Notice:
Tiny Utopia Press is a (very) small press consisting of 100% homemade, handmade impromptu chapbooks & broadsides of poetry written by myself, my friends & hopefully, in the future, other awesome poets of a similar ilk, as well as works of prose fiction, history, lyric essays, folklore, monographs on art & music, visual works & other genre-twisting stuffs.
Books & broadsides will be collaged, typed, printed, cut-up, glued, stapled, photocopied, etc. on recycled paper, in runs of 15-50 & sold at a very minimal fee.
Masthead:
James Cook
Brad Barnes
Emily Scorse
In the future we hope to expand into a larger press, with bigger runs & slightly more professional design quality, but the lo-fi, DIY, 'zine aesthetic suits us just fine. We are influenced by Futurist artist books, DADA, punk rock, situationist philosophy, psychogeography, the mimeo revolution, worker's presses, samizdat, secret transmissions, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ecstatic Peace, the Beat Generation, lost souls, abandoned buildings, folklore, Emma Goldman & Buddhist practice.
We intend to create tiny utopias to hold in your hands & share with your friends. We are reactionaries against the trend of e-readers & other tablets, believing that good old fashioned wildly dissonant & anarchic poetry & prose should be homegrown & passed around like contraband.
first titles available:
notations: city, James Cook ($5) - a 2-page chapbook on recycled map paper
first hymn/second hymn/third hymn, James Cook ($5) - a 3-page chapbook on various surfaces
other titles coming soon.
For now, send an email to edwardjcook22@gmail.com for billing info.
As soon as possible we will have: pictures
a link-up to Paypal
a list of forthcoming titles
Thank you.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Robert Louis Stevenson
Midway through the cold-from-hell, I'm reading everything I own by Robert Louis Stevenson, and loving it. Kidnapped is the kind of adventure story that always reads like perfection when you're ill. The Scottish Highlands setting is perfect. The dialect is great. The pacing is wonderful. It makes me want to read all about the Jacobite Uprising. It's interesting that Stevenson was pretty much absent from the canon for most of the first part of the 20th century. His books were given that horrible ghetto status: 'boy's books'. It turns out that the adventure narratives: Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, Kidnapped, David Balfour are well-written and terribly addicting. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston may well go down as his most nuanced masterpieces, though honestly I haven't read them yet. It's nice to have them in my pocket.
Related: The Anomoanon (former band of Will Oldham's brother, Ned) have an album called A Child's Garden of Verses consisting of said poems put to music, which sounds like it could be awesome.
Related: The Anomoanon (former band of Will Oldham's brother, Ned) have an album called A Child's Garden of Verses consisting of said poems put to music, which sounds like it could be awesome.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Two Kinds of Ascension
My post today is about two albums, both bearing very similar titles: John Coltrane's Ascension and Glenn Branca's The Ascension. Both of these albums are avant-garde staples and both have their own legion of cultists.
Coltrane's Ascension serves as a watershed between his earlier more 'traditional' playing and his wild late style, which arguably found its greatest expression in 1966's Meditations and the wonderful duet with drummer Rashied Ali, Interstellar Space. The most striking thing about Ascension is its sheer wall of sound. It was recorded with a 'big band' featuring his usual group of McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on upright bass, Elvin Jones on drums, as well as Marion Brown and John Tchicai on alto sax, Art Davis on a 2nd upright bass, Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson on trumpets, and Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp joining Coltrane on tenor sax.
That rhythm section has been described as 'monolithic' and that's about right.
The album opens and closes with a variation on the opening theme of Coltrane's masterpiece A Love Supreme, then proceeds from there into outer space and back; a soundscape that pulls itself apart and reforms endlessly, like some 13th century Lurianic Kabalist's reconfiguration of the ten Sefirot...
It can be overwhelming on first listen, but a deeper look reveals layer upon layer of skronk giving way to bluesy modal solos, hints of New Orleans funeral marches, circular rhythms interlocking and then unraveling and then coming back together.
I have frightened people out of the room with this record, and others have literally hugged the stereo. At right around 40 minutes its some of the most concentrated and intense playing ever laid down.
Glenn Branca's record The Ascension has some of the same visceral quality - sheets of sound, throbbing rhythms - but moves in a darker atmosphere altogether. Scored for four guitars, bass and drums, the record features Lee Ranaldo (later of Sonic Youth fame) on one guitar, Branca on another, Ned Sublette (later a World Music composer) and David Rosenbloom on the other two, Jeffrey Glenn on bass and Stephan Wischerth on drums.
The Ascension sounds like NYC in the late 70's and early 80's must have looked and felt like (captured most spectacularly in Luc Sante's essay "My Lost City") - a neo-dystopian fusion of rotting splendor and absolute freedom.
The bass is a menacing rumble. The guitars are spiky, angular, lean, precise, savage, cacophonous. This music seems lit by some half-forbidden subterranean light leaking out of abandoned subways at 4am. It seems architectural and chaotic at once. Full of danger and ecstasy. A catalog of the city's ghosts. A requiem for every junkie, prostitute, bum and criminal that's ever looked up into the gray sky above the crazy wastes and searched for some shred of sentience...
Sonic Youth has been mining this same territory ever since with their own brand of controlled chaos (and as far as I'm concerned hitting their stride with the pastoral gorgeousness of 1985's Bad Moon Rising), but nothing has come close to the absolute beauty and terror of this masterpiece.
Coltrane's Ascension serves as a watershed between his earlier more 'traditional' playing and his wild late style, which arguably found its greatest expression in 1966's Meditations and the wonderful duet with drummer Rashied Ali, Interstellar Space. The most striking thing about Ascension is its sheer wall of sound. It was recorded with a 'big band' featuring his usual group of McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on upright bass, Elvin Jones on drums, as well as Marion Brown and John Tchicai on alto sax, Art Davis on a 2nd upright bass, Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson on trumpets, and Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp joining Coltrane on tenor sax.
That rhythm section has been described as 'monolithic' and that's about right.
The album opens and closes with a variation on the opening theme of Coltrane's masterpiece A Love Supreme, then proceeds from there into outer space and back; a soundscape that pulls itself apart and reforms endlessly, like some 13th century Lurianic Kabalist's reconfiguration of the ten Sefirot...
It can be overwhelming on first listen, but a deeper look reveals layer upon layer of skronk giving way to bluesy modal solos, hints of New Orleans funeral marches, circular rhythms interlocking and then unraveling and then coming back together.
I have frightened people out of the room with this record, and others have literally hugged the stereo. At right around 40 minutes its some of the most concentrated and intense playing ever laid down.
Glenn Branca's record The Ascension has some of the same visceral quality - sheets of sound, throbbing rhythms - but moves in a darker atmosphere altogether. Scored for four guitars, bass and drums, the record features Lee Ranaldo (later of Sonic Youth fame) on one guitar, Branca on another, Ned Sublette (later a World Music composer) and David Rosenbloom on the other two, Jeffrey Glenn on bass and Stephan Wischerth on drums.
The Ascension sounds like NYC in the late 70's and early 80's must have looked and felt like (captured most spectacularly in Luc Sante's essay "My Lost City") - a neo-dystopian fusion of rotting splendor and absolute freedom.
The bass is a menacing rumble. The guitars are spiky, angular, lean, precise, savage, cacophonous. This music seems lit by some half-forbidden subterranean light leaking out of abandoned subways at 4am. It seems architectural and chaotic at once. Full of danger and ecstasy. A catalog of the city's ghosts. A requiem for every junkie, prostitute, bum and criminal that's ever looked up into the gray sky above the crazy wastes and searched for some shred of sentience...
Sonic Youth has been mining this same territory ever since with their own brand of controlled chaos (and as far as I'm concerned hitting their stride with the pastoral gorgeousness of 1985's Bad Moon Rising), but nothing has come close to the absolute beauty and terror of this masterpiece.
The Croatoan Songbook
A section from my ongoing poem-of/in-process "The Croatoan Songbook" was featured on Jerome Rothenberg's blog Poems and Poetics, and on Jacket2. Here is the link:
https://jacket2.org/commentary/james-cook-croatoan-song-book-if-you-wish-become-owl-movement-i-excerpt
Much thanks to Jerry, whose work has been a huge influence & inspiration.
https://jacket2.org/commentary/james-cook-croatoan-song-book-if-you-wish-become-owl-movement-i-excerpt
Much thanks to Jerry, whose work has been a huge influence & inspiration.
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