TheCrimsonNinja's Xanga

still early, but:

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:54:37 GMT

1- inglourious basterds
2- moon
3- sunshine cleaning
4- away we go
5- where the wild things are
6- up
7- zombieland
8- whatever works
9- the brothers bloom
10- the fantastic mister fox
11- coraline
12- watchmen

and imho, that's a sad slate of a 'best of' list. 2009, you disappoint me.

please, please tell me i'm forgetting something great.

a potentially incomplete list of movies i have seen this year, or maybe at the end of last year, i d

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:22:16 GMT

now that's a title. these are all the movies released this year which i stopped jerking off long enough to see.

as per last year, (T) means i saw it in theaters.

Defiance (T)
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
Killshot
Taken (T)
Fanboys
Coraline
The International
Street Fighter (T)
Watchmen (T)
Sunshine Cleaning (T)
I Love You Man (T)
Fast and Furious (T)
X-Men: Wolverine (T)
Star Trek (T)
The Brothers Bloom
Terminator Salvation
Up (T)
Away We Go (T)
The Hangover (T)
The Taking of Pelham 123 (T)
Moon (T)
Transformers 2 (T)
Funny People (T)
Inglorious Basterds (T)
Zombieland (T)
The Invention of Lying (T)

with just over two months of movie viewing left this year, now is the time to speak up regarding your favorites, least favorites, or otherwise so that i might see and enjoy these movies before the year's end. this has been a "catch up" year for me so far, and most of the movies i saw this year don't make this list because they were actually released last year. also, it seems like movies sucked this year. 'Basterds' and 'Sunshine Cleaning' are almost definitely the best two movies in that list, and neither one would have been top five a couple years ago.

Marathon Monks (repost to save an edit)

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:49:20 GMT

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The problem with it all is that you get no choice in the matter. Things have begun before you even know it, and by the time you do gain self-awareness, you are too far along to do much of anything except just keep going. Or else. And who ever picks else? Nobody. That’s who. Me? I’m fifty-five, and I’ve just found all this out.

I’m divorced. Recently unemployed, and by force rather than whim. Two kids who I never see and who never remember my birthday. When people ask what I do, I tell them I’ve been recently immersed in the art of breathing, and they chuckle. They don’t know that was first said by some snooty french painter. I just read it somewhere.

There’s these monks, they call them Marathon Monks. They run this 25,000 mile course in these mountains called the Hiei mountains around Kyoto on a quest for ‘spiritual enlightenment’. That’s the equivalent of a full trip around the world. Took the last guy who did it seven years to complete it. Can you imagine that? Seven years of running?

The past seven years, I’ve started to do what I like to call Old Man Things. Things one does when one gets old and retired. I go on early morning jogs and late evening walks. I read the local newpaper and write letters to the editor which never get published. I do the crossword. I took up fixing things and making things. The gutters still leak though, and it took me seven tries to build a simple little newspaper stand in my basement workshop, a stand which I quickly filled with finished crossword puzzles. I tried to get into cooking, but never really managed to put my heart into it, so I’m not sure if that would have been my passion or not. Because that’s what all the Old Man Things are, really, are just things to fill time and space. Things to be not-void. Things to inhabit and occupy to the areas in one’s life, until one can find a true passion. A calling. A reason.

These monks. They wear only a simple, thin robe. A hat and some sandals, both made out of straw. They woke up, put that stuff on, and knew that it would be on their backs for the next seven years. The next 25,000 miles. Running on mountain trails, scrabbbling across scree, sun in their faces, then at their backs. Only forty-seven monks have ever survived the trek, which dates back to seven-hundred-something.

My friends have thinned as I’ve aged. That’s just the way of things. When we start in this life, we have four hands to help us up: two from our father, and two from our mother. And we are lucky to get those four hands. We have to find more as we go. We befriend the people scrabbling at our ankles when we pull them up to our level, and in turn they’ll drag us up the next rung. At some point, people stop and look down and realize that they are now at the place that they first knew as horizon when they came screaming from the wound between their mother’s legs. And they content themselves to stay where they have arrived, and thus they help fewer people climb. All their peers keep climbing, and the only people passing through their space then are those who started when they saw the dust from all those other heels rising into the wind.

Me? I think I’ve still been trying to climb. Lord knows I still have responsibilities and chores, so I must still serve some purpose to this great, grand machination called life. But what really tells me that I must still be climbing is the enlightenment. I haven’t achieved enlightenment, yet.

When I was a kid, and I saw people the age that I am now, I always felt a subconscious fear, a subtle twinge in my spine that sent a whispered but urgent message to my attentive brain, and that message was don’t ever grow so old. Because people the age that I am now seemed so decayed and eroded, back then, what with the lines and creases weathering their tanned faces and gnarled hands.

These monks, most of the time they can’t make it. Not everyone achieves enlightenment. Some are those people I told you about, my thinned out circle of friends, people who have reached a point close enough to the apex that they are content to spread their metaphoric picnic blanket and nap beneath the shadow of the peaks. But these monks, this Tendai sect, they often reach a point where they can run no further. I imagine they look out beyond themselves, at all those sandalprints in the road, and then they look ahead of themselves, where the sun is likely setting. Perhaps it has already fallen.

Tradition holds that a monk who cannot make it back to the temple must take his own life. If they cannot return to the temple, Enryakuji Hoshuin, they are to commit suicide by hanging or disembowelment.

In the morning, after I’ve had my morning wedge of grapefruit, and my one and a half cups of decaf, and my pills (always the pills) I stand in front of my closet, Hands running among suits I used to wear to work, T-shirts I used to wear underneath. Now, all my shoes except my slippers and my comfortable sneakers are in a mangled pile, Gucci corpses stacked high against the back wall of the walk-in next to my wife’s abandoned Tahari handbags. My watches, Tourneau and Cartier, gently tick away the days on a shelf. I never wear them anymore. I run my hands across silken ties, and I think about those monks, high on their mountain trails, their thoughts turned towards enlightenment. I think they dream about their homecoming, about their brothers draping blossoms at their feet and bowing to receive the blessings of a newly enlightened one.

Surrounded by my old silk and my old leather and the light from the naked bulb in my closet, I think about the monks who never make it, and I know what they think about, too.

indications that you are, in fact, a shitty poet

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:27:23 GMT

if you can't stop using the word 'maudlin'.
if you only write poems when you "feel something" or when you are "moved".
if you've decided you are never sharing your poems
with this fucking world and these fucking people
who will never ever EVER understand you

if you write your poems in a quirky little cloth-bound notebook
if you write them on the walls of bathroom stalls
trying to squeeze out the quarter pound
of chips and salsa you consumed last night
at the open mic where the guy you like with
half his head shaved plays his acoustic guitar

if you think poetry can change the world
or that it can't or that it matters
or that it has to be the topic of every conversation you've ever had
or if you can't name thirty poets, or even three,
who are alive and breathing and beating their
fists against their desks or chests trying in vain
to get you to actually read something, goddammit.

if you just break your
lines in random places or don't break your lines at all
or can't figure out your meter or your rhyme scheme
or only write sonnets or villanelles or haikus
or have never written anything but free verse
or blank verse or essays, letter, postcards.

if you shy away from words like 'shitty' because they aren't poetic.

if you ever use weather as a metaphor, or if you
think a metaphor is appropriate for war,
or if you think war is too touchy a subject
and poems should be about baking bread
and burying pets and riding bikes at the
dirt hills in the unfinished subdivision down the street.

if you write your poems in the bath or on the train
or in some other space that's just a placeholder for
your real life. if you stop fucking to write a poem
or stop talking to write a poem and make your
conversation partner endure an awkward silence
because you have to capture the stuff that makes
up lines like these, well, i think you know.

if you are in an MFA program or couldn't get accepted
into an MFA program or fucking hate MFA progams and
decided just to find your own workshops where you
sometimes just stare at the posters in the library lounge
and wonder who these people are and what they are talking about.

if you read your poems in bars, if you practice performing
your poems in front of the mirror or record them for later
viewing or write cryptic shit that can't even be read aloud
or if you are afraid to submit your poems to the places you like to read
or if you bother to submit your poetry to somewhere
as if it, or you, will ever be good enough.

if you wear a beret or a baseball cap or a smoking jacket or a trenchcoat
or a pair of galoshes your grandmother gave you even though
they're a size too big just to remember her every day, and how that
bitch just couldn't get anything right.

if you put your cigarette out at the end of the page
like you sign your name with cancer.

if you even mention coffee or even if you've ever drank it.

if you are an American, who will never even know what poetry means
or where it comes from or how much of each ingredient to add, or, god
help you, if you think there are actual ingredients, like a pinch
of this and a palmful of that, like words are coarse little grains and
mysterious leaves you can lump together with saucy syntax to
create something anyone else would want on their tongue.

if you are writing this poem, right now, and you keep on doing so
rather than just relaxing and going to bed to spoon your sick wife
and wrap your arm around her chest until the ribbing of her tank
wears its pattern into your skin and sinew, muscle, mind, and makes
the sort of impression that a poem, or a poet, can only dream of.

what a girl wants

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:43:04 GMT

wants her to keep chasing the tv weatherman
wants her talk show
wants her money back
wants her facebook account

wants her style
wants her haircut

wants her to dump boyfriend
wants her swagger back
wants her shoulderpads back

wants her rim-shot
wants her hubby killed
wants her guy friends as groomsmen what-to-do

boys to hit my boys, marriage to disappear, billion dollar blanket shit back

son, space, own line of shoes

wants boyfriend to fight alcoholism
wants her million dollars sooner, not later

hair back, house back, look back, cheese sandwich

she wants her kids
she wants her ice cream

old face, image, outfits, dogs, her mom, smile, airline, son to get, husband to get, boytoy to get

where i'm blogging at the moment.

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:53:57 GMT

www.kyleoncomics.blogspot.com

on a review of wing'd!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:24:10 GMT

i normally haven't linked to reviews of my poetry, but there's a great review of the animalistic little chapbook i put out through Blood Pudding Press a couple years ago here.

read it, and then come back.

Wilson makes it pretty clear in the first three paragraphs that she's not really in the frame of mind to engage with or appreciate a Blood Pudding Press offering. i mean, i don't know what she thought she was getting into with Juliet Cook's outfit, but this is the kind of thing that her press does best: feral, oozing, ghastly, applique, parasitic, absurd, slime, and, most importantly, amusing. to this point, she hasn't really engaged with any of the actual writing at all; she's critiquing publishing ephemera.

i'm not entirely sure that she understands that the table of contents is supposed to be a table of contents, and nothing more. if she does get this, then why the section on the table of contents? who reviews a table of contents?

at this point, i gauge her reaction: "not impressed"..."ick"...searching for "artistry" and disappointed with my lack of a bio... and i have to ask myself, why exactly is she reading this book?

i really take umbrage to the fact that i would ever make fun of Kevin Federline. i would situate his personage within a context of heightened absurdity for the sake of achieving a juxtaposition (between my poem and the original Stafford poem i am partially appropriating) and thematically comparing the tough decision Stafford's narrator makes in his poem with the sort of surreal celebrity nonsense that my generation must grapple with in the media in order to get anything of substance, but i would never make fun of him. at least, not in a poem. i think a poem is a dreadful medium for insult and mockery, since no one reads poems.

after that, Wilson is pretty much dead on. i'm not sure what she means exactly when she says i am trying to be "poetic", with the poetic in parentheses like it is here, but whatever she is trying to say, i like it. i love how anything can be rendered into a vague sort of insult by putting it in parentheses. if i had really wanted to make fun of Kevin Federline, i would have put his name in parentheses, just like Wilson does here.

i don't want to get caught up in trying to justify the poem, but i think my linguistic choice is self-explanatory. just listen to the line I wrote and the line she implicitly suggests i should have used instead to avoid being "poetic" (lawl. i laugh at the goal.):

"most of what comes between me and she/is mud"

-OR-

"most of what comes between her and I/is mud"

i think the superior line is obvious, especially given the diction in the rest of the poem.

i hope all of this doesn't indicate that i dislike the review; i'm puzzled by the aim of some of it, but on the whole i enjoyed it. Wilson completely got what i think is the most integral part of the collection, which is an exploration of the self, especially as it is comprised and compromised by our own (in-)humanity. i really think the only thing we strongly disagree about is the aim of poetry in general, perhaps. she seems to be baffled by my "Poetry and play to no ends," as if poetry and play weren't of course the end in and of themselves. anyone who is trying to accomplish anything more revolutionary in the world would do well to wield a more tangible tool.

i like reviews because they give me a chance to talk about poems and poetry outside of the classroom, which i really love. as much as i love writing and reading poetry (and fiction and nonfiction and etc. for that matter) i really love discussing "the craft" (insult intended) even more, i think.

A Brief Summary of Ways in which I Suspect I Might Die

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:59:36 GMT

Car Accident

If it were legal for Vegas to set odds on my manner of death (which, hey, maybe it is legal, I don’t know, I’ve never been to Vegas (and even if it isn’t legal, they are probably doing it anyway, am I right?)) I suspect they would give the best odds to the car accident. I have been in four major collisions, two with other cars: one due to snow, one due to sun, one due to excessive intoxication, and one due to the supreme idiocy inherent in being sixteen. All of these mishaps were my fault, and yet I refuse to consider myself a ‘bad driver’. My odds of being in an accident are simply higher because I drive a lot more than most people. Except for the year and half following that excessive intoxication accident in which the state of Nebraska decided I probably shouldn’t be allowed to drive. During that time, I rode a bike all over the city. And considering my recklessness in doing so, that really only made my chances of dying in a car accident that much greater.

I’m not really afraid of dying in this fashion. I’m always calm while the car is actually being crushed, smoothly steering through the impact as the windows shatter and the side panels collapse and the frame buckles and the tires squeal out in denial of their own ineffectiveness. I don’t know if this inner peace is due to the fact that I no longer believe I can die in a car accident, or because I know I will.

Ebola

Although this may not seem like a very likely way for my life to end, I have been simultaneously fascinated and terrified by Ebola ever since I read the book The Hot Zone when I was ten years old. The book details a breakout of the Ebola virus in Reston, Virginia and goes into depth detailing the symptoms of the virus and the very painful way in which it claims its victims. I’ve read a lot of supposedly ‘scary’ books over the years, but The Hot Zone is the only one that ever kept me awake at night. I’m still not sure why. Did I expect an infected monkey to leap from my closet in the middle of the night or ambush me on the way to school the next morning, quickly biting me, laughing a maniacal monkey laugh, and then running off, its diabolical mission complete?

I rarely get sick at all, and I never go to Africa where the disease is most readily encountered, so I don’t think I have much cause to worry about Ebola. Still, this is one of the most frightening ways I can envision myself dying. I think it’s the lack of dignity in it all. It’s hard to consider that the last moments of your life, the dénouement putting everything you’ve done before into context, can consist of a sweaty, agonizing seizure during which you bleed from every orifice and vomit your melting organs out into your own lap. No thanks. Give me the car crash.

Murder

The odds of being murdered in any given year are 1 in 16,360. To me, this is not so large a number. I want a number in the millions, a number like being struck by lightning, a number like winning the lottery twice in the same lifetime. I sit in the stadium and feel the sun on my face and while everyone else is watching players warm up or ogling cheerleaders I am thinking to myself: six of these people will be murdered this year. I stand in the back at assemblies at the local elementary school where my wife works as a teacher and think, someone in this town will be murdered this year.

I’ve already had opportunities to be murdered. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint during a home invasion when my roommates and I were having a party. Most people sat silently on our couches or smoked nervously in our kitchen while the three men rummaged through the house, looking for drugs and cash. Worried that they would take my laptop with all my writing on it, I got in a shoving match with one robber in my upstairs bedroom. They must have been really reluctant to actually shoot anyone.

I’m not afraid of being the victim of a murder because it seems important, vital, compelling. It seems as though my last moments would be spent locked in a struggle to survive, and that’s pretty consistent with life as a whole and seems like a fitting way to die. For someone to want to kill you, you have to be pretty important to them. You have to matter. And even though the company might not be the best, you aren’t dying alone.

i am now married

Sun, 31 May 2009 22:45:30 GMT

that is all.

pictures available shortly.

wing'd for a pittance

Sat, 23 May 2009 12:42:31 GMT

Blood Pudding Press is having a massive sale right now on their poetry catalog. that means, if for some reason you don't already own a copy of my first chapbook of poetry, entitled Wing'd, now would be an excellent opportunity to acquire one.

www.bloodpuddingpress.etsy.com

there are some other really great works of contemporary poetry available at BPP too. i recommend Horrific Confection by Juliet Cook and the multi-author Growling Softly.