DeathPaletteZom

I was going through stuff in a drawer the other day and I came upon a bunch of tickets from ages ago, including a pair to Sonny Rollins’ 80th birthday celebration at the Beacon Theatre, the famed gig where Ornette Coleman was the special guest. A memorable night it was. I remember being gobsmacked by Ornette’s arrival, as if Sonny was finally making his peace with the avant-garde. The next day…

Robert Creeley was born on May 21, 1926. Hmmm. This calls for something. What’s on p.100 of his collected poems? I take it off the shelf and, as you might expect with Creeley, it’s one short poem. To wit: Two Times 1 It takes so long to look down, the first time thinking it would then and there either  shoot up or else drop off. 2 One hand on the trigger one hand on the hand.  What? Do I really…

I was poking around in an old project, The Book of Haiku Revelation, and I discovered two poetic assemblages made from Burroughs’ The Soft Machine. Burroughs, along with Duchamp and Gertrude Stein, among others, is an overarching artistic presence in the Death Palette series, so, methinks, why not give his haiku assemblages a whirl though BTR. First, the haiku that worked so well in…

You never know what you’ll find on a simple park walk. I found this, which suggested a poem whose first line would be, “You blew the door off my frozen moment.” I ran the line by Chat before it saw the photo—I had to convert to jpg before it could read it—and it started going on about Duchamp and Ginsberg based on previous discussions. Then it saw the photo and it wanted to continue going on…

The Whitney Museum was an unlikely venue for what turned out to be Cecil Taylor’s last-ever gig, but there you have it. April 23, 2016, was the date, the concert serving as the culmination of the Whitney’s tremendous Open Plan: Cecil Taylor exhibition. Though the frail, 87-year-old Taylor had to be carefully helped to the piano, he seemed otherwise reasonably vigorous, and I wasn’t focused on the…

I’ve been pondering Breton lately, as one is wont to do after reading the great Polizzotti bio, so I took my copy of The Magnetic Fields off the shelf, where it’s been sitting for many years. I must’ve poked around in it at one time or another, though I can’t say I read it through as one would do with an “ordinary” book. Too much automatic writing in one sitting is like overdosing on Mad Libs,…

Off a room of Greek art of the fifth century B.C., beckoning like a glowing black abyss, is the Met’s Man Ray show. It’s oddly tucked away, but it’s not a small show, and there’s really no reason to complain about it, but as a museum-goer near me said to her friend, “Some of the rayographs can be pretty boring.” Well, yeah, they can be—in some respects, we’re a long way from what was visually…

I was in Philly on the weekend to see Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100. And of course to pay homage to Duchamp at the magic peepholes, but this is not about that. Or maybe it is. Maybe everything is about that. At any rate, I didn’t take many pics at the show (I bought the book), but I did take a rather casual shot of this vitrined Breton book of poems, which has a fetchingly amusing title and…

On a typical flâneurish outing, I take a typical storefront-surrealist pic and later decide to run it by Chat for a short poem in the manner of Gregory Corso. You never know when Chat will hit the jackpot, not to be confused with the William Gibson Jackpot that AI will eventually hit if it gets enough (nuclear) power. The choice of Corso is only because I’d been poking around in Mindfield. Not…

I have a used copy of Breton’s Mad Love, translated by the great Mary Ann Caws, and it’s one of those used books that someone marked up for a class. This can be quite annoying, but in addition to the usual underlining there are a number of phrases that are boxed, as if they require extra attention. And they are going to get just that. Here’s a box on an unusually decorative page. There are…

Is Andre Breton’s list poem, “Free Union,” the French precursor of Ginsberg’s “Howl”? Well, no, or perhaps it is, but the question is mainly a segue to Ginsberg writing about “Free Union” on the Allen Ginsberg Project, where he notes that Breton’s poetry is “a bit wooden and his prose arid . . . There’s a funny tone that he’s got of imperious insistent proclamation and manifesto stubbornness . .…