OUR FUTURE: toilet tags

THIS IS IT?

recession koan: art imitates 3M-Sony-life

For those who've seen Jean-Luc Godard's "Tout va bien" (1972) and have followed recent reports of bosses kidnapped by striking workers in France:



Does life imitate art, or does Godard manipulate strikes?

respect-for-lease

derelict lyrics:reed llik

One of my goals
1. to live in an insignificant and pointless town
where people never pull the shades
and double breasted bankers are shot in cold blood
by horses on foot


One of my goals
1. to form a jam band of infinite eternal songs
and the die hard fans who breed in the open air
sacrifice their young to corporate headquarters
guaranteeing future record sales
in my old age


One of my goals
1. to sing battered lyrics
over the loudspeakers of factory outlet lingerie stores
in order to inappropriately interrupt at inopportune moments
the decisions of female warriors seeking asylum
from the persecution of natural lighting


One of my goals
1. to write a psychedelic book
detailing the shocking mendacity of my life thinly veiled in non-fiction
from which Oprah Winfrey will decode
the meaning of the universe
with the help of a scissors and a mouthful of apricot jam


One of my goals
1. to kiss the beautifulone on the corners of his lips
causing him to sink into the underground current of
mourning dove and killdeer birdsongs sung backwards
as we wait for a solar powered subway during a total eclipse



christine vyrnon © 2009

Bill Holm Uncaged

Bill Holm died this week. Years ago I wrote my first fan letter ever to him… and never sent it. While an undergrad, I attended Bill’s reading-recital. A big burly guy of Icelandic heritage from rural Minnesota, Bill wrote tender and caustic poetry about a landscape for which I refused to be homesick. He read a few concise words about the tundra and then meandered over to the piano to play precise Brahms.

The tundra poetry didn’t choke me up, but the music did.

I don’t think he cared whether or not we liked the music. The music was for him. The words were for us.

At the time I struggled to find a balance between music and writing. Until Bill, I didn’t know that writers could be musicians and musicians could be writers.

I had led a charmed and harsh prairie farm house life to a soundtrack of my sister's piano: Chopin, Mozart, Debussy, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Rachmaninoff. We were an unsettled family of musicians pulling the grass apart/ to place our fingers on God’s heart (Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence 201-202).

Underneath aborted fan mail to male writers with rural souls is my mother’s mantra: “Write what you know. Write what you know. Write what you know.”

What do I know? It’s just as difficult to find antonyms to music as to write synonyms for what I think I know.

Is writing about the logical loop of thoughts on a page or the pressure of the pen in a hand that cramps? Is piano music about concise precision or the bounce of the keys under the fingers, the bounce of sound in a house in the middle of nowhere? Is singing about vocal emotional prowess or the resonance of the sound vibrating through a living breathing body? Is all art, sound, word about manipulating the emotions of others or jolting and soothing one’s own psyche?

I quit caring about small rural life. I suppress dreadfully poignant bullshit observations of what it means to grow up rural. Leaving rural life boils down to understanding what a caged wild animal must endure. I was on the verge of caged animal madness when I saw Bill Holm. His music calmed me.

Now I cage the music.

I live on a concrete island surrounded by a river of rumbling cars, as close to the heart of a City as I can stomach. Yet every day I look west and see a mirage of wheat and corn and grass and snow.

I know out in Bill Holm’s landscape there will always be a window open to a room with a piano… a concert of Chopin for an audience of combines and cows.





Bill Holm's Website