Desert City series as Baby New Year

Both Marcus and Tony blogged about it already, but we had a great Desert City reading this weekend and I wanna write about it too, even though I arrived most of the way through the bilingual opener with Marcos Cantelli and Rachel Price and didn't get a good listen. I'm ashamed to say that I was indulging another personal passion, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers win by an incomprehensible stroke of luck. "By the ghost of Ken Rumble!" I shouted as the Jets' kicker, in a tie game, bounced a field goal attempt off the crossbar from 47 yards away with 2 minutes left. And then I shouted "By Todd Sandvik's eyelids!" when the very same kicker shanked a 43-yard attempt with 4 seconds left, again in a tie game. The Steelers' kicker smacked it through in overtime for the win, but not before fanatics such as myself practically vomited up our lungs from the tension. I was practicing some serious hoodoo on the TV screen right before the winning kick. Fortunately I had discovered that sharpening Iris' colored pencils with the electric sharpener while the play was in progress seemed to bring the Steelers good luck. And now, hooray, we get to do it all over again next Sunday night against the Patriots!

Anyway, after Marcos and Rachel read what sounded like some pretty nice lyrical poems, Standard Schaefer read. He did what you always wish a poet would do -- read only one poem. Really, no one reads only one poem, do they? Even if they have a long poem, they always squeeze in one or two more short ones, just in case the big poem flops, I guess. But Standard actually stuck to one -- a bestiary that had me and Patrick Herron snickering in the front row the whole way through.

Here are some of the good lines, from a poem made up largely of good lines:
"something of something is never apprehended"
"allegories leave the antelope to its own devices"
"the greeks drew fish on tombs who were strictly fishermen"
"memory is only a phase of sadness"
"the indians, or innocents, are never welcome"
"jaunty, jackbooted creator"
"we were never jerusalem, and we won't be again"
"the worst kill for it and think they're cooking"
"opinions are omens of obituaries to come"
"as the parrots put it, poetry is impossible, why plead its case?"
"just as a halo is only a lack of spears"
"verbs looking for something to do"
"this is a zoo of dividing by one"

I didn't get a look at the poem, but it seemed paced in a stanzaic way. Dense like Standard's other work I've read (Nova and Water & Power) but with movement. I still don't quite understand how it wasn't repetitive. How many times can you one-up a line with another line? But it just built and built -- vertical movement. I think it was because all the ironies were adjacent or incidental. The best humor has sincerity under it.

Then at Todd and Laura Sandvik's Blue Door after-reading reading we heard Tanya Olson give a trio of monologues. She's very relaxed and certain in her delivery -- she made perfect sense in Todd and Laura's living room. Tanya is curating a reading series called Durham3 which begins its run next Friday, and now I really trust her curatorial skills.

Randall and I settled into a room to project all the super-8 reels I just got back from processing. Here's a quick rundown:

I shot a lot of footage of the inside of the Byrd Theater in Richmond when we were all up there over Halloween weekend to see Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle. Even though the aperture was all the way open, very little of the inside of this beautifully and campily restored theater came out. The shot I was anticipating the most was the heavy, pleated curtain coming down after films ended, but that's almost invisibly dark. As it turns out the best shots are of the conical chandelier over the seats. Also a couple shots of a roofer across the street, holding a flaming torch.

A couple of weeks ago I shot a reel of the birds around 9th Street here in Durham. Just before twilight they take to the air in swarms that fly around and change direction like a school of fish. I caught a bit of this, but will have to make a second attempt to try to get closer to the birds.

There were several reels of the Thanksgiving chicken project that Randall dreamt up. We shot him catching a couple of roosters, putting them in cages, and driving to his sister's in Shenandoah, VA. On the drive I got some good shots of the Golden Skillet chicken restaurant as well as the signage outside an exterminating company. Thanksgiving morning we were going to be taught how to slaughter the chickens by an old farmer, but when we woke up the chickens were gone -- stolen, cages and all, from Wendy's outdoor stairs. So we shot our fruitless early morning rounds to all her friends' houses to see if they stole the chickens. Some of this footage is good, but I think we'll be hard-pressed to get anything but an impressionistic film out of it.

There was a good reel of London around the Westminster Bridge, and a dark reel of the Rikugien Garden in Tokyo.

I shot a good reel of trees and plants in my side yard, as well as a couple of interiors of our new house.

By far, by far, the best reel was the one Randall shot the day after Thanksgiving. He'd heard about this crazy cat woman who lived on a hill outside Shenandoah who had like 20 cats out in her yard, all on leashes. He and Wendy found the place, and it's all true. Each cat even has a little plywood house. It's tract housing for cats. Depressing and hilarious. Apparently Randall has some good audio of the cats meowing at him over and over again.

There are still a few reels I haven't projected yet, so that's something to look forward to.