Diaristic Report

Jim Leftwich
September 2017

 

Decide Today w/Neural Necrosis, Tater Fraterabo,
& PNA Hosted by Star City Shadow School and
Art Rat Studios

Obviously diary entries, poems, improvisations and extrapolations,
research notes, speculations, collages of quotes and other pilfered/
proliferated texts, self-skeptical meditative anxieties written around
the looming inevitability of an actual event, notes as guard rails,
barricades and fallout shelters, anti-poems, reflections on subjective
memories of collective dreams  — any of my writings, in fact, whether
preliminaries or post-scripts, cannot be actual components of actual
events, now or then, past for anyone or future for everyone, they can
only be a record of myself, circling an event in words, unable to name
any event myself, unable to describe a position which is my position
vis a vis any event, past or future, real or imagined, existing in its
multiplicity as from the outset experientially fictional, to whatever
degree, producing almost immediately, almost as a simultaneous
parallel event, a nostalgia for itself — offering itself, to anyone who is
willing to write themselves into the record of an event,
as a presence no matter how alienated within the event as it was
unfolding, as potentially a text, several texts, one certainly prior to any
actual event, as research, preparation, anxiety and desire, one during
(which will occur mostly as notes taken in the mind — remember this
sequence, remember this phrase, remember these instruments and
props), and one after the event …which is perhaps permitted, or even
desired, however weakly, by someone other than the writer… by
maybe two people other than myself, if it is even safe to assert that
much — this writing, then, as a refusal to define itself, to say, with
Olson, “in this place is a poem which I have not been able to write,”
and to leave it at that, another series of love songs in another
wasteland.

 

Decide Today w/Neural Necrosis, Tater Fraterabo, & PNA
Hosted by Star City Shadow School and Art Rat Studios
Sunday AUG 13 at 7 PM – 10 PM

Art Rat Studios
Supported by an eclectic line-up from Roanoke’s noise and avant-
garde community:
Neural Necrosis (Andrew Mathews of Rotting Obscene, Human
Infection, etc.) – Guitar-throttling shriekfest
Tater Fraterabo – Multi-layered, unpredictable NOISE
PNA – Polyvocal Choir of Syncopated Screams
Olchar E. Lindsann – Vocal contortions & frothing at the mouth
Wilheim Katastrof – There is no escaping the sound

Come submit yourself to some Cincinnati anarcho industrial breakcore
punk, courtesy of DECIDE TODAY, from the long-running DIY
anarchist label/press/band/distro/activist collective Realicide!
Don’t miss some of the most harsh, sophisticated, raw, angry,
inspiring, politically radical, painful and generous noise touring in the
underground today!

https://decidetoday.bandcamp.com/track/june-11th
https://decidetoday.bandcamp.com/track/igniter
https://decidetoday.bandcamp.com/track/bulletbelt

Bring your spare shirts / jackets / skateboards / whatever to be
screenprinted or stenciled on the spot by Decide Today (Donations of
ink etc. welcome)

 

The following three songs were performed between scheduled sets
throughout the evening. They fit in perfectly. Woody Guthrie could
have shared a stage with Robert Inhuman at any time in the past 75
years or so. Jolly Banker was recorded for The Library of Congress by
Alan Lomax on March 22, 1940. Guthrie’s guitar inscribed This
Machine Kills Fascists would not look out of place on the Decide
Today merchandise table. Dylan’s Masters of War was written in 1963.
Neil Young’s Working Man was recorded in 2015 as part of The
Monsanto Years.

Katastrof, guitar and vocals:
Jolly Banker, by Woody Guthrie
“If you show me you need it, I’ll let you have credit,
I’m a Jolly banker, jolly banker am I.
Just bring me back two for the one I lend you,
Singing I’m a jolly banker, jolly banker am I.”

Masters of War, by Bob Dylan
“You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy”

Katastrof, guitar and vocals, & Ralph, harmonica:
Working Man, by Neil Young
“One summer morning just around dawn
Four men with briefcases were on the working man’s lawn
We’re gonna sue you, take you to court
For patent infringement, and the criminals you support”

 

There were, soon, we in the rearview mirror, abrupt. Haven had that
for now embroiled in feverfew renewed. Noises leak from an adjacent
future as entertainment entrained to elsewhere and otherwise. There
is no hiding from the remnant, remembered discursively, a curved
ensconce, how full of shit on a sliding scale is pragmatic and
ineluctable. Voices speak in sprockets, gurgledegook, gobbledegunk,
their shadows opening the field of constructed dreams. The
introduction could consist in its entirety of “you are part of the solution
— so am I”. Memory compelling derails the coast of coins, encrusted to
amassed plunder, hoard and avarice publicly pristine (Hirst
meticulously wreckage between the problematics). …little scraps torn
from books that Pettibon is either reading, scanning, or casually
dipping into in order to find that one odd, what one hopes for, comes
ashore among the margins of wisdom. Soothing turned the fertile
moon to erotic sabotage. Mutilated lyricism explosive sonnet closely.
Elvis read books studiously for hours and hours. Larry would bring him
books, books, books, piles of books. Massage the right-hand wall.
Floating banana poltergeist. Jack Spicer on the radio, talking about
radios and Jack Spicer. Ephemeral improvised keyhole, static.
Scribbling, like Charles Olson, on the walls and windowsills. There is a
pile of trash=art on the floor beside the doorway, doors sway, which,
since you are reading this, was probably made by you. I’d like to read
a poem that is not necessarily autobiographical. Every time I read this
poem, people ask me if the details are true and I have to tell them
now, in advance rather than afterwards, that the vital statistics in this
poem are not autobiographical, it is a composite.  Norse reads “I’m
Not A Man”. …la carretilla de Rosa, which homonymously translated
also says “the red wheelbarrow.” Follows closely like a bent paperclip
the irrational slide down Bent Mountain to the woman who goes out
fucking on Sunday, fucking the mountain itself, towards the baby with
eyebrows of stone, translating the sonnets of Catullus. While there are
no windows memories, very dusty, of high school automatic writing
experiments, reading Breton, nothing to do with cut-up or collage, all
that reading and thinking gets in the way of exactly what? Also what’s
for lunch and/or breakfast, while the dogs are yelping in the house
next door, past the bowler hat and sunglasses copy lampshade
clothespin five of diamonds, crumpled sheet of paper in a box of
stamps, where one of the cats has recently been sleeping. Weaving a
bamboo cage around yourself, having just gotten back from the
grocery store, rhyme suggests agglutinative atmospheres of words
and their shadows. We are convincingly half-trance sentences of
semi-heightened poetics engineering improvised middles. Perhaps
when we grasp the enormous potential of this swarm intelligence we
can finally understand why the poet Arthur Rimbaud in his beautiful
hymns to the Paris Commune in 1871 continually imagined the
revolutionary Communards as insects. Reading Rimbaud’s poetry in
spatial terms, though, Ross attempts to rescue him from the sterilising
notion that he is in some way ‘immature’ … We appear formless, but
not exactly formless, not definitively formless. We listen to the sound
of the shower upstairs. It is not the shower. It is water running in the
sink. Duet of refrigerator and air conditioner. The house is a chamber
ensemble. I have wanted to record the dryer, maybe with a shoe,
three bath towels, a quarter and a dime. Spontaneity, however,
researches the distributed intelligence. Over directory retreats while by
comparison a study manufactures reporter however supported music
in analysis, the space of change has burgeoned while we were
playing. Puppet chickens excite quick dance. No packages.

 

cf. notes and emails to Warren for his Post WWII Countercultures
class
1964 Bill Dixon, October Revolution in Jazz
musician owned and operated labels and venues
1965 Charles Olson, Berkeley Poetry Conference
“declaration of independence for the republic of poetry”

 

Robert handed out a broadside before his performance, actually as
part of his introduction to his performance, which introduction was as I
think about it a few hours later part of the performance. At the top of
the front side is written:

“I had a dream that I died but it wasn’t a nightmare it was about
deciding what to do with the moments I have left when you know your
time is running out where you gonna go I ain’t trying to let this life slip
by with no avoidable regrets”

 

Google-Search Copy-and-Paste Anti-Poem for Neural Necrosis

We’d like to study the time courses of neuronal apoptosis vs.necrosis
in the mouse brain and prefer to use western blots than morphological
apoptosis, necrosis seemed to lack a well-defined core set of hallmark
features tipping-off a robust underlying. Hypoxic necrosis of dentate
gyrus neurons in primary culture required the activation of an orderly
cell death program indepen-dent of protein synthesis. Neuronal
necrosis widely occurs in devastating neurodegenerative diseases,
such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Results Mean neurological score and mean number of necrotic
neurons in the cortex were more favorable after transient (30- to 60-
minute) Necrosis is caused by factors external to the cell or tissue,
such as infection, toxins, or trauma which result in the unregulated
digestion of cell components. In contrast, apoptosis is a naturally
occurring programmed and targeted cause of cellular death. Brain
ischemia often results in neuronal necrosis, which may spread death
to neighboring cells.

 

The PNA Polyvocal Choir of Syncopated Screams, consisting in
various configurations of Olchar, Warren, Brad and Tom, performed
simultaneous poems intermittently throughout the evening, finishing
with Olchar’s “Charnel Chapel”:

#1- Crack! Corrupt crypt-coughing gnashing slashing nerve-entwining lash contain regurgitated deaths, crumble reliquary
#2- aaaaaaah ktchaktchaktchaktchaktchaktchaktchaktchakcha crack crack crack crack
#3- ItSlunkItSlunkItSlunkItSlunkItSlunkItSlunkItSlunkItSlunk for god’s sake get out for god’s sake get out for god’s sake get out

 

At the bottom of the front of the Decide Today broadside is written the
following: “For years I bit my tongue and let each day fall through my
fingers same routine as the mainstream just high on dreams to dodge
the pain until the anxiety of alternatives clawing at that exit door finally
won my allegiance you see I finally changed my name I know it’s mine
to decide and I’ll decide today”

 

Tater Fraterabo, from his Bandcamp site:

Gaudi, Zoroaster, and I step out of the Mountain

Myth making machines
Now nobody knows
Our oscillating omens
Putridly penned poems
Questions qualm queens
Reaching rather rightly
Somebody said something
To tell time
Unless you have a better plan
we wait in perfect bliss
ten times

And step off the mountain anyways

from Cracking Skulls on Golgotha, released April 17, 2017

 

Issue #8 of The In Appropriated Press is out and was available on the
FREE table in the middle room of the Art Rat. Front cover: Dogs on a
mission. DeVos Bush 2 both Clintons Reagan Bush 1 Obama and Jeff
Sessions watch as a smirking Trump bayonets a large punching bag
labeled Civil Rights. Contributors: Repass Nelson Cassidy Lindsann
Leftwich Heath Grimm Fry Evert Chriss Blafas-Chriss Bennett. Blit
Vom Anti Micro. From Olchar’s essay entitled How Do We Know? On
Reclaiming Knowledge for Life: “Dissenting communities need not
only to construct new social structures for the interchange of
knowledge, but even more fundamentally must develop ways to
embody the transfer of knowledge, entangling it entirely with our
collective and personal lives, friendships, psychologies, daily habits,
and ways of speaking and thinking.” Four full pages of afterMAF
Collab Fest Work. Cut taped stamped glued smudged smeared
scrawled ripped from the pages of the Norton anthology of poetry and
rendered all but unreadable writing against itself dirty vispo endless
glacial peanuts against the formation of a replacement canon. Kamog.

 

Olchar performed a piece which might have been entitled Violence. It
included frothing at the mouth, as advertised, and reading/chewing
from the front page of a newspaper. I think I heard a scrap, maybe two
scraps, of the word “counterprotesters”. Also maybe slightly less of a
scrap of the word “helicopter” as it was spit into the air. I leaned over
and told Warren that it was the best response I had heard so far to
yesterday’s events in Charlottesville. He nodded. The applause that
followed the end of the performance was much longer than is usual for
an Art Rat audience.

 

The back of the Decide Today broadside is taken up with the lyrics to
9 songs, some of which Robert performed during his set at the Art Rat.
He finished his set with an extended appreciation of the space and its
inhabitants, encouraging all involved to do whatever is needed to keep
it going. We are working on it, all of us, with all of our varied energies.