Good news consumers! Early next year, SpringGun Press is going to publish the first two volumes of the ever-expanding Container Store collaboration with Joe Hall. Not sure of the official release date, but for those AWP inclined, it will be available in Chicago. So, buy that shit. You can get an online preview of TCS in the fantastic Bernadette Mayer Portfolio in Drunken Boat #14. There are also a handful of pages in print form brought to you by the wonderful Caketrain journal, pictured below. Oh boy!

While the prospect of making much headway into the underbelly of Korea’s art world is fairly low given my foreigner status and non-existent Korean language skills, I have, through sheer luck, run across a number of worthwhile bands and artists in the past couple months.

While most of the live music in Korea plays things pretty safe (the university scene consists mainly of music students playing generic indie rock to politely seated crowds of peers) or else caters to a specific audience (the foreigner butt-rock market by way of bars like FF), there are, thankfully, a few exceptions. Perhaps the most interesting show I’ve seen in the past year happened at Gogos 2 (which has been redesigned to hold performances) and featured a group who goes by the name (((10))) which made finding them online nearly impossible. (I did, and you can check out some of their songs here.) Vocal loops, skittering beats, bent electronics, and a penchant for improvised exploration. Sonically somewhere between Actress and the work of Honey Owens, (((10))) fills a noticeable gap in Seoul’s music scene, and fills it well.

On the art side of things, here are some pictures from a tiny gallery in Hongdae, Seoul of an exhibition titled GOODMONEY, work by artists concerned with the aesthetics of commerce. Good stuff:

As for poetry, I’ve managed to keep paying attention and work on a few projects despite all the insanity of moving to and living in Asia. THE CONTAINER STORE collaboration with Joe Hall is reaching its unnatural conclusion, a photo/textual essay called 391 HANGANG-RO 2-GA about the destruction of one of Seoul’s red light districts is practically done, and a collaborative erasure project with Geoff Walace is underway. A selection from THE CONTAINER STORE is slated to come out in the next issue of Caketrain, one of the slickest looking journals on the market today. 391 HANGANG-RO 2-GA should be available in the next issue of Frankly, though I’m not sure when that is going to happen now that Stephanie is headed to Austin, TX.

As for movies, I’ve been watching a lot more lately. The Possession (1981) by Andrzej Zulawski has stuck with me more than most. Evidently the inspiration for Lars Von Trier’s  controversial and absolutely perfect Antichrist, Zulawski’s film takes the psychological trauma of infidelity as its subject to Von Trier’s death-of-a-child. It’s well paced, well acted, and emotionally intense – even when it drifts into horror movie territory. There aren’t any talking foxes, but there is a vaginal monster growing in a dark room that needs to be fed.

Also in the horror genre is the Japanese phsych-horror masterpiece Hausu by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi. Recently touched up and re-released by Criterion, Hausu is easily the trippiest horror flick I’ve ever seen – a colorful, blood soaked, and joyful film that deserves to be ranked high on any serious B-horror best of list. You can find clips from the film on youtube, but the high-def remaster looks great, and it’d be a shame to not see it on a big screen.

Katie and I arrived at the airport in Seoul on Wednesday at five in the morning. After the fourteen hour flight (I watched Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland about 4 times) I was ready to smoke a cigarette. Luckily immigration and customs only took about 5 minutes getting us to the baggage area where we found all of our luggage intact. While we waited for the bus station to open, I chain smoked, and Katie and I agreed that Alice in Wonderland was as dark, funny, and well made a film as could possibly be hoped for with all the shitty CGI manipulation. And it was shit. But, the airport was slick. Lots of curved metal structures and glass tubes taking people places. But the airport in Seoul, like all airports, felt pretty much like a non-space. I only knew I was in Korea when I reminded myself that I was. The fact that I was surrounded by Asian people seemed more like an anomaly than anything else.  A few minutes before the bus terminal opened for business, a forcefully friendly cab driver (who had offered a number of times to take us to Jochiwon) helped us with the Hangul spelling of our destination which we then used to buy our tickets. The first hour in Korea was surprisingly smooth.

The bus ride to Jochiwon was uncomfortable, mainly because of the heat. The Korean passengers didn’t seem to mind riding without the air on, but while the ride wasn’t exactly cozy, it was entrancing. The terrain is much different here than anything I’ve ever seen. We drove for a while alongside the Yellow Sea, which was spotted with beautiful mountain islands, topped with vegetation, that rose steeply out of the water. The soil in Korea is red where you can see it, but during the rainy season nearly every inch of ground that isn’t a building is packed with foliage. Even in the cities, any open space between buildings is crammed with red peppers, soy beans, corn, green onions, and other edible plants I don’t have names for. They practice a sort of guerrilla gardening here, which is refreshing, and the older Koreans even make use of the wild vegetation growing along the drainage ditches and in the mountains.

We traveled for around two hours through a pretty large expanse of rural countryside, scattered intermittently with small cities, each one looking exactly alike (tall white stone highrises that look like/are apartment buildings, surrounded by smaller four or five story buildings full of restaurants, singing rooms, and internet cafes). Jochiwon is a rural town known primarily for its exceptionally good peaches. It’s small, probably the same size as Lafayette, IN, but there are two universities, one foreigner bar, and a movie theater, not to mention a train station that can get you to Seoul in the blink of an eye.

Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr are putting together what promises to be one of the best seminars of the summer. The seminar, focused on “social poetics” claims to be open to anyone who wants to attend, the cost based on yearly income.

From the mission statement:
“Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.”

I’m going to do everything I can to be there, but looking at my calendar it seems I’ll be moving out of my apartment during these dates: July 26-31, 2010. If you’re interested check out the Facebook group.

More than any other text I have encountered, plagiarism/outsource causes me to question the ways in which I read, along with the ways in which texts produce value and distribute meaning.

FEMINAISSANCE ed Christine Wertheim | Les Figues Press | 2009

Les Figues Press keeps kicking out the jams. This is a thought provoking collection of feminist/feminine texts that directly challenges the 60/40 ratio found even in avant circles – by straight blowing them out of the water.

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge Books | 2008

I keep coming back to Davies’ smart, smart-ass, meandering diatribes for a kick-start.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: a project for future children | Kelsey Street | 2009

A haunting, beautiful work about the body, identity, travel, colonial power, memory, art, and femininity.

Lawrence Giffin | Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane | Ugly Duckling Press  | 2009

David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009

The cover is as squirm-inducing as the poetry.

Francis Picabia | I Am A Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation | The MIT Press | 2007

MIT Press should win a medal for making context as important as content with their Francis Picabia collected. This is how poetry should be taught. The essays and snippets of biography linking poem-to-poem here provide the reader with the historical and biographical information needed to understand the nature of each gesture. Known to many only as a visual artist, Picabia’s achievement in text is astounding. Perhaps more than any other Dada writer, Picabia stuck to his (anti-everything) guns. With so much of the current avant fields revisiting modernist techniques, Picabia proves to be a wonderful and strangely familiar monster.

Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009

Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009

Even if one ultimately found their arguments redundant, or even reductive, you need only look back at the comment fields  when this book was making the rounds to realize that it was necessary. I for one, thought it was nice to hear someone saying the obvious things with conviction, and the not so obvious with the same. That’s how conversations get started.

Judith Goldman | The Dispossessions | Atticus Finch | 2009

Seeds wreaking violence
A negative dialogue between seeds
Words do not harm each other
Looking for words [that] don’t harm each other

Stan Apps | Grover Fuel | Scantily Clad Press | 2009

As overtly political as Grover and Elmo could ever be.

Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey Press |2009

These poems have such a beautiful balance. Goddesses, cultural critique, and the body. No one else could pull off the final couplet “We put the poopy blocks / outside and then it rained” and make it feel so alive.

Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009

Kim Rosenfield | re: evolution | Les Figues Press | 2009

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocte | 2009

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams | Unpublished

For keeping me entertained this year. These are going to look great in book form.

Leslie Scalapino | It’s go in horizontal | University of California Press | 2008

A great collection, mostly excerpts from Scalapino’s longer sequences. The only downside is you’ll just go and buy the full books.

Maurice Burford and Jess Rowan | [prithee] | Abraham Lincoln | 2009

I know nothing about these poets, but I loved this chapbook. I pondered about their process and source-texts for so long I almost missed that these absurd, wild-frontier love poems are a pleasure to read.

The Conseuences of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics ed. Craig Dworkin | Roof Books | 2008

This book covers a lot of the core issues being raised in/by contemporary poetics. There’s not a bad essay here.

Slavoj Zizek | On Belief | Violence | First as Tragedy, Then as Farce| 2009

It’s been fifty years since Breathless shook things up in the cinema world, and Jean-Luc Godard, who hits seventy-nine today, is still going strong. The most recent of his films to see release in the U.S. were 2001′s In Praise of Love and 2004′s Notre Musique. Surprisingly enough, these two films are among his most elegant, haunting achievements. Godard’s films have become elegiac, meditative essays on everything from revolution, war, death, intellectual property right, love, sex, redemtion (everything they used to be about only less chaotic, and more focused).

This beautiful sequence from Notre Musique features Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet (who died in 2008). In the scene Darwish is interviewed by the film’s French Jewish protagonist. Their conversation circles around the notion/possibility of a “poetry of the oppressed”:  Am I the only one who finds a resonance between Darwish’s position here and that of Godard’s, the aging revolutionary artist looking back on their body of work, and the political spectrum that has hardly changed in light of it? I imagine Godard’s reflection on his former Maoist activism, and all the political potential of ’68 France, could be summed up in the words of Darwish: “I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”

I think Godard is a much wiser filmmaker than he was before, perhaps not as fun, eccentric, or irreverent, but a filmmaker who can construct complex, philosophical questions about life and art through sound and image. For anyone put off by his work in the 80′s (or for those of you who never dug the Breathless – Weekend run) I’d recommend spending some time with his recent output.

In other Godard news, it seems he has a film in the works titled Socialism, starring, among others, punk poetess Patti Smith (!?). Let’s just hope it’s not anything like her epic poem/Kevin Shield’s collaboration.

Last week I became a temporary Barnes and Nobel spokesperson. While I’m not a fan of corporate bookstores per se, I am an obsessive film collector, so when the entire Criterion Collection went on sale at barnesandnobel.com for half off their retail price, I got excited. I called people just to let them know. And yes, I put money down on it.

The majority of the films I purchased I already knew (Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Stan Brakhage’s anthology, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s collaborations with Kobo Abe) but there were a few films that I hadn’t seen and knew little about. Of the latter, the biggest surprise was the Nikkatsu Noir collection. The collection includes five films all released between ’57 and ’67, years in which Japan’s oldest movie studio, the Nikkatsu Corporation, was adapting their pallet to compete with western imports (by the late 70′s and early 80′s they would devolve into making soft porn). With titles like A Colt Is My Passport, Cruel Gun Story, and Rusty Knife it would seem hard to go wrong, but these films more than surpassed my expectations.

Take Takashi Nomura’s quite beautiful yakuza flick, A Colt Is My Passport. The film follows a hired assassin (Joe Shishido) as he plans and successfully realizes the killing of an influential mob boss (in broad daylight). After retrieving his payment from the rival gang, Shishido and his partner attempt to flee town, only to find themselves cut off at the pass and double crossed by their former employers. As the net tightens, Shishido and his partner are forced to take refuge in a seedy trucker motel that is under constant scrutiny by their would-be killers. Here they are taken in by a maid with a severe case of wanderlust (“All that’s left for me is dust and the smell of men and gasoline”). The final sequence takes place in a flat, windswept wasteland, our protagonist waiting for an onslaught with nothing more than a shotgun, a shovel, and a handmade dynamite bomb.

It really doesn’t get much better than this. Perhaps these films have simply been overshadowed by the wackier, experimental noir flicks that would come out of Japan in subsequent years (I immediately think of Suzuki’s Branded To Kill which stars none other than Joe Shishido). Suzuki’s much tamer Take Aim at the Police Van, featured here, is still a heavy hitter, but lacks the WTF moments familiar to American art house cinefiles.

P.S. –  Not to contribute to the shitstorm your life has become, but it’s too late to take advantage of the aforementioned sale. However, getting it used on Amazon ain’t too bad, and with Xmas coming up who knows? maybe somebody you share a blood line with will scoop you up a copy.

A NYT article I skimmed this afternoon stated that one in eight Americans is currently receiving food stamps. While that may seem rather grim, the article went on to reassure the public that the stigma surrounding food stamps has significantly decreased (good news for the post-grad school crowd). But not everyone is letting their excessive free time go to waste. Eric Scovel is taking full advantage of his (un)employment status and redesigning the Gnoetry Daily website. Things are already looking good, and it seems that all the old posts have survived intact.

It’s about time this change happened. Making the jump from Blogger to WordPress has not only made the page look better (no more tiny text) but has also made navigation much smoother. Now it’s easy as 3.14159265 to browse posts organized by Author or Series (say for instance Eric’s extremely enjoyable Leaves of Grass/Free Culture haiku mash-up FREE GRASS). Some thirty+ poems from my own Zapatagraphy project have ammassed themselves over the past few months there as well.

Viva Computational Poetics!