Screw it. I'm a poet. I know it. Hope I don't blow it.

Never mind, I'm just going to go ahead and post what I wrote today.
I don't really care that you all hate it
Plus, while I'm doing this, I'm not working on my paper.
I was listening to Sage Francis' "Makeshift Patriot" EP while I wrote it, so that almost certainly influenced most of what it is, except for the part about my shoulder, which was written while I was listening to Kanye West's "Through The Wire".

Untitled.

Wrote some things some people liked
But they long ago forgot those
An unremembered postseason
MVP like Jose Rijo
The only bling that I got
Holds my shoulder together
The steel pins in my bones
I'm gonna rock forever
I asked for platinum
But they gave me stainless steel
Went under that knife
Suddenly understood what was really real
I had tickets to the show
Turned 'em in for a sling and pills
Supposed to see Atmosphere
Instead I had time to kill
I don't have any tats
Just my hard earned scar tissue
'Cause when your shoulder's pierced
You kinda notice the real issues.
You used to the shadow
Warm yourself with hope of brighter days
Things go from worst to worse
But we keep on rhyming anyway
I ain't gonna sell my soul to you
But I might think about a rental
My problems only seem financial
I'm promising you they're really mental
We all want an eye for an eye
But no one's quite sure who to blind
We're in an existential crisis
But hell, is there any other kind?
All I want is the truth
But the truth is what I really fear
Gonna leave my voice on tracks
Just my way of saying I was really here

Like Eastwood I'm unforgiving
Telling Little Bill what he don't deserve
My front lobe has wild things
Tell me they don't want to stay on some preserve
Tempests in your teapot, yeah
That's why I'll stick to coffee
Starting to wonder just a little bit
Will my time ever be really free?
Swing low and behold
While I burn like a cigarette
Break my heart one more time
It ain't like I won't forget
Big screen plasma TV
But your picture still ain't clear
Give you enough to worry over
So you don't notice what you should fear
Big Brother might be watching, yo
I'm watching the prodigal son and his boys
Playing in the life-sized sandbox
And my neighbors are his soldier toys
When they're playin' they patriot games
They know it pays to load the dice
It breaks my heart that you don't listen
Cause I don't know I'll get to tell ya twice.

You might believe what you can see
But I only trust what the numbers say
Your money is your own I know
But I'll only spend what I gotta pay
You hit em low and I'll hit high
But I don't think that he'll fall
Cause when the shove comes back to push
I'm betting that he felt nothing at all
But the point was never to try and win
The goal was always just make 'em bleed
Just enough red and white cells maybe
To water and nourish this here seed.

Dispatches From Academia Hell- Final Transmission

The papers are coming together, albeit slowly. The Nabokov one might turn out all right, but the poetry paper is good and proper fucked. It's going to be a disjointed mess, and that's optimistic. I've discovered just how little I really think of Kevin Young's "Blues poetry". Nothing he wrote is as well-written or haunting as a Robert Johnson song, or even a good Howlin' Wolf song. I've decided modern poetry critics haven't actually read great poetry, but merely recent poetry. It's the only way I can think to explain how excited the critics sound in these blurbs. His conceit feels more like a dillentante than a clever twist on a great tradition. Franz Wright is actually a pretty good poet, although I've become increasingly convinced that Free Verse is just masturbation. When did meter become a bad thing? Blur was right. The Modern World is Rubbish.

I wrote a whole bunch of lyrics today (with a rhyme scheme!) They're basicly hip-hop lyrics, written in a sort of ABCB DEFE scheme. If Keith likes them, I'll probably post them here. Shit, even if he doesn't I might go ahead and do it. So all of you (both of you) have that Sword of Damocles hanging over your heads.

Only three more exams until I'm done with college. (Until, in about three or four years, I begin begging grad schools to let me in). At this point there is nothing bittersweet of the concept in and of itself. I'll dislike reality, but I really hate school right now. I'm tired of college students (present company excluded, if indeed any present company is reading.)

Memo to David Chase

David, we need to talk. Now, I've following The Sopranos for a few seasons, and I'm something of a fan. Like everyone else, I'm sad that the greatest show in the history of television has to come to an end. At least, you keep telling all of us that it's coming to an end. In fact, according to the "next week on" trailer, there's only five episodes left. I'm glad you had the little reminder, because watching tonight's episode, I'd never have been able to guess that.

Don't get me wrong. It was an okay enough episode. Tony had some good lines, and the scene between Phil Leatardo and Vito Jr. was great. (Speaking of little Vito, I have to say that I never saw that locker room scene coming. In fact, on my personal list of moments that I never expected to see on The Sopranos, the goth kid who's dad was a gay mobster taking a crap in the shower was pretty low on the list, between Bogdonavich capping Christopher because he didn't like Cleaver and Phil telling his favorite Frank Sinatra story to the Chairman of the Board's daughter... wait a minute...)

David, I'm sure you know what you're doing, but shouldn't the bodies be piling up by now? I had at least three recurring characers clipped by now in the office pool, and all you've given us is Johnny Sack dying of cancer while Sidney Pollack watches.

Didn't you see Godfather III? Don't you know how important it is for mafia epics to end on a high note? You only have five hours left, and no one has gone to the mattresses yet. Hell, we haven't even seen the FBI since the first episode this season. Sure, you've resolved the Junoir storyline, and you seem to have set A.J. up to finally join the big boy storyline, but were still waiting for something big to happen this season. (And the fight between Bobby Bacala and Tony, awesome as it was, doesn't count)

We're all waiting for the baptism montage from Godfather I, and all you're going to give us is Tony gambling too much? Fugedabout it!

You still have time to give everyone's favorite show the ending we all know it deserves, but your time is running out faster than Tony's patience. You know what we all want- we want to see Phil take out Paulie. Or Tony take out Paulie. Hell, I'll settle for Meadow taking out Paulie. My point is, someone needs to kill somebody, and fast. Or you might as well bring Sofia Coppola in as A.J.'s new love interest and have Meadow move to Rome to sing opera.

Third Prize is 'You're Fired'

I spent most of today working the NCSU FOL book sale. It was pretty...yeah. It was a book sale. I sat in a chair for six or seven hours and people gave me money, and then I made change and they left with books. Sexy time. I wound up buying a few books that are pretty boring if you're not me. (Biographies of Billy Martin and Alfred Lord Tennyson, a couple other baseball books, a Doonesbury collection of mid-70s strips, Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", sundry other books)

Tomorrow's going to be essay writing day. I have a pretty good idea what my Nabokov/suicide essay is going to look like, but no fucking clue what my poetry essay is going to be. I will also be not studying for the exams I have over the next few days.

So, I finally saw "The Departed" this week. It's good, very good in fact, but it doesn't seem like a Best Picture winner, and it certainly doesn't crack the upper tier of Scorsese films. The ending is a little over-the-top, and I had a hard time getting into the shrink who sleeps with both DiCaprio and Damon. Best Nicholson movie since "About Schmidt", easily.

Maybe more exciting- Amazon's selling "Glengarry GlenRoss" for six bucks, so I've got a copy now. If you haven't seen it yet, then you really need to, if only for Alec Baldwin being awesome. The rest of the cast and a brilliant Mamet screenplay is just frosting, baby.

I saw a girl at the book sale wearing a t-shirt with the line "Son this ain't a dream no more, it's the real thing". Which was awesome. The line is from Dylan's song "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)", a completely underrated track off of his "Street Legal" album.

A belated top 5:
Best Scorsese Films
1- Taxi Driver
2- Raging Bull
3- Goodfellas
4- Gangs of New York
5- The Last Temptation of Christ

This Month's eMusic Downloads (April)

Birdapres- Get It Done. The album he did with fellow Canadian rapper McEnroe, "Nothing Is Cool" is one of my absolute favorite hip-hop albums,

KRS-One - Keep Right- I'm going to see the Blastmaster live on May 12, so I figured it was appropriate to grab an album that Keith assures me is fantastic,

Molemen- Four Songs: My Alien Girlfriend, Life Sentence, How I Won The War, Follow Me. I bought these for the guest stars- Slug, Buck 65, Brother Ali, Sage Francis.

El-P- One Song: Deadlight. By the way, if you haven't bought "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" and you have any interest in hip-hop, you should rectify that.

Poe - Three Songs: Not A Virgin, Trigger Happy Jack, Angry Johnny. I've liked the song "Not a Virgin" for a while, and I had a few spare downloads to kill.

Psalm One- The Death of the Frequent Flyer. I'm seeing her rap at the Brother Ali show on the 8th. It's on Rhymesayers, which is generally a good sign,

The Seeds- Three Songs: Can't Seem To Make You Mine, No Escape, Pushin' Too Hard. The legendary 60s garage band. One I've always meant to get into.

The Fall- 458489 A-Sides. It's a greatest hits collection from a classic punk-era band. One of the glaring holes in my relatively small, but fairly decent classic punk collection.

Wreckless Eric- Wreckless Eric- A minor classic punk rocker. Will Ferrell sings on of his songs in "Stranger Than Fiction"

Some other music stuff:
-The reissue of the Sly & The Family Stone catalog on CD has finally begun. I already bought "Dance to the Music", and I'm excited about getting a chance to fill one of the single biggest blind spots in my cd collection.

-The new Patti Smith covers album is pretty alright. I bought it mostly out of curiosity, and because she covers "Changing of the Guard", which is probably the most underrated Dylan song he released on a regular album (as opposed to releasing on Biograph or in the Bootleg Series). I actually have kind of a warm spot for cover albums, or at least, for the idea of covers albums. It all depends on whether the artist in question knows their limitations. RATM"s album has good covers of "Renegades of Funk" and "Kick Out the Jams", but whoever thought it was a good idea to give them "Maggie's Farm" or "Street Fighting Man" needs to be injured. Patti's song choices are pretty good, but some of her covers are just sort of boring. Which is the last word that should be used about the punk icon.

-I can't stop listening to the new Nine Inch Nails album, "Year Zero", especially the single "Survivalism" (featuring some backup from the wonderful poet/recording artist/actor/genius Saul Williams). It's the best thing Trent's done (that I've heard, anyway) since "The Downward Spiral", and might be better than that album.

Sorry that I seem to have forgotten how to write well today.

Nevermind

So.

I should probably update this, but I'm tired.

So I'm not going to.

Who the hell are we and where are we going?

I had a strange experience today. In film history, while watching the historical film "The Science of Sleep" (2006) lines began coming into my head for a poem. The weird thing was that they were appearing, fully formed, in iambic pentameter. I'm guessing that Nabokov's "Pale Fire" is probably responsible for part of that, but it was odd, nonetheless.

"I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar". I had always thought that the first line of "How Soon is Now?" was "I am the sun and the air". I'm guessing Morrisey meant for that to happen. Sorry. Sidetracked. I was checking the wiki page for the movie, which was pretty damn awesome, as well as being magnificently weird (it was directed by the same cat who made "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") and it mentioned that the sleeve for the Smiths single hangs behind the main character's bed.

I've written in iambic before, and it's a lot easier than you'd think. I've never been able to decide if it's easy because we're so used to Shakespeare, or if Shakespeare used it so much because it's so easy. Call it a lit nerd's version of chicken and the egg.

24 was pretty boring tonight. Sopranos was pretty good last night. I don't have to go to work tomorrow, so I might be able to get a good start on my third Nabokov paper (not that you ethereal bastards care). Graduation is less than 20 days away, and I feel like there' s no direction home. Not in a completely bad way, but not in a completely great way either. Actually, when you live at home, then... nevermind.

I'll try and post tomorrow after House is over. Again, not that anyone is reading or anyone cares. I've been thinking this through and I have some ideas for this thing.

Later.

A Hungry Feeling/Came O'er Me Stealing

I haven't been able to watch the news for the past thirty-six hours. It's just too much to handle. Guns are evil fucking things, and when evil fucking people get their hands on them, then evil fucking things happen. Tragedies too intense and immense for anyone to be able to being to deal with. I can't even being to imagine what all of the people in Blacksburg are going through. I...What the hell else can anyone say? Words are the most powerful tool I can imagine, but even they fail sometimes.

I hit Schoolkids today because, for reasons I can't entirely explain, I felt a strange need to buy the album "A Nod Is As Good As A Wink to a Blind Horse" by the Faces. (Allmusic has something to do with it, and after discovering the divine Big Star because of the site, I decided to grab another album they seemed to keep recommending) You might not know who the Faces were, because rock and history is constantly tortured and distorted by the so-called Classic Rock radio stations. The Faces were an English band that grew out of the Small Faces. The lineup included Ron Wood, who would go on to replace Mick Taylor in the Stones, Kenny Jones, who would join the Who after Keith Moon died, Ian McLagan, who did session work for Dylan and Springsteen and the Stones after the Faces broke up, they were produced by Glyn Johns, who worked with most everybody who is anybody in the rock pantheon. The front man was a guy named Rod Stewart, who you might have heard of.

After buying the album, which I have yet to listen to, I felt the need to buy Stewart's "Maggie May" off of the iTunes. (I also bought "Same Old Song" by the Four Tops, which was kind of the theme to the magnificent film "Blood Simple" and Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale", which just plain kicks ass.) The song is so damned good. How the hell did Rod Stewart go from that kind of genius to being, well, Rod Stewart? It's kind of like how Stevie Wonder went from "Superstition" to "I Just Called To Say I Love You" (although Wonder is far better than Stewart and we should all spend more time thinking about just how great his 70s masterpieces are)

I also bought the re-issue of the Ben Folds Five album "Whatever and Ever Amen", one of my absolute favorite albums in high school. My copy was irredeemably scratched, plus this version has a bunch of sweet bonus tracks. I'm still pissed off that I had to miss their show at the Cradle in 1999 because I was forced into being a "junior marshall" for senior night. The band broke up the next year, and I never saw the local heros.

On Saturday, I was at Schoolkids (there's a pattern here, if you look closely) and finally replaced my purloined copy of Radiohead's "Kid A" album. I have no idea why you would want to know this or why I am telling you this. I think I still don't really have any idea what I'm doing with this blog thing, other than killing time and emptying some of the words that are always cluttering my brain. I do have to watch myself a little though- I've discovered that one person actually reads this damn thing, and I'm in danger of repeating my insights in conversation that I had already blown here.


The Braves won tonight- Smoltz is still the man. The Nats (who we beat) wore VaTech caps tonight, so I kind of wish we could have won last night and lost to them tonight. One thing I do love about baseball is that the Nats were allowed to wear the VaTech caps. It seems obvious that a team would be allowed to offer such a simple tribute, but I guarantee you the NFL would never have let something similar occur. After Pat Tillman died, his former teammate Jake Plummer wanted to wear a sticker with Tillman's number on his helmet and the NFL wouldn't let him. Another example- on Sunday baseball withdrew the league-wide retirement of Jackie Robinson's number for any and every player who wanted to wear number 42. In the NBA, Jerry Stackhouse (a hated Tar Heel, but apparently a very good person) who wears the number 42 as a tribute to Robinson wanted to wear the name "Robinson" on the back of his jersey, but David Stern and the Brass turned him down. Further proof that baseball is the one true pro sport. Now if only the AL would get rid of the DH and purity was returned throughout the sport.

The post title is from the first lines of Brendan Behan's song "The Auld Triangle" (Also known as "The Royal Canal") The Pogues recorded a great version of it, and Dylan and the Band played it on the Basement Tapes (it's not on the official ones, but I have it on a two-disc bootleg. I really need to get the complete bootleg, which I think runs to five discs) There is no real reason why I typed it in the "title" space.

Oh, Keith- I just checked Wiki. The Mission Hill pilot aired 9/24/1999.

It's time for another top 5 list.
Something easy.

Top 5 Western Films

1- The Searchers
2- The Wild Bunch
3- Unforgiven
4- My Darling Clementine
5- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, edging out Red River