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Dear diary: sunday, dante, birthdays, coco

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coco, originally uploaded by Ululate.

A Sunday morning, Dante being especially cute, dashing through the apartment like he’s on a rampage, letting out little myows and ending in these crazy tumble-pounces. Gary has five Hong Kong DVDs piled up in front of the computer, he’s googling them and deciding which one to watch, I’ve eaten fried eggs with shoyu and furikake, there’s a powdered-sugar dusting of snow on everything outside. So much winter still to be got through. I don’t approve of the winter, I detest it, what’s the deal with it, make it stop.

My 45th birthday arrives next Wednesday with neither a bang nor a whimper… more like (nods to Lorraine here…) an insistent humming. Is there still time to turn the plane around? (nods to Nick here) Or to seduce the pilot? (nods to Sharon) “Don’t worry about things you can’t control.” (nods to my stockbroker)

Out in deep Astoria last night to celebrate Melissa’s 40th. Sitting on Brandon’s couch with Drew, Katie, MacGregor, & Gary watching Melissa’s home movies from her babyhood and also Brandon’s movies. I have asked Brandon if he will be my guru and teach me how to make movies like his. I liked the scenes of the crazy lady with the crazy frizzy hair. His movies make me uncomfortable to be human, and I like that. Drew said that the scenes of cable-access poetry readings made him feel depressed about being a poet and full of self-loathing. In a circle, we discussed this, Katie and Brandon and Drew and Gary and myself; they wondered how did this aberration, this poetry thing, happen, and wouldn’t it be convenient not to have fallen into it. I feel differently, and rue all the bourgeois things in my lifestyle unconnected to poetry, but perhaps that’s just my upbringing.

Delicious canolli at the party, and I don’t even like canolli. Did I spell that right? On the train home, Gary was iPhone-bowling. On the train there, with Drew and Katie, looking at the rows of passengers all with their white earbuds. Earbuds, earbuds. There’s a poem in there somewhere, having to do both with developing foetuses and postmodern alienation.

Yesterday’s reading was Carolee Schneeman and Tony Conrad. I showed up a bit late but did see most of Carolee’s film of her performance piece in which she made a giant apple pie for the audience, addressing, among other things, the theme of “the good breast.” Tony Conrad read what I guess was a video scenario that was kinky in content but so flatly told ¬– the analogy with Burroughs kept coming up, later ¬– that it was IMHO about 110% de-eroticized. Sexual descriptions not from a subject position are invariably boring.

I skipped a couple of diary days, didn’t I, well, it’s not my resolution, I’m only piggybacking. Gary can tell you about the lovely dinner at Rob & Kim & Coco’s. I only want to add how fun it was to be on their couch with all of them AND their hound dog Walter AND their cat Fella. How cozy! And is there anything on the planet COOLER than Coco and her sitar? I think not.

Nada Gordon1 Comment

To those, like JK, who would sneer at my claim to embarrassment-as-motivator: I own my embarrassment, and it’s my prerogative to be adolescent at 45. At least I’m emotionally honest, and not sitting in judgment of anyone.

Really, I find people so infuriating.

Can you teach poets to dance?

Nada Gordon6 Comments

Here I give a belly dance lesson at the Brooklyn apt. of Julian Brolaski and E. Tracy Grinnell on the occasion of their Gold & Silver Solstice Party, December 20, 2008. It’s a little difficult recruiting learners at the beginning, but it ends in a lot of lovely dancing.

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It is a great pleasure to smoke a clove cigarette after a couple of months without one. I almost fainted with pleasure when I smoked one today, on Canal St., on the way to the Poetry Project.

Foreign Body Sensation Remix

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Here’s my remix of the first two stanzas of Charles’ great poem:

Such thrills as chide me fold away
in the indulgent catachresis of male
dismay. Most arduous
of all, distractions:
the band, of minds, makes faces
in sensuous confusion
to face the mates. Entering more
quickly than diction might undo, a glib
of digital croons audience to mother
on. The clacking
of this indignity reduces
for a pittance what lurkers ask
askew. Stochastic
burps, designed in arms, will savor
for its Asians arts and
salaams. Aviaries
know the slice of mom.

Yet hand-cocked bijouteries
refer to what
they want, prestidigitated
slamdunks, queering
humps. Boys
to anger for
a spanking, hieratic
peals incarnadine,
beds betrayed (sashayed)
inside whose harm?