Right now I'm at work, and Boston has been shut down by the blizzard, and I'm bummed because I was hoping to give class. I've realized that other than doing hard drugs and dancing to my friends' bands, the only thing that makes me happy and want to stay alive is teaching.
My classroom is set up. I have all the parts of my lesson ready. There is pretty hipster music, the Ruby Suns, playing on the radio. The room is warm. There are no students in it.
I'm teaching myself Haitian Creole. Mwen bien, mon amie. Li fe nevez treinte di maten. That's supposed to say "I'm well, my friend. It is nine-thirty in the morning."
Poems of Sam Pink which I translated have been published by a webjournal in Chile name Cinosargo. You can download the pdf version of the journal HERE. You can read the original blog post they did with the pieces (with a really cool-looking pic of Sam Pink) HERE. Some other pieces of his which I translated are going to be published in an anthology of "escritores del norte," meaning "writers from the north." What really pumped me up about getting published by Cinosargo was that we were considered from "North America," instead of being considered "American," which is awesome because I have ingrained resentments towards the U.S.A.
After trying a bunch of times to do the proper thing and get official rights to translate poems of José María Lima, meaning I called people in Puerto Rico everyday for about a month, and have continued to send them emails, I decided to say fuck it, and have posted up again all of the translations of the man done my myself, and my dearly good friend, Alfredo Perezjurado. You can check out mine HERE and Perezjurado's HERE.
Another dear friend of mine, Marc Hennessy, makes beautiful music by using looping mechanisms. You can check out his new website HERE.
I've learned of another Puerto Rican poet who I have been enjoying much recently. His name is Salvador Villanueva, and I have been translating his stuff too. Once again, I have no rights to this, but nonetheless I am posting the translations on my Facebook page. You can out one of them, "Status Update," HERE.
And some other friends I made thanks to have being been a part of St. Dad is the band White Lung. They are going to tour the East Coast in April of this year, and I have organized my life around being able to be there for that. That means I have made sure that my classes and jobs will not interfere with my ability to be in New York City to fuck shit up while they are there too. I have also told everyone I know to go. I will continue doing this till the moment has passed. They have a really good album which came out last summer, and it is being streamed at what seems to be a big-time hipster music rag. Check out their album, "It's the Evil," HERE. Check out their webpage, which can be quite entertaining at times, HERE.
***UPDATE***
So it seems that the White Lung tour dates has changed, so I guess I'm not exactly sure when I'd be fucking shit up in NYC. They say they need help booking the tour. You can check out their tentative schedule HERE. They're going to be on tour with Nu Sensae, who also rock it. I don't believe in hype, so all I will say is that I saw them play live once in Gainesville, FL, and enjoyed it, and have listened to them on recordings, and also enjoyed that.
Some poems of mine will be included in this nice-looking journal put out by friends of mine, Ben Larson, from Farms, and Michelle Chrzanowski, whom I met because she works with Ben on these zines. Check out the zine HERE. I had a poem about my last roommate published in the previous zine they came out with, Dragon Slutz. I posted about this already but did a bad job of scanning and uploading, so I'm including that poem in this post.
My roommate, Kenny, the ghetto-dragon
Kenny is my roommate. He is a dragon.
He is a half-Puerto Rican, half-Costa Rican dragon.
Sometimes he connects me with bags of weed.
He calls it “Green” or “Haze,” depending on the quality of the moment.
These are the moments in which you can truly notice his state of being a dragon.
He inhales and blows long trails of smog from out of his snout.
The smell is not that of cheap or expensive marijuana, but of the digested bodies of white people.
We live on the lowest level of an underground lair off Dragon Lair Blvd., three stops from the train station.
The fact that it was three stops away from the train station is why I moved in.
Desperation and necessity are why I moved in.
In his cave of our lair Kenny hoards many valuables.
He has a large flat-screen TV, a queen-sized bed, a pimped-out sound system, and a water cooler.
He has weapons of fallen knights, which he shows off when he is drunk on pints of white people’s blood.
I asked him why he had so much gold under his bed yet was living here off Dragon Lair Blvd.
“This is the ghetto,” I said.
“You know me. I’ve been doing this since I’m fifteen.”
He then told me he let female dragons believe he was a mad money-making dragon.
“I be fucking all these bitches.”
I’ve yet to find out where Kenny works. He told me he did security.
I would feel secure if a dragon like Kenny were watching over me.
Sometimes Kenny, my roommate, the dragon, wakes me up with reggaeton at ten AM.
At points like that I need to leave the house.
I'm going to have a new Mr. Potato Head story published soon at Girls with Insurance. Until then you can check out the real Mr. Potato Head making an appearance on a video Madore made promoing his upcoming issue of Dispatch.
Welcome to dispatch 3.1 from disproductions on Vimeo.
**UPDATE***
The new Mr. Potato Head story, "Mr. Potato Head decides to move to a city in the northeast," has been published. Check that out HERE.
Napolnariz, a band with whom I have a lot of history with, good and bad, the band which probably means the most to me in context to my definition of punk rock, and punk rock is what I use to define a lot of things in my life, reunited to play some shows in Puerto Rico this past month. It looks like it went wild. I have spoken to Jonpol, living in Toledo, OH, on the phone, and he has confirmed that it was a wild time. Some really rad person, a person who is keeping a video diary of their sex-change process in an extremely conservative patriarchal society like Puerto Rico, has posted a video of one of my favorite Napolnariz songs, "Mariela."
***UPDATE***
I wrote an essay about what happened between me and No Bunny sometime last year. You can read that HERE.
Other than that, fuck the world!
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