Blonde On Ponde

Artifice IV and Before the Bride

dorholtt — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:23:24 +0000

Artifice magazine, which is publishing its fourth and final issue as they are launching as a press, had contributors send in audio so that films could be made. A piece of mine entitled “Before the Bride” is published in the issue so I decided to make a film for it, which can now be seen here (http://vimeo.com/30882340).

Paintings / in the Works

dorholtt — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:39:06 +0000

These are a few things that I’ve been working on. Two are close to finish. The sizes range from 20×24 to 30×40. I have started working with creating things specifically for people. I’m working on two pieces where I’ve checked out the space and then picked a size, a focus for color, and agreed upon either simplicity or abstraction.

The piece above has been in the works for over a year.

The first piece below doesn’t transfer well on photo but is on very nice old studio canvas board.

The second piece looks like an art floor but is a wild collage made on an old curtain.

The third is one that I making right now for someone.

This one is smaller and complete:

The 5th is complete and framed, a bit off in the photo.

The last is smaller and on its way.

The Grunge Era

dorholtt — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:06:31 +0000

There’ s a lot of treatment being given to the 20 year reunion, of sorts, of the Grunge era, or the area most typically dominated by bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. While I’m particularly enticed by Cameron Crowe’s upcoming documentary on PJ, as well as a book and two-disc release revolving around unreleased tracks, I find it difficult to talk about the distance of something that does not seem distant. However, a lot of great discussions are cropping up around this issue, the most recent within an article written by Simon Reynolds for Slate, which I would fully recommend reading and which I hope will draw some deeper conversations about the introduction of the web and how it has truly assisted in or diminished the possibility of musical success and appropriate placement of tunes.

Here is a link to the trailer for the Pearl jam Film.

My Top 70 Favorite Bob Dylan Songs

dorholtt — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:50:04 +0000

Robert Zimmerman turns 70 today. This could mean a lot or very little to whomever, but it is a mark that does not go unnoticed for Dylan fans and, quite frankly, every talented musician. Part of me wants to write a giant homage to Bob but this has been done. I have spent countless hours writing about him, writing while listening to him, and even issuing reviews of his last five albums. However, it is a blast to try and make a list of one’s favorite songs. It is also strange to make a list of 70 and still say “damn, there are a lot more that need to squeeze into this.” In making this list I didn’t place any sort of statistical importance on what songs I chose, I simply listed them for how much they’ve had an influence on me, how much I return to them. Just like his catalog of phenomenal albums–some days one is your favorite and another day one from ten years later is your favorite–these songs oscillate from endless play to dusty repose. After compiling the list the top three albums that I chose from (though perhaps not my favorites as a whole) Were Blonde on Blonde, Bringing it All Back Home, and John Wesley Harding. Let’s get some conversations started.

1) Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Bringing it All Back Home

2) Blood in My Eyes, World Gone Wrong

3) She Belongs to Me, Bringing it All Back Home

4) Don’t Think Twice it’s All Right, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

5) 4th Time Around, Blonde on Blonde

6) Visions of Johanna, Blonde on Blonde

7) Most of the Time, Oh Mercy

8) New Morning, New Morning

9) Idiot Wind, Blood on the tracks

10) Moonshiner, Bootlegs Vol.1-3

11) It’s alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding, Bringing it All Back Home

12) It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Bringing it All Back Home

13) When the Ship Comes In, The Times They are a Changin’

14) Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Highway 61 Revisited

15) John Wesley Harding, John Wesley Harding

16) Love Sick, Time Out of Mind

17) Baby Let Me Follow You Down, Bob Dylan

18) Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, John Wesley Harding

19) Shelter from the Storm, Blood on the Tracks

20) If You’ve Gotta Go, Go Now, Bootlegs Vol.1-3

21) Blowin’ In the Wind, Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

22) You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Blood on the tracks

23) The Times They are a Changin’, The Times They are a Changin’

24) Went to See the Gypsy, New Morning

25) It Takes a Lot to Laugh it Takes a Train to Cry, Highway 61 Revisited

26) Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, Blonde on Blonde

27) Hard Times in New York Town, Bootlegs Vol.1-3

28) Mama, You Been on my Mind, Bootlegs Vol.1-3

29) The Man in Me, New Morning

30) If You See Her, Say Hello, Blood on the Tracks

31) Man Gave Names to all the Animals, Slow Train Coming

32) As I Went Out One Morning, John Wesley Harding

33) All Along the Watchtower, John Wesley Harding

34) I Want You, Blonde on Blonde

35) Meet Me in the Morning, Blood on the Tracks

36) If Not for You, New Morning

37) A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

38) Like a Rolling Stone, Highway 61 Revisited

39) Simple Twist of Fate, Blood on the tracks

40) Chimes of Freedom, Another Side of Bob Dylan

41) Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Blonde on Blonde

42) Not Dark yet, Time Out of Mind

43) I’m Not There, The Basement Tapes

44) Just Like a Woman, Blonde on Blonde

45) Stuck Inside of Mobile With Memphis Blues Again, Blonde on Blonde

46) I and I, Infidels

47) Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bringing it All Back Home

48) Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine), Blonde on Blonde

49) Things Have Changed, The Essential Bob Dylan & Wonder Boys soundtrack

50) Jokerman, Infidels

51) Forever Young, Planet Waves

52) Series of Dreams, Bootlegs Vol.1-3

53) Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

54) Ballad of a Thin Man, Highway 61 Revisited

55) It Ain’t Me Babe, Another Side of Bob Dylan

56) Masters of War, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

57) Tweeter and the Monkey Man, The Traveling Wilburys

58) Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, Biograph

59) Girl from the North Country, Nashville Skyline version with J.Cash

60) Boots of Spanish Leather, The Times They are a Changin’

61) Highway 61 Revisited, Highway 61 Revisited

62) Buckets of Rain, Blood on the tracks

63) I Dreamed I Saw St.Augustine, John Wesley Harding

64) Mozambique, Desire

65) Hurricane, Desire

66) Shooting Star, Oh Mercy

67) Tight Connection to My Heart, Empire Burlesque

68) Where are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat), Street Legal

69) Mr. Tambourine Man, Bringing it All Back Home

70) Desolation Row, Highway 61 Revisited

construction vs. expression

dorholtt — Wed, 11 May 2011 16:46:51 +0000

What generates the space in which one’s writing lends itself more toward expression than construction, vice versa? As of late, I keep hearing discussions on the difference between the aesthetics of the two (Reginald Shepherd’s old blog posts), mostly discussions noting that this type of discussion is occurring and less that it has any merit beyond such offhanded/handed-off auspices. What is striking about this particular analysis is that it deals quite specifically with what we occasionally call the “response poem,” or the poem that knows it is doing something in relation to something else, even if that doing is never seen as done. Coincidentally, since labeling is always a hot topic and the key for relational commentary, the poems many young writers have, as of late, offered up and sutured into journals can indeed be called response poems, or at least poems that know something of what they are doing, or are done from having just encountered something that invites the royalty behind their veil to want at do.

Yet this sort of analysis, of other said analysis, might only leave us betwixt the poem and the voice creating its totality, the thing and the thang, for can it not always be said that certain po-hums are more expressive and certain others more constructive? Yes, yes it can and now has been, but the particular gut of this conjecture is originally reacting to the idea of making space.

When one knowingly constructs the shape of a work, that is to say she/he boats the words with the current cringing below them, thus striding out to tide, they are concurrently abiding by the expression that an allotment of space has made and/or is making. For instance, the place Samuel Delaney, in his moving and commendable work Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, meets the same man over the course of years in the right rear of a pornographic movie theatre, is a known and even comfortable place for the continuance of pleasure. The space is a part of a larger place yet it is confined in its routine, albeit an oppositional untracking of the understood regulations of routine. Delaney, in turn, learns to construct an amalgamation of intention, resorting to the multifaceted organs of pleasure inasmuch as they are being met in a more defined pantheon of comfort—he goes to a place that in comparison to where we go (the poem) needs an inside and communal arena with similar voices and understood silences. Plainly slated, as poets we rarely shuck the awareness we have of that which precedes the poem, but when done, when neither construction of nor expression of known content faces off first, a poem reaches a pleasing height where its delicacy is a cruda we feel we are chomping on for the first time. However, and not entirely unnoticed, the removal of the idea of the poem, or as with Delaney the dislodging of the central meeting place, allows a poetic scope to careen from outside this very arena, almost as if it births then watches its kin settle into a space without ever governing that space with the laws of verse arrival.

So, what the fook am I getting at? Remember Stan, the gentle protagonist of Burnett’s Killer of Sheep? Okay, if not then pretend—now remember when he places the warm coffee cup against his cheek, checking out of the moment, sitting in the center of a place he is half-nakedly laboring in, shutting up the banalities of survival while reveling in one of the most arguably soft but revealing moments of the film? Consider the expression here: as an audience we are inclined to receive this moment as Stan’s expression of having found some calm in the impoverished off-hours of a gritty Los Angeles graydayscape. We are also aware that he may or may not be constructing, from sentience, a form of solidarity otherwise unattainable, especially given the societal boundaries the film black-and-whites us with. What shins me here is that warm cup against the cheek, the poem after the pornographic movie theatres have been dismantled, the prose encased in a completely unknown offering of voice as bound by neither expression nor construction but the ability to be just flat out of its known productions. As with Killer of Sheep, the most intense and visceral moments of such aesthetics reside in a sort of loud-mouthed silence, in a charge of wordery so heavy from the buds that its tongue slaps its spittle down without any sign of it having come from within or even outside of poetry’s convoluted mouth. Needless to say, I am now always searching for cheek moment of poetry.

I believe the debated relevancies of aesthetic expression and construction needn’t be at the forefront of our own productivity, but instead strut as sort of an aside to the ongoing play our poetry is for ourselves and for others. Whether or not one believes all their work is a grain in the sandcastle of their own poetic proficiency, it can still be said that each minor but advantageous output is rooted in something we search for in the mad and desirous realm of our own work. We (we being used quite generally) are less entering the field that magnetizes our passions and anxieties as writers and more so arising from that sensory field that has certain lines both raw and revolving—the things around us. I am forever reminded of Joshua Clover’s poem “Poem,” in which the following lines rattle all heretofore discussions: “we lie down in categories/and wake up in concepts.” Even if this is a farfetched question in relation to Clover’s lines, I offer it up for some purified think: what are the categorical constants that we sit down to when we make poems and do we come out of them with something notably conceived of? Do we have the street name of our first house hung above our scribble? Are the pleasures entwined in our inhabiting our own physical and mental places revamped for commercial betterment when inked? Where do we sit in the spectrum of voice, our scribble, and the relationship to that which clearly veins us all and will hopefully forever? No agenbite, just inwit.

thoughts after Perloff

dorholtt — Wed, 11 May 2011 16:32:14 +0000

I am quite struck, finally, by Pound’s proclamation in Guide to Kulchur, that one must bounce about not only the traditions of one’s familiar poetic predecessors, but also that of all other culture’s traditions, in that he or she “might acquire some balance in not mistaking recurrence as innovation.” For me this statement equates to one saying that the instantism of a close friendship’s laughter, such as a witty remark come to the shores of a random weekend debate, is, because of that universal consciousness we safely herald, truly an unoriginal recurrence; for are we not allowed to drape the schizo phonetically, are we going to tell a real schizophrenic that their perception of reality in place of a revealing memoir is more fiction and thus of another’s distantly constructed mind blaze? I speak of schizophrenia here in terms of imagination and cresting the otherness of self.

I have so often, as of late, tried to shave off my self-consciousness along these lines. I have tried to deepen the nowness of construction as opposed to question the integrity of expression. For instance, the relatedness of automatic writing to my own energetic blasts of prose is to me less categorized as a “writing through” than as a this-works-for-me-because-it-gives-me-to-the-reader moment. How is it that we can crank only solely from the past and thus forward, as opposed to raking the future in order to reel ourselves into it? Sure, the practices of narrative which embolden imagery or sharpen the acuity of familiarity may blast a monotonous lobby into larger and even more familiar space, but that element is more a writer’s incapability of newing an idea than an idea feeling new, then being linked randomly by a well read critic to the past as something refurbished or only half-recurrent.

Perhaps to quote Courbet:

“It is the duty of the human spirit to to work always on the new, always in the present, starting from acquired results. One should never begin anew, but proceed from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion. Real artists are those who take up an epoch just at the point to which it has been brought by the preceding periods. Going back is the same as doing nothing, it is a pure waste of time…Beauty is in nature and is met in reality under the most varied forms. As soon as it has been discovered there, beauty belongs to art, or rather to the artist who knows how to see it.”

Black Warrior Review

dorholtt — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:32:24 +0000

Black Warrior Review Has a beautiful new issue out. There’s a pretty stellar chapbook by Jen Tynes & Michael Sikkema inside of it as well. I have a piece in it entitled Nightmare Directed by Wim Wenders. Coincidentally, a few months back poet and rapscallion Nick Demske was in NYC reading from his book Nick Demske and he filmed me reading the poem from BWR outside of Madison Square Garden, which can be seen here.

Which leads me to Madison Square Garden and the fact that I was there on Saturday night to see LCD Soundsystem’s close to four hour long farewell show. I have no words for this show. Too many highlights, including “45:33,” an album I’ve been sprinting to since it arrived five years ago. Here is the setlist:

1. Set 1
2. I’m Not In Love
  
  (Intro)
3. Dance Yrself Clean
4. Drunk Girls
5. I Can Change
6. Time to Get Away
7. Get Innocuous!
8. Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
9. Too Much Love
  
  (with Phil Mossman)
10. All My Friends
11. Tired
  
  (with “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes snippet)
12. Set 2
13. 45:33 Part One
14. 45:33 Part Two
  
  (with Reggie Watts)
15. Sound of Silver
16. 45:33 Part Four
  
  (with The Juan MacLean)
17. 45:33 Part Five
  
  (with Shit Robot)
18. 45:33 Part Six
19. Freak Out/Starry Eyes
20. Set 3
21. Us v Them
22. North American Scum
  
  (with Win Butler, Régine … Chassagne, Jeremy Gara, and Will Butler of Arcade Fire)
23. Bye Bye Bayou
  
  (Alan Vega cover)
24. You Wanted A Hit
25. Tribulations
26. Movement
27. Yeah
  
  (Crass Version)
28. Encore:
29. Someone Great
30. Losing My Edge
  
  (With “Da Funk” by Daft Punk snippet)
31. Home
32. Encore 2:
33. All I Want
34. Jump Into the Fire
  
  (Harry Nilsson cover)
35. New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
  
  (with “Twin Peaks Theme” by Angelo Badalamenti intro)
36. Electric Avenue Play Video
  
  (Eddy Grant song) (Outro)

Are you Thinking in Links, Acting in Links

dorholtt — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:24:34 +0000

The company I work for, CJP Communications, has an updated blog called Unboxed Thoughts which is full of updated and engrossing material. I recently wrote a piece about linking and how we leave behind that which we first sought after, in terms of knowledge. Read up here.

I am a Natural Wonder

dorholtt — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:10:10 +0000

Lily Ladewig and Anne Cecilia Holmes run a great journal/site dedicated to publishing poems from different poets, though each is entitled “I am a Natural Wonder.” I recently wrote one of them and accompanied it with a short film. Enjoy both here.

Blake Butler–There is No Year

dorholtt — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:15:59 +0000

If you’re in NYC you have four chances to make this event. I suggest getting out for at least one night. I will be reading portions of Blake’s forthcoming There is No Year in partnership with the celebration tonight and tomorrow. It should be a gnarly marathon of wor(l)ds. GO!