Brian Freedman (Philadelphia, USA): "Hot Date Miscellany"

Dating, among the middle-school set, was a complicated affair. It revolved more around telephone conversations than anything else. Making out was a good several years in the future, unless you happened to find yourself at one of those absent-parent parties. But once in a while, a date would be planned, and that’s when things got interesting. As for Allie and I, our first and only date proved to be a collision of worlds— the real one, with me as its ostensible center, and the fantasy one, whose five suns around which everything revolved, were the perfect and unattainable Donny and Danny and Joey and Jonathan and Jordan.

The New Kids On The Block were scheduled to perform a three-night series of concerts at an outdoor arena in the city, and though all the tens of thousands of tickets had sold out within twenty minutes of their release a few months before, Allie’s mother had somehow managed to procure three of them for the third concert. This was no surprise, since standard operating procedure was that one parent would accompany the happy couple on any date that involved an activity more demanding or complicated (or even, in suburban terms, more dangerous) than going to the movies and Friendly’s for a scoop or three of ice cream.

But that, as I found out less than a week before the concert, was never the plan. Allie and I were on the phone one warm spring evening. Or, as I should say, Allie was listening and I was showing off while talking to her behind the door of my closed bedroom, the thin crack of space dividing the bottom of the door and the top of the high-piled blueberry-colored carpet, covered by three pillows to prevent the sound from escaping, and the family from knowing I was on the line yet again with my girlfriend. The last thing I needed was another one of my father’s famous mock-up conversations, on the old banana-phone he so loved.

Anyway, we were talking about the latest six-grade gossip— the fact that Candice Cooper might just like girls that way. I knew she didn’t. I’d started the rumor myself, after she began spreading the word a few months earlier, after our one slow-song at the six-grade dance, that I breathed heavily when I danced, and that she felt something weird against her leg as we rocked back and forth, to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”—

© Brian Freedman 2004

Brian Freedman (Philadelphia, USA): "The Films of Sylvester Stallone"

The movies of Sylvester Stallone have always been pretty formulaic, and there are certain things you can count on in each of them. A beautiful woman who secretly lusts after Sly; a bad guy whose comeuppance is guaranteed to be both brutal and graphic; and a scene in which our stocky Italian hero is both shirtless and oiled up, and either training for a big fight, or making crazy monkey-love with the woman who had been lusting after him since the beginning of the movie. The examples of each are limitless, once we get past the artistic integrity of the first Rocky movie. And even in that one, Adrian, the quintessential swan in schlump-y pet-shop-worker’s clothing, secretly has it for Rock-ster from the get-go.

So, really the seeds were planted way back in 1976. But once they were given that special Hollywood water and sunlight, there was no stopping their double-time germination. A perfect example of this is Rocky IV— a film which features nearly all the Sly-film requisites— from the death of Apollo Creed at the hands of the indestructible Russian tramp Ivan Drago, to its extended gay-porn-like training sequence in the wilds of Northern Russia, to the steamy look of desire from Brigitte Nielsen (who here plays Drago’s voluble wife), who shoots in Rocky’s direction every chance she gets, as if she were saying, merely with her eyes, that if it weren’t for this damned Cold War, she’d jump him right then and there, and have ice-melting Commie sex with him in a second.

The point, really, is this— much like those poor people who live beneath high-tension wires, or the brave souls who were employed by the company that was contracted to clean the Chernobyl reactor site, regular exposure to the films of Sylvester Stallone can be hazardous to one’s health. Especially if that person to whom we’re referring is a thirteen-year-old, whose Saturday night diet consists of nothing but. I, of course, was no exception, and Sly eventually got to me, too. What, I began asking myself, made so different from the characters that got laid on my TV screen every Saturday night? It wasn’t as if Stallone was ever that great looking. And he even spoke like a punch-drunk bar-brawler from somewhere in Jersey.

The answer, then, was clear— muscles. He had them— he got laid. I had none, and I got none. The solution was simple— I needed weights and a training program. And after a few months of hard work and aggressive calorie-consumption, I too would be fucking Brigitte Nielsen in a boxing ring.

© Brian Freedman 2004

Personal Mythologies II: Postscript

The Personal Mythologies II reading at the Kelly Writers House, took place, as is documented on PennSound, on September 20, 2003. One of the poems I read that day, What Needs No Myth, was meant as both homage and a challenge to William Butler Yeats and The Second Coming, one of his signature pieces. The Personal Mythologies II mp3 was placed on my PennSound Author Page in 2018. It took until this summer to really look closely at the entire reading. What Needs No Myth, I felt, is the strongest of the pieces I read, and also one I'd forgotten about. Providentially, it fits in with the Apparition Poems series and with all the writing I've done around philosophy. So, I sent the piece to Eratio. It was released on August 17. Many thanks to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino and also to PennSound for keeping me awake!

For the end of summer...

ADAM’S CURSE

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
                                              And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labor to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

© William Butler Yeats 1902

Jeremy Tenenbaum (Manayunk, Philadelphia): "Portrait of Abby Heller-Burnham"

                                       © Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum 2008

Post-Feminist Poetics

 An inquiry into post-feminist poetics on Jeffrey Side's blog. 

An inquiry into an elite post-feminist on Ink Pantry. And on mp3. 

...................................................................................

Live in Brooklyn on PennSound (March 30, 2007):

Pigs and Planes
Disappear
Solipsist
Hell In
Becky Grace (for Becky Hilliker)
Clean
Red Life

Creep
Live in Brooklyn (extended reading)

Also from PennSound: Personal Mythologies II (September 20, 2003)

The Tapestry of American History '03
Coca-Cola Dream
Proust and Love
Ode On Love
Hamlet and the Last Drop
Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound
Halloween and the First Person Singular

Poets and Prophecy
What Needs No Myth (after W.B. Yeats)
Revealing Mystic Truths (includes To Bruce Nauman)
Personal Mythologies II (selected reading)
Personal Mythologies II (ur-file)

Also from PennSound: This Charming Lab (March 27, 2004)

Stoning the Devil
Dominique
Fragment (Prose Haiku)
Ode On Jazz (2)

To March (with intro)
(Ode) To March
This Charming Lab (selected reading)
This Charming Lab (ur-file)

Live at the Writers House (WXPN) (April 5, 2004)

Ode On Jazz (1)
To Bruce Nauman
Icarus In New York
Episode 46: Fieled

Acid Dropping EP

                    A keepsake of a time and a place, and of possibilities.

Acid Dropping EP is:

I. A Clangorous Din— Speck

II. Stone the Devil— Speck

III. Viaje entre las luces— Vince El Mejor

IV. Driving Home— MalreDeszik

V. Hipsters— Falki Hoz

VI. Feel (I saw) remix— Zenboy1955

Various Positions:

On the Soundclick Jazz Overall chart, A Clangorous Din reached #15, Stone the Devil #12, Viaje entre las luces #18, and Driving Home #29.

On the Soundclick Electronic Overall chart, Hipsters, a.k.a. Ode On Jazz (3, with Falki Hoz), reached #20. Feel (I saw) remix reached #8, making it a national hit. 

Featured on Things You Heard When You Were Dead (shane p).

All tracks feature spoken word by Adam Fieled, from (respectively) Opera Bufa, This Charming Lab, When You Bit..., Ode On Jazz, and Curiosities (Feel). 

From Funtime Records, and Jamendo.  

Produced/engineered by CC Mixter, respective artists, Eris Temple, and the Kelly Writers House.