Pure Nonsense
All writing starts somewhere. Sometimes that place is very far away from making sense.
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Two strong wills dueling in the alley. The smell of wet brick.
The damp urge of the spirit, throwing kerosene-soaked rags toward drum fires, and me, and me, and me.
Nowhere. Important.
Living in a sense smell—a thought hell.
Ragged missing person on the moors, eyes squinting at the mist, rubbing at the nape with rough sadness.
Love, falling from this plate as a slow-motion grape and you, a rodent underfoot seeking energy.
All is squashed.
Where on the doll in the room at the front with its hem hitched up and a button on the dresser? Where?
The drapes rage at the crack of the sill, the frame painted over by a caretaker who took no care.
Speaking in riddles as though being transcribed and translated. Banned from libraries.
Coded for the cloak-and-dagger, scribbles in the cuticles, malice in the margins.
The fool exists in the gradient, oscillating between more or less with fingers slippery upon the dial.
Peepholes and carpet snakes. Whatever that means.
The creaking boards of a world that would rather not feel our footfalls.
Statues and monuments, spoken to dust. Tongues taking bribes and licking fingers broken by too many attempts at the F-Chord with no warm-up.
This timeline is doomed. The paper cuts are infected. The sting is unbearable. We continue to fold.
To ache at the arrival of the morning and the shifting of sheets and the feet on the carpet with tacks and glass and tears of yesterday.
A thing read. A sight seen. Living with the knowledge.
Hiding in the cracks between history and future.
The gas of your bloat fills the cavern, suppressing the sound and irritating the eyes.
Cruelty is a song that broadcasts on all frequencies and resonates at all volumes.
How will I explain this one? To whom will I explain, let alone concern?
An afternoon spent walking on wet streets with paper hearts and the sound of recklessness and boredom droning at the trestle.
A shriek. Was it you?
The sound of hope being slain in a sucking gully.
Flipping coins to be lost in the teeth of sewer grates, two eyes glowing in the shadows.
Fear blinding with the rage of Christmas.
Talking with the chains of a time of reckoning, spoken with the timbre of a ghost. It is in the key of E.
Tattooed in the parlor with inks squeezed from catalogs, the colors bleeding into the pores of perception and testing positive for faith.
Through the black-tinged soot of a chrome muffler, there, the voice of God restrained by a highway limit.
Who is your master now and is he in the Senate?
This is not a manifesto. It is a nonsense. Dose nonsense. We follow nonsense. We are nonsensical. Words build. Words destroy.
This universe likes curry.
The poet lives in the moment of your birth, of your consciousness awakening to the mystery of the slow blink.
I am not of the what of and gone to, the dot fading in the center of your screen from a time gone by.
I am a dinosaur.
I am not.
This is a list of starts. To what? Nonsense. Pure nonsense. It is start nonsense.
Start nonsense. Start it everywhere.
Follow it to the end.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇
This week’s amends…
So many pull quotes in this excellent profile on Michael Stipe in the NYT. It’s probably behind a paywall, so I hope you’ve got a freebie left this month to read it. If not, here are some highlights I saved.
He was 62 at the time: still plenty of sand in the top half of the hourglass. But, he explained, “I’m at that age where I’m realizing, OK: All these ideas I want to focus on, I’m not going to have the life span to be able to complete all of them.” It wasn’t lost on him how many friends and acquaintances whose names came crackling into our conversation were no longer alive. Even on his way to meet me, Stipe said, he’d gotten news alerts that two people he knew had died: the actor Ray Liotta and Andy Fletcher, a founder of Depeche Mode. Stipe’s point was: “I have to start choosing and picking.”
Stipe’s role in R.E.M.’s creative process was sensory and responsive: He had three brilliant bandmates who threw new music at him constantly, and it was up to him to seize on the particular songs that spoke to him and fuse each with a melody. That dynamic seemed to be retained in how he experienced music in general. He wasn’t uninterested in artists’ lineages and influences, but he focused more on how their music felt in his body, whether those sounds made him move.
Later he’d tell me: “I’m wildly insecure. I have impostor syndrome to the [expletive] max.” Sometimes Instagram served him clips of R.E.M. concerts, and he wondered: Where did it come from, the audacity to do that in front of tens of thousands of people? He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to be in competition with your former self.”
With visual art, his process is freer, more impulsive. But lyrics demand rigor. “It’s your voice and your words, and that’s about as naked and personal as it can get,” he said. This was the major bottleneck for the new record. Stipe was daunted by the task of finding suitable lyrics for a new style of music, as well as by his own perfectionism; he couldn’t force himself to bear down and write.
On Rotation: “Wild Flowers” by Warmduscher
Great song for a day with a certain kind of mood. Language warning, if you need one.
I think if MoMA acquires your archives it means you dun good.
"I'm trying to emulate a level of craft that's important to me. Otherwise, it's just more junk."
Master printmaker, Jacob Samuel, makes his last print.
“What I do is hardcore, extreme etching.”
Beautiful to see what goes into this.
Via Kottke
There are many divisions in the World Yo-Yo Championships. The routines are long and the music choices… meh. But, the skill is great.
Here is the winner of the 1A division, aka 1 yo-yo.
Go here to watch the others, including 2A - 2 yo-yos, 3A, 3 Yo-yos that interact, and other divisions where yo-yo ain’t even on the string.
Via Neatorama
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple