Rich Baiocco

When.Love.Left.Me.Poetry.Came.Searching.And.I.Found.Things.Would.Write.Themselves.So.Long.As.I.Held.A.Pen.I’d.Feel.Lighter.When.New.Love.Came.Searching.I.Found.I.Could.Write.Nothing….I.Was.Light…And.When.Love.Left.Me.Again.Poetry.Came.Searching.I.Found.Things.Would.Write.Themselves.Away.If.I.Held.A.Pen.On.A.Scale.I’d.Weigh.Less…Only.When.Poetry.Left.Did.Loveless.Death.Come.Searching…

I don’t have enough money/Proof of Residency to get a California Driver’s license (YET) but I got a San Francisco Pubic Library card.  Even that wasn’t easy.  I had to mail myself a postcard to prove that I receive mail at my girlfriend’s adddress…I do.  I brought the librarian the postmarked postcard and I now own more Public Library cards (4) in my life than I have cell phones (3). 

Support Your Local Library. Some of them even carry rare Richard Yates short story collections that the used bookstores don’t often get.

Speaking of support, I can’t get enough of this photograph.  

I’ve seen it on a book cover before, but for some reason this wider shot just mesmerizes me.  Maybe it memorizes me, actually, and I go on auto-pilot looking at it. 

To find out who took it, and read a great essay on farm life in Nebraska, click here

~rjb

Are you much that surprised to learn

     an automobile will be the death 

          of you?  Even after all the Warhol

Crash worship imagery and industrial psychology,

     damage on the family plan, I’m lost in S.F.

          Now & Found a whole

Highway quaked and collapsed like an upset toddler: The 

     Better Judgement City, fogged; The City Of

          iSmartcarphones By The Bay.

Just this morning while recklessly jaywalking

     the intersection of a woman 

          snipping her chin hair with a cat nail clipper—

Barely gripped wheel of the Prius she steered

     straight up my ass—and the screeching halt, iShit

          my pants seeing God through cheap sunglasses.

My Love, I Do Not Mind Waiting 

For You These 2 Weeks,

This Whole Summer,

My Haunted Year of Sleepless Nights, Aching.

For I Mend In My Aching &

You Will Come When I Stop Waiting.

2 Weeks Slip By

In A Season,

And The Dawns Of An Entire Year—

Like Olympian Discs Ablaze Beneath Peach Fleece—

Collect In One, Brilliant

Welcome

I started reading Please Kill Me, again out here in San Fran.  Iggy is unstoppable.  So are the Dee Dee and Richard Hell sections.  And the Patti Smith.  Well, the whole book is in my top 10, if that means anything to you.  Really gossipy and really greasy.  A hybrid iteration of Truman Capote and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Read it.  And as Iggy says “keep going and things will get better. Don’t give up.”  Don’t Give Up

~rjb

Iggy Pop::  On my twenty-first birthday we opened for Cream.  I had spent the day transporting a two-hundred-gallon oil drum from Ann Arbor to Detroit so that we could put a contact mic on it and Jimmy Silver would hit it on the one beat of our best song.  I got it up the three flights of stairs into the Grande Ballroom, by myself, and then we discovered that our amps didn’t work. And when we went out onstage everybody yelled, “We want Cream! We want Cream!  Get off, we want Cream!”

I’m standing there, having taken two hits of orange acid, going, “Fuck you!”  It was one of our worst gigs ever.

I went back to Dave Alexander’s house with him.  I was heartbroken. I thought, My god, this is twenty-one? This is it? Things are just not going well.  

Dave’s mom served me a cheeseburger with a candle in the middle of it.  The idea was to keep going and things would get better.  Don’t give up.

Between “Bankrupt On Selling” and “Talking Shit About A Pretty Sunset” I can always center myself

bartschaneman:

There’s something about Modest Mouse when shit is fucked up that is undeniable.

From the AFRICA section of Jerome Rothenberg’s amazing TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED, found in my girlfriend’s bookshelf, which I guess now is my bookshelf by acquisition. I came out to San Francisco with only 4 books: 1) The Art Spirit by Robert Henri which I’ve written about here before and highly recommend whether you paint or not. Greatest book on ‘noticing’ I’ve ever read, which can help any writer. 2) Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie. 3) Please Kill Me oral history of NY Punk and rock scene compiled by Legs Mcneil 4) King Rat, lent to me by my girlfriend but I haven’t read it yet. Has anyone? Thoughts?

~rjb

The Train (by Hurutshe)

Iron thing coming from Pompi, from the round-house
Where Englishmen smashed their hands on it,
It has no front it has no back.
Rhino Tshukudo going that way.
Rhino Tshukido no, coming this way.
I’m no greenhorn, I’m a strong, skillful man.
Animal coming from Pompi, from Moretele.
It comes spinning out a spider’s web under a cloud of gnats
Moved by the pulling of a teat, animal coming from Kgobola-diatla
Comes out of the big hole in the mountain, mother of the great woman,
Coming on iron cords.
I met this woman of the tracks curving her way along the river bank and over the river.
I thought I’d snatch her
So I said
“Out of the way, son of Mokwatsi, who stands there at the teat.”
The stream of little red and white birds gathered up all of its track
Clean as a whistle.
Tshukudo over the dry plains
Rhino Tshukudo out of the high country
Animal from the south, steaming along
It comes from Pompi, the round-house, from Kgobola-diatla.

First 24 hours back in California and I know already I’m a different person. Last time I lived here was 5 years ago—San Diego—and i was terrified of how my body had chosen to live itself. Never sleeping, booze in the worst and least social way, too many pills, desperate to avoid confronting myself, missing everyone and everything to death, crying speechlessly behind the darkest, cheapest sunglassses I could find. There was no respite, no relief, and no safe word. I yelled ‘“UNCLE! UNCLE!” but the slow stranglehold never released, and my uncle was in prison in Florida for something he was too ashamed to admit to me except in letters that he post scripted: stay in touch with your Aunt, she doesn’t believe me when I say I did these things for her. What scared me most about my situation was that it started off so great.

Ended up washed out on the shores of north Pacific Beach, mouthful of broken seashells and jeans, shirt and sneakers soaking wet and weaved with seaweed from a midnight mission I couldn’t remember. I’d run out of love. I’d written a book and run out of words. I couldn’t cope with criticism, the stories I thought I wrote FOR my friends turned out being perceived as betrayals, and I was some sort of traitor which was a total mind fuck, but a good early writing lesson.

Things were bleak because they were always ending. I ate a burrito and I thought, this is the last burrito I will ever eat. I took an airplane and said I will die on this plane. Same with saying goodnight to friends in town. Same with finding some girl out drinking: it was always the last sweet sex, the last sweet girl I’d talk to, then disappear on.

But 24 hours back in California and I know I’m a different person. The city is big but not at all intimidating, and you dont need a car to get everywhere like southern california. I think of a poem and I can write a poem. There’s no struggle in that sense, in getting lost in the chasm between what I feel and what I fake. I struggle in other ways now, and that’s fine.

I’m here and it’s a beginning, it feels like a beginning, even if it doesn’t last forever it will take me someplace else. I wrote mostly about New York City since I started this tumblr, and now I’ll be writing about San Francisco for a while. Any other artists in the Bay area on tumblr? Get at me. Page St and Octavia.

~rjb

Just left the green heat of South East Texas and while I was there read in a magazine the best oral history ever written on the country music movement lead by WIllie Nelson that relocated the good shit from Nashville’s declining strings—adorned—RCA—Chet Atkins controlling sound to Austin’s burgeoning drug realist sound.  Some people call it Outlaw Country but I always thought that name was pretty lame.  

This Lonestar kid I kicked it with the last few days, Ryan Boy Abernathy, gave me some songs he thought I’d like so I figured I’d share them with you.  WARNING: They may take the edge off what ails you

• “L.A. Freeway”  Guy Clark
• “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?”  Waylon Jennings
• “Luckenbach, Texas”  Waylon Jennings
• “Cosmic Cowboy Pt. 1” Michael Murphey
• “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain” Willie Nelson
• “Shotgun Willie” Willie Nelson
• “(Is Anybody Going To) San Antone” Doug Sahm And Band
• “Help Me Make It Through The Night” Sammi Smith
• “My Maria” B.W. Stevenson
• “HIll Country Rain” Jerry Jeff Walker

Album-wise, wouldn’t hurt to get into Waylon Jennings play the songs of BIlly Joe Shaver on Honky Tonk Heroes or anything from Willie Nelson between/including Yesterday’s Wine and Red Headed Stranger. Geronimo’s Cadillac is another weird record by Michael Murphey, Kris Kristopherson was on the scene covering Marcia Ball’s “Me & Bobby McGee”, that Jerry Garcia band Old & In The Way were coming around with one of my favorite songs ‘Lonesome L.A. Cowboy’, The Rolling Stones were writing ‘Dead Flowers’ and soon Townes would start playing out too.  Weird, sleepy, druggy time in music history but…

~rjb

This girl is always posting interesting things.  follow ‘whiskeyleaks’— if you don’t know, now you know

whiskeyleaks:

couer / heart: This word refers to all kinds of movements and desires, but what is constant is that the heart is constituted intoa gift-object—-whether ignored or rejected.

You wait for me where I do not want to go: you love me where I do not exist. Or again: the world and I are not interested in the same thing; and to my misfortune, this divided thing is myself; I am not interested in my mind: you are not interested in my heart.

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments; The Heart

Be Scared Of Whats

To Be Scared Of But

Whats To Be Scared 

Of Today?

Really.

Chipping A Tooth On Other Peoples Opinions Of Youth Or Your

Own Kind Of Fun? Fear Is There—

Material For The Chop Shop Hustle 

To Ghostride A Silver Morning From A Nightmare Clunker—

& My Favorite Smile Is The Toothless Punk Who

Boxed 15 Minutes With The Schoolyard Muscle

When All The Haters Bet She Wouldn’t Even Show. 

Dont Give A Damn 

About Gas Price Inflation,

Practically A Shut-In.

Anyway Walk Everywhere.

Feed Family: Soups,

Support Neighborhood Shops.

Friends Close To Vest.

Who Needs Wallyworld?

If I Could Care Less

Would Not Suggest

Electric City Tram.

…Maybe Public Horse.