Massacre Indeed.

 I keep spinning lines in my head about connecting dots, constellations, moths in paint, fractured teeth that hold no gums.
In the meantime, a song that I loved some time ago. Enjoy.

Big Sur pt. 2

 

Pooled, puddled today

reflective of that which surrounds

quivering with every minor agitation

of surface.

Bits of matter send ripples backward

until folding in on themselves

settling for inertia.

Try.

Imitate in this space. Count letters, no, just syllables dispersed in the line or in the artifice of poem. An intrinsic pulse, now this is rhythm. See as we are penning and penning nothing of consequence. An entire narrative residing beneath the surface from which we cannot begin to scratch. So to be making this friction you can feel the static charge and when you score this, so will an anthropology inhabit these figures. I chew on such certainties, a documentation of documentation, knowing the landscapes mouths make when reading and the diaspora suits the cause.

Echoes from the East

While I was the Station Manager at KVDU, the University of Denver's student radio, I hosted a show called Mostly Local Anesthetic which my friend Eric Peterson produced. Every week I brought in local bands to drink beer, talk and play a little music. When I graduated, we made a compilation CD that we released at a great show at the Hi-Dive.
Today, I was reminded of how great that all was when KVDU released a downloadable version of the album that can be found here. It has some of Denver's best bands (both active and now-defunct) and is definitely worth a listen. I'm curious to see who from the dusty D will be in Austin for SXSW this year too since we just got a house for it. I cannot wait to see Mo McG and crew in March! Busy week, but new writing will be up this weekend. Maybe new photos too...

Winter Wanderings

I've finally gotten around to posting some of the pictures I've collected this winter (NYC, SF) thus far and Wyoming and Michigan by the end of the week. Also some of the photos from the Big Sur trip that remind me of tumultuous times, kind of like this song too. Savor them if you will.

MFA applications and the like

It is official. Today I finished the last of my applications for graduate school applying to University of Montana, University of Wyoming, University of Oregon and of course to University of Iowa. Now it is up to the universe to see where I go from here. On another note, I'm back in Colorado again just waiting. My grandmother is dying in Michigan and my mom wanted me here to help her out and to be close for the funeral. It has been a long time since I have had to deal with death. I find myself failing without any candles to light and too sleepy to cry, magpie dilemma.

an update of sorts.

i haven't written in a spell. trying to focus some energies - trying to figure out how to bundle thoughts into precise packages of stanzas. i work. alot. more than i should at my age (i heard a fellow DU grad refer to her current state of joblessness 7 months after graduation as "funemployment". i wanted to smack her out of nothing more than pure jealousy) so when i finally get some time to myself, i sleep. or as of late, cycling through insomnia and too much sleep, i read. i finished a really great book called Tinkers. i'm going to post about it soon. now i'm reading Primo Levi's Periodic Table. but that's neither here nor there. here are some floating thoughts right now.

states away, my grandmother is getting back to her Norwegian roots
dying near the Canadian border in the dead of winter
mother flies to her side on Thursday
i fear she's being led to slaughter, mother that is
grandma is having a procedure involving platelet manipulation
her blood appears to have turned toxic
almost forty years of bitterness can do that i hear
it is fitting and i don't feel sorry for her because she was always mean
took back those Nancy Drew's she gave us for Christmas
i thought i'd learn some tricks that would help me figure out why she was so hateful
perhaps i would fret over her almost death then
but this is now and now we have
heat in the house and i've got a little money saved for books and i am walking
to the store at night and buying discounted persimmons to eat while i watch my prayer candles
burning down until tonight's magic hour so i can wish or pray or just believe
that these bets i've made will pay out
that the ice cubes in my glass won't wane until i can locate my own roots
turn a heel and sneak back to a border, cold water sloshing in my veins.

Raised.

Family business says the pitch,
swollen octave unspun.
Here we came
through decisions not our own.
Here, we realized
obligation is coercion.
The numbers mean nothing,
scratched out in spindly script,
conveying children as median,
reaping fruit from sapplings
rooted in fault lines.
This is a mode of torture
not suitable for dinner table talk.
Impregnated with histories,
there is the giver
and one who loves the kill.
Rate the return
ages thirteen and eleven,
anger is the dividend
and there are many interests lost.
This doesn't add up:
wringing hands and cowboy boots,
the stains pooled beneath perception,
stressing vertebra three and four.
Capital raises the octave
and abacus shoulders buckle.

Big Sur Poems

Taking Cover

Covering tracks
    with spoons on the way up Sinai, fingering index cards with pencil-scraped directions.

    with Communist leaflets and clever condoms wrappers never put to use in our copper rims.

    with ground incisors and redwood bark, peeling away at something fearsome.

   with single light refractions that dim the lens.

    with crocheted feeding tubes and a Xerox - the last will and testimony.

 Color Theory

Switching film from
black and whit to color feels
like switching religions
where we answer to
the same god but
the latter lacks fire and
brimstone and
my worship seems forced
without that contrast.

You ask me why I
take colorless photos but
my calculated reply sounds
hollow: in black and white
I show definitive place but
keep the colors for myself.

This passion sways on secrecy
like you and me
and settling for color film
is sign of developing.


Postcard from Coast, pt. 1

After I've come,
my back to you I turn.
I see you
in an evening down-
pour, your naked body
pressed to the stump
of a fallen redwood.
You were yelling
something about condors.
The windows are open
and it is December.

Points
In a photo:
We are standing on a rocky outcropping
surf spray sticking to our cheeks.
It is dim, violent
the air and water shake.
I hope we are exposed.

Filling pockets with pebbles of jade
weight hanging in our balance
through a wooden tunnel with
piss-stained boots and crumpled tissue
a view.
I wish the Beats hadn't seen this first.

Concerning P90X

rain again. thoughts drop, splatter. dripping sliding streaking against windows, meeting panes. on the reverse a fitness video reflects my fears that i am unfit. unfit for this. pull the shades. stop the thought-pattern my face with sunken circles, flush with cheekiness and call it a night.

working.

3:42/ there are scraps and i am attempting to assemble something near meaning, something profound. but i'm not sure that exists anymore. i've been reading journals, making notes.
3:43/ i cannot picture my work within the context of the greater writing community. i see the work of others, i see it parallel to mine but yet the strings are too frayed to make a connection (on my end of course). where are the intersections? chaos? Cole says that's where her writing comes from. but they all say that in one way or another i suppose. stating poetics reminds me of the humidifier of my sickly youth: all blasting vapors and drops then nothing but deep breathing.
3:54/ how is one to do this? how is one to place a value on their passion by sending it out to the assessment of others? does it cease to be passion when it is brought forth from the secure pages of red blanks books, typed, spell-checked, addressed, then sealed up until opened by judging hands (wrought with paper cuts and coffee stains)?
4:00/ i've been obsessed with time lately. checking the clock over and over, several times daily (more than is normal i feel).
4:01/ i keep trying to retrace the steps in my mind to uncover how i ended up here: six stories up in a bare office, broke, exhausted, fragmented somewhere within the penumbra of...what i can't say. the instinct is to blame responsibility, parental control and ambition, but i don't remember making that many concessions and i can't say that i've ever been good with decisions.
4:05/ it is dark here but i don't want to go home. trains under water frazzle my nerves and pale my knuckles uncomfortably. across the bay there is just more work but of a personal nature. applications piled on nightstands and shards of poetry-laden paper stick to my sheets.
4:06/ what do they want? where to go?
4:07/ i dread the mailbox and drink Red Zinger tea, quoting the boxes under my breath. i stare at the stains the leaves have left on the sidewalk though i know not when: season-less place.
4:10/ i want to buy things i can't afford and go to the grocery store but the shifting shape of my flesh...
4:12/ i want to be in ruins. i want the luxury of a drug habit or a psychotic break but that sounds worse on paper than it does in my head.
4:14/ the progression won't travel in reverse and this,
4:20 / this is inertia.

Cigarette Break, 9 November 2010

Up the street he came,
down near the loading docks he went.
Mechanically, as if moved by wires.

Beside a rusted dumpster
Below the sweatshop with no doors he stopped.

Removed from bag a thin mat of thinning weave
Spread himself out on the sidewalk and began reciting Asr.

I watched his lips forming words,
lost to the sirens before reaching my ears.
I saw as he stood,
knelt,
dipped his forehead to the ground.
I wished for the concrete beneath him to feel soft and forgiving.
I prayed for it to feel like sand.

And I don't know if he was there out of circumstance,
or will,
or why my chest hurt watching him
carving out a space for his faith
in a city built on fault lines.

Fighting Wars, or Boredom

I heard a little Metric today which reminded me how in love with this remix and video I was two years ago when I was abroad in Scotland. Out of boredom I looked it up and now it's yours.

Found, Found Text Piece.

I am creating unique and individual ceremonies: the celebrant and ceremony design. Mind spring in times of change. Between your middle and index fingers, save your property, your possessions, and your sanity. Hold it with your thumb. Open the tips of arrowheads, a substitute for knives at the table. Equaled with acts of aggression – water, smoke, fire, mold. You’ve been through enough.  Please complete: peel and save. Adopted and modified experience today. Change due. Urgent restoration. Trash in a bag.

Notes on Spilled Milk.

I see you -
    dipping fingers
    into piles of gray ash
    cut up and
    collaged then
    stuck.

There is a mechanism here -
    a series of threaded spools strung
    strung out
    through beer can tab eyelets
    in the shape of a geranium.

It is a machine for seeing -
    where particles of memory
    triggered by the sound of falling
    falling acorns
    travels through fibers
    refracting meaning at forty degree angles
    until synapses diffuse and the image is
    revealed in a post-nasal drip:
                                    

   a brown haired savage

throwing tarot cards from the roof

singing about sunshine.

Notes on Nevada

I.

Time peeled away beneath sandstone cliffs, exposing pulpy present where I was seed, waiting to be spit.

II.

Sped through Nevada's vertebrae - the ribbed connection encapsulating pulse. We were synaptic, holding hand like Thelma and Louise (only at the bottom of everything, looking up rather than down).

III.
People often discuss the importance of inter-connectivity: of the impulses of atoms colliding across demographics. The fractures deserve the same level of inspection. It is the disconnect between people that make us feel human - fallible, obscure, isolated. Connections have their merit, but it is only a person turns off a television that they know its design.

IV.
Taking pictures of abandoned houses in meth country is dangerous. Ten minutes in a stand of abandoned houses is all you get before gun-totting men in pickups kick up dust, clouding your lens. The aperture compensates like my fear, capture it. Make me convex, make me vexing, make me snap, shutter, release, advance.

Notes on Postcard Writing.

Dear ___________,
    We've moved to San Francisco where I've vowed to reconnect with my pen. The sea lions have vanished, the sun won't stop shining and the cable cars are always full up - like our bellies on lentil soup.
    They said coming this way, immersing ourselves in the crux of technology, would better prepare us for future lives in the 21st century. But here we are strangers mistaken for __________. Here we count change before store clerks as others pay with food stamps. We find respite in knowing that we are better, will be better because we are young, white and educated. Inside we resent and envy the ease with which they (you know which they I mean of course) handle the hardship. Here, they keep sunflower heads floating near the door of the super market and I pocket one each time I exit because I find the smell of decay comforting.
    Our apartment is quaint and lovely however, as we have filled it with past treasures accrued during blissful coed years at private institutions. Second hand chairs sit well with me.
I've taken to altar building (but this you know) and push myself to hear, to see beyond this constant stimulus. I wonder if people are really happy here or, if they are merely adept at maintaining facades at least until personal quakes shatter them.
    On a happier note, faraway lover has planned a visit though I can't imagine crossing state lines to see myself. The parting was so cinematic (me driving away distraught as he stood in the street sobbing until he melted into the rearview, evaporated or something more poetic) that I had longed for a Super 8 to capture him, us, us and the time where the reel needn't be switched and the tracking of my melancholy would never be off. When he arrives, we will eat mussels on a park bench before repeating the scene in the Oakland airport (but this time in opposite roles). For this I am not excited.
    But the fog will hide the impending despair and I will be thankful for the din of the city. Maybe the seals will come back coated in food stamps and we will smile.

Notes on Altar Building

Tonight: altar building though I know not how.
At Wal-Mart in Oakland, purchased:
    one Bic barbecue lighter (the long kind)
    a vile of red children's glitter
    three Catholic prayer candles (because they're pretty and cheap)
    a bag of Red Vines (for chewing in consternation)
(though I'm not Catholic and the Lord's Prayer is the extent of my recital knowledge)

On the bedside table:
    St. Jude - "most holy apostle"
    Our Lady of Perpetual Help - "Mother of good counsel"
    Powerful Hand - "Powerful Hand of God"
    (Faith contained in Chinese-made glass cylinders bearing bar codes instead of stigmata.)

I remember your house and the stunning altars there. You spoke of affecting outcomes by harnessing energies and performing daily divinations. Hints of Hudu, Santeria and Christianity disintegrating into new forms like bones becoming ash where you are urn. At the time I smiled and agreed while you aimlessly fingered a trinket box containing your grandmother's incisors.

But somewhere along the line - a disconnect occurred my notes became illegible - caught between the fervor of your sacrament-coated tongue and Maurice Blanchot.  Now I am in an Eastern Bay attempting to arrange a spatial meaning only to find
                                                                              the accumulating of ether doesn't guarantee ignition.

It all just looks like clutter.

Four days of flannel.

Made a roadtrip West, moving to Berkeley.

Time peeled away beneath cliff rinds of sandstone - exposing pulpy present where I was seed, waiting to be spit from citrus tongue.

 Sped through Nevada's vertebrae topography, scaling ribbed roads looking for the connections said to encapsulate pulse.

Dixie.

We fell in together easily, like sugar dissolving in sweet tea where he was sugar and I was tea.

Changed on a granular scale.

The emotion could not be captured on film.

Although attempted:

a gray-white blur with the faint out line of a single lace 

(the thread fraying about my vital organs, crossing schism to the cavity of his chest, entangling).

Falling Over Photographs

This past weekend, Jesse and I went to the mountains to take some photographs of the leaves changing. It seems strange to me that the idea of going to see the changing leaves was so novel to me seeing how I used to live in Bailey and always took it for granted. If there is something to be said about moving to a new place, it definitely makes you look at your old home in the most sentimental of ways. I want to take pictures of everything here before I go so that I can surround myself with the photos once I get to Berkeley. Perhaps doing that will make being there less difficult that I know it is going to be. Here a few of my favorite shots from the trip. Feel free to check out my Flickr to see the additional photographs.

Puppy Love

Dr. Dog has long been one of my go-to bands since I saw them at Bonnaroo in 2007 or something. Here is their latest video, making me love them even more. Observe:

Still Gimping.

I have turned the Gimp machine into the afterlife for some of my older personal photos. Observe:

We were going to a Goth party circa 2008.

Undergraduate Commencement, DU, June 5, 2010.

Gimped Out.

Ah... Photoshop - perhaps the best thing (but also perhaps the worst) to happen to photography has been my unicorn for some time. Throughout my time in school, I had unlimited access via the computer labs and in the form of trial versions downloaded through the Adobe site. Now that I'm graduated, broke and having more time than before to mess with my photos, I've download Gimp - Photoshops' cooler open-source cousin. Tonight I have been playing with color curves. Observe:

This is a photo my friend Rachele took of my while doing some sightseeing in NYC during CMJ Festival last October.

This is a photo I snapped out my car window on the way home from visiting my friend Iliana in Santa Fe last summer.

Audiogasm: Candy Claws

Completely enamored with Candy Claws right now. Here is why:

PS- Their new album Hidden Lands is out now.

Such a Card.

Cards. I love them. I love playing them at bars, in parks on porches - anywhere really. Which is why I am elated that my mother has found a very nifty deck for me complete with a travel case. No more rubber-banded stacks in my satchel! Huzzah! The case even has a nice little quote, "One good turn deserves another." Score.

Treasure Treasure, Listening Pleasure

I cannot tell you how excited I am for Treasure Island Music Festival. I just purchased a ticket to see Sleigh Bells, Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem at the Fillmore in Denver on October 22nd, but now that I see the lineup for this festival, I am having buyer's remorse. Not only will I have to fly back to Denver for that show as I will be living in San Francisco by then, I would be able to see more great artists for half the price by going to Treasure Island. Oh my, decisions decisions.

Flick, Flick, Boom

35
Originally uploaded by ImproperNoun

All of my black and white photos from New Orleans are now available on my Flickr page for your viewing pleasure. If you like what you see, add me as a contact or follow my PhotoStream. Thank you kindly.

New Orleans, part 1.

City, sticky as after-beignet fingers, where hand doesn’t glide across page but rather stick-lift-pull repeats along it. Where we slept amongst souls in a slave quarter down a long shadowed brick corridor, behind a wrought-iron gate – cursive inscribed Seven-Thirty Orleans. We were standing, statued, somewhere between Bourbon and Royalty – marveling at foreign whispers and history-stained sidewalks.  We came to be inspired, to understand how humidity expels creativity. To be like the writers we so admired and prose our way out of the post-collegiate mire.

Ramblin' Woman

Wow. It has been a struggle to settle down long enough to write a post. In the past few weeks I've gone to Austin to visit Maureen and look for apartment (I thought I was moving there but alas, San Francisco has a better job opportunity so I will be there instead somewhere near the end of September), San Fran on business, Buena Vista camping with old hippies and to New Orleans on a rather intense road trip with Iliana. While I haven't been able to develop all of the pictures, below you will find some of my favorites. There will be a smattering of writing coming in the next few days as well. Enjoy.

 This Spring, I spent a large portion of my portfolio photography class working on this project entitled Doc.u.meant. Now that I have finally ordered hard copies of the books, I'm excited and apprehensive to see how they turn out in print. If you think you might like one, they are available at their printing cost via Blurb here.

Doc.u.meant by Whitney Van Cleave | Make Your Own Book

Cleanse.

She's washing her hands, detaching the skin, burying knuckles in flesh ribbons.

Self Portrait Project .27

Self Portrait Project .27
Originally uploaded by ImproperNoun

There are points when the inception of another self are necessary. You and I are here in this
.