudo-relevant youth culture trends, instead having this sort of wholly disproportionate affect on the world around us, chomping down on fast food over-processed meat, verbally lambasting convenience store clerks for bringing them the wrong brand of cigarettes, while bombarding them with a multitude of questions that are pointless and easily answered by being aware of their surroundings.
Yet I love being around them
It tends to strike me as Quite the confusing conundrum, but then again, my own misgivings and judgment calls are really what keeps me entertained throughout my interactions with “normal society”.
I think I just enjoy giving my fellow humans the benefit of the doubt, and inadvertently giving the human race a second chance to “wow” me.
He pointed to where I had just been
I found the Mucinex, picked the strongest one, with dxm so maybe I’ll be able to get fucked up off the pills and feel “good”
I ambled around the store a little more, accumulating an orange juice, two V8 fruit juice blends, and two bags of organic trail mix of the fruit and nut variety.
I walked up to the cashier, feeling very proud of myself for being healthy, because on a given day, I consume somewhere around twenty cigarettes and ten cups of coffee.
My heart must feel like Ted Kennedy’s colon.
There was an Asian man of his early to mid twenties, at the counter. He looked like the picture of Tao Lin, the poet laureate of the alterative youth culture that I immerse myself in, on the back of “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” which was in my bag that had been sewn, safety pinned, and duct-taped back together the night before. But he looked much more mainstream than I would romanticize Tao to be
I put my items on the shelf and began to look at breath supplements
Like I said, I was getting sick, and it would turn out to be flu, maybe even the swine flu, I never went to a doctor so I don’t know any sort of strain information. I’m just a writer, and I don’t know all that much about science, but what I do know is that when you are sick, the mouth collects bacteria much akin to the empty bottle of vodka and assorted used up coke spoons lying strewn akimbo in Lindsey Lohan’s apartment, and the Mucinex makes it all the more complicated because clearing all that congestion carries the nasty side effect of a very thick film resting on your teeth, tongue and general innards of the mouth, and it feels disgusting, like a permanent dental dam affixed to the inside of your mouth, and on top of it your breath will smell like Fred Flintstone’s feet, and if your breath smells like Fred Flintstones feet, girls will not want to talk to you, very much less sleep with you, then no one will want to publish these long and wordy “poems” ( I don’t even know if I can call them such anymore, it all seems to be self involved prose and resembles the general innards of my mind at any given moment when I am smoking marijuana) but if no one wants to publish me, I will curl up into a ball in the corner of an apartment in wicker park drinking rubbing alcohol/cheap self loathing gin with no tonic because I won’t feel fancy, and I will only eat clif bars and they will be all over the floor and maybe I will start doing heroin and of course if you’re going to immerse yourself in the same lifestyle of a William S Burroughs type of character, I might as well start freebasing crack-cocaine, because honestly what have I to lose at this point, and then there will be all sorts of tin-foil and rainbow striped straws, and I really will be able to see the magnificent centipedeal insects they theoreticized about on “Alf” but never had the funding to capture onscreen, and it will be somehow perched in the upper corner of where the walls and ceiling intersect, and it will be furiously masturbating, much like a monkey in the zoo, and then it’s semen (I mean, for semantics sake we’ll call it semen, we are talking about intergalactic multi-pedular creatures here, I know as much about them as the next person does, mainly because Alf never went into details, but there is some sort of ejaculatory pattern happening here) dripping down the walls, it has the taste of cotton candy, and back to the subject of freebasing, if you cook the ejaculate on a strip of tin foil and suck the smoke through a straw type tube, you’ll see the most fantastic colors and have some sort of lucid dream in which Bozo the Clown will give you an upside down tugjob and prompt you upon your own ejaculatory pattern to play Bozo Buckets with the semen trajectory of Peter North, and I’m fairly certain that if you hit the farthest bucket, you win the prize of death.
As this is going through my mind at the counter, I see a package that says “organic” and I hear Mainstreamer Tao’s voice roll a stop sign in my mind and say “do it bro, you need a candy bar there’s too much healthy shit here”
I frown because he is obviously of the species genus “bro”, and he is not of my kind, and I am pretentious so I consider moving to a different register, but I take the organic breathmints because it fulfills today’s “organic identity” but I am frowning
He looks quite discouraged
This is a proud moment for the “alternative community”
We have just won a battle defending our collective “organic identity” against the mainstreamers wishing us to conform to the hegemony of America, to buy their subjectivity, to read People and US Weekly magazines and idolize the complete wrecks of society that we consider to be celebrities (they are not famous they just do their jobs and get paid more than we do), but they want us to read it like some sort of archaic religious text, and watch Fox News without pretension or even attempting to decode the message, only taking it at face value like sheeple, and they want us to shop at The Gap instead of American Apparel, I and we just collectively said “no!” and therefore we have rejected your syntax and are forming our own cultural identity based on postmodernism and existentialism and general ostentatious bullshit.
As he rings up my items, hiding crushing cultural defeat behind his hollister smile, he grabs the two bags of fruit and nut organic trail mix and chuckles and as I glare at him with a condescending quizzicality,
“Man you know that saying “you are what you eat?”
“Yes”
Short one-word answers are key to condescension
“Well I’m just saying I wouldn’t be eating all these fruits and nuts if you get what I’m saying.”
Oh. Moment of truth. The mainstreamer has thrown down the gauntlet to the alt.
The gay joke has landed.
This should be clarified, not for any reason other than the fact that I like to masturbate with my pen, and if you haven’t gathered I am somewhat in love with myself, that I am wearing slim fit Levi 511 skinnys that are shoplifted (not really, but I fanaticized about it), Woody Allen loafers with no socks both literally and visibly, a whiteblack checker-print flannel and a robin’s egg blue cardigan pulled over it, both from urban outfitters, complete with a wool tie from my grandfather’s closet in 1943 paired with plastic sunglasses with the lenses knocked out, both for ironic effect. And perfectly disheveled hair. We can’t forget to mention that. I will be wearing the same outfit when I walk into CVS a few days later because I enjoy this outfit and recycle it often, sometimes with a different covered flannel.
I sighed
“Oh”
“I wish I was as uncultured as you. Maybe I could actually find that funny if I was.”
Then I turn around and strut in validation, having scored two victories for the alts in one fell swoop, the kind of strut that has the sort of piss and vinegar usually reserved for classic pro-wrestling superstar Rowdy Roddy Piper.
That was what happened in my mind.
In reality, I looked down at my Woody Allen loafers, said nothing, took my bag and left, muttering “jackass” under my breath as I left the counter. I continued to stare at my feet for the ensuing three hours of film class in shame.
We were watching some sort of very hard to access film, maybe my mind was unfocused because of the fact that I am a poor excuse for a student because I am so shamelessly self-involved, and when you spend 4 hours in front of a mirror to look like you just rolled out of bed, well obviously that doesn’t leave much time to do your reading for class, and let’s be serious here, there are FAR too many blogworthy mp3s to pirate, or even better record off of a myspace profile using garage band so that the already “low-fi” pop interpretations are now low-fi recordings of low-fi recordings, and when it comes to authentic garbage, my mp3 player may as well be the world’s hippest landfill.
I began to think and stew about the situation of CVS, because like I said, I do not pay attention in my film class because I do not do the readings, for I exist in a contradictory state of a writer that does not have the attention span to read an entire book in less than seven months, unless for purely pleasureful self-contentedness. I notice that my brain has a propensity to fantasize about watching those who I have a distaste for experience some outlandish deaths, and Fake-Tao is now being raped repetitiously by a gang of gorillas, sticking kielbasa fingers into anal cavities and slamming gargantuan six foot phalluses into his ocular sockets, and they are tearing off limbs and copulating with the open wounds, and he tries to scream in pain and horror, but the seventy three foot long penis of a sperm whale is currently playing rectal rooter, and seeing as how Fake-Tao is only a mere five-foot, maybe seven or eight inches, (and trust me, he definitely does not posses a seventy three foot long penis, of course since I am degrading him, it may have only been between one to three inches long, but the gorillas have gregariously removed it regardless) the whale penis is now making it’s way out of his mouth and he has become a sort of human kabob, and believe you me, I will always remember this image, and if I ever see him again, I will say something to inflict this sort of pain upon him emotionally, because this unfortunately is only a morbid daydream far beyond the real of actual possibility.
On Tuesday, I went into the same CVS
I bought a bag of expensive rolling tobacco, an Arizona Iced Tea of the Arnold Palmer variety, and a peanut butter crunch Clif bar.
I see him working the counter and I wait so he can be my register.
I am wearing the same clothes.
I like this outfit
I really think it communicates my individuality and personal brand effectively, making me attractive to both male and female alts, while highlighting my better attributes such as how intelligent and hip I perceive myself to be.
I am a persona of pretension and arrogance and you will like me for it.
While evaluating my purchase, he chuckled again, and said
“Not so healthy today Harry Hipster?”
I smirked and dropped the bomb
“I wish I was uncultured as I am perceiving you to be between the gay joke on Thursday and your quip just now. Maybe then I would find you to be clever. Good luck seducing high school sophomores.”
I am strikingly self-satisfied in my reality.
I am a persona of arrogance and pretension, with a dash of bitter, self-indulgent rage.
I will find solace in my own reality, because the actuality of the situation is not the reality that is actual, but instead the actuality that we precipitate. That is how I survive.

Breasts.

I’ve seen about three hundred breasts
in over to twenty one years of existence
(that’s one hundred and fifty pairs, I’m not THAT suave)

mind you, we’re speaking in realities here
this does not take into account
the surreptitiously spellbinding attraction
to the statuesque woman that crowd
the roadside motels of the information superhighway
or the bordellos of late night televised promiscuity
for we are speaking in realities
and although quite entrancing
these women are not real
like I said, I’ve seen quite a few breasts in the literal sense
and the women of celluloid
let’s be honest here
are far from the verge of reality

of course, for argument’s sake, let’s be serious
who want to see you naked
when you look like Susan Boyle?
but i digress

let us not forget
the wonderful original programming
of our “premium cable television” stations
whether it be comedic, dramatic, or sometimes
“tastefully” pornographic

speaking of such, a note if you’ll allow me the director’s chair
to those affiliated with “skinemax” and related programs on other networks
the women yes are beautiful
and the storylines are just as entertaining
as your penetrating counterparts
but when filming simulated insertions
take some pride in your work.
this poor “actress” is vigorously performing fellatio
on the mid-torso area!
spare what little of her dignity remains
and direct her head to the crotch
i don’t think that’s asking much
just help me suspend my disbelief
but i digress

oh yes, premium cable
original programming
where cussing, nudity,
and all the rest that those pesky puritanical censors
attempt to hide from American eyes
are not only allowed
but embedded to the point of nauseum

so let’s estimate.
both on and off the silicone
I’ve seen five thousand breasts in my lifetime
(once again that’s two thousand, five hundred pairs
for those reading who routinely put their trousers on backwards)
and I’m simply lowballing that number folks.
by the time you read this, that number will have increased.

Upon the traditional soul searching and pondering
It dawns upon me
that’s quite the staggering number
for just twenty one years.
but let’s make our one sided conversation
a little more interesting
let’s talk about sexual equality

for the exorbitant amount of tits i have seen
let’s compare the amount of cocks i have seen.
This is a more concrete number
Let’s say that I’ve seen all of thirty dicks.
in real life.
once again, I am excluding porn.
but then again,
in porn,
there are tits
in direct proximity to the dicks
even though those tits are sometimes outnumbered

(what is America’s fascination with group sex anyways?
most will never experience it,
and you’re better off.
honestly.
it’s akin to twister,
but sweatier
and quite slippery as time progresses.
but i digress)

as for television of the non-pornographic sort
i have seen maybe fifteen to twenty swinging male members
and yes i am lowballing once again
personally, this doesn’t fall into a gay/straight and the great divide between
but maybe it does in the eye of the camera

the way I see it, we’re being inundated with tits.
i mean it makes sense.
keeping the sexual status quo of course.
the boys grow up to worship sex
not to mention see women as their sexual objects

on the opposite side of the coin
the girls grow up
to think their tits aren’t big enough
or whatever nonsense the American media machine
beams into their easily permeable little minds
i mean we have shows
(with tits)
about plastic surgery
(still mostly about showing as much tit on E! as possible)

let’s extrapolate; paris hilton is a celebrity.
no one really cared who she was until she got “leaked”
onto the internet naked with a cock in her mouth
(which, i add, she sucked with about as much enthusiasm
as her father probably did raising her)

kim kardashian is a celebrity.
We’re reading the same carbon copy plaque here
except both her ass and her tits are gigantic
and she showed much more gusto
than her waif-ish blonde counterpart

the girls who were blowing hugh hefner
got their own tv shows
as did the aforementioned socially useless semen receptacles
but at least there are barely blurred out tits on “the girls next door”

this truly is unimportant,
for it’s all absolute dreck

back to following the bouncing balls
I’m mildly impressed to say
that I’ve seen more cocks in the media
in the past few years
in fact it’d probably be 90% if not 100
of the non-pornographic cocks I’ve seen in the media altogether.
maybe it’s a preference for foreign films,
which pay less attention to American taboo
maybe it’s tolerance
or maybe the ladies just want to see what the fuss is all about

but for sheer ratiotic factuality
maybe equality of the sexes
only truly exists
as an impossibility.

Or perhaps the cold reality is that
for middle America
the enternal target demographic
there’s nothing remotely attractive about a cock
while a nice happy rack
is a hell of a lot more interesting to look at
I guess they call it the boob tube for a reason after all

the taste of the 30 year grandfather cellar aged whiskey and coffee blacker than the all encompassing blanket of night’s embrace hits the back of my tongue, throat, swirls down the drain of flesh and muscle, pulling my eyelids back in shock, promising vague coherence for just another five minutes.
a twenty milligram capsule of time release amphetamines promises that these eyelids, most certainly bound to be glazed red before the oncoming tide of day’s rise and fall roman empires nestles itself softly within my gullet, as the ever welcome prickling intoxicant makes her presence to be known within ever miniscule fiber of being.
most would call this some sort of youth in revolt, but no, that is the wrong classification sir, because at 21 going on 57, the youth is no longer revolting, but rather some sort of lion trapped within a coma, a single finger twitching to life amongst the comatose hospital beds.
every day is a constant struggle for sexual supremacy
i’ve supposedly sold my soul time and time again, i doubt the deal has taken because i have little that i want.
there is not enough pot left to take my musings to a higher level.
there are no more capsules to widen my pupils left but not right
i will merely stare aimlessly at the stains on the walls of my apartment cubicle,
wondering when my time to be scrubbed off will come

Sarcasm requires no creativity.
It doesn’t even have to make sense.
“I am a lying weasel”.
Appear earnest but not brainwashed
Never laugh when you’re being sarcastic.
If you feel the uncontrollable need to giggle, wait.
When being sarcastic, remember to smile.
Part pucker, part grin.
“I am being a wise-ass now”.
Sarcasm, best in person, also works well in writing.
Written, the pucker technique is different.
There’s subtle, professional sarcasm
And its cousin, total bull.
Both valuable in the world.
There are idiots out there.
Avoid punishment.
Continue to support ridiculous advice.
It made perfect sense to you.
Co-workers are acceptable targets.
Co-workers will realize, and seek revenge.
Often worth it.

At midnight every night, I make the same decision. I decide whether or not I will be sleeping tonight. You see, self-imposed insomnia is a cinch when you already have a latent breed of the red-eyed dragon sitting inside you, breathing fire under what you consider to be an ass whenever your eyelids get a little bit heavy. And every night without a thought to the contrary, three tabs appear on my Internet safari. The first is facebook. In my own personal cyclical cultural conundrum, social networking accounts for at least 50 percent of the time that I inhibit the space behind a backlit keyboard with a ninety seven degree angle screen attached involves some form of social networks, and my preference is facebook. The second tab is Tumblr. Falling somewhere between the ergonomically useless waste of webspace we have come to refer to as Twitter and the chatty Kathy that we call facebook, I have to admit it kind of gets me going that I can blur the line between three social networking formats while staying on the same page. The third is gmail. people rarely email me. for some reason, I innately sit in front of the screen for hours and recycle through the first three tabs of facebook, tumblr, and gmail, checking over and over again. No one ever comments, no one “likes my pictures”, and there is no new email beyond spam.

At 1 am, I begin watching videos of prime time television shows from the 1950s. Every 15 minutes, I disable full screen on the stream so I can bathe within my own futility when still no one has acknowledged the presence of my Internet being. I feel alone, like there is a dark pit somewhere, and between the poetry and rambling diatribes, I am sinking further and further in, melting away from the world of pastels and third dimensions into a pungee cell comprised of an arbitrarily repetitious cycle of ones and zeros. I return to the sitcom, and as the voices keep me company, my world bleeds black and white. I stare at the ceiling.

I smoke pot. I check gmail. I check facebook. I check tumblr. I open up a fourth tab, and type into the search field, “is there anybody out there?” I’m directed to tablatures for Pink Floyd songs. Not the answer I was looking for. I feel alone again. Sometimes I feel like I’m an iguana laying cold and dead in the snow. Elements of my skin are scaly to the touch, in part due to the vigourous rigors of living in Chicago during the hibernation season, partly because when I leave my habitat, I do not wear gloves or a hat and sometimes not even a coat, because I belive that I “look good”. Sometimes I feel like I am the only person awake in the city. The room next to mine is blaring heavy metal. Or maybe it’s the apartment below me. I am still groggy, I cannot calibrate the patterns of sound efficiently. I am watching dilbert, because my room is small and cubular, and as a student, I feel that I am stuck in a dead end job where I cannot learn the skills at the pace my appetite demands, and I feel I have lost “the knack”. I think about her and she is asleep. I feel like my life is a very dead pan cartoon, drawn in all black and white. I hope my cartoon is ironic and hip. I hope my cartoon is referenced in pitchfork. I open a tab for pitchfork.com , and I wonder what they would rate my life. I’d hope for a 7 or an 8, but in reality, I’m probably ony around a 4.5. I stare at the dirty-white ceiling again, wondering, hoping, desperate to believe that somewhere there is another living breathing entity who’s sole thought at that moment is of a want and desire for me. I masturbate to the possibility. I sit very still in silence. It is six in the morning. I am a waste

Adam Serwa
Section 1:
3. Explain Hall’s theory of encoding/decoding using an example from current popular culture. You may choose from any medium, but you must clearly illustrate how the artifact is encoded with certain meanings and by whom and how it has been decoded differently by various groups of potential consumers. Do not write about potential decoded meanings; your example must have clear examples of separate meanings and understandings that have emerged and been articulated to the larger culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ4jZeGUFzI
This is what I will be discussing it is Grizzly Bear’s Music Video for their hit song off of 2009’s Veckatimest, While You Wait For The Others.
The artifact we have here is a music video. The general consensus of a decoded meaning of the video is the dissatisfaction of those who live in a high-culture situation, “waiting for the others” to forge a path for you, to show you where to go. Now we can decode this through Hall’s “Circuit of television” albeit adopted slightly for a five minute video clip for both television and youtube/bloggable “memeification”. The production of the video clip is very “avant-garde” with the use of cultural artifacts, mostly associated with childhood in a high culture setting, the constant wearing of the fencing uniform being the main driving source of high culture, (via a Wes Anderson/Royal Tenenbaums outlook on High Culture, the Parakeet seen atop the boy’s head in the beginning of the video can be relates vaguely to the falcon in that film), also we have the dissatisfaction and confusion of someone trying to find hs own way in a culture that is mostly handed down (rebellion via the explosions of books and childhood items spewing forth from his head) and we see that dissatisfaction in the scene where he is sitting alone on a stump with a swan hat on, pecking at the red rubber kick/dodgeball.
We move on to step 2. Distribution. The fact that music videos are directly released to television, but mostly the internet, because many music video channels on television have now been taken over by sub-standard “original programming” that features some sort of tracker around the bottom of the screen telling you what the background music is, but no one is paying attention. This means that music videos are traveling based on word of mouth, and word of mouth is stirred by public perception and how a product is distributed. We can decode the Grizzly Bear video as “High Culture” because of the fact that it was mainlined to the insider blogs upon release, therefore giving it a level of exclusivity, therefore public perception will grow, because it has now become a commodity of being a part of “the in”.
Step 3, being circulation, continues to further explore the circuit of word of mouth, as the video amasses youtube plays, it moves further into the cultural eye, now being taken in by the purveyors of youth culture, and thanks to the imagery, being lumped in with things like Wes Anderson movies, especially now with his new movie “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” using stop motion animation as is cleverly employed in this video as well, also taking in that stop motion real life style used in some of the more psychedelic scenes (basically the second half of the clip) to now draw loops into drug culture and alternative culture of the 90s indie scene, where stop motion techniques were regularly employed by bands like Nine Inch Nails and Beck. All of these connections that will be drawn to the original decoded meaning of disconnect will further the circulation of this video to different sections of the world consumer populace, therefore spreading the message.
Finally we come to step four in the cycle, before we come back to production, we have reproduction. Reproduction will come in the form of mimickery, as well as people that will be inspired by the meaning and the visual aesthetic and will go on to create other materials from this template, or even just a band further expanding on the concept of using a music video as a disassociative statement, such as has been the progression in Grizzly bear videos as demonstrated by Grizzly Bear in their video progression
Deep Sea Diver - http://www.youtube.com/user/grizzlybearband#p/c/97B918296DA7AF34/2/RcMnnP6Bn94
Knife – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuYZbYtAl9A
Hobo Clown – (not a music video) http://www.youtube.com/user/grizzlybearband#p/u/5/_M8ejo974vk
Two Weeks – http://www.youtube.com/user/grizzlybearband#p/u/2/tjecYugTbIQ
Ready, Able - http://www.youtube.com/user/grizzlybearband#p/u/0/Puph1hejMQE
As well as imitated and built upon by other artists like Animal Collective
My Girls - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zol2MJf6XNE
Further building onto the cycle as production begins and ends in a reactionary fashion, creating a chain of inter-related avant garde music video pieces.
Section 2:
2. Please explain and illustrate a concept we have learned sometime in the semester in a medium other than the answer to an essay question so that someone who did not participate in our class could understand the ideas. Some possibilities might include:
• A scene or short screenplay
• A proposal for a visual art piece
• A poem or short fiction story
• A series of photographs

For whatever you choose, please include a short artist statement that explains the theory or concept you are describing, why you chose the medium you have described and why your representation would help to explain the theory to a new audience.
The concept that I am planning to tackle here in this poem entitled No Pomo is Bricolage.
Dean Martin dropped martini bomb tunes,
In croon he sang: here’s to
The booze! Bathed in a drunk debonair luminous moon.
While Ginsberg balked at mere thought,
Kerouac took on his greatest jaunt,
And Dylan rasped caustic cacophony blues.

Langston Hughes caught the weary blues,
Buddy Holly strummed Peggy Sue island in the sun boom tunes
Genius button helped track the jaunt
Do you perceive to act the part of fool, slink under the covers to
Smash all the elements that comprise you, take the thought
Fire it straight to Nero’s moon.

Cinderella cried, her Sinatra blue eyes wide, bathed in summer moon.
Struck with the dreamer plight blues.
Childhood memory stroll, walkabout peacebone thought
Summer convertible rag top bumping rave on tunes.
Now sweet doe eyed Zooey coos to
Jenny Lewis glory, while our sentimental hearts take a fall leaf jaunt.

Panda Bear climbed strands of bamboo while the bros danced along their jaunt
While my treeship shot the moon
And wouldn’t it be nice to
Banshee beat with the purple bottle blues?
Deadbeat summer awoke strange new tunes,
While Conor went outer south, thought

Was prior poetry titanic as thought?
Down down New York, Mexico jaunt
New souls evoked via firebrand tunes
In wide awake, lifted Omaha moon
Chan, oh beautiful muse to blues,

Stuck Inside Mobile with Bob to -
open the doors of perception to -
Quiver and shiver in Einstein thought
Did it cross your mind, to sing the mountain blues?
I shunned my summertime clothes in joyous jaunt,
While I Felt it all around Montague moon,
Capulet lover sings forbidden love tunes

I should’ve taken acid with you, listened to the tunes to
While you were with the others under the moon, gazing at mere thought
Stillness is the move, abandon the jaunt, and stray off the path of the weary blues

Now, the concept of bricolage, as defined by the Barker text, is the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts.” It is also defined as “a process of signification by which cultural signs with established meanings are reorganized into new codes of meaning.” Now what I am trying to achieve here through the medium of a “sestina poem” is by taking cultural icons in artistic merit, from writers, to fictional characters, to musicians via their song titles and lyrics, I crafted a bricolage that pertained to the cyclical nature of culture. The inside joke here is that everything that is being referenced has referenced something else pertaining to, influenced by, or being the influence force on the proprietor of another referent source. What this ultimately says is that our entire culture circles, merely adding on rather than exchanging out. Now I do realize that we are most certainly not in poetry class so I will describe my chosen medium. According to my Poetry Workshop-assigned copy of “The Norton Anthology of Poetry”, “The Sestina, the most complicated of the verse forms initiated by the twelfth century wandering troubadours is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoy, or concluding stanza, that incorporates lines or words used before: in this case the words (instead of rhymes) end each line in the following pattern:

Stanza 1:ABCDEF
2: FAEBDC
3:CFDABE
4:ECBFAD
5: DEACFB
6:BDFECA
Envoy: ECA or ACE [these lines should contain the remaining three end words}”

Now let’s break this down to really show the effect of bricolage here.
Stanza 1 is referencing Dean Martin and less obviously the legend of “The Rat Pack”, as well as writers and a musician of the Beat Generation, being Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Dylan. These three rebelled against the very kind of attitude the Rat Pack ascribed to. Yet they all had booze in common. Small ways of linking, but also the bravado shown by dean martin and the rest of the legendary crooners can be seen in the bombast of some of Dylan, Kerouac, and Ginsberg’s works, especially on the subjects of drugs.
Stanza 2 breaks things open a bit. Langston Hughes, a famous Harlem jazz poet starts things off, with reference back to both is poetry in “weary blues” as well as referencing the genre of the blues as well. The next line combines buddy holly, 1950’s slang, and dinosaur buzz band Weezer. “Genius button” references the use of a genius button in creating the frame/patchwork of musicians quoted. Then there is a Dylan-esque musing that ends with a reference to the Roman emperor Nero, which is actually a reference to Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row.
Stanza 3 starts off with Cinderella, a common helpless maiden reference, entangled with the phrase “her Sinatra Blue Eyes” which is not only a callback to dean martin in the first stanza, but also a reference of Justin Vernon’s (or better known as Bon Iver) song from 2007’s For Emma Forever Ago’s song The Wolves (Act I & II). This ties together about 200 years of culture recycling itself, the age of Cinderella, the Sinatra moniker of “Mickey Blue-eyes” and a sad man dressed in flannel with a mighty beard recording sad acoustic folk music. Pressing along, “Stuck with the dreamer plight blues” is reference to Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again by Bob Dylan, once again referencing the first stanza. This is tying back with the cylindrical nature of the meaning of the piece, the rigors of the format, and also the nature of bricolage to create new meanings and associations. The third line references in upon itself the “childhood memory” being associated with the word “walkabout” seeing as how Walkabout is a 2009 buzz single by Atlas Sound featuring Noah Lennox (Aka Panda Bear AKA part of Animal Collective), and AnCo (Short for Animal Collective, frequently referenced henceforth) is the owner of the next title, that being Peacebone. The “Summer Convertible is further 1950s Americana, and “Rave On” is a Buddy Holly song, referencing the second stanza, and it was also covered by M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel for Ward’s 2009 album Hold Time; coincidentally we reference Zooey Deschanel in the next line in accordance with her elder self, Jenny Lewis, or Rilo Kiley and dating Conor Oberst glory (we’ll get to that later), followed by a song by she & Him who are M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel, who’s singing voice in said song resembles a young Jenny Lewis.
Stanza 4, we are in the thick of it folks, it’s going to be closing time soon. Panda Bear AKA Noah Lennox is referenced by his stage name and his song Bros, which is referenced out of context of the actual meaning of the song (although it does reference in this context the “follow up” to Bros AKA AnCo’s closing song for 2009’s Tour-de-Force Merriweather Post Pavilion. Brother Sport, which are both about the death of Noah’s father and the effect on family.) The word “Treeship” in the second line is reference to buzz band of 2009, Memory Tapes 22-minute opus that I was listening to as I wrote the majority of this piece. Wouldn’t it be nice to… is a reference to The Beach Boys, which means Brian Wilson, who is tied with Bob Dylan for the most linked back to influence in this piece. (He INVENTED baroque pop people!) now the next line is two AnCo songs, The Purple Bottle and Banshee Beat smashed together to create the image of dancing around a fire wailing, drinking from a purple bottle, which is a reference to taking acid, which reference Dylan, Ginsberg, and Kerouac esoterically. Deadbeat Summer is a reference to yet another 2k9 buzz band, this time Neon Indian, and it also esoterically references the new genre that arose in the summer/fall seasons of 2k9 penned by Carles of hipsterrunoff.com to be “Chillwave”. And then we start with Conor Oberst first referencing outer south, which references Bob Dylan, because let’s face it, Conor Oberst is what happens when Bob Dylan doesn’t care about politics, but instead is 15, lives in the Omaha suburbs, and is infinitely sad until he turns 23.
Stanza 5 will continue to deal with Conor Oberst for the next four of six line, first referencing his earlier “emo” work, which was pretty much everything up until arguably Fevers & Mirrors or Lifted, and how everything that was considered great back then is now mostly considered drivel since the advent of Conor Oberst’s new workings. The next two lines reference his two solo albums as of late, those being a self titled album with a 4 song ep called Gentleman’ Pact being later released, and 2009’s Outer South, referenced in the first band, and the use of the word “firebrand” bearing reference to both his new attitude and “spunk” and also to the phoenix at the end of Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, as Conor springing from the ashes of Bright Eyes which he has announced the impending disbanding of, which then not only references back to Dylan because of their obvious comparisons, but then to all writers and poets mentioned prior, thus creating a completely new meaning. Two of his most critically and publically well-received albums are referenced in the next line, those being Lifted and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, and also a reference to Omaha. Finally we break away from the 5 lines of love for Conor, and we invoke Bob Dylan once again through Chan Marshall, AKA Cat Power, and her cover of the song Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, which refers back to both the first and second stanzas.
The Sixth Stanza begins in mid thought, referencing Aldous Huxley’s book about the effects of LSD on the mind, while we then produce some symptoms of LSD ingestion with a reference to the Einstein-inian types of thought patterns that occur under the hold of the drug, so once again the esoteric drug reference wrapped in biography of certain prior referenced back history are now referenced again, albeit esoterically, and we are balancing into the three-headed cycle of format, meaning, and cultural patterns. The third line is a reference to folk music, which is a lot of reference backtracking. Line four references AnCo once again, tying stanzas together, via their 2k9 radio smash Summertime Clothes. The fifth line is a double whammy, mixing yet another 2k9 chillwave buzz band, Washed Out, with a reference to Shakespeare. We’re making new connections y’all, don’t stop me now. This is Bricolage. I am the Bricoleur, follow me.
We have finally reached the envoy, which is buzz band after buzz band. Should’ve taken Acid With You is a song by Neon Indian, who have been referenced before, “While you were with the others” is a play on the song title While You Wait For The Others by Grizzly Bear, which is followed by Stillness is the Move which is a song by Dirty Projectors, and both Dirty Projectors & Grizzly Bear are from New York, which references back to New York. Which ties back to Conor Oberst, which ties back to Bob Dylan, therefore tying the whole piece together.
The reason for the choosing of such a medium was simply in the intersection of having to write a sestina for my poetry workshop coinciding with our lesson on postmodernism, with involved culture jamming and of course, bricolage.
As for why this idea will help, it takes the concept, which I constantly drove the concept of its relation to Girl Talk/DJ Greg Gillis or another mash-up dj, and puts that theory into practice. Also the use of every recognizable elements of pop cultural references mixed with the esoterics of the “insider joke” (hipster saying alert! Like, oh my god, that’s soooooooooo postmodern) make it obtain differing states of cultural relevancy to different discerning eyes, therefore creating its own circuit of self referentiality, therefore extending the aforementioned three headed beast of meaning, format, and concept all circling together in a never-ending loop of constant discovery of new links win the chain work. Therefore making it a living, breathing example of bricolage.

talk about music
be more like carles
talk to lao lin over gmail
get published
see the us
fail out of art school
get kicked out of my apartment
get in trouble with the police
get my heart broken
have someone mend it back together to break it again next year
develop a venereal disease
die a horrible newsworthy death
come back to life after three weeks so you all forget about me
pursue a sexual relationship based on the confines of facebook/myspace/tumbr/twitter/craigslist
travel somewhere and decide not to leave
resolve to be more resolute
decide to be indicisive
kiss more humans
sleep with the lights on
do more drugs
so that 2k10 feels like 2k redux