"The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else's capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing."
It occurs to me that this is my relationship with Jersey Shore;
that I have given them back nothing, and feel weary.
(We take everything from our celebrities, and make them weary.)
I thirst and hunger and long
to have the world flow through me;
I long to have Snooki and Mike
flow through me?
(They return me back to myself, but I worry about how they are doing.)
For my blood was cola. / For my authority was small
involuntary muscles / in my face.
"I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing. In commodity exchange it's as if the buyer and the seller were both in plastic bags; there's none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn't consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange."
I am trying to keep my relationship
with plastic bags moving;
every day I feel Jersey Shore in the juiced muscles of my face.
I am a juiced Guido of the face!, Snooki
as I try to keep my rare exchange with you moving.
Sometimes I am mad at the MTV of you,
dragging me from the house to lead me to
nothing.
But it is myself I quibble at. Endlessly needing...
2
...or in separation. I felt it
in the garden full
of cans:
Warhol said it, too, as a garden of cans.
Somewhere in this blog I broke
my character, tried to keep
it moving.
3
I want to keep culture moving! A culture
of the wind...
My friend River, who I work with on a farm (and who said, when I asked a question about picking the green beans, "it would be a crime to overthink it!"), said he was home-schooled and, as a result, avoided a lot of mainstream culture, but I am not like that.
I feel the Main Stream flow through me;
deltas and deltas flowing and buoying up out of me,
trying and trying to be translated
into song.
4
The first season of Jersey Shore is over
and has been over for awhile.
I went out over the summer
(which has been over for awhile)
with my sister; we watched Jersey Shore before we went out
into the wind and the blustery drinks of our faces.
