John Waters says “if you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.” I agree, and always make a beeline for the bookshelves when I’m in someone’s apartment. I used to subconsciously curate my bookshelves for this eventuality before I worked in publishing, but since I’ve been in the biz for about five years now (and Rachel more than that) we have lots of books that aren’t necessarily representative. We got rid of probably ten or so boxes of what we could live without when we moved, which would’ve been anathema five years ago but you learn to let go. Also, I love YA and space operas, but you don’t keep those after you’re done with them. Anyway, I got a new camera, thought I’d turn the other cheek and share some of our shelves.
The New Orleans Saints are playing in Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday and it’s officially a thing. I knew it was a thing – officially – when my sister, an ornithologist and the world’s foremost expert on the Swainson’s warbler, a small swampy bird that’s notoriously tough to spot, gave me the run down on Pierre Thomas (#23) one morning when I called to talk to my five-year-old niece. And my mom…I can’t even get into that. She raised me atheist – rational humanist for those with delicate sensibilities – and now she asks me why I’m not Catholic like her; it’s the same with football but with Drew Brees (QB) on the votive.
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I don’t even know what to say about this – I don’t really want to say anything about it, actually (he’d been dead to the world for so long that it’s like hearing a myth died) – except that my selfish half-to-whole is really hoping there’s no deadhand control keeping me from reading the stockpile of words he probably has hidden away somewhere… and I feel just a little conflicted about that too (UPDATE: from the NYT obituary, “New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home”).
Wikipedia, per usual, gauchely channels the oversoul:
A friend recently covered one of my older songs, “Vespers” (“Younger” in the player at right), which was something I’ve been wishing would happen since I started recording in 2004 – getting covered – and I know that seems like not long ago, but check your calendars. And it’s everything I’d hoped for, by the way, even though he’s not sure he wants me posting it here. The me that wrote the song seems to make more sense now, or at least seems more emotable, and the song makes more sense to me, too. Also: it has a bass line.
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“I… I had a dream we were Pangaea – you were enormous and I was enormous, and we were laying side by side not touching except for our ankles and our finger tips, which were enormous and cold, but a good cold, and we were sub-continental plates shifting softly beneath silk Cambrian sheets, and when we woke up we were familiar, in the dream, like a mangrove forest. I remember saying that in the dream and thinking it was really important, and then not saying it again when we woke up because it felt too small out of context.”
“I couldn’t get to sleep last night, was lying there, twisted up in the sheets and trying not to move. Started counting to a hundred but got to eleven and felt stupid, so started counting down from a hundred. That felt stupid too so then out of nowhere I thought: Base 7. I don’t even know what that means, really, but I started trying to count backwards from a hundred in what felt like Base 7. Which ended up being too much, so I started counting forward to a hundred in Base 20, but that was too much counting – didn‘t even get to nineteen before it felt stupid again. Was just lying there frustrated in bed for like two hours, wondering about numbers.”
“Oh god… but also, there’s so much timing with everything. How terrible if you, you know – I would want my kid to have like a venerable principal, like a Headmaster. Like an FDR or something. How terrible if you got some young CEO, you know? Someone not august. That just changes everything, and no way to plan for it, really. Like, so also: what you want is to have a baby so it doesn‘t have a new years birthday, right? But then what about wanting it to have a new years birthday so when it‘s older it doesn‘t have to hate itself twice in one year?”
“I don’t even dream anymore, really. I used to make up my dreams when I was a kid – I’d wake up and they’d ask me what I dreamt, and not dreaming didn’t feel like an option so I’d just say whatever about unicorns or whatever you’re supposed to dream about, and they must’ve either thought I was a normal dreaming kid or I was a really out-there kid that made up pretty standard kid-sounding dreams for whatever kid reason. And then I guess that started me dreaming after a while because it was easier to actually dream than to wake up and have to force some story. But I’m back to not dreaming now.”
A new decade, a different direction; experiments with cursive and “British humor”.
Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:
The thrilling follow-up to The Monsters (1988)
Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:
By a young Nick Courage, working under the first of many surnames.
Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:
I actually tried *not* to buy records this year, wasn’t hep to the scene. And the stuff I did get was mostly cock rock from FatWreck because they started charging 8 bucks for all their vinyl and I was editing english composition books and feeling my virility leak away; couldn’t control myself. So, this isn’t much of a year in review in terms of songs that hit in 2009, but it’s my year in review, and I recommend it pretty heartily. I was able to find almost everything I wanted except “Petting Party” by Vampires of Dartmore and “Birdbrain” by Allen Ginsberg and the Gluons. Find those songs, you’ll love them.
Pre.S. 100% of Colleens I know are 100% into Salt ‘n’ Peppa.
Video after jump…
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Had been having some doubts about 2009 – felt like sort of an under-the-radar year for me. Enough doubts to make a list… and it turns out 2009 was pretty busy after all (and I know I’m only hitting a few of the highlights – what’d I miss?). Not to mention, AMR visitors have more than doubled since this time last year – so thanks to everyone for making this a thing [update: just checked, we actually sextupled, not doubled]. And I think we’re actually going into our 5th year!
1. moved twice (and with gf!)- now at literal foot of the Williamsburg bridge. logged over 70 miles walking to work before it got too cold, can’t wait to pick up again.
2. switched jobs, from editing english composition books to being a singularitarian for a literary house. am now working on some of my favorite authors’ books (which, has that ever happened in publishing? maybe twice?).*
3. recorded 23 AMR Podcasts with Rachel.
4. conducted 11 pretty exhaustive Friend of a Friend interviews.
5. wrote 5 articles (polemics) on plagiarism, copywrite, humanity, and the aspirational self: Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon, pts. 1-3; Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background; Civil Disobedience: J-B. Lamarck & the Aspirational Self
6. 6+ paintings, including: Skeleton, Magneto Tweets, Lucky the Cat (timelapse below), Fishman Jones, and my portrait of Rachel.
7. Mark Fullmer curated/birthed COURAGE: A Portrait of the Artist as a Man, which is too sweet to even talk about (and came with a Courage wiki!).
8. wrote a few songs I’m proud of (can listen to most of these at right, if not there: are in the AMR archives somewhere): Fierce Love (on Loud Guitars), So Okay So, Everything Fake is Real, Our Jurassic Holiday, Home Movie, Don’t Be Yourself. Also re-recorded Green.
9. wrote a few poems I liked enough to post: Finning Sharks on Garbage Island and Eco-Warrior at the Feminist Bookstore.
10. lost Bat to Miami at beginning of 2009 – getting Bat back in 2010. this time a real rock experience is inevitable.
11. celebrated Halloween in July, threw two housewarmings. these were strong parties – wish everyone reading could’ve been there.
12. my boner dollar was shanghaied and stickered all over Brooklyn and the LES. had fun tracking these – super weird to see something you did so cavalierly posted on every ATM in town.
13. was sketched alongside Moony (my favorite catahoula) by Michel Gondry.
14. co-published, but really just publicized, Tweet Tweet – the first ever Twitter-based poetry book.
15. was a comp-rhet cover boy for New Comm Ave.
16. contributed to AMUZE (L.E.S. zine) as much as possible – even got a chance to do the cover:
17. first real vacation since undergrad – Nantucket with Rachel’s family and Pounces the Cat. Caught some of the Nantucket film festival, read a book about dinosaurs. Touched a whale skeleton.
18. read both Infinite Jest and 2666 in the same month – year of the big books.
19. conquered year-long authorial dryspell (maybe linked to not having a computer in 2009) – psychically prepared for first full-length book
20. i had a garden in 2009. Did anyone know about that? Watering can and morning glories and window box and mini-trowels and everything.
Hope y’all all have strong 2010s!
xo
courage
*Hey, speaking of my new job – if you watch/share this I might have a better chance of keeping it.
These past four months or so I’ve been preparing myself for the novel I promised myself I’d write before my 28th birthday [update: not my first, but the long overdue second attempt]. My problem has never been with words, more with plot and accessibility – that’s where the poetry business comes in – so basically I’ve been building a wire mother I think I’ll be able to love simply and directly and for the long haul. This morning I found out what she sounds like (below).
Not surprisingly, this track is from when I was 21 – from a tape I got through an ex-girlfriend from a prep chef who was friends with the singer. I actually had, I think, a live demo version – which got stuck in the car I ended up leaving with my non-wire mom in New Orleans, so she ended up listening to it for a few months with STOP ANIMAL VIVISECTIONS and KILL YOUR T.V. stickers on the bumper. Now the radio’s broken and instead of fixing it she has a transistor radio you have to hang out the window, which is more rock and roll than the song, really.
Anyway, this is the last you’ll hear from me about it. Just felt like a Christmas Miracle to finally get the sound down.
I knew, as it was happening, that a pre-dawn livery cab ride across state lines was bad news. Those drivers aren’t used to 3 AM straight-aways, they go too fast. Then, approaching Newark Int’l Airport, the whole freighted gestalt of a fluorescent Anheuser-Busch billboard behind an honest-to-god smokestack looking like an industrial fire. And finally, in New Orleans, that disconnect:
this green or that green.mp3 (No Sexy Regrets version). Actually, don’t choose – I like them both. But, I was going through my mp3s yesterday for the player and realized I’d never recorded a clean version of “green,” my song on SORRY ABOUT THE SOUNDS (the colors album). You gotta have a clean version.
click here for green.mp3 redux
While clicking through the archives, I also found this – the cavalierly misinterpreted guiding principle of No Sexy Regrets: “It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it … obvious effort is the antithesis of grace.” – Baldassare Castiglioni (Book of the Courtier, 1528)
