publicly complex

sat. night kate schapira, host of the publicly complex series, invited adam golaski and andrea henchey to read at ada books in providence, rhode island. a good turnout in a delightful setting. highly recommended. check out these upcoming:

Isabelle Garron, Sarah Riggs & E. Tracy Grinnell
Sunday, 11/16, 6 pm
Ada Books, 717 Westminster St., Providence, R.I.

&

Jeffrey Yang and Katy Lederer w/ special guest Forrest Gander
Saturday, 11/22, 6 pm
Ada Books, 717 Westminster St., Providence, R.I.

Flim on Facebook

Flim Forum Press is now on Facebook - fans take note.

I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut

I have come to strengthen the currency.






Everything belongs to someone.






Difference drives commerce, it drives envy, it steers.






A friend is a fellow investor.






In America, even the boys are men.






We have more possessions and live longer than animals.






Praise your boss’s faults and mimic his virtues.






No two prices are the same.






Wealthy by anyone’s standards: wise, independent, and content.




excerpted from a set by Eric Gelsinger

see Oh One Arrow and Buy Later

How We Saved the City

To belong to ownership: a twist too neat for inverse. The signs are going up everywhere, like rabbits along the highway. Looking around, we see them. Root the birds' -nest fungi out of the aloe pot. Humble underpinnings, that desire has. Safe to own: the warp in your board, meld in your corner, to set your windows in. We should hang out our shingle: one kind of math or another done here. Every tenant's shingle should be out. The floor slopes from its hump. Time paid for by the wet trees that surround us explains the difference between "fewer" and "less." Properties. And less. Ownership links and sets through the city, puts on, shrugs off. Shuns and shuts out the bleared opposite.




Architecture supports each moment financially, moments that could be floating their independence over bridges. So say borrowed dwellers, tender more (weirdly, mathematically) to some moments than others. Not dream-logic but of the dream house, it proceeds, we can state about it. A waterdrop changes the shapes of everything nearby through reflection, not accuracy, just reflection. It isn't a true mirror or a rear-view or a mugger's mirror or the one James found on garbage night, big as me, with carven frame. All over the city in the waterdrop members members of a privileged group rise early and snap at their husbands.




The belief that ownership will save the city qualifies, comes under the heading, or falls. It's like saying that slow dreamlike boats piloted by mimes will, or dirty Valkyries on bikes. It's like going without saying to a city made of wood, PVC pipe and brick, bundles of hair that used to be rats and tax forms and windows that can't be saved, this way: teetering on the lip of preservation. Sill of surface tension. City snapped at that moment. The key on rent day sears the hand, the office cools me by name, i hand over my math. Posters up for the New Urbanism, olive- and rust-colored friendly fire. Blades of fans that fall with a crash for no reason, or a rented wind. Apartment like paid silence, house, an alibi. Fewer lots, but less time.


Safe as Houses by Kate Schapira

in A Sing Economy

Sing it to the ceiling

The evening was alive with first responders. Poets, report, restoring song to the dollar. Daily drilling, bottom lines, dying signs, in the streets all day. Negotiate atoms and national ethos, form and efficiency, input and output, sin and celebration. Sense and memory, happiness radii, spatial happenstance interface. Desire, dinner, damn cameras, family houseflies, worms and a swarm of eyes. Rain for rent, cattle for sale, cryotext sandwiches, a pumpkin in the bassinet. Cost of walking, cost of talking, breathing shoals of technology, new kinds of knowing. Oh, emotional ecosystems. Oh, local and global grief. Key conservation, relative abundance, savior selves, we are on that brink, over / whelmed thin dime. Sing: shingle and shingle and bricks and windows. Sing: research and development, fall off and shatter, offer/answer/transaction. Sing: Gigigigigigigive. Sing: next and next and next annexed. Love with a love that was love than love. Sing it to the ceiling.

more on A Sing Economy

Rabbit Face The Alps

e. points to the rabbit's face + sez: "eye." Then, "nose." But the way she pronounces the words: "I" + "no." Something anti-descartesian about this rabbit exploration.

Cynicism, of course, is no longer cool. Thank goodness. Nothing generates worse poetry. + hope springeth. People smile in the streets, Europeans are slightly less frightened of us, + the office manager at the university had cake in the common room, simply because America is awesome once again.

The reason for all this change? Brandon Shimoda's The Alps. I will always remember where I was when The Alps arrived from the printer. There's no doubt about it; since the release of The Alps, more cookies were baked, more wars were discontinued for lack of interest, + more flim forum poets found prosperity.

Proof? The proof, m'dears, is inneth the puddingeth:

Stephanie Strickland has a new book, ZONE : ZERO; Laura Sims' new book, Stranger, is forthcoming from our friends at Fence; + Harold Abramowitz's new book, Dear Dearly Departed, is due soon. Jessica Smith and Amanda Ackerman have poetry at the very cool Womb Poetry. Adam Golaski is reading at Kate Schapira's series, hosted by Ada Books, in Providence on Saturday the 8th. Lastly (for now), John Cotter has just put up a new issue of Open Letters.

Yup, all this good fortune--and more!--is due to the release of The Alps. Don't be surprised if you see people rubbing their copy of The Alps. Don't be surprised when you crack open your fortune cookie + inside is The Alps. Don't be surprised if you order The Alps, + soon after win a big pink teddy bear at the carnival. Did the candidate you want to win the election win? Yeah, The Alps. What was the prize baked into the cake brought by our office manager? The Alps.

I will be most curious to hear e. read The Alps outloud. For I believe only then will I penetrate its most hidden wisdoms, the wheels that turn our fortunes to good.

all saints day alps

the alps is out and orders for copies are tumbling into the flim offices. that folks are excited about the alps is hardly surprising. what has surprised me is how rapidly the book has penetrated popular culture.

last night--halloween--I counted seven trick-or-treaters dressed as brandon shimoda. one shimoda mask in particular caught my eye: by squeezing a pump, hidden in the tongue of a sneaker, the wearer caused letters to flood across the face, just as in real life! some of the cheaper, knock-off shimoda masks looked--oddly enough--quite a lot like jaye bartell.

that so many of the neighborhood kids already owned a copy of the alps did present one problem--I had to dash to CVS to pick up copies of organic furniture cellar and our parenthetical ontology to give as treats!

my mask? a klane face, of course.