Am confused. Just having to capture the logic of America's recovery and reinvestment saga will do this to you. Barack Obama sponsors a stimulus that will take up to $900 billion or so, a big plan; he gets House democrats to draft it and they do, without republicans, but as a gesture to once-and-future (they hope) kissing cousins the dems toss in $300 billion in tax cuts; Obama pours tea and coffee for John Boehner ("o my god") and John McCain ("country first") to massage them coming onboard yet, thank you, they exit fleeing in the other direction; something's going awry for days after as Obama watches opinion polls slip for his plan while he's forced to defend nominees under fire for past-due taxes ... just as opponents find their voice defining the plan as pork; meantime, to bring a new level of crossed purposes into view, yesterday Senate compromisers, 'centrist' democrat Ben Nelson and 'moderate' republican Susan Collins, try their hands at stripping funds from the plan for state and local governments, education, Amtrak, cutting the plan by $100 billion; Obama flies Air Force One for 30 minutes last night to Williamsburg, VA to campaign among partisans (House democrats who have already approved the plan), but this is more a public relations initiative to appeal to the broader base of American voters, no doubt seeding new misgivings among moderates and centrists in Congress, making compromise all the more elusive; the jobless rate rises today to 7.6%. The jump in unemployment will bring democrats and maybe a couple of republicans back to the stark reality of economic collapse, according to the journalistic script, and Obama will have his stimulus with or without bipartisan support. We'll see. If so, the debate then moves to whether this has been (a) truly a bipartisan outreach on Obama's part and (b) whether bipartisanship is worth the effort. That self-involved debate colors our politics for days or weeks and distracts us from preparing for new havoc in international banking and commerce, much higher unemployment here, new US financial rules (negotiated with China), more stimulus talk, less healthcare reform talk, incremental (and minimum) green energy investments, government securitizing mortgages to benefit the system (mortgage lenders), republican gains in 2010. Am confused.

Here are 8 random things about me and how I hide my bad taste in anime music videos. These are tricks I recommend with an iPod or any personal videoplayer.

1. Smoothbore ambush. When listening to The Wiggles, I pocket my instrument and walk briskly around the office or living room so the sound isn't restricted to one area and everyone else gets a piece but doesn't know where it came from. You have to be careful when you do this. Don't stop until the full playlist, including Kill You by Dethklok, has been expelled from your pants.

2. Focused fly-by. I scout out an area in the office or my housing situation before firing up Taarna and Sammy Hagar. I walk around and check for other anime addicts. If there are any, I leave and come back again after lunch.

3. Courtesy flush. I run to the nearest bathroom and flush the toilet once Lupin the Third starts. This reduces the amount of airtime the video has to stink up the office or apartment.

4. Walk around in denial, banter. This works when you're "alone-together" (housemates or colleagues out of sight, in the wings). The instant I select favorite I also begin talking to myself; I try walking from the sofa or chair, to a nearby window, then to a doorway checking if anyone is coming in; and I repeat the cycle while Steal Princess, Rogue's Whip keeps playing. This can be a calamitous strategy if a Demon Puff shows up and tries to bust me. It's best then to pretend Steal Princess does not exist.

5. The Demon Puff. If someone at home or at work doesn't realize I'm in my own space and tries to force the door open while Petting College Girls is fast forwarding, I remain where I am until the Demon Puff leaves. This is one of the most shocking and vulnerable moments when watching personal anime where others lurk. If you stick to your guns and stay put, however, Demon Puff will get the message, and you will avoid uncomfortable eye contact.

6. No big deal. You're in a very public place, an elevator or hallway, for example. You accidentally press the arrow for Mighty Ravendark and several loud notes slip out at a machine gun pace. Don't panic. Turn the horned almighty down or off and remain where you are until everyone else exits. This way you'll spare everyone the awkwardness of what just happened.

7. Cough cough. A phony cough alerts all new entrants into my area that I'm watching Persona 4. This can be used to cover-up The Murders, Transfer Student, Rainy Midnight, and Yellow World.

8. Work those toes. A subtle toe-tap can be used to signal potential Demon Puffs that you are occupied. This will remove all doubt who's in the shadow of the Darkthrone.

Brain damage is in the eyes. Brain trust damage, too. You can spot the bounce in his retinas when Barack Obama screws up and he's forced to deflect our attention. In retrospect, hadn't it been clear to transition executives, the real screwballs, a criterion for the New Ethics in Government would be to pay taxes? A sprawl of voices in my head congratulates our leftist colleagues on The NY Times editorial board for tackling this huge moral hazard, issuing marching orders to Tom Daschle. It's not every day (we don't think) we'll have the chance to see the liberal media, under the guise of objectivity, do the heavy lifting for big pharma and the investor class. As the story line shifts incrementally from hope to doubt, capitalists and their playthings, the media, including The Times, are out to inflict further damage and bring Obama down a notch. Limo service and chauffeur taxes aside, we were told Daschle was uniquely qualified to steer health care reform through Congress. This no longer applies. Submit a caption: Obama screwed up, a cartoon pattern that is beginning to hold in public reception to his recovery-stimulus package now under repair in the Senate. Meanwhile, Obama asserts that this is not a time for profits and big bonuses. In turn, the same government-subsidized forces of hypocrisy that feign outrage at Daschle's $140,000 tax snafu are pissing in their Snuggies over Obama's order to limit bailed-out bankers to $500,000 salaries. Cable news loudmouths, like Jim Cramer, who earn high incomes at the behest of capitalists demur. For sure, Obama's salary cap is nothing substantive, another deflection. It's an overtly populist appeal from Obama, symbolic medicine to go along with more bounce in the retina to unscrew the damage.

A good number. Come to think of it, among the poets I love, for real, a good number of them are ex-Catholics and/or dyed in the wool Buddhists. Same with those I love at a distance, like Ryan Trecartin (see below), George Romero, and John Waters. (I don't know if Cindy Sherman is or ever was a practicing anything; her opus is Buddhistic.) The hysteria in all their works has religion, a matter of faith that fades away or dies. Once there was something out there (childhood?) swelling up around these guys, and in early sexual encounters it got intense, surged, and took off, causing more illogic and internal hysteria to pour up but mostly plunge, embarrassing and yet it's a rocking house party, like losing both death and life, dropping your pants, breaking water gushing down on your legs and heels and further down under the ground. In those terms, there are the visual poets I've mentioned, singling out Ryan Trecartin however for special mention, because he has poetry, he just wants to stylize your head for his online, to match his vision — here's another clip, labeled I-Be Area (Pasta Locker to JAmie's Area), to back this up further.

In addition to the visual poetry of filmmakers and photograhers, there is a textual poetry of hysteria brought on by religious fervor cum death. It could be, come to think of it, this is the only strain of genuine American romance. Obviously, I'm not talking about a soiled grab bag category like American sublime. I'm thinking about a Lost Sublime That's Dead to the Touch. Maybe, alternatively, The Fucked Pioneer. It might start with Emily Dickinson, just as American sublime does, but it takes us subterraneously to darker, greener, more wholesale hells and chat rooms we like to think of as ours, now.

Poets George Romero, Cindy Sherman, John Waters — each to the utmost of her paradigm, concepts, pep, and atomized abilities has come up with visual info that's more compelling than data we poets capture, re-capture, and/or write down as text. (Double dare: prove me wrong.) Add to the visual poets list video artisan Ryan Trecartin, featured in the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure. He pulls off the splintered equivalent of tribal truth-telling in this short clip from I-Be Area. There's nothing in poetry today that comes close, nothing that can declare and convey, I'm not allowed to play because of my past...uncontrollable forces. Yes. What can I do? I know how I feel now...I am waking up. I'm on your side. I am temporary.

Chuck in 3-D. You're off the island.

Two-faced Janus has exited with a sneer pointed in the direction of bright persons of certain merit and acquired outlook, cut-and-pasters, textual connectivists, and other dedicated tech practitioners of The Craft. Irate avantists had to persevere for up to an hour Saturday without recourse to Google as their usual, trusty search engine / comp bot / wing man broke down this morning, issuing bogus safety alerts and dead hyperlinks to hungry appropriation artists, e-poets in need of stump words, and anyone else looking for a fast fix of text off the web. "I don't know how I can take a risk right now without Google," said Emile Durkheim while the search engine went offline, "I have that sinking feeling going from plagiarized distortion to distorted plagiarism. You know, plagiarism in quotes." Durkheim, an e-list updater and, along with his life partner W. S. F. Pickering, author of innumerable pamphlets, t-shirts, and graphic hand towels developed from mining the internet, is prominent among a growing number of arts bookers and administrators dependent on internet tools not only to communicate but also to be. Tension lifted by Saturday afternoon once Google pulled strings and re-fired tubes giving new hope to the discourse-starved aggragated in all quarters and sectors on the planet where WiFi and everything coming through it are person-given rights of artistic personhood.

I'm marking the update, along with the comment box and links to four additional posts by Gabe Gudding, as archival material in the mon-Bourdieu-outdiscourses-you ______. (The blank requires your filling in a noun phrase, such as translational kerfluffle.) All together, the update contributes to the debate about everything phoned in in poetics. As does this from Anne Boyer.

Paid to be friendly.
At the center an oculus. The I.
Moving forward.

I admire Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale for it's serious humoresque, not entirely self-knowing. Much of the wit submerged in cunning queasiness, vapors of unbalanced tones and transparent methods, it finds a ratio of constitutive disharmonies, method and tone sticking out unobsequiously to enfold showmanship within an immediate and addictive bearing on the present. V. Joshua Adams captures impressions like these and raises only a small measure of doubt about their utility in Chicago Review.

Worth a mention. Segue Reading w/ Eileen Myles, Rodrigo Toscano, Christina Strong, Laura Sims, Lawrence Griffin, Rick Burkhardt, Thom Donovan, others. Launch of Cannot Exist #4. The notice reads, in part, that the zine, edited by Andy Gricevich, is "devoted to overlap between politics, philosophy, and poetry." Who doesn't need overlap?

Bowery Poetry Club
Sat., Jan. 31, 4 to 6, 308 Bowery

Internet Aliens

Ballet's focus keeps an eye out
Watching us spin like sentience
Stuck in the happy medium

Sweetness itself catching everything
To give cause to baby Mozart
Squawking about cognition in opera

Who's moved parts from minor projects
Observing very little community,
Clumsifying long hours of letting be

Freezing hands into claws, which
Is why he should reserve dissonance
To guard shapes of light and volumes

Nested within a keyboard to determine
The performance.

The Washington Post will kill its Sunday book pull-out in a couple of weeks. Further proof of the diminution of print media. Artless reduction for figure and ground, newspapers and books.

To recap. The gotcha moments. Banter about an e-list, some of whose members lay claim to procedures and attitudes that thousands* already got. The commonplace as ribald proprietorship. Steps one, two, three, four, five.

*Gabe Gudding suggests the range is dozens. Gabe may be right if we were to stipulate procedures in sets or as an ensemble to describe a process, but the broader point is web-mining is a discernible practice for a number of poets, not just a few on an e-list or two; using the internet to cull vocabulary, shift tonal registers, elaborate and emend text has been a widely adapted process feature for a number of years. As for attitudes, there is no critical evidence that argues for anything new or exclusive in this regard.

George Schneeman, RIP.

Are they saying the same thing? Chögyam Trungpa intones First thought, best thought; George Balanchine, Don't think, just do. Both mean and don't mean what they say in specific contexts. The meaning / no-meaning problem buries itself in applications: a first thought in Trungpa's belief system is already problematic in that thinking (or not-thinking), even when it's "first," impedes being (and other incidents not attached to being); while Balanchine wants physical movement to function over, far above mental representation of movement, but one thinks on the way up to execution. Both statements — first thought, don't think — are fine examples of the layers in which meaning deploys non-meaning and, of course, simultaneous perception of opposite outcomes.

George Perle, RIP.

Dream within limits. What do we do here at pantaloons? We tease out opinions on how language gets done in poetics, poetry, politics, other redeeming or nutty enterprises. We ply language for several affects. We're not so interested in dreams. But once in a while we can't help ourselves, like this morning when we woke from a flash within a dream of such gruesome practicality we were distressed. I was, somehow, in search of tortured performance glamour, visiting a nice sports-transition store. No deeper pretext or prelude. I am in this nice, really dark place. The lights were out. But there I was casually shopping along with other guys. The shop was like Under Armor where mannequins, staff, and customers match up wearing comfortable, form-fitting shirts and sweats and sometimes jackets pulled a quarter inch back, almost off their collarbone, not to flex but to suggest upper body development. In other words, there are steadfast figures and outlines but nothing shows. The men have eyes and the mannequins don't move. That kind of carefully lunatic store. What am I doing here in this economy? That was what I was thinking as I picked out five pairs of socks. A pointillist grey pair, two pair in enlarged, graduated chocolate pixels, and a couple of pairs in black, one with a hint of a blacker digital plaid overlay. Everything was going to blend with my other clothes. (So what was the point, acquistion-wise?) The total came to under $200. Dreamers can translate the effects of geopolitical transparency into overlapping layers of desire, textured fantasy, aimless expectation. We call this shopping.

Recent film notes.

Burn after Reading

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Milk

Quantum of Solace

Rachel Getting Married

Slumdog Millionaire

Twilight

Wall-e

You cannot outlast us. That's the sound bite. Obama's been reading intelligence briefs and signals to us, sternly, there's more mayhem to come. He's not frightening us, he's stating the position clearly. Terrorists are out there and we have them surrounded, we win no matter, no apologies for what we are or how we live. A male dare packed into somber oratory about reclamation and the journey. At the moment we thought he might soar, Obama chose to tamp down the language. Emphasis on work, government that works. Responsibility. Common dangers. Swill and blood stains in the snow. George Washington crossing the Delaware for Christ's sake. Icy currents for four years.

~~

Competing egos from Harvard Law. Chief Justice Roberts overstepping bounds, Are you ready...senator? Roberts was not gracious, interrupting Obama when he began the oath at a point where Roberts had paused, forcing Obama to start over. Roberts twisting the word order of the middle part, misplacing the adverb faithfully, administering the oath without the text, a fabulously flawed performance.

~~

Senators Byrd and Kennedy, dueling invalids.

~~

A review stand that emptied well before the middle of the inaugural parade. Obama, his wife, and Biden stood alone. On television you could read the names of the guests that fled the cold. Signs on chair backs for "The Joint Chiefs" were prominent.

--

Beyond discussion: inaugural poem, Rick Warren's Christian invocation, Joseph Lowery's racy benediction, John Williams's schmaltzy "Air and Simple Gifts" (though it was good to hear the players, particularly Anthony McGill).

Improbable hat, Aretha.