Space Between: May 15, 2001

To work a shift at the Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia in the Aughts was a relatively simple, straightforward task. I worked there from precisely the turn of the century until mid '06, when the University Fellowship at Temple University allowed me to graduate upwards (I had done a low residency Boston MFA from Philly). We all had our ways of passing the eight-hour shifts, seeing as the work-load wasn't too heavy. For Mary Harju, who worked at B & N until '09, when she moved to New York to do her own MFA (which I felt was unnecessary, after PAFA, and told her as much), the shifts were reducible to how she looked that day, her threads and the fashion statements she was making with them. Mary loved clothes, and she loved to dress. I am, admittedly, no clothes horse myself, so it is difficult for me to judge how much fashion gravitas she had. I noticed that Michael Barbella, an intelligent, charming gay man about fifteen years older than us, who was the B & N head manager while we were there, approved of Mary's moves. As she effortlessly sashayed around, Mary didn't always say much; it took me a while to draw her out. But, since Mary loved to be well-dressed in public, and since she was no snob about working retail (nor was I), B & N was no stretch for her. The Renaissance ideal of well-roundedness was also hers.

Mike Land was difficult to ignore at B & N for other reasons. At a lanky-yet-strapping 6'3, Mike's life was animated by a central contradiction- even at a young age (and Mike was precocious in every way), he was an extremely advanced hustler with a heart of gold. Mike took pains to pay attention to all those around him, and to make everyone feel special; yet the Puerto Rican edge of his good looks meant that certain types (including Mary Harju) would always mistrust him. How Mike passed the eight-hour shifts was to practice his seduction skills on absolutely everyone. Venus rising in Libra, and with stamina to back it up. Nick Gruberg was a problem at B & N. Also tall and strapping, at six feet even, Nick was a scientist first, and a U of Chicago graduate, and enjoyed employing his considerable IQ toying with other people's brains. He let Mike and I off the hook, considering I was a Penn grad and Mike and him became fast drinking buddies; others were not so lucky. Alone among us, Nick eventually got his ass fired for his transgressions.

What all of this is leading up to is one shift I worked at B & N: May 15, 2001. Mike and Nick weren't there yet; I was yet (also) to be Mary's hubs, but was in a long relationship with Melissa Floyd, a Southern belle transported to Philadelphia, whose delicacy and refinement were appreciated by most of us, and who already knew Mary (they were spiritual cousins) to be a rather sinister threat. I had spent several months delving deep into Modern Philosophy texts- prompted by the niggling fact that I had been a philosophy major at Penn State, and had let philosophy go for several years. May 15, 2001 was a bright, sunny spring day in Philadelphia. As my shift started (was it 4-close?) a series of ideas occurred to me in a certain order, resolving many of the problems I was encountering in Modern Phil. aesthetics texts (Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc), and the solutions came to me in a kind of lightning bolt. For the rest of the shift, I was on fire, and scrawled the thoughts I was having onto scraps of paper. Many of the May 15 notes became the backbone of Space Between, as it developed in 2013. In the crude form I collated them in that May, they didn't look like much. Melissa, another high IQ, liked them; Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum was tolerant but befuddled. Because there were so few philosophy heads around me (I was doing English at Penn), it took me a dozen years to get back to the notes the right way. Yet May 15, 2001 was certainly the most memorable shift I ever worked at B & N, and the feeling I had that day of being struck by lightning was unique. All those years in Aughts Philly were lit up by lightning bolts- the explosiveness was reliable, as Philadelphia ascended to heights none of us could've foreseen in 2000, when the distant rumble of thunder was heard which was to deliver us a mature United States.

There Is Such Noise & Gravity

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, was one of Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum's favorite books. In early 2001, Jeremy and I made plans to do a series of readings in Philadelphia, including one at Jeremy's alma mater, Villanova University, off in the 'burbs. We had both had some recent success: Jeremy had twice had poems published in the Columbia Poetry Review (Columbia Chicago), once in 1999 and once in 2000, and my Icarus In New York had just been released in American Writing 21. Jeremy used a quote from the Pynchon book as a title for the series: "There Is Such Noise & Gravity." We did Big Jar Books, Book Trader, and the Villanova show in (I believe) March '01, also with J.D. Mitchell, a novelist and new friend of ours. What I remember about these readings is that Jeremy liked things to run in a punctilious fashion, and they didn't, always. He also liked to maintain his place as the center of attention. There was already a drift, in 2001, from Jeremy, away from literature, and towards graphic design, video work, and photography, which is mostly what he did in the Philly Free School years. I was still recovering from the 2000 slog of my own ambitious performance project, This Charming Lab, which straddled the same worlds PFS would later, but with less success. All my new 2001 routines focused on literature as the centerpiece of my creative life; until 2001, it was literature in contention with drama, popular music, and other interests. Hopefully, someone somewhere has the Jeremy fliers for There Is Such Noise & Gravity. Jeremy's graphic design eye was borderline flawless.

Another occurrence in '02 which did not involve Jeremy: I did a series of readings at the North Cafe on South Street, under the aegis of Natalie Felix, a poetess/performance artist roughly my age who had set up shop in South Philly at the time. My writing in '02 often involved rigorous imitations of Romantic poets Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; both the forms they used and their thematic tropes. This turned out to be all on the road to On Love in 2003. Fortunately or unfortunately, much of the formalist writing I did in '02 is now lost to time. I later dismissed the poems as too derivative to be published, with the exception of On Love and On Psyche, which appeared in American Writing 23. Natalie Felix was an indulgent presence, even as her own poetry tended towards spoken word formality. In all honesty, I can't remember why Jeremy was never able to make it to the North Cafe. I do remember that much of the formalist stuff (including On Love) coalesced thematically around my relationship with Mary Harju. Jeremy liked Mary immediately.

July 10, 2004: Philly Free School 1

The first Philly Free School was held on the late afternoon into evening of July 10, 2004. Nick Gruberg had not yet been adopted into the fold; Mike Land showed up in August, ready for action. That night, it was just myself and Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum. We got a miracle to dovetail with the Hinge Northern Liberties show; it was a bright, sunny summer day, and the sunset (the Highwire bay windows faced west) was gorgeous. I read On Jazz and a few other things; Golden Ball did a musical routine not unlike London Free School era Pink Floyd; I had imported Luke Fishbeck and Lucky Dragons from the Hinge show; CaConrad read briefly; and (God help me!) I think there was another band who played that night, but I can't remember who. What I do remember is that the laissez faire attitude of the Highwire rubbed off on us, as we served all kinds of "refreshments" which had been provided for us, so that by the end of the show everyone had a nice, dreamy buzz on. Philly has decent space-cadet karma.

Another factoid to set in place about the Highwire, and the Gilbert Building; it was on the third floor, and most Highwire patrons took an elevator, followed by a long, white-painted, winding hallway, to get there. This means that for the duration of the Free School shows at the Highwire, we felt secluded enough from street-level action to party in peace. This wasn't true in Northern Liberties; there, it was more a matter of luck. It was also true that the first show employed only the main Highwire space (here pictured), not the factory space adjacent to it, which would come in handy that fall when we expanded our repertoires. By 2005, our productions at the Highwire were quite baroque, between where the refreshments were, where the performers were, and what was happening back and forth between the two spaces.

Hinge Online

The story of Hinge is not one I can tell; or, rather, one I can tell conclusively. They were around for a number of years in Philly; their el primo era seems to have been the early Aughts. I published in Hinge several times; they also accepted, eventually, several mp3s from Ardent, the '04 EP I made with Matt Stevenson in South Philly. Hinge for me are made most memorable, other than for their benign online presence, by the Northern Liberties extravaganza they put on in the spring of '04, in the middle of Ardent and me finishing Penn. It was a brilliantly sunny, warm, spring day; we got lucky, especially as the warehouse space where the show was held had a big yard in front where everyone could hang out, imbibe. It was, for the multi-media nature of what was presented (including my reading), and for the general Aughts Philly ambiance of permissive indulgence, as halcyon as it could be. As I watched Lucky Dragons weave a weird sonic web over the crowd and conquer our sense that computer-generated music couldn't have vibe and depth-resonance, I knew in the pit of my stomach that this is where the public side of my art had to go. I was thinking, still at the Hinge event, of the London Free School around Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd; that was the cultural reference point which occurred to me in there. Of course, London has few brilliantly sunny days, and what I imagined that Free School was like might or might not "op over" Hinge in Northern Liberties. Still, I wanted to conglomerate Hinge/Northern Liberties with my Swinging London fantasies, and by 7-10-04, was at the Highwire Gallery doing so, thanks to the generosity of Matt/Radio Eris.

These two Hinge hinged from Wordpress, On Love and Hamlet On Pine Street, demonstrate that as a poet, I was flexing muscles heavily under the influence of London; but, the London of Shakespeare and Keats, rather than Syd Barrett's. The space cadet, stoner, bed-hopping version of an art-city that is Aughts Philly has yet to be evaluated historically in comparison to these versions of London; when you are singed by a city's art, however, these manners and forms of questions are never far from your mind. With London, it is difficult to say. Here, Hinge Online will certainly have a vaunted place in the cultural history of Aughts Philly: tight but loose, a guarded fortress but a generous one, and right on a bunch of cutting edges at once, as the parameters broadened of what the Internet could be for artists, and those wishing to occupy cultural space in a city and a country, as we all did. Ten years later, all the richer.