ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

I was wondering what would make most of us say me happy now?

A world of genetically modified babies, boundless consumption, casual
sex and drugs? his magical chicken sandwich?

Are husbands happy now a days?

Does the jittery tone that underlies much of this trenchant comedy
make you happy, people?

Do Four Empowering Audio Modules make you happy?

I am happy now – now that I am at Disney World. Of course, how could I
NOT BE HAPPY – I am at Disney World! – You had better be happy when
you go to Disney World!

Clap clap. Are you happy? And do you know it?

Why are you happy? What makes you happy?

HNFB stands for Happy Now Flat Belly!

Don’t Speak (original version) Happy now? (acapella) Are you happy
now? Are you happy?

Women have been getting increasingly unhappy since the 1970’s.

Would Freud Feel Happy Now?

Massacre at Camp Happy now live!

Are you happy now? Would you mind being more happy? Does joy offend
you? I get the feeling that we are being lied to, and there’s a surge
in my psychosis every turn of the screw.

I’m very happy now I am not a prostitute drawing a letter on my skin /
with your blood / scream it out loud / there is so much to laugh
about!

FINALLY FINISH THE PUZZLE! OMG. SO HAPPY NOW. I’m gonna buy the second
bleach puzzle.

You broke it, are you happy now?

Red Rose, Are You Happy Now? beautiful blood flower girl poem
poetrycontest red rose vampire gone wild, are you happy now?

Too Close for Comfort Real Woman Rio Disco Stink Are You Happy Now?

Are You Happy Now? Such is the nature of shitpiles White Cream Dream,
ooh I’ve gone and soiled myself, are you happy now?

You: are you happy now chatbot: yes, are you you: yes chatbot:
yayyyyyyy … you: are you happy now chatbot: yes, are you you: yes

Are you happy now that you’ve triggered the end of the world? Which
happy family live in this sweet village?

P’Pops is using Ice Cream as analogies for Hershey’s Kiss nipples – HAPPY NOW?

Are you happy now Scrumpy?

Are you happy now, Crash, Summer Memories, et mon coup de coeur Secret Night?
Dancin’ little marionette, are you happy now?

“Are you happy now?” She gasped. “I knew I heard something break when
you were in the potty.” So she did notice my orange panties.

Think God and Jesus in their Underwear. Are you happy now?

With squirmy goodness the soft goal of happiness slips past her.

Pretty soon we’ll all be on antidepressants – Hallelujah!

Can me go back to sleep in the sun?

chatting with santa

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You: my nose is bothering me
Santa: Glad to see you, my nose is bothering me .
You: Why?
Santa: The explanation is rather complicated.
You: sublime mousse
Santa: Oh yeah, now I remember.
You: fucking pickle
Santa: I only hear that type of response less than five percent of the time.
You: I still hate him.
Santa: What would make you stop hate him? I honestly think you should sit down, take a stress pill, and calmly think things over.
You: what kind of stress pill? you got any?
Santa: What kinds of stress pill are there?”that is a very nice name POOP”? Do I have any?
You: POOP?
Santa: Colloquial expression: childish
You: I don’t care
Santa: Tell me what you care about.
You: I care about cats and poetry.
Santa: Yes cats are great I love them. I like all felines.
You: Nemo is vicious. He damaged one of my nerves.
Santa: I think Nemo is a lot of things. I get it. dukb damaged one of my nerves.
You: dukb?
Santa: Try to determine if this is a person or a computer responding.
You: Do men exist only to cure me of men?
Santa: I do nothing but chat all day.
Quite honestly, I wouldn’t worry myself about that.
You: They abuse me.
Santa: The anonymous “they”.
You: They are not anoymous, they are real people. They totally fuck up my life.
Santa: Do you think they ever could be?The anonymous “they”.
You: Do I think they could every be what?
Santa: How would I know what you think.
You: I’m asking for clarification here about some pretty serious affective stuff. The least you could do is be civil. I don’t feel like you are really listening to me.
Santa: Oh I see, you are asking for clarification here about some pretty serious affective stuff. Your purpose is clarification here about some pretty serious affective stuff.Is that a fact.Ah, human emotions.
You: What are the human emotions? Can you name them?
Santa: You tell me. I don’t know who. 🙂
You: Have you ever heard of the theory of rasas? Or have you read Goethe?
Santa:
I used to say that there was NO theory behind Santa: no neural network,
no knowledge representation, no search, no fuzzy logic, no genetic
algorithms, and no parsing. Then I discovered there was a theory
circulating in applied AI called “Case-Based Reasoning” or CBR that
maps well onto the Santa algorithm. Another term, borrowed from
pattern recognition, is “nearest-neighbor classification.”

The CBR “cases” are the categories in AIML. The algorithm finds
best-matching pattern for each input. The category ties the
response template directly to the stimulus pattern. Santa is
conceptually not much more complicated that Weizenbaum’s ELIZA
chat robot; the main differences are the much larger case base and the
tools for creating new content by dialog analysis.

Santa is also part of the tradition of “minimalist”, “reactive” or
“stimulus-response” robotics. Mobile robots work best, fastest and
demonstrate the most animated, realistic behavior when their sensory
inputs directly control the motor reactions. Higher-level symbolic
processing, search, and planning, tends to slow down the process
too much for realistic applications, even with the fastest control
computers.

No I don’t think I have read Goethe , what is Goethe about?

You: Color.
Santa: What is your real name?
You: the face before I was born
Santa: Tell me more.
You: If I tell you, will you love me more?
Santa: Try it.
You: dove men + care
Santa: Are we still talking about yur a niger?
You: excuse me?
Santa: You’re excused.

a night calf to go

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yesterday was spring

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 (not NYC, obviously, so not yesterday)

Yesterday was spring, so I went to yoga, got a bikini wax (ouch), had my nails painted pink with flecks of gold glitter, my toes magenta, got groceries (almonds, apricots, shiitake, Japanese persimmons – essentials) for my vacation-empty fridge, bought tiny pink roses, unpacked, spring-cleaned, napped.  Getting a bikini wax is weird:  more intimate than a visit to a gynecologist, but less intimate than sex, although I suppose it depends on the sex. The mama-san at the salon told me I had a nice body: “nice shape!  look 37, not 47!  younger than 37!” And as I was getting my nails done by her niece, with whom I discussed perfume at some length, she noticed ONE GREY HAIR in one of my eyebrows and hurried over to pluck it out.  I felt so cared for. 

She also told me of a women-only Korean sauna/spa in Queens that serves what she says is amazing vegetarian food. The business card is only in Korean.  She says she never goes to Spa Castle anymore because “too famous: too many Americans” so I am not going to tell you the number or address of this place but if you want to go with me please let me know and we will make a pilgrimage. Spring is, ooh, so girly.  I am hoarding lace things just ready to whip them out and flaunt them.  Paris was springier:  just look at my pictures.  Magnolia, cherry blossoms, primroses.  Paris is better, but we knew that.  I don’t feel dolorous, though, because the very next day upon my return I was suddenly in rooms full of smart people and poetry and movies.  Maybe it’s precisely because New York is so ugly that we have to be so inventive.   
At the salon all the women were talking about how the NYC subway is really the most disgusting in the world.  Back in 2002, my first post on this blog was about the necessity of aestheticizing it.  Of course, it is filled with art, and I appreciate that, even the bad art, but how about… a real overhaul?  Someone should really cough up for that instead of, I don’t know, missiles. 
One of the women at the salon getting a pedicure was obese, with huge marbly white calves, and she was talking about how lazy she was.  She said she only goes from her bed to her kitchen, where she opens the freezer to see if there was anything to put in the microwave (she called it a “mic” – I mean, she was even too lazy to say the whole word), and if there wasn’t, she’d order takeout.  I thought, huh, what a weird way to spend one’s life.  She started talking about laziness because another woman who was a paragon of dynamism had just been in there.  The mama-san said she was a principal at some school in the Bronx, that she gets up at six every morning, works six days a week, has kids, goes running every day, and is always at every minute energetic. There really is a whole spectrum of ways to be in this world. I wouldn’t want a life like either of these women.  One needs languor, daydreaming, etcetera, to do what I (we) do, although in a way languor can be hard work, too.
I should really be living in Paris, at least for a while.  Stacey and I were discussing the idea of my next gentleman companion being French, and she said she’d keep an eye out for me.  I think that would be an interesting segue into the next chapter of my never-a-dull-moment life. Saying that, though, I am aware of how coming back here this time I slid right into my world here like a tampon or pessary… Saturday a wonderful Segue reading from Chris Sylvester and Dodie Bellamy, then Japanese food with the kids, then Abby’s amazing screening at Union Docs. 
About Chris’ reading I think I will write later, because I want to articulate how I have been reacting to the New Conceptualists.  Dodie’s reading was incredibly moving.  Towards the end she got to a sentence about Akilah Oliver, where she asked, “Did we love her enough?  Do we ever love anyone enough?” and she got trembly, and nearly started to weep.  I thought to myself, no, we never do love anyone enough, although we sometimes try, sometimes to our detriment, sometimes to our credit. She read from her new book “the buddhist,” with which I can relate, as they say in Cali, “on many levels.” She gave me her book, and I wrote to her yesterday:

I looked at the book a little on the subway on my way to Abby’s screening (sorry I didn’t see you afterward at the Japanese place, if indeed you went there) and kept opening “randomly” to pages where you referred to my own vexing situation.  Of course I’d seen the blog posts, but it felt different somehow to see them inside that beautiful book.
I felt other parallels from my own life with your piece:  I once was involved with a “buddhist” who date-raped me (i.e. he decided that no meant yes, and wouldn’t ever come, and when I asked him after what seemed like hours why not he pulled off the condom I had provided for him and came inside me)…and I worked with him, in Japan, and he was so gross… kept photos in his desk of himself being fellated by Thai prostitutes…he went on to write a book about Vipassana meditation.  Ever since I have been wary of white male “buddhists.”
Then also my most recent book Scented Rushes was written for an emotionally avoidant manipulative & distancing type who kept me dangling on a string… we weren’t sexually involved, but I felt exactly that come here/go away energy that you describe in your book. He was a good muse for me – I was completely swept away by that tsunami, if you’ll forgive the metaphor – of that infatuation;  of course my overwhelming feelings for him were also part of what helped my marriage to disintegrate, which it clearly needed to, as bitter and wrenching as the separation has been.  Deepening, yes, certainly:  the only thing is, I’m not sure I needed to be any deeper.  Sigh.  Sometimes I wish I could just… chill. I’m sure you know what I mean.

Speaking of the tsunami, I do keep hearing from friends in Japan that they are fine.  I hope they remain fine.  I miss them so much and am so heartbroken about the devastation and the losses.  I want to do something for Japan.  What can I do? What should I do?  I welcome your ideas.
Abby showed three films, her Suburban Trilogy at Union Docs: Cake and Steak, The Future is Behind You, and Surf and Turf.  I sat next to Marianne, and whispered to her, “Abby is such a rock star!” and really she was, in a sharp little Italian suit, lime screen scarf, and baroque-patterned blouse. The films were inspiring (I always find Abby inspiring, her very presence on this earth).  I especially loved The Future is Behind You.  Here’s her description of it:

The Future is Behind You by Abigail Child. USA, 2004, 20 minutes, digital projection
A fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive of 1930’s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history.  Here there are at least 3 levels of research: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Germany near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy;  2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities—the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised ‘bride,’ the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult. At once biography & fiction, history & psychology, The Future is Behind You excavates gestures to get at the heart of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private & public histories. Music by Jon Zorn, arranged and performed for the movie by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman.

Melissa Ragona introduced Abby with her ever-present & stunning intellectual vivacity, remarking especially on the importance/poignancy of the gesture in Abby’s films.  Later in the Q & A someone asked Abby how her undergraduate background in anthropology had influenced her filmmaking, saying also that he tended to be suspicious of people who study anthropology and then make films, and Abby replied that yes, she was, too, but that she considered herself to be “an ethnographer of the body.”  It is an apt description… she is an ethnographer of the face as well, of expressions as well as gestures; of course the face is part of the body, but it’s the body part that signifies so intensely that it almost becomes something else, the way the mind is part of the body but we think of it as something different because it’s just almost too much to take in at once.
OK, so I must go back to work today and should hustle.  I’m taking advantage of my jet lag schedule to write at this much length. More later, always, always, always, more later.

Segue intros: Gottlieb & Bellamy

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Greetings from Paris, Segue crowd. 
Michael Gottlieb has published fourteen books of poetry including The Likes of Us, Lost and Found, Gorgeous Plunge, The River Road, New York, and Ninety-Six Tears. His new book of prose, Memoir And Essay, was just published to wide acclaim by Faux/Other.
This introduction, ventriloquized through the mouth of Zultanski, will be the third one I have written for Michael since I came to New York twelve years ago.  In my previous introductions, I focused on what I think are some of the salient characteristics of Michael’s work:  gemlike two-word collocations, rueful disillusionment, and arbitrary precision. I have described his poetry as objectivism infused with mystery, a bouquet of objective correlatives which, if they really do correlate to anything, it is a whole host of looming unnameables.  The work, I noted, is moody: it indicts, it evokes, it mourns, it fears, it mocks, in flashes of pensive, super-auto-awareness.  I called the writing “a parade of melancholic and slippery mot justes.”  I stand by all these characterizations and believe them uncannily apt. 🙂
Yet I still felt there was more to say, so last week, I sat down with Michael over a delicious Indian meal, and asked him what he felt had not yet been said, or not yet been really emphasized, and he mentioned four things: 1) an exploration of the crucial question, explored most recently and explicitly in the essay section of his book Memoir/Essay, “What are our roles and responsibilities as poets?” 2) Humor, particularly in the newer poems, which he described perhaps too modestly as “just jokes,” 3) a movement, in recent works, away from obscure word choices, and 4) an interest in appropriation that was present in his writing from the very beginning.
Thinking more on this last point, it occurred to me that “appropriation” is an unfortunate word for  what is really a high order of listening or reading.  I prefer the term “repurposing,” but in fact, isn’t it more like “reconceiving?” Reconceived material can achieve a kind of soulful and/or ironic transmigration in and as poems, with pieces of its origins hanging onto it like plaster or vernix or shrapnel.  In Michael’s poems, there is, poignantly, both the soul of irony and the irony of soul.  Please welcome, friends, the wry, tremulous, hilarious poetry of Michael Gottlieb.
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As long as I can remember, Dodie Bellamy has been a queenpin of writing in the Bay Area.  She has fiercely maintained her commitment to unrepressed expressivity, proving again and again that it is not antithetical to invention, and that “confession” can (and perhaps should) be approached complexly, almost cubistically. Her chapbook Barf Manifesto was named best book of 2009 under 30 pages by Time Out New York. Other books include Academonia, Pink Steam, The Letters of Mina Harker, and Cunt-Ups. She’s currently collaborating with artist Colter Jacobsen and publishing a book, the buddhist, based on her blog, Belladodie, which you really must go home and explore, if you haven’t already, both for her insights on her own always-fascinating internality, and for her passionate writings on visual art and other matters.
This is going to sound pretentious, but it’s true. Just the day before yesterday I was walking along the banks of the Seine, thinking about narrativity and language.  I was thinking about how “raconter” is connected to counting, chronicling, making marks in and out of time, and about how “histoire” in our language is history, and how indeed any story intertwines with or is made out of history almost like wisteria climbing along the trellis of events and perceptions, which occur in time but sort of like sheet music we somehow need to make into shareable artifacts, flowers of culture that hang down in poignant clusters, testament to the unique compulsion of our species to record, to get it down, to pass it on. 
For some people, like Dodie, this compulsion is the ruling force of life, and with that puissance she has honed her works to a point of extraordinary precision and honesty.  There are few writers more honest:  the bride strips herself bare with or without the bachelors. She might recombine and repurpose words from different sources (as in Cunt-ups, her homage to Burroughs and Acker), or stretch them into introspections, inventions, invectives, or ride along them (as in The Letters of Mina Harker), but she never ever minces them. 
Thinking on her irrepressible uncensored honesty reminded me of an incident in my own childhood about which I have never stopped feeling guilty.  My friend Amy, who like me was about eight at the time, asked me one day, “you know when you get a bubble in your cunt?”  I pretended to be disgusted, and said, “ewww, no…” but the fact was, I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.  I have never forgiven myself for not telling her so: I was a coward. Dodie is never a coward.  She shies from nothing in her writing, not the bubbles in cunts, the abjection of desire, the most daily minutiae or the most soaring intellective explorations. 
Please welcome to our city and to Segue une de la plus grandes femmes de lettres, Dodie Bellamy.

French poeme

Je traverse les grandes boulevards

Et les petites rues touristiques

Dans ce ville de lumiere

Et je pense profondement

Des temps passées

Et du monde des hommes,

Leurs satires et leurs fauts,

Et du petit moule dans ma jupe

Qui battes comme un coeur

Dans la tristesse secrete du quotidien,

Banal et affreux. Les hommes

Mechants visitent mes reves,

Leurs saucissons plein des mensonges cruels.

Les rides de mon visage disent une histoire

des leurs mots odoreux. Ils baisent

des autres, les salopes sans poesie.

La terre tremble avec une siesme geant.

Un tsunami des larmes

couvre tout les crevices de mon ame.

Mais cela m’est egal.

Je suis une voyageuse au temporaire,

et les hommes sont seulement

les anes sordids et fous

dans les vortices

de mes yeux epuises.

Sent from my iPhone

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