If there was even one slight disappointment in last night's LCD Soundsystem/Arcade Fire show at Red Rocks, it was that the young woman in front of me continually held her camera above her head, so it's in almost every shot except for the last few that I was able to take after her battery died.

But the music was amazing. This may have been the best live show I've ever seen or heard. Having caught Modest Mouse at Red Rocks earlier in the summer (a show that does sticks with me) I can say that the sound quality was much better last night, for both bands, and I doubt The Arcade Fire could have chosen a better opening act than LCD Soundsystem, which sounded so much more lively than I thought possible. The weather was perfect, the sound was good, and, well, it's hard to be unimpressive when you've got 12-13 people on a stage, switching instruments, using strange things like hurdy-gurdys, accordia, and toy pianos. Damnation, if they come to a neighborhood near you, do go. If you like music even the slightest little bit, go go go go go go go!

Seriously.

This one will stick with you.

—Julien Gracq, Reading, Writing

The Lomographic Society International is now offering a modified Diana, the toy camera from the 1960s that was knocked off more times than anyone can count. The LSI has put together a gallery of Diana replicas here, that's worth looking at if only to see the strange names and think about what it would mean to have a camera with such a moniker, or to be starring down Harrow's barrel.

I just ordered one and am looking forward to its arrival. I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out.

There are also poems by Chris Abani, Laura McCullough, Rick Barot, Amy King, Bob Hicok, Frankie Drayus, Eve Rifkah, Peter Jay Shippy, Tara Moyle, Matthew Wills, Karen Schubert, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Joshua Ware, Rich Murphy, Didi Menendez, and me.

The VCU group does such a nice job, with Blackbird and they're continuing that work with Diode, which promises to be a fine addition to the reading list.

It's here. And I'm proud as a brother that my brother has made and published these photographs.

But, also as a native and a student of the South, I'm grateful for this work.

Because, I'm Joe's brother, it's hard to pretend to any sort of objectivity, but this book is one of those I would immediately have to buy had I seen it in a bookstore, for here is a window on the world through which I drove for many years, the cross-haunted landscape of the Deep South, often grayed through weather or familiarity, but always indelibly signed with the signs of Christ, of God, of church — from simple roadside memorials to the folk-apocalyptic sculpture gardens like W. C. Rice's Cross Garden in Prattville, Alabama.

Maybe all of the South is like this. I remember when I used to drive I-77 and I-81 into the middle of Virginia, I'd see a trio of crosses from Galax to Wytheville and beyond, almost alarming in their size, uniformity, and ubiquity, and also challenging insofar as the center cross was often painted yellow or gold, which I thought somehow missed one of the points of Jesus's crucifixion, among the lowly from whom he never stood apart.

But—maybe because I've logged more road-hours in Alabama than anywhere else and because that's where my brother's logged most of his road-hours—the scenes in this book take me back, both to Deep South roadside and to the practice of driving just to drive, to think, and being caught be these signs more often than I can remember.

You can get a preview here.

This weekend's celebration was wonderful, and it involved lots of eating, on which more soon (we have photos), but for now, let me say, go get this book.

I don't know what to say except that the Marxism Lecture will be offered by the incomparable Gillian Silverman.

I'll miss it because my brother's book With Signs Following: Photographs From the Southern Religious Roadside is being published tomorrow and I'm off to Oxford, Mississippi, to help celebrate and maybe spill some whiskey on Faulkner's grave.

Here's what's in the works that's been keeping me quiet:

• Working with colleagues to complete the launch of the Colorado Center for Public Humanities. We're hosting heavy-weights Michael Berube (9/6), Stephen Prothero (10/4), and Patricia Limerick (11/1) to start it off.
• Copper Nickel 8 is almost done and will be released on Friday, September 28th at Matter Studio here in Denver (2132 Market Street). Party begins at 7pm.
• Same night (9/28) Copper Nickel will publish a book, in addition to its eighth issue. It's called & (that's right) and it features scads of double-exposure super-saturated Lomotography and double-exposure poems by Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson and by Jules Cohen & Mathias Svalina. In publishing this book, Copper Nickel will found Counterfeit Press, on which more soon.
• Copper Nickel/Counterfeit Press and friends will present the Denver Mint Poetry Festival, October 18-19, featuring readings by Hadara Bar-Nadav, Adam Clay, John Gallaher, Kate Greenstreet, Janet Holmes, Joshua Kryah, Alex Lemon, Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer, Zachary Schomburg, Mathias Svalina, and Eliot Khalil Wilson, and the opening of an exhibition of artifacts and poetry at The Lab.

I'll check in with you all very very soon.

If a precis may be offered...

The first part of the summer spooled away in the continuing quest for permission to quote a small handful of songs in A Murmuration of Starlings. The end result of that adventure was that, though I got most of the permissions, two publishers finally told me that I could wait forever to hear anything, so I cut the lines in question and in one case completely rewrote the affected poem, making it much better in the process. All the delay had pushed production off schedule, but the fine folks at Southern Illinois University Press and I worked out a new schedule, and it looks like the book may indeed appear in January/February after all.

What did I learn from all this? Well, there's a much longer treatment of that to come, but basically, this:

• First of all, never depend on anyone else for some part of your work. As I wrote earlier this summer, I'm drawn to the idea of writing a responsive, even a documentary poetry, but I clearly need to find a way to do that without quoting, from songs in particular. Because...


• ... the music industry doesn't much seem interested in considering their properties as much more than lines of profit. In some cases, there's no argument you can make to encourage even a consideration of the propriety of the quotation, and in most cases, even two or three continguous words will constitute quotation requirinig license, to the point that the "Fair Use" section of the United States Copyright Code might as well not exist.


• Finally, I'm not sure why anyone listens to music anymore. I love it, and I feel, as Nietzche did, that without music life would be a mistake. But at present, the experience of music is a very strictly policed experience. Your encounter with music is going to cost you something, and there's no way to have an active engagement with it that will enable you to capitalize the time you've spend learning it. I'd have thought all artists created in order to encourage not just enjoyment but enlargment in their audiences, but I see that would have been incorrect.

In any case, it's done. At least until the book goes into reprint, if ever...

After all that, I went with S to L.A. for a wedding, and, while there, at the best hamburger I have ever eaten in my life, at a small Santa Monica joint known as Father's Office. Our local guide, a friend of S, made the claim, and reported that the Today Show had named the burger as one of the three best in the nation, a claim of which I was exceptionally skeptical. But, as it turns out, it is true: the burger is the best I've ever had. I've been working to replicate it here. On the same trip, we had a few Key Lime Pie Martinis at the Dresden Room, seen in the movie Swingers, where Marty and Elaine played some old standards for us, including some songs I probably better not name so the copyright police won't be shutting them down.

Meanwhile, I was researching and planning a new series of poems, surely to become the next collection, though who knows how long that will take. I can see some shapes, but I don't know how long it will take me to make them. Hopefully some will emerge before too long.

The latter half of the summer, which is sadly almost done, has been divided mostly between Copper Nickel, The Lab, and a new project, The Colorado Center for Public Humanities.

Copper Nickel 8 is almost done, and we're working to complete our first book as well, a collection of double-exposure photographs and double-exposure writing, all of which will come out on Friday, September 28th, at Matter Studios here in Denver, on which more soon.

The Lab's been a hot-bed of excitement lately. They brought my brother out for Mixed Taste, and he and I presented head-to-head Walt Whitman and Whole Hog Barbecue, followed by a pork-fest hosted by Jim 'N Nick's new Colorado flagship store, headed by Todd and Kim Koone, the best hosts you'll ever meet. Todd and his crew cooked two whole hogs for the event and brought their signature trimmings: mac-and-cheese, collards, baked beans, cheese biscuits and more. You should have been there. Certainly some of the best 'cue I've ever had. It was good to have Joe here. We had a good time.

There's more to report from The Lab, but soon.

The Center for Public Humanities has been on a third burner, meanwhile. I had to get a website up and some press releases out, so I faced again the issue of the blog platform and went back to Movable Type. I spent some time working with WordPress but found that the themes I liked visually were in conflict with the core engine in some cases: I was working with K2, which had sidebar modules that overrode WordPress's new native modules, and I couldn't get them to work together. Lots of headaches. I was committed to making it work, especially since I discovered the Institute for the Future of the Book's new CommentPress. But in the process of upgrading WordPress, I wiped out my entire site and while rebuilding saw that Movable Type had introduced a beta version of Movable Type 4, which, as it turns out, has a lot of the features I liked in WordPress, but with a core I know really well. So, I've started playing with that and soon think I will move everything I run over to MT4 which is now in public release. Again, I like WP's motto "code is poetry," but the poetry wasn't always scanning very well, so it's back to the Gutenberg scenario, for now anyway. Given the CommentPress development, I'll probably always also have a WordPress installation going, too, to use for other types of engagement and maybe at some point all the systems will converge in one platform.

There's more to share, but not today. It's BEER:30, so time to signoff.

I hope you all are well. Drop me a line.

Here.

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