the LA scene: part 1

It's about time to write something from LA.

Last night Mary and I went to our first reading. It was at Beyond Baroque, a literary arts center and chapbook archive in what was once Town Hall in Venice. We walked there. On the way we stopped at a little J-boutique looking for shoes for me and all we found were the "latest style" from Japan, this from the proprietor who said we were very welcome even though they'd closed an hour before. Les Figues, a local press, was featured. Most of the stuff was utter nonsense and/or gobbledegook. I don't know enough about poetry to tell which. Fortunately, the person we were there to see was kickass, and read her poems in French and English. Except for the fact that most of the people seemed to be in a good mood, it was like any other reading I've ever been to. It ended and we went home, where we opened the laptop to watch our "stories".

Here I begin the true subject of this post: Entourage, a show that may be fun or funny if you don't live here, but which is just the stupidest show I have ever seen because I am here. Because I've been looking to get into a fight for a while, I want to announce an open challenge to ANYONE WHO LIKES ENTOURAGE. I challenge you to defend this poorly-orchestrated cliche orgy as a form of entertainment. I challenge you to prove it better than watching chimps knife fight. Anyone.

That aside aside, there do seem to be things going on. In Chinatown, for instance, Eileen Myles was recorded this evening in a basement down an alley off a boulevard. The place is called Betalevel, and they record readings and interviews with writers. We missed this one. But it did get me to Google "Eileen Myles" and I got her website where in addition to the usual writer stuff I found a link to her "blog," some kind of monster gross thing "curated by Infiniti". It looks to be some kind of lifestyle blog for intellectual types: how to be bored in hotel rooms when you've run out of cigarettes, and so on. Interestingly, you can't navigate back to the eileenmyles.com from the totally punk blog sponsored by MSN. I had to reload her page, ended up on her "bio" page and found out that her new book of poems describes "the transmigration of souls from the east coast to the west". If she means that literally, I wonder whatever became of my body--but she couldn't mean that literally because a few lines down she calls herself a "virtuoso."

What's the story with this poet?

Other news: Just finished Ryan's book of poems, "when i come here" from Plan B. It was great to see in print so many of the poems I'd heard, especially "boy" which turned out to be shaped like a kite turning left.

Currently reading the Overture to "Swann's Way" in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation. Let's see how far I get.