UbuWeb has posted several of Harvey Kubernik’s era-defining anthologies of spoken word recordings, and from the capstone of his LA trilogy, Neighborhood Rhythms, comes this naughty little number by Bob Flanagan (aka The Super Masochist – see his REsearch publication on that whole scene).
One observation about Kubernik’s LPs, especially the early ones: they are less about strong, individual poems and stories (tho Flanagan, Michael C. Ford, Wanda Coleman, Dave Alvin, and a few others turn in some fine standalone pieces) than about creating a soundscape — patter traffic he calls it — with snippets of sound, music, and voices collected from key venues at significant moments to define a transitory cultural zeitgeist. So rather than picking and choosing a few links, hit play on the on the player at the top and let it run for a while. It’ll be 80s LA once more, before we knew, we’d never be post-modern again.
Fuck Sonnet
I’ve been a shit and I hate fucking you now
because I love fucking you too much;
what good’s the head of my cock inside you
when my other head, the one with the brains,
keeps thinking how fucked up everything is,
how fucked I am to be fucking you and thinking
these things which take me away from you
when all I want is to be close to you
but fuck you for letting me fuck you now
when all that connects us is this fucking cock
which is as lost inside you as I am, here,
in the dark, fucking you and thinking–fuck,
the wallpaper behind you had a name,
what was it? You called it what? Herringbone?
Jedediah Smith 