Another Poisoned Cruise Barf Boat!
Right now, there are 419 people vomiting all on the same boat. CAN YOU IMAGINE? The ship will be at sea until FRIDAY.
"That's Not A Knifecrime Island"
The colonies strike back, as stabby Prison Islanders show that they will not be outclassed by their former wardens: “ROBBERIES at knifepoint have soared almost 50 per cent in Victoria over the past five years, while possession of knives and other weapons are up a quarter in the same period…. Melbourne saw at least seven knife attacks between Friday and Sunday, while The Alfred hospital this week said it had treated 24 stabbing admissions in the past fortnight.”
French Cigarettes Really Are Different Than American Brands

The Times reports on a controversial anti-smoking ad in France aimed at young people.
The slogan is bland enough: “To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco.” But it accompanies photos of an older man, his torso seen from the side, pushing down on the head of a teenaged girl with a cigarette in her mouth. Her eyes are at belt level, glancing upwards fearfully. The cigarette appears to emerge from the dress trousers of the adult.
There are two other ads showing young men in the same position, though in those cases the adult is wearing a suit jacket and a watch.
The paper notes that the campaign’s critics contend that it “creates a false analogy between oral sex and smoking,” which is absolutely right: You smoke the cigarette AFTER the blowjob. French people KNOW THIS. [Via]
Autism For Girls
There’s an interesting article in the Independent on the difficulties of diagnosing autism in girls. I was totally unaware of the link between autism and anorexia.
The Poetry Section: 'Intimate Immensity Safe Room' and Other Poems by Paul Foster Johnson
The Poetry Section: ‘Intimate Immensity Safe Room’ and Other Poems by Paul Foster Johnson
by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Poetry Section is quite pleased to bring you five-yes, five!-new poems by Paul Foster Johnson.
Colonnade of States
Happiness, long in coming, mists the windows
of the theme restaurant. A guard with a cleft
forehead works wordlessly on our compulsion
to submit. Ours is a nation run by military
bureaucracy, but here its absence is generalized
into an atmosphere of control and more
basement bars accommodating travesty. It has
become necessary to shrug off the Libra need
need need to decode the shiny ties at businesslunch.
Beneath a ring of golden women assembled
from compossible worlds or hallucinations or lies,
I feed the creative principle copious saliva, a sequence
of code spitvalved into headphones that furnish me
with nation language as late as 2006 and hope.
Gaylord Texan Panic Room
I like how a shadow gets artificially long
if I trust that it veils the unsayable
a convergence that recurs in listening to
songs about drugs when exercising
thinly veiled, sweatsuit inspired
by Oskar Schlemmer
Leigh Bowery and Teletubbies.
The cottonball shrubs are rendered to scale
but you cannot run to the lake as it appears
during undocumented drinking
where divine rays of light over a water attraction
distribute ridiculous comfort.
Do I dare enjoy a flank
coming at me unmediated by society?
He emerges out of nowhere
as if from behind chaises longues
too volatile to be out experiencing syncope
thus giving meaning to procedures
by reading manuals in hill country.
A thorax bearing scars of childhood surgery
condenses every straight boy
who has made himself available.
Here I signal ambivalence about sausagefests
like polluted sunsets or their artificial beauty
always worried that the outcome will be confused
with funk art.
Visual Agitation
I compensate for passions that never claimed to be new
waiting for distortion with a crocodile bag jabbed
at my rib. What I have against it crumbles
and gapes. Lines culminating in exotic skins
leave me suddenly lusting for a tan in something like
a solar puberty, gaily pulling streamers so I can present
something hopeful. Sad I do not not not know
the angels of the facility or the order of their passions
transplanted into sheetrock across the diagonal
from the cafeteria to the elevator. It’s the new year
and they are willowy. My loyalty is easy so I clear
the entrance to make of this less a shithole and more
the magic union of subject and object, ungovernable
passions not not not scantly springing into action.
Study in Pavilions
The river hurls itself into the sea
with acid, bitchery, and clumsiness
as happens when we are asked
to invent improbable scenarios of travel
accounts surcharged by lovesickness
that finally come to be told
on a dilating screen
in modular units exclusive of breath.
In a Bay Ridge travel narrative
she curled a horn of hair
into submission, hair and eyes
like team colors in an exhortation
to cultivate personal style
while I confronted bisexuality
by rubbing a jewel case demonstratively
over emotion poured onto a bed.
Someday language will ordain
isolated dance moves on a pier and experience
will be organized by carousels.
I wish I could remember
who had been thinking a lot
about shame even though
they left me to wonder
if they were serious or kidding.
Wonder is a reflex
that allows me to avoid relating
generationally like with a 90s frisson
of NWO or a suspicion that seeming
randomness is purposive.
For days I meant to establish myself
in a carrel, to camp permanently.
What is your relationship to carrels?
Are they where you arrive, snack-laden,
at universals? It is said that they are underoccupied
before we arrive there with our sorrows.
Hallucinations projected onto them
would describe an ideal or an arc.
Instead the burned-away part has followed
me here, an extension of myself
proceeding into the wilderness
between sand-colored buildings
a victim of violence fueled by organ music.
I wind myself around my inheritance
of monism. I would rather make my own ether
than have to explain again
that I don’t work with images. My ancestors
wrote poems on napkins.
The weeds of the railbed
make me want to prove I am not
the fruit of my father’s
modest civilizing mission, desiring
a cigarette in greenery
and it is suspiciously green
with plant fluff in the gutter.
So tell a story of infelicitous recurrence
deficient in affect
thriving on awkwardness
not mechanistic
even speaking to being lazy
in love, lazy in research
indulging emotional substitutes
for serious matters as they cluster
around an epiphany or whatall in your mouth.
If it bear resemblance
to a succession of drones
or the mysterious black boxes
replacing trashcans on subway platforms
secret it into a bower or bus shelter
paranoid spaces, lucky charms
that I indemnify and hold harmless
best visited after hundreds and hundreds
of thousands of hours of practice.
Intimate Immensity Safe Room
The germ of the house
is a paraphrase
of the windowless, doorless chamber
we mince toward.
We want to go somewhere even more remote
and see a bald eagle
erasing its kino-pravda
see the fossil record of absence and dread of the inevitable
in a forest setting
after which we can sport fictions.
We want to go to the sea
at low tide, when it gives up prefabricated shelves
and a creature will launch itself upward
suffocating for our benefit.
But I am at work and I mince toward a chamber
my voice is a doorchime
always when my mind goes blank
in the middle of explaining phenomena
in this case “Can we all get along?” taped there to the wall
in paraphrase, its border an abundance
of gingerbread men.
I would not flinch though sensible to typography
insofar as it is conveys a person, like GOD in all caps
or one presently lisping, awakened by art
which it uses to jog something in itself.
It hammers terms of art into a shape
before branching out from a peach sweater
to a pink shirt, brooking crashing noises
as everything outside backs up.
Paul Foster Johnson’s first collection of poetry, Refrains/Unworkings, was published in 2008 by Apostrophe Books, and his second, Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, will be published in 2010 by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Pom2, Fence, The Portable Boog Reader, Antennae, Bird Dog and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006, he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and lives in New York, NY.
You may contact the editors at poems@theawl.com.
Also, Eating Is Like Uploading Music To Your iTunes
Forget the whole bit about naps making you smarter, because, you know, NO SHIT. We all need rest these days, especially those of you with jobs. No, what gave me pause here was the way they explained the benefits of a nap: It’s like “deleting your e-mail” for your brain. Richard Lawson was right, The Machines are winning.
Dick Cheney's Central Chest Muscle Was Upset
Apparently former Vice President Dick Cheney had “a mild heart attack,” which would seem to indicate that he actually has a heart. Not buying it!
Distractions Make You Smarter
“According to Don Ambrose, a Rider University professor who studies creative intelligence, incubation is most effective when it involves exposing the mind to entirely novel information rather than just relieving mental pressure. This encourages creative association, the mashing together of seemingly unrelated concepts — a key step in the creative process…. A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of social networks — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.”
–Wired’s Brendan Koerner tries to convince you that you are not wasting your time when you mess around on Facebook and Twitter. Or The Awl, for that matter!
The Spandex Report: Williamsburg Fashion Weekend
by Erica Sackin

On Saturday night, about ten men and women in white body paint and blue lips were standing on a stage; they wore knitwear short shorts made from recycled sweaters. Only one was wearing a furry bunny mask but they all held croquet mallets. Surf music played in the background as styrofoam “snow” fell from the ceiling. Then Arthur Arbit bounded onstage holding a tallboy can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and welcomed us all to Williamsburg Fashion Weekend.
Williamsburg Fashion Weekend (WFW) is not, you may imagine, affiliated with the official Bryant Park fashion week. Arthur has been an organizer for three years; it features various performance artists/designers who, as he put it, “are not afraid to break the rules and cross boundaries in search of a deeper meaning to body adornment.”
This season’s shows took place over two days at Glasslands, an event space constructed mainly from cinderblocks and corrugated metal that is located across the street from the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory.
Arthur’s own line, King Gurvy, was described by his stylist as “Hawaiian surf with snowflakes.” The models had stumbled around the stage in their little knit shorts and rompers, pretending to play croquet and playfighting. One wore hockey skates.

“This is a platform for designers to really fuck around,” said Arthur. “It’s a kind of a vehicle for designers to let loose and not worry about repercussions, or whatever it is that designers worry about as far as mainstream vs not mainstream.”
The lingerie show, by designer Alisha Trimble, featured models posing while being fed cake off a silver platter. They had their mouths dabbed with handkerchiefs, and their faces were smeared with lipstick. Then one woman put the now-empty silver tray on her back and crawled offstage.

A show by San Francisco-based line Flawk featured deconstructed dresses, sunglasses and elaborate masks made from vintage fur, feathers and teeth.

Desira Pesta had 40s-inspired clothes and her show also featured an elaborate evening gown that was fastened with a ten-inch piece of welded metal.

“Williamsburg is largely young,” said Pesta, “and I think people who are much more open to a very handmade aesthetic. It’s grungy, it’s gritty, it’s kind more up my alley than a very polished hoity toity event.”
Everyone I spoke with in the audience said she found at least one thing that she, or at least a friend, would definitely wear.
“This is the first line of that’s really wearable,” said Dimtri Zabatay, one of the King Gurvy models said of that show. Zabatay was in little knit shorts. “Last season I wore something that was basically a dominatrix type of a cock piece that was protruding in a really scary way, and I couldn’t really wear that out to bars. This is something I could actually wear home.”
The finale of the night was Total Crap Uninc. Their show started with a model doing a striptease down to her black leather pasties and g-string. It also featured a straightjacket body suit over torn fishnets; it ended with the designer herself in a yellow leather jacket giving the audience the finger.
“There’s definitely more innovation here,” said Silvana Kim, an FIT student in the audience. “We just really love the neighborhood, and I’m sure we’ve bought a couple of things from these guys. We came tonight because a lot of this stuff is going to work its way upwards.”

Erica Sackin writes and lives in Brooklyn. She was once a contestant in the Ms. G Train competition, but lost. ‘The Spandex Report’ covers the lives of the youngs. Taylor Long is a photographer in New York-and there are more photos to see!
The Many Varieties of Dan Penn's "You Left The Water Running"
“Dan Penn wrote the song, and with Spooner Oldham backing him in a late-nineties concert, he turns in a performance that trumps anything in Crazy Heart. The acoustic guitars sound fantastic, and it’s proof that country rock and soul are next-door neighbors with a low fence between the properties. What would Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, or Buck Owens have done with the song? This gives us some indication.
–Awl pal Tim Sutton provides a nice history of the soul standard “You Left The Water Running” at the Moistworks audioblog. What would Japanese soul revivalists the Fave Raves do with the song, at the Red Cloth rock club in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district? See above.