"A new popular romance, releasing the properties of abstract desire...a history not just of what [Jersey Shore] is, but what it can become."
---McKenzie Wark, author of "A Hacker Manifesto"
"Brave and interesting...i hear the whitman-through-spahr of it, and the finding of marxist-materialist crux in the "low" that steered the Objectivists. but it's also just "you," the styled hair of your present thought...call it a left poetry version of wanting-to-have-a-beer-with-Bush."
---Geoffrey G. O'Brien, author of "Metropole"
"I guess I don't need to watch it to read it, what a relief. And hey, that's you in the ab photo, right?"
---Forrest Gander, author of "Eye Against Eye"
iAMJiMMYC Scottie Piffington
Luned PalmerJanuary 5, 2011 at 3:05pm
I'm sorry, are you serious?
That is beyond amazing. Just read though your posts and I laughed so hard and cried so much. Fuckin brilliant idea Mr. Fetus
"A charming but dated and even futile endeavor, perhaps hopelessly removed from the real politics and activities of social transformation."
---Rita Raley, author of "Tactical Media"
"A hollow laugh at power, but it is still a laugh, the enjoyment both solitary and shared....[Jersey Shore] forges a social bond and a political consciousness held in common."
---Rita Raley, author of "Tactical Media"
"Treading water in the pool of liquid power need not be an image of acquiescence and complicity. In spite of their awkward situation, the political activist (anachronistically known as the artist) can still produce disturbances. Although [Jersey Shore Poem's] gestures may more closely resemble the gestures of a drowning person, and it is uncertain just what is being disturbed, in this situation the postmodern roll of the dice favors the act of disturbance."
---Critical Art Ensemble
"Rather than execute a strategy of risk mitigation toward a position that can’t be flanked or undone, [Jersey Shore Poem] operates entirely within the field of risk. Everything it does is intended to be misread, whether celebrated or dismissed, by the well-read and worldly but uninitiated: with one hand it speaks directly to people who get it, and with the other she blocks the profanation of her work by playing into the paradigm of people who don’t. This is an open challenge to those who have the capacity to live like immortals yet choose to live for the world. All of us have this capacity and face this choice. The goal here is not to make fools look like fools, but to risk looking like a fool in order to raise the stakes. There can be no revolution without risk. This is not to say that the author of Jersey Shore Poem is a revolutionary. There is no concrete objective he is striving toward, only the vision he already inhabits and offers up to us. But it is precisely this vision of the impossibility of existence that enables the possibility for change. Either you believe in it or you don’t believe at all. To Jersey Shore Poem, these are the highest stakes. What happens next is up to us."
---Dan Hoy, from "The Pin-Up Artist"
"While [Adam's] poetry—that of the splendidly individual—presupposes as a condition of its very possibility an individualistic, bourgeois society, and the individual who exists for himself alone, it nevertheless bars the commonly accepted forms, no less than the themes, of bourgeois poetry. Because this poetry, however, can speak from no other standpoint or configuration than precisely those bourgeois frames of mind which it rejects—not a priori, silently, but with express intention—because of this it is blocked, dammed at the source: and so it feigns a feudal condition. This hides itself, socially, behind what is tritely called an aristocratic stance. It is not the pose which angers the good burgher who cannot fondle these poems in his own accustomed way. Rather, however anti-social this pose appears, it is brought to fruition by the same social dialectic which denies the lyric writer his identification with the existing order of things and its repertoire of forms, while he remains sworn to this order in its every detail: he can speak from no other standpoint than that of a past society, stably ruling itself from within....In this sense the poem, like all of [Jersey Shore], is neo-romantic. It is not, however, real objects, not sounds which are called up, but a buried condition of the soul. The latent force of the ideal, artistically compelled into being, the absence of all crude archaisms, raises the song above the despondent story (which it, nonetheless, offers)....Elevated style is attained not by pretending to rhetorical figures and rhythms, but by ascetically omitting whatever would lessen the distance from the tainted language of commerce. In order that the subject may truly resist the lonely process of reification he may not even attempt anymore to retreat to himself—to his private property. He is frightened....great works of art are those which succeed precisely in the most doubtful places....If its expression concentrated itself in the individual, completely saturating him with substance and experience garnered from its own loneliness, then precisely this speech becomes the voice of [animals] between whom the barriers have fallen."
---Theodor Adorno, author of Lyric Poetry and Society
"Adam! It has been so long since the last time we wrote. It was great reading your love poem to to Jersey Shore (which is what I spent my day doing yesterday). It made me laugh, think, and feel connected to you even though we haven't spoken in months."
---Adriana Lara
"There is a difference...between [Adam] and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose. Or, perhaps I ought to put it in another way: the thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death."
---James Baldwin, author of "Notes of a Native Son"
"it's like a disease for Snook for love"
---Nicole Polizzi, cast member, Jersey Shore
