Two events 23 hours apart, nearly back to back! Tony Towle and friends. December 2, 8:00 p.m. Poetry Project at St. Mark's, 131 E. 10th Street. John Ashbery. December 3, 7 p.m. Vanderbilt Hall, Tishman Auditorium, 40 Washington Square South.

Another "event" worth squeezing in now or between Wednesday and Thursday, Brian Kenny, ongoing exhibit, at briankenny.

Scenes of Venus and Dutch towns, there's a hydrangea boat and it's sinking. This is my office. Welcome. I'm writing about it, not just doing something. I taper the next new visually inevitable thing and select for gameness. A deep-seated specialist would work with genres and forms and play something interdisciplinary; I see beyond impertinence and scars. Um, ok, yes, ma'am. I've misspelled the signs. I got a procedure to make it better, sham wildflowers, a few with a weird, obscure bounce, and fuchsia spurge past the goalpost. I'm on an errand stream to a structualist's degree, undone by a commensurate for another time, a serener surface.

Politics and the dignity of appearances don't mix. (The financial industry is just noticing.) Nothing personal, this is the sustained concussion version. Well, I'm politicized and hysterical reading and writing for my slot on Fox owned, I'll say for charity's sake, by Comedy Central. By owned I mean kneed in the head, puked on, and rendered paranoid. So... as I write for charity... you could say... I also give in involuntarily for what's not available, for recondite sentiments, for the boink of whinnying for pleasure. Or I cry when it becomes fashionable. I credit everything on the surface without a message. I'll trade you.

In this age of taking the left and lefties on the chin, the ripe and sour, there's a new self-help book, Fisting Birch, and it goes on in just one vein, that of the hegemony of rhomboids handing out welfare checks, and above that there's a patchwork of cities, breaks in the traffic, and social critics. Ms Class Wars is the author, and she asks too many questions. To crest any divide between us I'm turning over this and that in the notes. In this she incants, "Can a straight man be svelte? I don't think so. That's why I'm eating John Boehner, within the hour, in the duplex. We're extremist soul mates, radical and best friends." She trails off from there, the smallest of minorities on top of a wide, floating head. That of all the absent-minded. I truly woke up at this point and decided there's more to liberal politics than being pro-slob.

My hands are too scared of rejection. I admonish my thin limbs. With the economy beginning to double-tier, I'm talking among summoned spoils we're scheduled to garner. It's looking like this is the rag century for risk aversion. Incoming, a mock-up animation, idiot access, and fear impressions. The worst part is our time has come, introverts.

Witless v. gutless, this is our daily fare, our salt and pepper, the full flavor spectrum to wearying political tactics and rhetoric from Republicans and Democrats, respectively. Only a few months ago we woke up repeatedly to morning news with the "up or down vote" mantra playing in the audio backdrop, chafing thematics for Republican senators to conjugate their battles against majority rule for George Bush's often offensive judicial nominees. Same senators today push for supermajorities on mostly every vote that matters to Democrats, because Republicans can do this with impunity — Democrats lack the rhetoric to reset the direction of Republicans' sloganeering, much less to counter with the up or down option available if health care reform legislation, for example, were redubbed budget reconciliation. Democrats could try this, but fear setting a precedent for ramming through controversial, once-in-a-generation reform. Sadly yet quite predictably, they are losing the perception game, perhaps the only game that registers in politics, not to mention political reform. While Democrats argue substantively about thin slices of public options and eliminating women's rights, they battle among themselves, making what they do and do not do appear petty. Republicans are seen as witless by some but unquestionably they are above the fray, throwing spitballs and a few boulders in every direction that's down. Some perceive Republicans as gutsy and, for now, that conjugates well enough.

Meantime, in concert with appearing petty as well as catastrophically dumb, the government has triggered the closing of The Washington Blade, an influential gay weekly. The Small Business Administration has taken away funds from the parent company that evidently did not qualify under SBA rules. Sister (and brother) publications will also be put to rest. Conjugate that.

As the zeitgeist has it, Kent Johnson is our on-again-off-again least-favored-by-the masses schlock detector. Exhibit over at digital emunction, Kent points to flarf, points a few times. He draws tangential lines of argument about a group (flarf is both a jelly mold and a gang, right?) of oozers of youth and cred beyond their years that, together, youth and cred, sell me they know what they do and they know better. Kent's unsold. That's acceptable to a degree. He's old like me. (I'm bald also. Kent would be better looking bald.) His conclusions attribute faults to flarf strategy and muddle the details: flarfists' rep for bad manners; flarf's derivative stature — cookie-cutting from the dada playlist, on one hand — its awful-makes-it-great (un)originality, theoretically-constructed from Perloff and Goldsmith, on the other; group equivocation toward and against any salience that might attach to achievements. The latter is ambivalent, intellectually rude, and cool. I say Kent hates ambivalence. He's old. I shall stay The Other to Kent by my consuming flarf for what it says and what it says it says, and then like others I'll blog about it to look bad, cool, current. We who follow flarf in the consensus it maneuvers are all about and over the airports of language, socked in, high up in the control towers of imbibing, ex-pilots, stewards, and passengers, dicking around and getting dicked to have a good time and to be shown one more shade in the rapture of oppression and Cartesian circumstance than one might have looked up before. Before people in 2012 dicked us, even. Most of this will happen again in 2012, by the way. It's likely the nation's next black president will be Barrack Obama. It's thaumaturgy, and it ages fast. He'll be as old as we are, maybe late fifties. A daughter of the president will age two decades, another miracle; she's now an art conservator in the global art consortium, an unmarried foil to a sensational young Obama-like black science adviser to the president. Art and science find one another on Air Force One flying to China to board a Staten Island-sized lifeboat (which is also a love boat, for them), leaving the president (her father, his boss) behind while the aged Obama presence searches for a missing person on the White House lawn, standing in for Diogenes until a tsunami, the biggest of the year, whips up propelling the USS John F. Kennedy to roll over DC, killing the president and his entire staff, save one cabinet member who is also on Air Force One and now the acting president, yet lacking the virility (and authority) of the young Obama because all year the science adviser has been smoldering, warning about the earth's heated crust and the wounds to come. The acting president is old. Has a strange, almost vampiric mien like Kent. Everyone close to the acting president, everyone but the young Obama-like science adviser, is Kent's age or older, as well. That's why 2012 is as exemplary as any time like now when younger practitioners of the arts deploy techniques like those of recidivists, speaking up to and for seniors and the old-new (awful-great) ways. Exhibit young Obama: physically showing up in India to uncover within an abandoned mineshaft the first boiling neutrinos (irrefutable scientific evidence!) to prove the earth is headed toward cataclysm — is this not irony adjured, a trope for googling within the new media to attain the data and the measure of the ancients, lexical juxtaposition and summoned lyric? Or how would one otherwise explain why the species is yet saved in 2012 when young Obama dashes from the subcontinent back to DC in twenty hours (sweat-soaked, without sleep!) to bring the bad news to old Obama that we might all be lost, news that might have been otherwise twittered in twenty seconds — can't this be construed as externalized internal strife, that of old v. new (un)originality, singleton v. collective production, strife that if left unresolved will bring about last days? It takes very little in the end, despite all the frolic and banjo-strumming that Kent resents, to see the higher purpose assigned to flarf as it goes out and about perfuming the stadium, filling the air with marauding psalms and lots of free stuff.

Find us in facebook. Then?

Often I sleep and dream about activated sludge given immunity. It's a horrid erotic enterprise and a pathetic conceit, but in one episode I could count my chickens on my fingers, fingers of one... Your hand got in its say, that is, to say it eliminated all that fuss, locked it inside. Anyway. I took your hand. Took it in, to heart. Not every detail was ready for the Hong Oaks section, home base, but the brass knuckles worked. You know, a hand is clueless about vertically integrated opulence, like cut-away brinkmanship set in the anonymous life deliberately made up to look boring, made up to think or to look as if it thinks it doesn't need a hand crossing The White River to skip dinner, coming through splinters of clouds and low pressure peeled back from summer, tenuous, jutting fingers into the interstate that brings you and me to Hong Oaks.

To recap, I don't think life thinks or can be made up.

And my chickens got counted despite my never getting the hang of it. I'm not worried, it gets easier.

I'm in periodic
I can't get it to
gether. Scooped out of
of about a minute
for French bashing
and the score will be set
tled, the last artifact
treated badly, worse
sunsetted or grand
fathered atonally. The
St. Pauli with bitters
in a flood of a strum
Ida... the shadowing
violet and motivated by
prodigy gracing the lost
fan magnets' wonder
ing if life as it is might
happen. I'd done the
drawing, and finished,
it's hideous, recoiling at
closed-circuit put an
ad on and shot
right back, clangorous,
indistinctly pounded
down the travel
pillow. Paddled by
a comic affair
watching moving men
reminders have that
never goes away.

My point is close
but the celebration bowl
blew up really fast. Who
is this Ricky G? Lickety
split it became
a shovelful then none,
a potato to dust,
to walk away from. G
said breathing over
raw nerves is an ordinary
perfect gift. So now I'm
defending your dissertation
from a childbed of sneaky
sang-froid. The inequities
of a flight of means
to an end of uncertainties.

Most adherents develop synthetic self-containment to face future life. It's in Order Two, by natural selection the gradual student refuses to settle in opposing viewpoints, to take local politics down to its roots, the lessons of Vietnam. For example, what, exactly, did we learn? Never let the creatures surface is one thing. Or nothing. You need to leverage the freaks to get ahead. Year after year we heal them and ourselves, each cell in the body spun out of starboard. Cells are factories and why we come back factory owners. One says the seas of government are misinformed. One says what another means which is never. We are the people running out of time.

I don't know where to take my politics. Maybe to that one in six of us. Seveteen percent and a fraction are underemployed or not working. The ten point two percent official rate of unemployment is only the measurable upper brush. Shameless, timid Dems are mostly silent, waiting for the infrastructure stimulus to rub out growth in unemployment, "Dr Formica, make it go away." Or perhaps my rant should go out to every woman of a certain income unable to choose because new rules forbid a subscriber to individual or small business insurance schemes to elect to have an abortion paid by her plan. Or better to take it to traitorous Joseph Lieberman, champion of every military spending bill since he's been in DC, who now declaims future indebtedness dubiously attributable to a public option as his 'matter of conscience' to justify blocking the Senate vote on health care and insurance reforms. I'm anti-crummy-politics today, moving on to going away to integrate other moods.

I've got goals. I'm an anthologist of agitprop. I think it's colossal. It gives me a boost as a lifelong intellectual. I'm party central when I have to be, too. But not when friends are struggling then flattened intentionally. (There is too much to go back to.) The hilly, glitter-draped lawns on this side of the divide are actual circumstances at twilight I prefer to canvass and peruse for my wine Ph.D. I'm looking for novel jitters from others. There aren't any, so it's out on the town looking for the perfect spot to brush up on my visual grammar of the assault on the deep.

Maine rejects gay betrothal. So. These are my last thoughts before we get married.

There's something I haven't told you. I'm passionate about what's right in front of me, captain, sire, I jog to burn, between teaser and trailer I'll speak up on your behalf. It's a tonic!

Look, we're all in a fix hungering for vibe trays and signature seacoasts. So. I'm still wanting to fine-tune Portland, our metropolis, shoulder to shoulder lead a band rendering old murder ballads. My emotions are definitive.

Poolside let's get the most out of facial expressions, shoulders hiked nice and high. Certain tainted instincts pose problems, forcing adjustments in religious observance. I love Maine. My fix, my ocean with hummingbirds. They seem to be singing our radical opera, so I'm alarmist coming out in the axis of abiding intimacy, creating a vogue for cold saltwater. But this is an ocean of air.

Paranormal Activity is a slick one-trick pony of pleasure waiting (90 minutes) to happen. We are one with the fidgeting self-tormented audience, substantial on Halloween night six weeks after the film's release, locked in a horrible grown-up abstraction, a brutally underdecorated three-bedroom townhouse anywhere in the suburbs, sequestered with Katie and Micah, Paranormal Activity's faunlike targets. Micah has turned himself into a player within the play, a film documentarian, poking an oversized camera in Katie's haunted direction whenever he can get away with it and even when he can't. Micah has time on his hands, having recently earned his associate's from a college annex next to Costco, I suspect; Katie still crams to get hers, and her unease about study is one pretext for the ample albeit unfocused Angst und Furcht built into the relationship even before Demon shows up. Demon is the third rail, a whiff of a character, though, because it never shows itself (as we wish it would) in skeletal, college-age, buff bodily form. Through old technology, time-lapsed shoots, Demon nonetheless effects its wickedness on Katie, making her queen bed a hellish lair and, inevitably through Katie, switching Micah's camera and Micah off. A fourth character, a middle-aged ghost buster with no "expertise" in demons, does a couple of walk-ons for comic extension, a simulacrum of the old guys and their outside perspective. Paranormal Activity argues in a word that there is no outside. There is only what's inside, which is perpetually immature, disgusting, and repulsive. Our mise en scène then is barely fit for longterm observation, deliriously unpleasing, Beckettian. Unlike Beckett, the film advances not through language but through hilarious and (obligatory) cheesy time lapses in which plain speech and narrative continuity become incrementally burdensome. Forty minutes into it, we want Katie and Micah to stop talking. Twenty minutes later we want them to explode, to be free of the metaphysics and misery waged inside a film that's stuck inside us, as it were. Happily, after one more midnight, two weeks or so into the narrative, with only a little time-lapsed hoot in the shadows to prepare us, Katie does a full-body thrust into Micah's camera, hurling Micah's cadaver right at us, doing the trick and the favor we had been waiting for. Catharsis. Psychic healing. Unpolished youth transformed into the next thing.