"I’m not big on introductions. Frequently they have a quarantining effect, and I prefer anyone risk exposure to writing’s radioactivity. Jon Leon’s texts burn like an extra shot of Chinaco downed too quickly, or one too many snorts of Bolivian. Fun stuff—and like when it burns when you pee, don’t regret it. I haven’t forgotten—and neither should you—the more toxic aspects of the radioactive metaphor. Despite his relative youth, Leon is responsible for almost a dozen tight books: some self-published, frequently by High Street in its various manifestations; others brought out by small but rowdy independents, Mal-O-Mar and Kitchen Press among them. They’re rare and glamorous as Hermès during the years Martin Margiela took the reins, and they sport titles veering from racy (Drain You and The Hot Tub) to cool (Hit Wave and Kasmir) to euphoric (Right Now The Music And The Life Rule). So far, I’ve refrained from identifying the genre Leon works in or with: poetry. Why? His often looks like prose, sure, but really it’s because most so-called poetry makes me want to kill myself or the person who wrote it. Marianne Moore famously declared she disliked poetry; I often hate it. Too much of it appears to be secreted by people totally regretting all the things that make life bearable, re: the specific names, above, of a good tequila, a pure cocaine, as well as a designer and a house both at their peak, peaking. Pleasure goods. “Hanging out at a pool and trying to finger you was so fun” begins a poem from Leon’s Drain You. Thinking about intoxicants, fashion and sex—and not just the thinking but also the pointblank words (poetry) and the exact matters the words stand in for and enact (poetry)—make up no small part of Leon’s writing. It’s about fucking time. Ours." —Bruce Hainley
Jon Leon, The Malady of the Century, Futurepoem Books, 2012.
"THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY is written as a swansong to a generation that has lost the will to perceive the linear progression of time; a generation that is a collapse of occasions, wherein no discernible or dominant motif is present because Now is the mixture of all times, when every trend that ever was is the current mode.
"I can swear it will be one of the most talked-about books of the year. He wrecks poetry; simultaneously, he makes it as chic and covetable as next season’s accessory, say an Isaac Reina 48hrs bag, bespoke for Frederick Seidel.
Baudelaire instructed that 'the dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep in front of the mirror.' Crossing platforms, from mirror to various pulsing LED screens and back, Jon Leon taps sublimity, rousing our daily patois to orgasm without interruption. The Malady of the Century is a portrait of the artist as a young verb. Like R. Kelly covering Les Chants de Maldoror."—Bruce Hainley
"Jon Leon has crafted a cold and funny porno-dystopia that 'sends up' poetry while also behaving like a strict modernist manifesto — a Stein or Pound reveille, with P.T. Barnum bravado, making it new. Reading The Malady of the Century, I think of the dungeon (Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper); I also think of the penthouse (Joan Didion and Frederick Seidel). Leon’s voice — if it is indeed a voice, or his — is charmingly post-sentiment; he evacuates poetry’s resources in order to stage, with hilarious, memorable, deadpan showmanship, a bildungsroman of the artist-as-void. Leon’s subject is the rôle of the 'poet,' a Rimbaud with the resumé of a Russ Meyer."—Wayne Koestenbaum
"This thick work is so blindingly over-the-top in how it hits on all the stuff the kids love these days, stuff that comes from a real place of daring integrity but can also land like callowness taken as a drug. Either way it’s great, I inject it. Porn-intellect-fashion-longing and I heart flat-affect. Easy to imitate, hard to aspire to, and I’m trying it now."—Rebecca Wolff
"In consideration of the work of Jon Leon, it is necessary to consider Jon Leon, the poet, simultaneously as an apostle and a construction. Anna Kaven (nee Helen Emily Woods) ended up, at a particular point in her career as a novelist, changing her name from that which she was born with to a name she had invented for a character in one her own books—Jon Leon has always simply insisted on living as a character in his work, as the character in his works.
His poetry.
There is a level of both the inter-textual and the extra-textual interaction present throughout his entire oeuvré; something that becomes apparent throughout his career. As Dan Hoy points out in his case-study of Leon, there’s a particular overlap of reality with a poetic construction of reality:
“We mixed agitprop, erotic dance, and horror to construct a total environment of focused bliss.” - Jon Leon, Hit Wave
’ll risk substituting tropes here and suggest the above sentence from Jon Leon’s Hit Wave could be taken somewhat literally as a nod to his overall objective (construct a total environment of focused bliss = enable and induce the experience of the impossible) and strategy (mixing agitprop, erotic dance, and horror = forming a triangulation of world, life, and nothingness).
The few reviews that I’ve bothered to read of Leon’s The Malady of the Century seem to locate its motivation in some sort of grotesque irony, a decadence, kitsch. This reading is a needlessly academic understanding of Leon’s work I think; a sort of insistent justification of the poetry as poetry for other poets. From Hit Wave:
I called TJ in the daytime, always before noon, to discuss with him the prospect of my gems, the possibility of elevating the word poetry to something with a little more suss. He alerted me to the fact that Poet’s Arcade was calling me “the world’s #1 non-academic poet.” “Poetry needs more readers and less writers” I told him. He agreed emphatically.
This is, perhaps, what Dan Hoy means when he tags his critical posts on the work of Jon Leon at Montevidayo with the tag “people who get it.” To read Jon Leon as poetry, to read it as kitsch, to read it as fiction, is to miss the point, to miss what’s exciting about it.
Intertextually, there is a world of overlap in Leon’s oeuvre. Hit Wave seems to be a core text (along with, I would say, Kasmir, which is not included as a part of The Malady of the Century) within the reality of “Jon Leon.” It maps out a career trajectory, and includes mentions of heaps of both chap-books and broadsides, texts. Some of these exist in the reality of our real world (as opposed to the reality of the diegesis of the text, where they all exist), and some of them might exist in the future. Hit Wave can be read as a structural guide, but then again taking it so literally might just be stupid.
Jon Leon’s career, thus far, has been based on a consecutive interest in a pure impossible glamour with the ephemeral, fleeting mobility of the invisible poet. Limited edition chapbooks released as PDFs of scans of text written on Hotel stationary pop up for sale and then disappear, never to be mentioned again. One of the chap-books included in The Malady…, which, as far as I know, never existed autonomously, is called Mirage—an utterly apt name for a fragment of Leon’s work. The contingency of Leon’s whole is fleeting. A crisis of faith, perhaps, lead to a limited edition cassette tape entitled “The Need to Exit the Self,”—which featured Leon recording himself musing on various things, crying, talking shit about Guyotat, and further—has disappeared from notice. The artist himself being in charge of his own website, constantly editing his own history. Is he lending himself to the idea of the artist-ghost, or has a dissatisfaction motivated this fluctuating body of work?
The nature of the texts lead us, as readers, to refuse to focus on technicalities, instead allowing the contingencies of what we know to feed us the gospel. And thus, I’d like to propose, perhaps, the existence of The Malady of the Century as a cipher to the first ‘movement’ of Leon’s gesumptkunstwerk. And by gesumpkunstwerk I mean reality.
Having read much of what’s collected in The Malady of the Century previously, albeit in disconnected bouts of encounters with black market copies, late night paypal transactions, and fugues of drunkenness, to revisit the works collected here in a single context, to read straight through, the trajectory is revealed.
The first line of the entire book tells us the only thing about Leon’s past we need to know:
A black God touched me today and I knew I was a poet.
The final poem of the book, ADULTS ONLY, completes, in its first manifestation, the entire life of the poet Jon Leon. The book is a life-story. There is both no outside and an absolute outside, suggested by uncollected texts such as Kasmir, The Hot Tub, Alexandra, The Painting Show, and more. Jon Leon is a poet of contingency. His poetry is the only poetry of realism—and of course, by realism we can’t even bother meaning ‘realist’ in a historical-literary sense, no, that’s too naïve. Leon is not a poet’s-poet, he is a man in the world, and so we have to understand realism as it’s defined by the speculative realists at the forefront of post-Kantian/correlationist thought. In discussing the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Alexander R. Galloway defines ‘realism’ as such:
"…realism means quite simply that an external world exists independent of ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefs.”
[clearly an idea such as that given above cannot be defended within the context of a poetry review, to take up arms against such an idea is ostensibly refusing what's become an entire school of thought developed throughout the network of philosophers writing and working across the globe, Meillassoux's book working as an inspiring launching point which finally allows us to move into our future, outside of the iron-clad grip of critical theory which, through to its death, still insisted upon the idea that there is no outside]
So if Leon’s book is a cipher, what is it that is being decrypted? Well, there’s several levels to address this issue from. First of all, I would suggest that the book works to decrypt and linearize Leon’s entire oeuvre. It’s a concession from a pin-up artist, a collect-call made to the world as a whole that has, up until this point, been missing out. It’s a mode of putting Jon Leon outside of Jon Leon (whose oeuvre almost entirely consists of self-published works).
Secondly, Leon’s book is a cipher to the idea that poetry is an hermetic, antiquated form that finds presence only within a hyper-self-contained zeitgeist of myopic poets, whether inside or outside of academia. It’s a revelation: reality television is nothing when Leon’s poetry exists.
Finally, Leon’s book works as a cipher to the nature of the world as we understand it. Leon, in an oft-quoted line from Hit Wave says,:
Why would people sell themselves short and not just live the life of pure creative glamour.
If there is a message through all of this, it is as given." - Impossible Mike
"I first learned about Jon Leon’s work after receiving a “black market” copy of Hit Wave … sent to me by an acquaintance who had scanned it to .pdf during after hours at their white-collar office job (Wiley Publishing, if it matters). Hit Wave had an excerpt of the chapbook Kasmir in the back. Then someone gave me Alexandra, then Tract, then Hot Tub (published opposite Glory Hole by Dan Hoy by Mal-O-Mar Editions). Then James Copeland was launching a new journal, Content, which was going to feature one artist per issue, letting them fill up the 70 or so pages however they liked. The first issue was Jon Leon, titled Elizabeth Zoё Lindsay Drink Fanta, with photographic stills I imagine he took of a TV from his mobile—with no text. I remember people being pretty upset about it.
There is already some critical thought published online about the tight self-control, beautification, and strategic posturing of the image Jon Leon has created for himself. The life lived as artist. In an open letter to Lindsay Lohan proposing (propositioning?) a collaborative project to her, he admits that he is “keenly interested in a certain pornographic mood or period, oft times softcore, fuzzy, and vintage.” I felt it was true and too accurate and for that reason I didn’t want him to say it so clearly.
So there already was, as much as there could be in contemporary poetry, a discourse surrounding the author. As of a year ago, he was rumoured to live in L.A., Raleigh, or possibly Miami. I ordered an artist edition called Die With These Bitches, self-released and published on unbound Gladstone Gallery stationary. Another newer release, which only circulated back to me via .pdf late this winter, titled Midriff, is scribbled on small nightstand memo sheets from the historic Chateau Marmont. Dan Hoy, writing on the critical website Montevidayo, says “It’s as if he’s living the message, yet waiting for someone else to deliver it to the masses. This puts any critic in the position of a kind of retroactive John the Baptist, announcing the arrival of Jon Leon’s image on this planet after it has already (rumor has it) departed”
Maybe about a year ago, Futurepoem announced that Wayne Kostenbaum [along with fellow guest editors Anne Waldman and Lytle Shaw] selected a manuscript The Malady of the Century by Jon Leon to be published in late winter. I spoke to Wayne about his selection after he appeared at a Wilde Boys salon in Manhattan, and he was asking me specifically about Jon’s personality, what he was like. What was I supposed to say? The Malady of the Century is his first full-length book of writing. It was a chosen book. The Malady of the Century is basically five books inside one cover, Drain You, Hit Wave, Right Now The Music and the Life Rule, Mirage and White Girls. There is really nothing like it. Hit Wave is the highlight; written entirely in vignettes, the sections take us through a world-chic poetics of power, dominance, the market, illicit desire, luxury and high fashion. A pitch-perfect memoir or tell-all constructing a narrative of literary celebrity, international speculation, sexual exploitation, art class barbershop magazines, enterprise, life as art.
From Hit Wave:
My life until then was a variety of despots: chokehold girlfriends, mindless trysts, naked bodies on a beautiful couch. I hated the way it was constant on top. I knew it to be untrue. Through the media I was in touch with my fame. I excelled under pressure from below. I wrote a book around this time about a dilettante named Sukarov. We were under pressure from the financiers. I abandoned the serial style of the 60’s and found the reactionary lyric impossible. An interview in Doublewide magazine received over 20,000 hits on the first day. I lied through my teeth but I did invent a new language. “I am a writer” I relentlessly repeated, “I am a writer.” But why goddamn didn’t I feel like it.
and
Broadway Video carried exploitation films exclusively. They also provided free condoms at the rental counter. Helen and I visited frequently in the winter months. At that time I lived on the west side with Andrew in a house full of Dali reproductions and psychedelic paraphernalia. Luckily I was able to move out quickly and lease a studio in Miami. Ketja and I took holiday at the Thunderbird Inn. There I wrote several vignettes under the heading “I Hate American Girls.” At night we’d watch the sky turn purple turn pink turn orange-blue and melt into the horizon below the palm trees.
and
I befriended Keystone early on as a writer. Like me, he had a keen interest in poetry but hated the very word. We decided one night while thumbing the latest installment of Revue de Poets that the problem was surplus. At that time there wasn’t much influence to be wielded by a couple of underpublished amateurs, but little by little we managed to shame the pipsqueaks back to the mediocrity from whence they’d come. Anticipating the day when luxury would replace bounty as a prevailing aesthetic.
Having published Jon in my now defunct journal, I offered to do a feature length interview with him, to be placed in the Paris Review, or Vanity Fair, W, etc. Maybe Vogue (Jack Gilbert was photographed for that magazine once after he won the Yale Younger Poets award). He agreed to the interview, and I sent the first question. Jon asked for some time to respond, then there was a long silence, and then finally an answer:
Ben, after careful consideration I’ve decided not to give anymore interviews. I feel it is distracting to the work, and that this is a time to focus on the books of the future.
I appreciate your interest in talking with me.
Cordially,
Jon " – Ben Fama
"I began reading Jon Leon’s The Malady of the Century on an obnoxiously balmy day in South Bend, IN, and finished it the next day, when the weather had resumed its usual surly attitude. Gliding through weather patterns like this was like wearing parachute pants in a gym class in New Jersey in 1983, waving the parachute, running under the parachute, emerging from the parachute to learn my gym teacher was going to compete in the New York Marathon, in synthetic shorts, a golden perm, and with a white paper pinned to his tanktop. One surface glided into a tide of surfaces till it got permed out. Intoxified the tri-state. My leg skin never felt so good.
The formal strength of Leon’s book lies in his deft use of the paragraph, a large squarish ice-cube like form that seems to melt under you as you clamber onto the syntax of the sentences, depositing you at the bottom of your paragraph as at the bottom of a warmish tumbler of gin. Cast your eyes back over the paragraph you just read, it’s like looking back up at a used tumbler: sharp and sticky.
“Broadway Video carried exploitation films exclusively. They also provided free condoms at the rental counter. Helen and I visited frequently in the winter months. At that time I lived on the west side with Andrea in a house full of Dali reproductions and psychedelic paraphernalia. Luckily I was able to move out quickly and lease a studio in Miami. Ketja and I took holiday at the Thunderbird Inn. There I wrote several vignettes under the heading, “ I Hate American Girls.” At night we’d watch the sky turn purple turn pink turn orange-blue and melt into the horizon below the palm trees.”
The above passage comes from the poem ‘Hit Wave’, a piece as slimly intriguing as a 13-year old proto-supermodel from Florida or the Eastern Bloc. You keep watching her to see how she looks at different angles, and only at certain angles does the beauty strike out at you, a cheekbrow, an eyebrow, a cheekbone, the funnybone. This long poem is an account of an apparently continuous speaker skeining from hit to hit—fume-thin celebrity success which keeps emptying out and reaccruing and which is a kind of flight between proper nouns, here the proper nouns of women’s names, cities, hotels, media outlets, the names of his own obscure-media hits (Tract, Reiner, Videotaped Sex). This encapsuled poem pops, the air gets thin, the writing is by turns sharp and hazy, it hits you, you take the hit, and in its thinness and mirrored surfaces you get high. In another poem,
“I know you always loved me for who I am. I fucking miss that. When we are smelling crack from the other room and trashing the motel while we do teenage stuff on the bed. I know that it’s just right when we’re in the bathroom loving life. […]I love it when you gave me the pills in the Clermont Lounge on a weeknight. I wanted to puke. The love in the air is so thick and heavy and green. I’m not stupid. I know you are thinking about me and want to call. Do it.”
Reading Jon Leon is a bit like being in that slick bathroom, loving life. The double mirror gives us not a mise-en-abyme of abstraction or obscurity but of flatness , availability, the self-presence of the present tense itself. Like a model in certain magazines, the present-tense will always turn its face or ass to us. Some may read these poems as critiques of consumer culture, media culture, a culture continually getting high off the laminate on fashion magazine pages or in our new cars, or in the masks we put on before assisting others. But I don’t feel critique in these poems. Rather, Jon Leon’s poems emit the exhilaration and speed and high tones and acute sensations of a parachutist in flight, with his parachute on fire, that kind of sharpness, clarity and precision. In flight, time stops being consequential. Individual moments are just garments lined up on a silver rack, catching the eye in motion. One finger can move them. Grinning and huffing and shopping and cuming and grinning into the bright light, into the Blu-Ray in HD." - Joyelle McSweeney
"Obviously, to be sick is not the same thing as having a malady. “Malady” is so gorgeously melodramatic, like that Lana Del Rey video for “Video Games.” Have you seen this? I hadn’t seen it until last weekend. I was in Ashland, Oregon and Stephanie, Kasey and Dana turned us on to “Video Games.” Lana is a 25-year-old Promethea carrying the fire of contemporary duende. It is partly a tale of her paramour, who, despite the electrifying vicissitudes of her outfit, scent, and magnificent voice, comes over to her house not to “take a body downtown” but to play video games. The lyrics of “Video Games” make its foil the psychotic gamer who dissociates from the real world experience of the angelic (Del Rey) in favor of whatever simulacral exploit he pursues in the game. Moreover, the sound reiterates the critique by being almost impossibly huge, “stirring” beyond any legible experience of the word.
This might sound a little conservative or old-fogey-before-my-time, but I think that the real present malady of our new century is a decline in sensibility. This decline is sublimely represented by the tragic snub Lana’s beloved extends. She refuses it with a wail of full feeling. That this wail is delivered with an undeniable measure of blasé minimizes its engagement not at all. Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes the relation of sensibility’s wane to the contemporary state of precarious labor: “The cognitive performance of the precarious worker must become compatible, fractal, recombinable. Cognitive ability must be detached from sensibility, from the ability to detect, interpret, and understand signs that cannot be translated into words. The standardization of the cognitive process involves a digital formatting of the mind, disturbing the sphere of sensibility, and finally destroying it.”
I was thinking about these things after we got back from Ashland. Do we need sensibility if we want to have any experience of real revolt? Like, if the destruction of our spheres of sensibility is a “malady,” then what would the role of art be, medicinal? Is Lana Del Rey not so much Prometheus as a Botoxed Asclepius breathing caffeinated Oxycontin into our lungs, shotgun-style? Is there a way in which our poetics can manage to activate a sustainable homeopathy for this capitalist force that demands our simultaneous compatibility and fractalization?
I didn’t figure out art and revolt that night. After all, I had rented Mamma Mia!, an achievement in film no less complex and beautiful than anything by Tarkovsky or whoever. And I was thinking about Jon Leon’s The Malady of the Century. Also I kept thinking about the men’s room at work. There’s a stall and a urinal, side by side. I’m fascinated by the social encounter that emerges when one person occupies the stall, and the other stands mere inches from him to piss. If I’m in the stall and somebody else is in the bathroom, I wait there until they leave. (Not because I’m embarrassed to be shitting. I mean, even Agnetha Fältskog shits.)
Maybe it’s just not my own private exhibitionism, to lurch out of the stall and encounter this other person who moments before had been a nonvisible witness to my richest excretion. So whenever I’ve used the urinal, am washing my hands after, and somebody comes out of the stall, I always feel like they’re hoping that I can redeeem their body by cognizance. That they need me to affirm (by contestation) their ability to fully live in this world. They need me so profoundly and I have nothing for them. They have just departed with a treasured gift and now they wanted me to fill its lack. No thanks!
I wonder how this scene would play out if it were inside The Malady of the Century. In its economy of sensibility and expression all of these worlds collide: deities, demi-gods, the smelly everyday. Just when you start to think it’s TMI you remember it’s never enough." - Brandon Brown
Excerpt:
THE TIME OF THE SEASON
I'm lying in a waterbed. On the glass-topped table next to me: the journal of Alix Roubaud and a gun. I haven't touched the gun, I haven't read the book. I'm listening to "Roses" by White Ring. I feel like I'm overdosing on Nicorette. I spit the gum into a champagne flute and pick up Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Ellis. I read 3 pages, and then I read 3 pages from Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and then I wander the apartment, kind of dazed, and put in a DVD of Dawn of the Dead. I watch the entire movie and drink 2 cans of Coca-Cola and eat ricotta, fig, and onion bruschetta. Some California strawberries. I'm feeling sort of high, but I didn't do any drugs. I'm listening to the track by White Ring and willingly shift into a trance. I look at thathipsterporn.tumblr.com. There are babes and dudes all over it and then a picture of Kobe Bryant in a mist of confetti, a giant 24 facing the camera. A champion. I thought about a lot of stuff, but all I'm really in a position to do right now is smoke kush. I don't have any kush though, so I think some more, although I find it difficult to concentrate. I think about how when there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the Earth. The dead in Dawn of the Dead converge on a shopping mall where 4 alive people retreat in posh isolation. I think about how their living room is fairly smart and attractive, and how I'd like to live in the suburban mall with them. I also think about MacArthur Park for some reason. I'm in MacArthur Park staring at a guy staring at a fountain eating a popsicle. I walk down 6th street and buy a taco, then I buy a $5 pair of sneakers. I don't know what the fuck is going on, whether it's a farm, a ranch, or a street – what country it is. I buy a DVD of a movie that hasn't come out yet. When I get home I take a bubble bath. I peer into the skyline of downtown Los Angeles and then I smoke what feels like a hundred American Spirits and read a book called The Merchant Bankers, gaze listlessly at a gold Wells Fargo marquee. That was another time. Today I'm overdosing on Nicorette, not reading the journals of Alix Roubaud, staring at the gun, tangentially thinking about some Robert Heinecken pictures I viewed at Cherry & Martin called Hite Hustler Beaver Hunt. 1 I think about pussy. I can't do anything else so I pick up a book next to me with the title Sex and Rockets about a guy who dropped out of school to build explosives in Pasadena and invoke a siren named Cameron through a magickal process. I look at this book a while and put it down because the writing in it sucks. I can't figure out the masturbation scenes with L. Ron Hubbard and the eccentric babes who believe in the magic. I believe in the magic though. The magic that is spun from the energy where I am. I understand that my life's purpose is to invoke a zone of pleasure through language and ritualistic sex that feels borderline, darkly. It feels good. That is why I continue to do it. I get into an American car and drive into the city. I invoke that zone.
Jon Leon, Hit Wave, Kitchen Press, 2008.
"Jon Leon’s Hit Wave is a racy tour de force, a fake memoir written in an absurd world where a poet can live the decadent life of the rich & famous. The depraved, egomaniacal narrator is better at “making real life seem like movies” than directors are at “making movies seem real.” Not “academic cool” but “world cool,” Hit Wave is a mockumentary for the chapbook set." - Elisa Gabbert
"Leon’s story follows the career of a poet, pornographer, and provocateur as he conquers the literary world, indulges in every excess available, founds his own private pleasure palace, yet remains bored and unimpressed with everything. Perhaps it’s the bright yellow cover or his recent legal troubles and penchant for sex-filled advertising, but I found it helpful to picture American Apparel CEO Dov Charney as the speaker.
I should say that the chapbook begins with two quick odes that immediately sold me on the whole project. The first is to cocaine, the second is to Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible.” From there, it’s divided into two section, “1982” and “Kashmir”. “1982” follows the immediate rise of the protagonist through literary and business success along with his sexual exploits, drug abuse, and seemingly inborn ennui. “Kashmir” shows the same speaker later in his career, living at “Kashmir,” a sex retreat, still surrounded by some of the same friends, but also emotionally isolated and unenthused with his own achievements.
The voice in this chapbook is so strong. The book reads like the confession/brag of an '80s Wall Street executive crossed with Caligula. Given the current economic crisis, this book, which can be read as in praise of or damning hedonistic self-serving excess, strikes at the heart of the American paradox—we are simultaneously what is best and worst in the world, the most skilled and equipped to realize our material dreams, but often by way of greed and solipsism which effects the world in ways we cannot be bothered to consider.
I’ll be seeking out more of Leon’s work. Both he and Rohrer have that rare gift to successfully cross poetry and politics. But politics aside, the poetry is what counts and these books are excited with phrases and metaphors and images that stay with you, that work over the world in a way that makes things a little clearer or at least a little less lonely." - barrelhousemag.blogspot.com
"OKAY, SO THERE'S five ways to feel, right? I mean taste, hear, grope, the other two. If you are alive you will do all these things at once. Plus you can have an orgasm, if you want. And being alive is a gradient. It's not like you're either alive or you're not: if you're eating coconut, you're more alive than if you're eating quinoa. If you're blowing coke, you're more alive than if you're whittling like a toy rhino or some shit. This is true. Every moment you're alive, you're sort of not alive, because there is a more alive way you could be living, always, like some kind of infinitely fucked up asymptote of sensation. And poets? Introspective, eulogizing, blessing the stuff of the world with some hot-ass linguistic concordance: forget that shit. That's not living at all. In Jon Leon's satirical faux-memior Hit Wave, poetry and sensation worship finally get photographed together, and Leon opens up interesting questions about the relevance of sensation in the face of memory, action in the face of record.
Hit Wave comes at us in three parts: the introduction, consisting of two odes to cocaine and Robert Palmer respectively, followed by "1982," a memoir of an imaginary late twentieth century in which poetry is a major arts industry, narrated by a Bret Easton Ellis-like shaker-n-fucker named Paul, and then closing with a present tense narration by Paul of his angsty retirement days in a sex resort named Kasmir. The title of Hit Wave alludes to Paul's massive output as a poetry kingpin, but it also serves as an encapsulation of his philosophy: hit it and wave. Cocaine and Palmer get odes because of the sensations they produce, so the odes really become odes to the speaker's own euphoria: "The sound of Eddie Martinez' guitar is like a chiseled diamond from an African well" is the speaker celebrating his own pleasure from diamonds and sound, not Eddie Martinez at all. Which is great, which is hilarious, because it burrows uncomfortably into the latent solipsism of thanking anything for making us feel so good, the line between gratitude and gratification.
"1982," meanwhile, is all about feeling, really really good. Hey, what if poetry and literature gave its practitioners the same tickets to fame and hedonism as rockstars and movie stars? This is the question that "1982" answers with deadpan and hilarious aggression, as our boy Paul remembers his time on top, the world of expensive broadsides and exotic threeways, avant manifestos and cocaine binges, selling out and chapbooks. Why all this is funny is because it highlights the absurdity of an art that attempts quietly and earnestly to sweep up after the world, make sure the world has its beauty and mystery tacked on with magnets to the refrigerator of history. Leon pokes fun at this idea when Paul remembers fondly one of his early projects, a porno called Golden Slumbers, for its humility: "I think our maximum audience was 200, but every one of them started their own Economy." But "1982" also makes fun of mainstream memoir conventions, with plenty of "little did I know then" style asides and delicious hyperbole: "There were huge problems facing me and I turned from them. I knew that if I faced the huge problems they'd stare me into oblivion." What "1982" mocks is our cultural obsession with lust and later repenting that lust, and our dubious conceptions of ambition and success.
In the final and most interesting section of the chapbook, "Kasmir," Leon goes beyond cultural satire and digs at what it's really like to be able to feel anything you want. Or, as Paul tells one of his many girls, "I've become better at making real life seem like movies than directors have succeeded in making movies seem real." Paul's club Kasmir is an assembly of things he wants and people he wants around him, and what Leon suggests is that this kind of assembling shrinks your world into one giant version of yourself: "When I ... see the throng and what I've made of them and how they needed me to make it of them ... Kasmir becomes more than that grand ... I'm inside Kasmir it becomes plaster it becomes my spirit." This is kind of a problem, of course, which is why Paul cums into a mirror instead of talking to people, which is why when clubbers from Brazil ask him if he's himself, he has a hard time convincing even himself that he is, but he has no trouble imagining those clubbers as mere extensions of himself. Whew. When we become devoted only to what we can feel, when we become shrines to our own capacity for sensation, what happens? What do we lose? Who do we annihilate? Hit Wave is hilarious, but it's also sharp and scary. When Paul confesses that "Kasmir .. is not a club at all to me. It's just me doing whatever it takes to touch me," it's hard not to remember all the things you've touched, the stones and skins of fruit. Though you remember how they made you feel, you have a hard time thinking up their names." - Mike Young
"It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art; and only that man can gorge himself with vitality, at the expense of the human race, whom, in his cradle, a fairy has inspired with love of disguise and of the mask, with hatred of the home and a passion for voyaging.” - Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds”
“When I listen to Robert Palmer’s ‘Simply Irresistible’ I know that life is everywhere and the globe will be united. The substance of art is returned to the world in this pinnacle achievement. It was not just Hollywood and Vine who partied a cheer in 1988. It was the entire seven continents uproariously celebrating the sound of a lifetime.” - Jon Leon, from Hit Wave
In Tract and Right Now the Music and the Life Rule, two of Jon Leon’s previous chapbooks, Baudelaire’s charged multitude is buggered and blown out into a universal field of rapture. Leon’s entire system of poetics is a traversing of this field, and in Hit Wave, his new chapbook from Kitchen Press, it’s made possible through an ecstatic recognition of the nothingness of which everything is made and the impossibility of anything at all. “My god I’m really here I think to myself.” He grabs hold of the particularities of time so tightly it ruptures, and all the timelessness at its core comes spilling out: “I’m not even sure what year it is sometimes though I do know what decade it is and what’s happening right now and how amazing it is being here a part of this period.”
Leon’s decade in Hit Wave and other works is an 80s thrown hard into the future, a blend of high intensity Wall Street, Miami, and Beverly Hills, but seedier and more glorious, and with a vaguely French vibe. Forever is always right now and right now is forever, and everything feels like cocaine. It’s like hearing the best euro pop song ever for the first time, all the time. The Now Wave. Take the poem “Gang Fire,” from Right Now the Music and the Life Rule:
Asia Argento looks incredibly alluring. The look on her face is like she is in another world. One where perfection and beauty exist only. She is surrounded by 12 inch records and has totally smooth skin and breasts that are barely visible in her Miss Sixty shirt. This shirt is striped with black and red horizontals. Her jeans are very dark and her boots are brown with elevated heels. Basically Asia looks like an alien she is so otherworldly hot. Her hair is framing her face like it is a masterpiece. I am listening to Jens Lekman now.
Or “Alpine Drive”, from his forthcoming book The Hot Tub:
I take a pharmaceutical with a glass of punch. For some reason I’m at a ball. 3 babes in Betsey Johnson walk by. So I bow my head. They don’t recognize me, but I know who they are. I know them from Facebook. I’m thinking net asset value as the dj continues to fuck up. I thought this was an opportunity and now I’m bored. Behind a curtain there’s a wall of pay telephones. I check my pockets and clink the curtains closed. Call a guy named Paul and eat my fist as he tells me the open market is drowning. I almost shit a troy ounce. So I walk back to the bar with my wallet in my colon and sneeze my order to the barkeep. He hands me a glass of something gothic looking. I pay the motherfucker in paper dollars.
The name Paul shows up again as the narrator of “Kasmir”, the long poem that closes out Hit Wave, and it’s hard not to think of this as some kind of nod to the Saint Paul of philosophers like Agamben and Badiou, with his ho nyn kairos (“time of the now”) and proclamation of an event whose universal importance can’t be determined by the situation that led to its occurrence (e.g. Argento’s hair providing the framework yet unable to adequately define the masterpiece of her face, with its fidelity to a beauty and perfection that’s impossible). Or the Paul-to-come implicit in Rimbaud’s poem “Morning” (from Season in Hell), the founder of a new way of life, if not Christianity: “Where shall we go beyond the shores and the mountains, to salute the birth of the new work, and the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, and be the first to worship Christmas on Earth?”
Leon’s Paul owns two nightclubs on the beach and rides around in a dune buggy and private helicopter, and he’s audacious enough to answer Rimbaud’s call by establishing a system of worship somewhere beyond the shores of high fashion, political rupture, and the rapturous excess of capital:
Basically I’m Paul. And I run The Embassy and the newer venture Kasmir. They are nighttime establishments in a place that could be anywhere. Wherever they are it’s warm there all the time and the sun shines mostly and there’s a lot of peace in the air. I’m thinking about all this stuff. What it means. I think I understand which is why I made the clubs. I mean, the establishments. The Center. Other than this nothing matters to me.
Paul shares Whitman’s cosmic exuberance and autoeroticism, and, like Whitman, will act like a total fuckhead if it feels right. “Kasmir is illegally full,” and likewise divine excess spills out of him, lashing out and overtaking everything in the vicinity: “I feel like going on a sick ego trip so I tell 5 people in line they have to leave now.” He’s also audacious enough to cross universal subjectivity with the exclusivity of initiates, tempered by an honesty easily mistaken for ironic naiveté: “This is not a chic place. It is a private world, inhabited by only the most advanced persons of the elite age.”
Leon takes these kinds of risks because he understands what Wallace Stevens meant by “It Must Give Pleasure” better than Stevens.[8] Kasmir is both nightclub and poem, and a similar fusion of avant poet and decadent entrepreneur occurs explicitly in the text: “I am the author of Kasmir. It is my highest grossing art.” Like the poem, the nightclub acts as a virtual space in which life is harnessed and amplified, obliterating any context or concern for a world outside it.
When I imagine Kasmir as I did before it was an actual building or whatever it is. Whatever an old word for a magnificent building is. When I imagine that looking up at Kasmir and I see the throng and what I’ve made of them and how they needed me to make it of them and Kasmir becomes more than that grand. It becomes more than so many blurred apparitions in unison. I’m inside Kasmir it becomes plaster it becomes my spirit. I walk to my pad and board my Sikorsky. I activate the radar sea search. I glide at top speed just inches from the waves breaking along the shore just yards from Kasmir and The Embassy.
This is an apostolic subjectivity laid bare, and a poem written as if it has no relation to other poems. “I don’t know anything about nightclubbing. Kasmir is really modeled after something else. It’s not a club at all to me. It’s just me doing whatever it takes to touch me.” What Leon understands, better than anybody else alive, is that poetry is pure forever; and a poem is whatever it takes, even if, like Rimbaud, it takes abandoning poetry forever to pull it off.
The Now Wave comes across as a cosmic, technopop sensibility, polysexual and open-armed but vicious in temperament and energy, and powered by an ungodly current of subjective and systemic violence. This violence manifests as violation and rupture, rather than mere transgression, and is akin to the divine violence traced recently by Žižek through Benjamin and others, which erupts out of nowhere and is a means without end, biblical in scope and ferocity—yet a belief in belief itself, or truth, not salvation, e.g. Robespierre’s speech “On the Trial of the King” in which he demands the execution of Louis XVI:
People do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
The Wave has no lineage or point of origin (poetic or otherwise), only sparks along the way, and it tends to eschew meditative fence-sitting in favor of immediacy and an almost paranoiac fear of writing poems that are interesting and smart but otherwise completely irreconcilable with life as life. Its contours are most evident in poets only loosely affiliated with each other, like Leon, Lara Glenum, Ben Lerner, Ariana Reines, Katie Degentesh and others. It’s not a movement but an energy percolating everywhere. It’s not against anything. It’s for forever." - Dan Hoy
"Primarily composed of two long sections of prose, Jon Leon’s chapbook Hit Wave employs an absurdist-satire that recalls Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. “1982,” the first major section of the collection, documents the artistic and careerist pursuits of an unnamed speaker as he attempts to reconcile himself to the fact “that poetry was now industry.” The piece’s narrator saturates the reader with a continuous stream of events, book titles, sexual exploits, alcohol-drug consumption, and faux-artistic revolutions that unwittingly imbricate him in the system he claims to oppose “during a political awakening that would remain with [him] as [he] attempted an avant coup in 2004.” Take, for instance, the following paragraph, which functions as a microcosm of the work as a whole:
While writing Long Hot Summer in Atlanta I went through a string of glossy women a la Eva Herzigova. Though I lived like a wretch my charisma was irresistible. I remember sitting in a restaurant in the East Village thinking about a plot error and how Carre sitting across from me looked like Noelle, a girl I’d met on the terrace at Zane’s and who’d said she modeled for Wayne Maser.
Throughout “1982,” book titles, such as “Long Hot Summer,” operate as signifiers emptied of specificity, vis-à-vis the writing therein, and instead act as contextual markers for the speaker’s extracurricular exploits: in this case, “a string of glossy women a la Eva Herzigova.” Of course, since the creation and publication of these books are detached from particular dates, readers are left without any sense of how the events before or after the current description relate. The one constant that does relate each event to one another is the speaker’s self-aggrandizing narcissism; the writing and “artistic” endeavors become window-dressing for caricature. In fact, the sheer volume of titles the speaker references (32 that he either writes, creates, publishes, reads, or watches) transforms the egalitarian Whitmanian catalogue into a solipsistic undertaking in which he falls prey to “the pleasure that only international prestige can offer.” Furthermore, the interchangeability of female names (i.e. “Carrie sitting across from me looked like Noelle”) evidences the rampant misogyny that pervades the text, wherein “a string of glossy women” serve as fulfillment for the narrator’s “sexual deviousness.”
All of these actions and attitudes are rationalized by the speaker through the lens of the misunderstood genius:
A lot of people didn’t like me. Most of them were poets. They called me names like proletarian, idealist, romantic, handsome. Fools I thought. Why would people sell themselves short and not just live the life of pure creative glamour. It is easy for me, to others it was a mirage. The real geniuses of history were the ones brave enough to be it. I couldn’t understand their criticisms to be anything but jealousy.
And this, it would seem, encapsulates Hit Wave’s conceptual focus: the manner in which misguided identity formation can so easily, especially in today’s cultural-environment of hyper-self-promotion, devolve into a carte blanche justification for dismissal of the other in order to foster megalomania; or stated in Leon’s words, extolling “the life of pure creative glamour” at the expense of “poets” and “fools.” In many regards, then, “1982” functions as a cautionary or moralistic tale. Yet unlike a Horatio Alger story in which the main character’s ambition results in an unassuming assimilation into bourgeois existence, the main character in Jon Leon’s story does not seek assimilation, but a recklessly autonomous existence that revels in inflicting “severe sickness and humiliation” upon “those people who ignored me.” To this extent, Leon does not provide a (much needed) model with which to combat Alger’s capitalist propaganda, but through caricature, unwittingly provides a nihilistic counterpoint that confirms the worst fears of those who resist that which resides outside of the hegemonic order." - Unvert
Jon Leon, The Hot Tub/Dan Hoy, Glory Hole, Mal-O-Mar, 2009.
"Jon Leon: So, I just read Glory Hole again for the first time in a while. Why the title Glory Hole when there are no actual glory holes in the book, unless the "masterpiece" that is "the frame I hang around my neck / and shove my face in" (from "Glory Hole") is a glory hole? What does the glory hole or the idea of a glory hole symbolize or represent for you?
Dan Hoy: The masterpiece is a play off of that image from one of your poems in Right Now the Music and the Life Rule, “Her hair is framing her face like it is a masterpiece”, with the face defined as a fidelity to a beauty that’s impossible. The masterpiece is always a miracle. But I’m exploiting the syntactical ambiguity to shift the masterpiece from the face to the frame, or the act of framing, of becoming the frame. To me there’s no real difference. But yeah it’s also a glory hole. The poems function as a glory hole. They act as both portal and partition, so a site of entry but also a barrier. Like if Dante’s entire human comedy was physically contained within the sign at the door that says “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” There is no space, just direct address, with a relentless antagonizing of the wall that divides intimacy and anonymity. They strip all context and speak to you in the face. But really I just decided one day I wanted to write a book called Glory Hole. This is mid-way through writing the book. It seemed like the perfect title, the words glory and hole crystallizing into this image of the glorious and the bottomless. The image as divine trauma, a kind of supreme ambivalence. I don’t mean just the concept of glory hole as an image, but the image as a concept in general. The first image is always the universe or the image of nothingness. All images are a reflection of the first image. In Glory Hole it’s called God.
I see these books as flipsides of infinity in orbit around each other but I know we haven’t really talked about it. For me the framing image of both Glory Hole and The Hot Tub is a circle, except one is empty and the other is filled with water. It’s like the difference between the void and the abyss. I’m wondering what the hot tub means to you as an image. For example does the circle function as a site of infinity, with water as the substance of life but also the way of life? I’m thinking of lines like “this world is totally liquid” but also specifically “He slowly parts with the cloud of immersed bodies” from the titular poem, where bodies move like water through a body of water made of bodies.
JL: The hot tub to me is a site of luxury and abandon. It's a place that people go when they are just that drunk enough. It's the first poem I wrote from the book. The title came to me after viewing a photo taken at Sundance of models in white bikinis sitting in a hot tub surrounded by the whitest snow. That it's filled with water and human bodies is a financial concept in my mind. The idea of flows, money flows, and that money truly moves like water and is accessible easily even when one doesn't have any money - one must simply place oneself between a transaction. The idea that the world is totally liquid is the idea of pure possibility, where everything is permitted and everything is within one's reach. The vignettes in The Hot Tub are people coming together in a transaction. It's like a ledger itemizing human interactions rather than financial transactions. The sun is always shining on these characters because "Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development." When people or a society have developed sufficiently they've created time. Austrian School economist Henry Hazlitt refers to it in Economics in One Lesson when he describes that a certain amount of unemployment is a good thing, because it means an advancement in productivity. Full employment, according to Hazlitt, is reserved for the countries that are most retarded. Time is for exudation, waste, as all profits are inevitably. Bataille turns rational economics on its head when he writes "that energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits." The Hot Tub is that reverie reserved for those advanced enough, immersed enough in the license of the market, to understand that waste is a condition of success. I relate this fact without a critical objective.
DH: I don’t know Hazlitt but I remember reading Bataille talking about the practice of potlatch among Native American tribes, where the objective is to humiliate and defy rivals through the spectacular destruction of your own wealth. Sometimes this entails slaughtering your own slaves. This seems apropos of waste as a condition of success. He uses the term “expenditure” for what he calls unproductive forms, or activities with no end beyond themselves. Things like luxury and war, mourning, art, etc. These are all characterized by a loss that must be as great as possible for the activity to take on its true meaning. So it’s about maximizing the opposite of return, attaining the most negative ROI possible. What’s interesting is he singles out poetry as being synonymous with expenditure. I’d say this explicit equating of expenditure and poetry is, if not the heart of your poetics, something at the heart of it. In Kasmir especially expenditure creates a field in order to perforate itself, so there are these moments of ecstatic infinity bursting through. But Bataille I think takes it in a different direction. For him poetry is a symbolic expenditure that does real damage to the poet. You end up becoming a reprobate or you renounce it and do something mediocre instead. Rimbaud kind of does both at once. A Season in Hell is basically its own announcement and renunciation. Blanchot’s take is that Rimbaud murdered poetry so it could survive, and Mallarmé says something similar: “He operated on himself alive for poetry.” It’s a strategic decision, and a poetic expenditure to the nth degree in that it expends itself to the last drop. There is nothing more to be lost. This idea of Rimbaud is like the first step. What Glory Hole tries to do is push the limit of negative return, or expand the opportunity beyond what can be lost, by taking this gesture of defiance and multiplying it against itself. In other words, what if Rimbaud felt the way he did, with a force strong enough to abandon poetry forever, and then kept writing anyway? But you could say this is exactly what Baudelaire is doing. It’s like the act of poetry as expenditure is a closed loop between the two: The next step after Baudelaire is Rimbaud, and the next step after Rimbaud is Baudelaire. But at the same time I view the excess of your work, especially Hit Wave, as very Whitmanian, like a French Whitman, rooted in a kind of cosmic exuberance and autoeroticism and fuck it nonchalance. I wanted to ask you about the prologue poem in The Hot Tub, how it relates to the rest of the book. Is it the same speaker? It reads kind of like a dedication to the reader, since it’s untitled and the only piece to use the 2nd person address, unlike Glory Hole, which is punctured throughout with “you”.
JL: I understood intuitively Rimbaud's refutation of poetry and subsequent activities almost before I began to write poetry. So from the beginning of my practice I've courted the idea that poetry is something to be left behind, abandoned. With each successive book I've produced I'm getting further from poetry. My practice is a deliberate expenditure, or waste, of talent, in an effort to absolve myself of what I consider a pathogen. I want everyone to stop writing poetry. My prologue to The Hot Tub is indeed an attempt to speak directly to the reader. It's the only way I know how to relate to the reader that poetry is not it. Poetry is not why you come to poetry. That prologue isn't a creative work. It's meant to say exactly what it says: love, music, being "on booze together," quite simply, life, is more important than this. Mediated by art and other forms of sublimation life is reduced to our perception of life. As far as my previous books are concerned I only know that there is a character named Brian Paul, the same throughout, who's only aim is a draining away of excess energy by any means possible until the energy is finally dissipated and involuntary death occurs. If the things he does or builds or destroys are increasingly excessive it is because it requires more energy to do these things and hence brings him closer to a total liquidation of energy. He achieves this in Kasmir.
If you can talk about why "Everyday is Forever," I might feel like talking about sunlight and sand.
DH: Because it’s always today. Whatever day it is it’s today when you die. This is an instantaneous continuity that’s difficult to experience as fact. Agamben calls our consciousness of our experience of time “operational time”, or “messianic time.” This is the time it takes time to end, or the time between the announcement of the apocalypse and the apocalypse. To me this is really just the circumference of the moment: Right now is happening right now. “The kingdom of God is at hand” is just another way of saying “It is today today.” Paul in Hit Wave captures this experience perfectly when he says “My God I’m really here I say to myself.” The comprehension that life is the impossibility of life. This is what forever is. When I talk about the Now Wave this is really what I’m getting at. There are two nightclubs in Hit Wave: Kasmir and The Embassy. You wrote a novella called Kasmir. Are you going to write anything called The Embassy?
JL: I wasn't planning on it but now that you mention it maybe I will. I think if I saw a different tone of light I would write The Embassy. The Embassy is under ground, or sand rather, and so I feel like it would be difficult to situate it within the parameters I typically work. Which is usually a response to ratios of ambient light in movies. I mean, that's usually my jumping off point.
From a macro standpoint, I get the theoretical framework of Glory Hole. I wonder if we could talk about the details. Stuff like "I don't mean to be a black box" from "Arizona or Florida," and the general attitude of Glory Hole. Like, you mention The Hot Tub as having a fuck-it-all attitude. I'd say Glory Hole has a who-gives-a-fuck attitude. What do you think? What were you reading a lot of while writing it? And also, how do you think these two books relate to this time and culture generally? We could talk about surface culture like fashion etc. or deeper shifts in the way people think and communicate maybe.
DH: I basically quit reading. I could stomach Agamben and one or two others and that’s about it. Mostly I watched serial TV on the internet and listened to the most brazen pop music I could find. I worked 10-15 hours a day, sometimes more. I was anemic as fuck and had been for years. The bright spot of my week was going to the oncologist to get tanked up on intravenous iron. I felt like a fraud sitting there with the chemo patients but I was basically the walking dead so whatever. I had no patience anymore for the kind of poems I’d written for a collection called Power Ballad, these long, wandering persona pieces, mostly dancefloors and celebrity, political conspiracy, sci-fi, ruined love. It’s like they were pop but not pop enough. I wanted something no bullshit. If the poems in Power Ballad are a critique of the world, Glory Hole is against even the concept of a world. So like the cruelest poems possible, but at the same time pop songs. Every line is a hook. It’s like some b-boy doing nothing but power moves. Only assholes do that. But it’s also the truth, like that line from “Kill the Lights”, “I drive like an asshole because it’s the truth.” I’m only speaking the truth from here on out. I think the line you quote from “Arizona or Florida” speaks to that also: “I don’t mean to be a black box / but I’m also not apologizing.” You could read that as the poems asserting themselves as emergent little death mechanisms. They’re not afraid to be a recording of the voice of God pulled from the wreckage. I’d say most poets are afraid to swing for the fences, if we’re allowed to use sports metaphors here. They risk nothing, when really you have to risk everything. Every poem is your last chance. I’ve talked with Ariana Reines about this in relation to Mal-O-Mar and I know you feel the same way: I’m interested in masterpieces, or miracles, and that’s it. I don’t have time for anything else.
I don’t know if I’m answering the entirety of your question, but my question for you is similar: I’m wondering if you could talk about how the surface referents of your work operate relative to the essence they evoke. I feel like the tactical strategy of your poetry and also Glory Hole is similar to advertising in its understanding of an image’s capacity to evoke a state of being or way of life, and how that reflects back on the actual thing attached to the image. Like the title of your poem “A Beverly Hills of the Mind”: it’s about the idea of Beverly Hills, not Beverly Hills – but there’s an implication that this idea of Beverly Hills is more Beverly Hills than Beverly Hills is. Badiou has this great quote in regard to Deleuze, a kind of conciliatory eulogy, that consolidates Deleuze’s thought down to one negative prescription, “Fight the spirit of finitude,” along with the affirmation “Trust only in the infinite.” I feel like your poetry is similarly aligned, and that to ask how the image functions is really to ask how reality functions, but that’s high level – I want you to talk brass tacks. What are you drawing from? What do you respect? I feel like a lot of the poems in your recent book Drain You and also Right Now the Music and the Life Rule are reminiscent of user-generated content, specifically online product reviews. I’m guessing this is because product reviews are all about trying to get at the experience of a thing, or its essence, to be truthful, to the point, and useful. The review itself is a product. I have a fascination with reviews of movie theaters on sites like Citysearch. There’s a lot of crazy class and race shit that comes into play, where the review mutates into a review of the audience. The audience as product. But I’m getting off track – What are you drawing from? What do you respect? How does it all come together?
JL: I was lounging in Beverly Hills very recently and I felt like it was kind of like the inside of my hot tub, which is like shapely and wishful, but I thought simultaneously that right now you can't be inside of anything. We live in a borderless society. It is the deep mix of externalities that one communicates with, and the external: the people, the places, the objects, the feelings, and the desires are indeed comprised within the product, they are the "core product" -- what you want it to do for you, so all writing that's about external things or images is about how reality functions, the right now reality that isn't ruled by the past.
I like to perceive going beyond the frontier of production. In economics, the transformation curve presents a defined limit based on the factors of production available. I think art expands the production possibility frontier to an indeterminate and possibly limitless rate. There is no end to the replication of feelings and their consequence. I believe in miracles as well, and to trip the boundary of the transformation curve would be an authentic "miracle," scientifically impossible, though a metric could be formed to account for the effect. This correlates, tangentially, with what you see as the user-generated aesthetic of Drain You and Right Now the Music and the Life Rule. User-generated content gives the audience focus and high control, it is also viewed as entertaining. Consequently sites that have these user-generated qualities have the fastest rates of growth, therefore accelerating the breakout from the production possibility frontier, and bringing us all closer to miracles.
DH: I don’t think reality functioning as an image is something specific to right now or the age of “the spectacle”. It’s fundamental. The universe is the image of nothingness. The world is the image of the universe. It’s the world we’re talking about here when we talk about macro-trends and the way we live. I think the shift toward user-generated content is part of a larger evolution. In marketing what’s happening is the brand and customer are becoming one. People create word-of-mouth campaigns at no cost to the brand. They beta-test and give feedback. They create actual marketing campaigns (like with video contests) and development code in the form of crowd-sourcing. This is all free labor that would normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable time. And they do it because they want a better product, a better user experience. It’s an inclination toward efficiency, and it’s the primary drive of the world in its current incarnation. It spills over into the relationship between the state and citizen, or the media and consumer, with the phenomenon of self-surveillance and monitoring your image online. You carry a GPS device so you know where you are at all times. You leave digital traces of yourself everywhere so you know what you’ve done and can forecast what you want to do next. Everything is connected. What this means is that all regulation is internalized. The state has effectively been replaced by the individual. This is an ironic, endgame scenario way beyond the New World Order of conspiracy theorists. It’s like what Debord says about how exile is impossible in a unified world. What’s terrifying is “We are the world.” But at the same time it’s not terrifying, or not any more than life itself. The impossible is always terrifying, and that’s what life is: its own impossibility. The challenge is always to embrace this impossibility, that is, to live life." - Dan Hoy & Jon Leon
"I say sorry, I’m the part where everyone’s dream becomes real.” – Jon Leon, Kasmir
When it comes to the pin-up stakes, the poet is not a prophet or oracle, but an apostle. Not a visionary of things to come, nor a cipher for the voice of God, but a strategist whose thought-practice is oriented around a universal truth. This truth is the impossibility of life itself, and the impossible as the fundamental stuff of reality. Everything is mundane and a miracle at the same time. Whether we’re referencing Rimbaud (“Christmas on Earth”) or Belinda Carlisle (“Heaven is a place on Earth”), the spirit of infinitude is what is most accessible, most dangerous, and most often dismissed.
Let’s start, for example, with a cross-channel analysis of the work of a prototypical poet as image-artist:
"We mixed agitprop, erotic dance, and horror to construct a total environment of focused bliss.” Jon Leon, Hit Wave
I’ll risk substituting tropes here and suggest the above sentence from Jon Leon’s Hit Wave could be taken somewhat literally as a nod to his overall objective (construct a total environment of focused bliss = enable and induce the experience of the impossible) and strategy (mixing agitprop, erotic dance, and horror = forming a triangulation of world, life, and nothingness).
Elsewhere in Hit Wave, Leon hints at his target audience:
"A lot of people didn’t like me. Most of them were poets. They called me names like proletarian, idealist, romantic, handsome. Fools I thought. Why would people sell themselves short and not just live the life of pure creative glamour. It was easy for me, to others it was a mirage. The real geniuses of history were the ones brave enough to be it. I couldn’t understand their criticisms to be anything but jealousy. I encouraged their cupidity and became even wilder and more attractive than ever. Around that time I released a book called Mirage, dedicated to my detractors. I won’t brag about its impact, but it was breathtaking.”
Unlike most[1] contemporary poets, Jon Leon is not writing for other poets. He has a completely different target audience: the image-artist in every single one of us: “People are out of body and in the air. They make torrid gestures that encapsulate everything. As their dictator and collaborator I am the key that unlocks the inner part of their soul” (from Kasmir). The name that dominates his system is Paul, the name taken by the Pharisee Saul after his encounter with the divine on the road to Damascus, and a name appropriated and unpacked by contemporary philosophers for its associations with universalism (Badiou) and the “time of the now” (Agamben). I’ve argued before that Leon is writing an apostolic poetry spotlighted by this frequent use of “Paul” as a narrator and Paul’s movement through “a zone of absolute indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world” (Agamben’s words, from his book on St. Paul); or, to use the formulation suggested earlier, Paul is reaching out to us from within the triangulation of world-life-nothingness where the impossibility of existence is experienced first hand: “My god I’m really here I think to myself.”
Time is a central trope for Leon, but it’s the time of “Right Now”, a kind of timelessness within time, or rather the experience of time as it happens, akin to Agamben’s “operational” or “messianic” time and St. Paul’s ho nyn kairos. This is a mode Leon prioritizes above all others: “The real geniuses of history were those brave enough to be it,” that is, brave enough to live as time. His promo videos extend this vision, with a bootleg look/feel evoking an early ‘80s as filtered through some vaguely remembered swimming pool (an effect achieved by filming his computer screen with an obsolete Vivitar ViviCam 35 Digital Camera). It’s as if he’s trying to recreate the year of his birth (1982, or at least that’s what a vignette of the same name in Hit Wave suggests) and what time must feel like to a newborn in its unadulterated, ahistorical form. To experience the image Jon Leon creates is to be baptized in the liquidity of time, and to emerge ecstatic and floating. As he says at the end of The Hot Tub, “This world is totally liquid.”
And yet despite this apostolic content strategy, which is executed through a kind of wild, universal, pop subjectivity, Leon’s marketing and communication strategy is more messianic and exclusive: an obscure blog that continually erases itself, limited editions that go out of print or get lost or never see the light of day, short-lived promo videos for actual or forthcoming or totally made up books that convey nothing but a vague vibe to the uninitiated, public readings recorded in advance and played back in lieu of an actual appearance, and sporadic, outrageous email blasts to his followers (“all 7-10 of you”) announcing forthcoming products or shifts in his “artistic vision”, e.g.
“i have produced a new product of art to help with the way mankind has evolved into new directions. this work of artwork is comprised of a poem and a video and is one component of a larger vision, MY ARTISTIC VISION, WHICH SOCIETY ATTEMPTS TO ERODE ON A DAILY BASIS THROUGH ITS HATRED OF LOVE AND SWEETNESS AND ITS OBSESSION FOR STUFF THAT DOESN’T MATTER AND IS THE TWILIGHT OF OUR TIME. thank you for being a part of it this is not a dream.”
Also:
“Hi, I just wanted to let everybody who has ever supported my work know that my blog now has ADULT content on it. There will be stuff about crack fascism bestiality black people and death and hating white bourgeois people on my blog now and maybe pictures of my cock. The same kind of stuff that got me fired from my job two weeks ago. Since nobody really wants to be associated with my ARTISTIC vision anymore as it becomes more violent saccharine and conceptual and personal I will probably be making a lot of videos and writing a lot of poem / vignettes about the dark parts of life like pop music and Newport cigarette advertisements that will have to be dumped onto this ADULTS ONLY blog because nobody cares to really do shit with it. Also, I wanted to give out my phone number to total strangers: [redacted]. I also wanted to say thank you to this ever diminishing group of people who get what is going on here. I also wanted to say F you to people who don’t get it / me (who are not receiving this) and what is going on here and that I may send out emails like this from time to time as part of my practice as an ARTIST and if you would like to be removed from my contact list please send an email that says please remove in the white strip above this box. Please understand that I may have to do this from time to time because my CREATIVITY is not permissible in society and I may have to just make creative emails to complete my vision. I also wanted to apologize for having to BECOME THE ART now since my ART PRODUCTS don’t make any sense in any kind of context and nobody gets me except a few very special people.”
So perhaps there’s a larger strategy that accounts for this universal/exclusive dichotomy, one in which posting your phone number for “total strangers” in a private email sent to “a few very special people” makes complete sense. Here I would refer back to the tension between “life” and “world” articulated earlier, or the form of nothingness we experience vs. the structure in which we navigate and make meaning out of it, and suggest that every word Leon writes is bristling with this tension. He’s spoken before of poetry as a “pathogen” that must be “abandoned”, and his overall poetic project as a wasting-of-talent progression toward this goal (in order, one assumes, to achieve a kind of unmediated communion with his audience). Or maybe what we’re witnessing here is an apostolic spirit caught within a messianic body, reaching out across the world, but from within “a private world, inhabited by only the most advanced persons of the elite age” (from Kasmir). It’s as if he’s living the message, yet waiting for someone else to deliver it to the masses. This puts any critic in the position of a kind of retroactive John the Baptist, announcing the arrival of Jon Leon’s image on this planet after it has already (rumor has it) departed.
POST-SCRIPT
Except his image hasn’t departed, it’s just undergoing a metamorphosis. According to recent emails and a new site, Jon Leon is now retired from writing and has segued into a producer-type role with his ephemeral Wrath of Dynasty imprint and gossip-rag hybrid Atelier Series. And yet, like the posthumous (popsthumous?) output of entertainers like Tupac and Michael Jackson, it appears Leon is still churning out hits in the form of an “estate” sale:
“I would like to give collectors and dealers a chance to cash in on my oeuvre and my creative high. Everybody knows I have “retired” from writing, but there are still manuscripts in raw form, print and electronic media, as well as videos and plans for very specific visual and memoiresque works, as well as a novella, and plans for visual work. I would like to give collectors and dealers a chance to bid on this work before, during, and after its creation. This will give you exclusive first come first served access to what I’m working on at the moment and in the future. You will receive updates and samples on a regular basis and may visit with me while I continue to create this work from wherever it is I live. Considering most of my written work is out of print and I’m basically inaccessible and any new work is likely to be sold at exorbitant prices or sell out within minutes this is the best way to have carte blanche access to my artwork and private papers, as well as guarantee that I will be able to continue creating it. I would like to reiterate that most of the work that will be created from here on will be visual art, objects, sculpture, and tapes.”
Cost for the title to a full year’s worth of work: $25k. “Serious inquiries only.” Less serious inquiries may be interested in “The Need to Exit the Self”, available for $12, originally announced as an unedited “12 volume set of intimate hotel-recorded cassette tapes by Jon Leon”, later amended to a single double-sided cassette due to legal concerns.
I want to end with an excerpt from his call-for-proposal email announcing the Atelier Series:
“Jon Leon’s Atelier Series is focused exclusively on the social aspect of literary culture. We are interested in short pieces that are about this topic. Examples would include descriptions of parties you have been to, people in the literary / art world you have had sex with, gossip, your friends, where you go, what writers are wearing, interesting details about writers / designers / artists only you know about, other social topics, including gossip. We are especially interested in pathbreaking essays on social life in the present literary culture from a variety of perspectives.
Please keep in mind that like Wrath of Dynasty these items will be distributed to a highly attentive, narrowly segmented, group of tastemakers, and that Jon Leon’s Atelier Series will also evolve and segue in some indeterminable way with a venture called Kasmir that will give those involved a way to participate in the culture they’ve helped to create in the form of private, completely elitist and pretentious parties.
It is my pleasure to welcome you now to Jon Leon’s Atelier Series.” - Dan Hoy
“Why would people sell themselves short and not just live the life of pure creative glamour.”
"On Friday night I read Dan Hoy’s post over at Montevidayo entitled THE PIN-UP STAKES: Poetry & The Marketing of Poetry. Approximately 2 hours later I was wasted in a bar across the street from my apartment, yelling at my roommate (who doesn’t really read poetry) that it was the best thing ever, insisting that she read it on her smart phone. About two hours after that I tweeted the phrase “If you take the lyrics to pop musick seriously they become the map of utopian society” (the “k” at the end of “musick” is my own superfluous nomenclature that surfaces mostly while “under the influence,” tying music to “magick” of course).
What was in my head, still, other than Hoy’s essay itself, was the video above, and more particularly, the song within the video. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw2o_Go4QWI
The lyrics, like a lot of pop-lyrics, perhaps seems shallow on the surface:
I’ve never seen you look like this without a reason,
Another promise fallen through, another season passes by you.
I never took the smile away from anybody’s face,
And that’s a desperate way to look for someone who is still a child.
CHORUS:
And in a big country, dreams stay with you,
Like a lover’s voice, fires the mountainside..
Stay alive..
(I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered)
I’m not expecting to grow flowers in the desert,
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime..
CHORUS [x2]
So take that look out of here, it doesn’t fit you.
Because it’s happened doesn’t mean you’ve been discarded.
Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming.
Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted.
I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered.
I’m not expecting to grow flowers in the desert,
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime..
CHORUS [x3]
Now let us consider Hoy’s essay. To be honest, I’m going to mostly ignore the marketing part of the essay, as that’s not what specifically interests me at the moment. But, to introduce what I want to arrive at, eventually, let’s look at Hoy’s examination of the image artist:
The image artist is always speaking to something universal in all of us, and either we listen or we don’t. Regardless, the task of the image artist is to contaminate the world with her vision, or, in marketing speak, to construct a strategic framework and tactical deployment plan that will achieve the objective.
Image artists often have an ambivalent relationship with results. This is because results, whether quantitative or qualitative, act as positive or negative feedback within an image matrix, and thereby impact the image itself. Although the objective is unwavering, the method of achieving this objective is always open to review. An image artist might adjust strategic direction, or abandon an entire communication channel, based on results.
In the comments to the post, Hoy cites both Tao Lin & Lady Gaga as examples of image artists– “The image artist, as a role, is ideologically neutral – it’s filled with the ideology of whatever is filling it, and its goal is to contaminate the external world with its image, whatever that is. ” What we have established here is the almost ubiquitous “super star,” mostly devoid of meaning, hyper-present in an image saturated world (little more than an image her/himself), a master of social media and marketing. What the image artist is is a mode. The image artist is “rich and famous,” but, and while they have just now really gained enormous presence, they are–in terms of theory–the product of the past. Everybody already read Baudrillard in the 90s. Every stoner in the world saw The Matrix. The image artist is basically a simulacrum, we all know what that means, there’s not really anything to talk about.
We could talk about how it was inevitable, but that’s not progressive. We all knew this. All that has happened is that something that was bound to happen has happened. It’s not a terrible thing because we were ready for it, it can even be appreciated on some level, but it’s certainly not anything to get excited about. I’m sort of intentionally smudging Hoy’s ideas of the image artist at this point, particularly regarding, for example, Tao Lin, but that’s not really my point. This is just introduction.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m more concerned with the titular Pin-Up Stakes. However, before we move on to the second half of Hoy’s essay, let’s segue into Alan Stewart Carl’s meditation on ‘writing as a white, [straight, I assume] middle-class male’. As Roxane has already pointed out, Carl handles his response admirably, eventually landing on the idea that “the best fiction, no matter its topic or the life experiences of its author, takes you into the unique life of an ‘other,’ a life that in some way broadens your own understanding of the world, that brings illumination to places previously darkened.”
My initial response is: fuck that.
actually that’s not really even just my initial response.
“But what’s the problem with that, M Kitchell? Seems like a pretty sound way to approach writing!”
The main problem is this: I have little interest in being “[taken] into the unique life of an ‘other’” in a way that “broadens [my] own understanding of the world.” Do you want to know why? Because I’m tired of the world. Fuck this world. This world is shitty and overrun by capitalism and bigots and genocide– if there’s anything we should all be able to agree on after the 20th century it’s that the world is TOTALLY FUCKED.
I don’t read things to help me understand the world, I already “understand” the world – it sucks (yes, this is incredibly reductive, I’m not a total idiot). I read things because I want to feel an entirely fucking new world, new life. When I released Dan Hoy’s Omegachurch on Solar▲Luxuriance, perhaps my favorite line from the entire work was the line on the back: THE WORLD IS THE END OF THE WORLD. This is a sentiment similar to that in the Pin-Up Stakes video posted above: EVERYBODY IN THE FUTURE / NEEDS TO DIE.
These words, sentences, phrases: they’re not negative. Not when understood within the context of the pin-up artist.
In Roxane’s latest post, “I Know Not of War”, she brings up and quotes the editor of The Paris Review:
During a master tea at Yale this past fall, Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, discussed the state of literature with the students in his audience. He said he is looking for “stories and poems that resonate because they are about real life,” adding that “young writers do not have enough life experience to tackle the important themes that only fiction can illuminate, so they write about writing instead.”
As to the first part, “stories and poems that resonate because they are about real life”: This is the past. Real life is boring. Real life is riddled with everything terrible. As to the second part, “young writers do not have enough life experience to tackle the important themes that only fiction can illuminate”: This is just fucked. Age has very little to do with what you can write about. I could, potentially, agree with this if the word “life” was stricken from the phrase “life experience” and replaced with “writing experience.” We can make the easy claim that a 17 year old who grew up “on the streets” has had more “life experience” than a petit-bourgeois in middle management who has never left his hometown. This seems so incredibly obvious to me that I can’t believe I’m even bothering to type this out: you do not turn 35 and suddenly win a medal that awards you “life experience.” This is agist as hell. Of course there are 18-year-olds who think they “know it all,” there are also 45-year-olds who think they “know it all.” Nobody knows it all. Nobody has some quantative amount of “life experience” that instantly allows them to “be a good writer.”
But ultimately, experience isn’t even that important. I can figure out if I’m going to enjoy a movie or not based on the first 15 minutes. I have figured out that “this life” or “this world” is “mostly pretty dumb” despite only being in my mid-20s. I don’t need to waste 25 more years “gaining life experience” (what is this, a table-top RPG?) to figure that out.
And this is where the pin-up artist comes in.
The pin-up artist is, ostensibly, a diversion from the image artist. As Hoy says, “I do want to define a particular type [of artists/image artists] who share a common objective: to end the world and change life.” He follows this up, “I should clarify that when I say ‘end the world’ I’m not suggesting a kind of artistic terrorism or terrestrial apocalypse. By ‘life’ I mean the form of nothingness we experience, and by ‘world’ I mean the structure in which we navigate and make meaning out of this form of nothingness.” But, instead of the image artist who has simply, basically, mastered marketing, the pin-up artist wants to master the world, which, in Hoy’s exegesis, is simply another tool.
I’m positing it here instead as the foundation of human reality: life itself is the first mediating factor, or image, of nothingness, and the world is what mediates the mediation. The world is made in the image of the image.
Arguably it is here that we come back to marketing, and it is specifically at this point, I feel, that the problem of privilege and class can arise, as Jackie Wang points out to Dan in the comments section. However, this isn’t the end of the pin-up artist. While we must recognize that the technological resources that enable the image artist are not available to everyone in the entire world, we can consider the fact that using technological resources to publish and disseminate the work of an image artist/pin-up artist does instantly enable you to reach a larger audience than, for example, a published poem within a printed lit magazine (note that I say “enables” not “guarantees”).
And with this power the idea is, perhaps, not to end the entire world at once, but perhaps at least to end the world that you currently inhabit. And since anyone who is reading this blog post, and since anyone who is exposed to the image artist is clearly accessing a computer, said individual is, at least to an extent, privileged above those who do not have access to computers. And it is this demographic, this world of those-with-computer-access, that the pin-up artist will bring to an end. And then the world as a whole can end.
And it is here that things become fascinating, because it is here that we encounter the impossible.
This is all to say that the pin-up stakes are defined by a subjective rather than material objective (though it may have material effects), and it is precisely this tension between life and the world that the pin-up artist exploits: the nexus of the first image (life) with the second (world). The greater the tension, the greater the cataclysm when this tension is antagonized, and the greater the probability that a linear conjunction of world-life-nothingness will be knocked loose and repositioned into a triangulation, with the artist and audience communing at the very center of it. This center is the experience of the end of the world, or rather, the end of the dominating proximity of the world. The position of life is changed. From this space, in equal proximity to nothingness, its image, and the image of its image, reality is no longer limited by what is possible. The impossibility of existence itself is experienced first hand, whether as a rapturous, uncanny joy, or terror, or trauma, or profound boredom, or as a kind of pure occurrence, void of affect. The exact contours of the experience are incidental: no specific feeling is sutured to the specifics of what happens. What we’re talking about is the point at which meaning collapses into infinitude. If we were to locate this vision politically, it would be the moment of revolt, inside the event, where all rules of particularity are annihilated. If we were to locate it personally, it’s the experience of right now as it really happens, tethered to but undetermined by the factual chronology of our lives. (bolded text bolded by me)
In his somme atheologique, Bataille lays out and develops his ideas of the summit, as well as that of the impossible. The most difficult part of Bataille is that the concepts he spends most of his time engaging with are concepts of non-knowledge, concepts that are formless, inexpressible with language. This is simultaneously their “point” and the reason that Bataille ended up writing as much as he did. Bataille’s conception of the impossible is where meaning collapses into infinitude: it is Foucault’s heterotopia, the Situationist’s dérive, Hakim Bey’s fucking temporary autonomous zone. But it’s, simultaneously, none of these. It’s the summit of existence, it’s the future in the present, it’s fucking spirituality, perhaps it’s what some people call god. But it denies all of this too.
I’m getting, perhaps, muddled here; I need to get back on track.
The pin-up artist is done with the world. They are above it. You could say that their writing is the future, but it’s not. It’s the present. The pin-up artist wants you to see that. The pin-up stakes are “an open challenge to those who have the capacity to live like immortals yet choose to live for the world.” And this is happening in poetry. This is happening in fiction. This is what I mean when I saw that art should be political. I do not mean that fiction should be boring, representational hum-drum demonstrating why the patriarchy is bad (or whatever); fiction should not be representing anything, fiction should be, in this particular example, anti-patriarchy without having to represent anti-patriarchy. Instead of writing about why the patriarchy should be taken down, write in the world where the patriarchy doesn’t exist.
Okay, instead of fragmenting off into infinity, as I am often prone to doing, let’s revisit a few lines of the Big Country song I posted earlier:
(I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered)
When I rail against “realism” and the “traditional mode of writing” this is what I mean: if you are finding yourself constantly beaten down working within the system that is beating you down, why are you staying within the system? You can write straight forward narratives outside of the system of a canon-driven realm of literature. You can destroy the world.
Dan Hoy ends his essay with the following:
The goal here is not to make fools look like fools, but to risk looking like a fool in order to raise the stakes. There can be no revolution without risk. This is not to say that the pin-up artist is a revolutionary. There is no concrete objective she is striving toward, only the vision she already inhabits and offers up to us. But it is precisely this vision of the impossibility of existence that enables the possibility for change. Either you believe in it or you don’t believe at all. To the pin-up artist, these are the highest stakes. What happens next is up to us.
This strikes me as a call to arms, and I’m ready to grab my fucking pen and kill everything." - Impossible Mike
Jon Leon, Alexandra, Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008.
"This, seems to me, like Leon's last engagement with more formally heterogeneous poetry before his switch to the paragraph prose-poems. Seeds of the content that would decorate Leon's more well known work can be found, but it's approach is different. I liked these a lot." - Mike Kitchell
"Alexandra, by Raleigh-based poet Jon Leon (the author of several other books and chaps), employs a clean, elegant format: a cream-colored, wraparound cardstock cover with an all-over print title in pale pink cursive. Like the cover, the work within is both sentimental and austere. The poems are mannered, drastically condensed and convulsive: Leon's romantic spirit and Marxist ideology vie for dominance in a psychoanalytic crucible; longing Hilda Doolittle quotes clash against prolix manifestos about capitalistic rationality and libidinous cathexis.
With its proliferation of first-person pronouns and whispers of the epistolary form, Alexandra is an analytical work that sears like a confessional lyric. Leon writes, "Gloria,/ The worst is that/ we could be nostalgic/ for our life, that we could say/ March is a metamorphosis/ away and I will/ not see you at my/ hotel room if I have one[.]"
And it seems as if the worst has come to pass in this profoundly elegiac work, which bids adieu to a world human enough for Doolittle to write "O I am eager for you!" without irony. In one rococo, arresting sequence, Leon intones, "goodbye heliotrope/ upon/ upon/ sated/ without breath/ and rebec/ good night/ nor reft/ nor wistful/ yours[.]"
But whose strange and restless voice lies behind this unsigned valediction; whence does it emanate? Perhaps the afterlife? "All the roses were gone/ and people kept saying/ 'It's winter.' I continued to walk." No, not quite—Leon embodies the perspective of the post-capitalistic soul, degraded to the point that it believes in "no/ one human speaker," no desire untainted by industry. But this disembodied soul still longs to touch another through the hedge mazes of power, psychology, money and politics, even as it despairs of ever doing so: "there is/ a way out of this diary/ if only through/ the dreary/ consciousness/ of someone else[.]" - Brian Howe
"Jon Leon, by now, is mostly known for his prose-poetry, his blocks of text reveling in baseness and decadence as a pure subjective bliss. As Dan Hoy says, “What Leon understands, better than anybody else alive, is that poetry is pure forever; and a poem is whatever it takes, even if, like Rimbaud, it takes abandoning poetry forever to pull it off. ”
Alexandra is, I would say, Leon’s last chapbook he published before he “abandon[ed] poetry forever.” More than the paragraphs, Alexandra actually looks like poetry from the consideration of separating poetry from prose. But there is no classicism here, no sonnet or articulated form. The text moves through various shapes, and there is a true sense of the heterogeneous here. Left aligned enjambed sentences are contrasted with paragraphs (foreshadowing what was to come), only to be met by text that jumps back and forth across the page. The ideas–the plot, so to speak–here is purely what you would expect from Leon, but it’s less base. There’s a level of artifice that Leon is aware he is using to hold these ideas, and ultimately it works out fantastically.
Still
there was a landscape
the woman’s neck
With its disappearance a whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure–which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body–has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the “universe” of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.
in a meadow
for example
without risk
the unofficial
only poses as an alternative
its compliance
designated
by its very name
but you know
that is
the first kind of enchantment
crysex
rimitive tape" – Impossible Mike
Jon Leon, Elizabeth Zoë Lindsey Drink Fanta, Content, 2011.
"It came in the mail, it was unexpected, it was a thin slice of a book, white with muted teal text and four circles with pong dashes. It came with a note (not to me personally) from the book’s author, Jon Leon in the form of a statement. I read the statement, it was interesting. I opened the book and inside there were black and white cropped photos, screen grabs, of Elizabeth (Berkley), Zoë (Lund), Lindsey (Lohan) Fanta (a carbonated sugary beverage) and a couple of other things. It didn’t stop time and space, but it did something. It is something that you look at and then it sort of seeps in and you are compelled to look at over and over again.
It has been a week or so since I received this unexpected book and it has stayed with me. Leon has stayed with me. The girls have stayed with me. These women are actresses of a certain type. Seen, used and a damaged by their roles as sex pots, they tier a few generations starting with Zoë Lund, who I was unfamiliar with, that stared in Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 in 1981 (she was 19 or so) and also co-wrote and had a small part in Bad Lieutenant in 1991. She died of an over dose via cocaine at the age of 37. Her face recalls Anna Karina and Anne Hathaway but doped up and possibly just punched. Her face is different than today’s girls; it is darker with thicker eyebrows. Her face is not included as often as Elizabeth or Lindsey’s but its placement grounds the sequences giving the other images weight and mortal tragedy.
The 90s are represented by Elizabeth Berkley, specifically as her role as Nomi Malone in the 1995 movie, Showgirls. This movie scalded any remembrance of Jesse Spano of Saved By The Bell days which Berkley stared in from 1989-1993, at the age of 17. In her infamous role as this Vegas show girl, Berkley’s (then 23) performance bizarrely twisted pornography and network TV personas. In Leon’s book she is always Nomi. The money shot Leon uses most is when Berkley is licking the stripper pole, tongue out, hair curly, eyes come hither. This still is especially emphasized half way through the book where half page images become full page repetitions creating a double sided quad.
And then there is Lindsey Lohan. Oh Lindsey…The situation of Lindsey is just too much, too warped, too everything that is fucked up with everything that this is right now. All these things are too innumerable to go into here, but the fact that she is very hot and very messed up is exactly why she is in this book. Lohan is 25 years old, has been hoofing it since she was 12 and has been to more rehabs, courtrooms, and DJ booths than is ever necessary. In Leon’s book she is not playing a character but herself. Paparazzi shots made to look like movie vignettes. Her eyes are sad, her face photogenic beyond fairness. She starts the book and her company with Zoë and Elizabeth makes the book all very right now.
Lastly there is Fanta. The fourth element is visual respite, a nostalgic reference along with a few other inanimate images that effectively tunes the book in its first half.
So is this a book. It is, because its physicality says so, but it is something else too. Leon presents this as an art book and it is his “first book that is not writing.” In an interview in The Faster Times, Content’s creator James Copeland, says that Content is, “there to be a rectangular space that an individual impulse can occupy for 80 pages.” This idealization has been attempted by many others before, but here, with Leon, it is actually done. This feels like a poem, the way the images are registered onto the page, the consistency of the cropping and the cinematic mid-shift psychology. This is a flip book of a sad song you vaguely remember listening to while smoking a pack of cigarettes and masturbating in a dark humid room. This book appears to be easy but it isn’t. This book seems glib, but it isn’t. It is unnerving and smart as hell and it makes you want to have Leon ask you to walk into the ocean with him with all your clothes on or drink rum and cokes at a Latin bar. Leon’s statement that came with the book also makes Elizabeth Zoë Lindsey Drink Fanta a window into his fascinations. It speaks of his self determined dissolution within “the scene,” with poetry, with whatever idea it means to be the idea of him. Lines that stuck out to reflect this are, “But truly, it’s more interesting to be a poet who wants to be a banker, than to be a banker who wants to be a poet. I thought of all these ways I could out myself as a banker.” He also refers to Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange of Death:
There is fashion from the moment that a form is no longer produced according to its own determinations, but from the model itself- that is to say, that it is never produced, but always and immediately reproduced. The model itself has become the only system of reference.
Leon ends his statement with “I want everything touchable right now.” These words, this context isn’t the piece in itself, unlike the failings of some Conceptual Art, the book holds its own without the text, but the sharpness, the tightness of the way that Leon writes his poems, this statement, whatever else, transfers in this book without strain." - Jamie Sterns
"Last month I received a copy of the first issue of a new project by publisher James Copeland called Content, a series that releases uniform length and shape books each filled with “content” from an individual author without restriction. The first issue is by Jon Leon, a piece titled Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta, which is at its most basic a series of photographs of the three famous women referred to in the title, manipulated and arranged by Leon throughout.
I didn’t quite know what to make of the book at first. I think I immediately thought, Why? But the book stayed out on my desk and I found myself continuing to look at it, and to think about the things Leon mentioned in the one page letter that accompanied the volume (reproduced here on Leon’s website), which includes the lines, “I wanted to talk about ‘the demented power of the lights,’ how literature is evil, the end of my ‘career,’ the end of the artists editions, my conceptual death, my simulation of life, my meltdown in print and on tape, my public facade, my disappearance from Los Angeles, my disappearance from the Atlanta scene, my disappearance from New York in the holiday of 2009. My resolution to ‘end this shit’ in 2010. To kill off the poems.”
Last week I had an email correspondence with Mr. Leon regarding the concept of the book, its assemblage, the context of creation and aging with creation, Lindsay Lohan, modeling, and disintegration in general, among other things.
* * *
I flipped through Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta as soon as I got it in the mail, not really knowing the project of Content: to have a uniform issue in which an author has a set amount of book space to do whatever he or she might want. I looked at it, and began thinking one way, and then realized that context of Content, and felt a shift, and still feel shifting now. I’ll admit I’ve thought about the material more than I thought I might given its deceptive pop-culture nature. I guess my first question for you, Jon, is how were you approached about contributing, and how did the idea to fill your issue with these images of these ladies in various contorts of repeated image occur to you?
- I don’t think of Content differently because of its constraints than any other book publisher with their implicit constraints. Qualitative, aesthetic, financial, or otherwise. Content has less constraints than most publishers. This gave me the opportunity to do something I may not otherwise have been able to do, to develop a concept unhindered. More importantly, James Copeland shows a real commitment, not to a single manuscript, but to an artist’s or author’s entire practice. He trusts their vision and lets them do whatever they want. That’s super rare.
Some months after meeting James in Hollywood he contacted me while I was living in an old hotel down South. At that time I wasn’t getting out much except to smoke cigarettes along the wrought-iron balconies that overlooked the outline of the city. I had a housekeeper then, and I didn’t work much, so my days ran one into the other, an endless succession of scrolling tumblrs and catching up on classics by Jean Rhys or Fitzgerald.
I fell in love with the attitude of Showgirls years ago while living with my first wife in Georgia. I became intrigued by Lindsay’s attitude shortly after. Sometime while living in the hotel I watched Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45. Zoe Lund was super real in Bad Lieutenant, a movie she also co-wrote, but after Ms. 45 I really fell in love with her. I was especially intrigued with the fact that her character doesn’t speak at all in that film, although Lund is in the leading role. Lately, I’ve been thinking about models and conceiving of them through style yes, but through Baudrillard too. I always thought models would be great to be around and were truly the source of everything good in the world. Now that I work for a fashion company in New York City where in my day-to-day life and in my nightlife I sometimes run into models, I find they are really even better than I imagined. I think models are the only true artists.
When I started making video off-and-on in 2007 I was appropriating, screening the screen. I was told they looked like a Chinese or Mexican bootleg of Bridesmaids or some other pirated new release. I got better at this kind of “photography” and wanted to see it in a book, and to photograph some of my favorite actresses and models. Not only because they’re hot and talented, but because I wanted to know them that way. I want to work with them. I can’t work with Zoe obviously, but I would definitely work with Lindsay on anything. There is something Bruce Hainley said when talking with John Waters about the photographer Gary Lee Boas. “No matter how bad the star looks, you know that he still loves the star.” I feel that way about this book, even though it’s a dark book, made of copies of copies.
You mention in the note that accompanies the book that you reached a will of resolution in 2010 “to kill off the poems” unto reaching “an unmediated communion with the audience.” It is interesting that there are almost no literal words here, beyond appearing in one image the phrase, “No signal.” There are also the words “MEN” and “Fanta” and “Especialidades.” Otherwise there are the faces of the women, and the Fanta. I wonder if you’d talk about perhaps what instigated or awoke and grew that feeling against the language of poetry, and if the use of these images accesses a different, less killed place in you, or perhaps a more killed place, and if this in some way has felt more “touchable” (as you also mention wanting in the letter) as an act.
- I think there is something like a notional subject present in all poems. Vaguely existential. When I’m talking about killing off the poems I’m not just talking about quitting poetry or killing the author, I’m talking about a paradigm shift in the way that we conceive of the artform. I’ve always thought of poetry as a lifestyle. This idea has evolved to include a phenomenological bent that is careless in its emphasis on total resignation to an immersive drift. I definitely feel the world becoming more touchable as I escape the page.
You also say in the letter, “Can you reproduce the model until it’s disintegrated. I think no matter what I want I want to see this carried to the end. I want everything touchable right now.” At what point along is this piece in the disintegration? What would a total disintegration look like? What do you feel when you [the creator] touch this book as an object?
- Total disintegration looks probably like Kasmir. Someplace after the disaffection of art. Avalon. It’s a type of consciousness and an acknowledgment of one’s instrumentality. It’s the demotivation to create art or books because there’s no differentiation between one’s life and one’s poetry. But not in a theater of cruelty kind of way. It’s more of a sexualized energia. I think it’s a consciousness of the luxury of art. When it’s no longer artwork, it’s just art. The total disintegration ends in not having to create something to put between yourself and other people any longer, an oft beautiful but circuitous communication. It’s no longer photographing Lindsay, but having a Coke with Lindsay. It’s no longer feeling compelled, because there’s a certain peace in the air and you can just as easily lie back into a yellow thatched lawnchair in a pair of Oliver Peoples and watch the waves break along the coastline as make a thing. It’s knowing that a designer wetsuit can have as much gravitas as anything in Texte Zur Kunst. When I touch the book I feel all that. I feel like bringing it into the lawnchair with me, or the deckchair, and just thinking about them. Thinking about us. Our lives.
I feel like certain kinds of people seeing this book would be angry: saying that you wasted their space/time, not acknowledging that this disaffection, particularly in with language. I’ve always thought that the minute you say something is art, that’s the quickest way to guarantee it is. Is this reception, positive or negative, important to you? Is there anything you’d say to someone angered by this work, or by any of your work? I’m thinking too of the mix of what could be called shock, which comes really from anything unexpected, in the language you produced particularly in your poem cycle (which correct me if I’m wrong, came after the Content issue?) Die With These Bitches?
- There’s a Youtube video of Amy Winehouse smoking crack. There’s a Youtube video of Saddam Hussein’s execution. There’s youth revolt in England. The IMF managing director may or may not have raped a maid. There’s an Arab Spring. There’s an album by Kanye West called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. There’s really no reason for me to think that anything I do as an artist or a poet can be shocking. That kind of reception isn’t important to me at all. I just create what I feel moved to create. The function of waste is a part of the concept of the book, a theory of waste is in all my books, but that is meaningful.
In Die With These Bitches, which came out immediately before Elizabeth Zoe Lindsay Drink Fanta, I’m breaking through something personally and aesthetically. I was influenced by Avital Ronell’s Crack Wars and her reading of the literature of euphoria. I was also influenced by the aesthetic of the crack epidemic in the 80s. Things like lime green tank tops and red trucker hats and tight Lee jeans. What social workers would call the “inner city” — whatever that means. Right now I live a few blocks from where Notorious B.I.G. grew up and the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare has organic markets, French restaurants, designer coffee shops, bodegas selling European fashion magazines, and so on. But there’s still the ghost vibe of the inner city. It’s a kind of palimpsest of the ghetto. I see people stumble around the streets who look like they woke up from 1983 and they’re asking me for 75 cents for a slice of pizza and I’m like pizza’s 2.50 now. That presence is kind of inspiring to me. But Die With These Bitches is also an exploration of my own aggression, masculinity, misogyny, and sadism. I sense that in contemporary poetry women are far more engaged with their ugly feelings and pathologies than men are. I don’t believe because we’re literate or working in a high art context that we don’t feel these things. Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game is a masterful representation of this.
I like the time shift element there; people stuck in another mode of self. It makes me wonder specifically with Content how you went about laying out the images as they are: if it was intuitive, or entirely preconceived, or whatever, for instance, to repeat the picture of Elizabeth licking the pole for almost half the book?
- I began with a lot of photos when I knew I’d be working with this material. There were some of Taylor Warren that I hated to let go for example. But as I sifted through the collection I found the images of Lindsay Lohan, Zoe Lund, and Elizabeth Berkley to have the most resonance. Their faces seem to convey a kind of hollowness in the images in the book that is open-ended, as if any narrative could be attributed to their existences. And I suppose that’s kind of what the media does to a certain kind of star. There’s an image and there’s copy to go with it. But it’s just copy. Without a personal connection to the person there’s no way to know all that is contained in a look. I chose to repeat the images because I imagined through repeated exposure to the same picture the viewer could come to know something about who these people are. Anything surmised from this study remains speculation, but still, there is an effort to understand the star as a person. I want to know them in that way.
Several of the images I photographed and rephotographed multiple times until the image washed out, almost losing all definition. These accumulate at the end of the book.
Having entered the disintegration and reckoned with it, what comes after?
- Nothing– I hope. I think, for a while at least, myself, I can lounge among the ruins. Manipulated photography, fugitive materials, waste. I rather like the idea of an antithesis. Of dismantling, unmaking, not making, letting things pass and fall into obsolescence. I miss thinking. And I miss other people’s thoughts. I feel like there is a global psychographic system in which rapid cultural shifts can be felt or imagined — anticipated. I mean, maybe, if we can stop producing long enough to listen for it, we could be over.
Until Lindsay calls about that Coke." - Intrview by Blake Butler
"Wrath of Dynasty is a boutique imprint of fine art objects that was established by Jon Leon halfway through 2010. If you’re not familiar with Leon, the best thing to do is check out his poetry, some of which is available online here. If you want to check out any of his many chapbooks, well, you’re pretty much out of luck, because they’re all out of print. In three days the final title from this season of Wrath of Dynasty, formerly Legacy Pictures, will also be out of print. In fact, in three days, everything Wrath of Dynasty has ever released will be out of print, at least until the next season starts and a new series of unique print objects are brought to light. I have been consistently impressed with Wrath of Dynasty, which has brought to light a lot of exciting and unique work that would undoubtedly be inappropriate for other venues, so I thought I’d send Jon an email and ask him more about it. Check out the interview behind the cut.
I’ll get this question out of the way, since it’s something I’ve specifically wondered about myself: What inspired the name change from Legacy Pictures to Wrath of Dynasty halfway through this first season?
- It came to my attention that there was a film and video production company named Legacy Pictures in existence since 1998. I’m not sure about the volume or type of projects they’re involved with, but Wrath of Dynasty is increasingly involved in promotional video projects for authors and I didn’t want any confusion at all. Going forward, the entire Wrath of Dynasty model is focused on book trailers and image production. Our mission is to be the go-to house for authors seeking to clarify their image.
The Wrath of Dynasty website informs us that we’re at the last title of this season’s releases, which is Prop Tragedies by Jennifer Krasinski, putting up this seasons number of releases to 9 (10 if you include your own The Painting Show, which seemed to exist as a Legacy Pictures release before Legacy Pictures existed).
What lead you to starting Legacy Pictures initially? Did you have any plan as to how many titles or what you would be releasing when you started out?
- Legacy Pictures began in the Spring of this year when I announced and brought out my last print object The Painting Show (formerly White Girls). I told a few people about expanding my interest in the author’s multiple to include other writers. Particularly other writers who were creating work that I thought wouldn’t otherwise become available. Daniel Feinberg’s title for example, The Ecstasy of Betrayal, is an interview we felt was too antagonistic to appear in Art in America (or too dangerous according to his legal counsel), so Wrath of Dynasty brought it out in a very limited quantity for those with the inclination to seek it out, for the initiated really. Another characteristic example is Kate Zambreno’s I Am Sharon Tate, an excerpt from a longer piece of her most provocative fiction to date.
In an e-mail to my patrons back in April I made explicit my intention to discontinue all production of my own work, and that this decision did not “preclude the production and distribution of editions by writers other than myself.” Legacy Pictures was really conceived in that sentence.
I did have a rough plan sketching out the pop-up idea of the press, the raw materials and design involved, and the type of work I wanted, but from the day I approached you about doing the first title I really had no idea how many authors would get involved. However, the appetite for this kind of format was so strong that took care of itself in a matter of days. I’m incredibly thankful and more than satisfied with the work I’ve been able to bring about through Wrath of Dynasty.
About halfway through this season’s releases, at the end of September, you sent out an email with the subject of “The Care and Preservation of Your Legacy Pictures Multiple.” One of the things that I like about what you’re doing is that you’re approaching the release of what could ostensibly be called “chapbooks” as fine art, often in terms of both semantics and content. In addition to publishing poems yourself, you have also had art criticism published throughout the web. How does this approach, relating contemporary lit to contemporary art, and the specific attention to the idea of the rare object, affect what you’re doing? Does it specifically flavor, so to speak, what you choose to release? How about how you market the releases?
- Where Wrath of Dynasty excels is in its conception of the printed object or “multiple” as the author’s art. Writing is an art form, as is bookmaking. That insistence is integral to the mission of the imprint and the context in which its catalog is merchandised. We want the work we produce to reach an audience ready to receive it. I’m not talking about an audience who reads competitively so to speak, the competitive reader who buys everything to survey and to inspect as a future outlet for his own work, but a sincere reader who’s interest is really a loyalty or a commitment to a certain authorial vision. Each and every author on Wrath of Dynasty has this kind of appeal.
An understanding of the market dynamics around this kind of object definitely informs who I publish, and an insight into the tastes of the reader through an ongoing relationship with that type of reader definitely helps us guide our authors to the work in their oeuvre that their unique audience, and therefore Wrath of Dynasty’s unique audience, would be receptive to. Through that lens, every decision we make is a marketing decision. Keeping them rare is about finding an equilibrium with demand and producing just below that. If publishers knew how to meet demand all books would go out of print immediately. As new readers emerged so would a secondary market for that title.
The very first Wrath of Dynasty title to enter the secondary market, Kate Durbin’s Fashionwhore, went on auction this past weekend in Los Angeles. I forecast more of that type of activity to come for our titles.
It’s increasingly important that publishing models be sustainable. The model of Wrath of Dynasty has succeeded through 9 titles in 3 months because it is that. Publishing models that operate on continuous losses through an insensitivity to the complexity and dynamism of pricing and demand further erode opportunities for authors to make a living.
And as a final question, what’s in the future for Wrath of Dynasty? Any titles planned for next season yet?
- I have a short list of authors I’m looking at for next season, but I’m not certain it will come together. Our focus now is almost totally on image production and book trailers. I’m already working with some of the sexiest and smartest people in the world. Going forward, I want to make sure everybody knows about them. - Interview by Mike Kitchell
Jon Leon, The Painting Show, Legacy Pictures, 2010.
Jon Leon, Drain You, High Street Books, 2009.
"I was watching a Kenneth Anger film when a large aphrodisiac God converged on me and told me to create a poem that pleases her."
Jon Leoon, Kasmir, High Street Books, 2010.
"Jon Leon at his densest, literally, in what one could call a novella, or a short story, or something, but you know what, fuck it, let's forget about genre or titles or words that classify, because I think this is maybe the cornerstone of Leon's work, I think this is the precipice. The book builds with an intensity, fractures near the end; it'd be too easy to just say that 'everything falls apart" because it doesn't, it just builds and sort of explodes into the impossible, there is death of [ ] but it doesn't even fucking matter." - Mike Kitchell
Excerpt:
Once inside Kasmir I’m mesmerized by the demented power of the lights. There is a long thin lipstick-red tube running the length of the ceiling. That is the only light in the room. The most attractive of ex-modern life hover beneath the light. Some girls are wearing Tata Naka. Most of the men look like androids. This is not a chic place. It is a private world, inhabited by only the most advanced persons of the elite age. I am quickly ushered into the Ward. There I am in contact with a strain of exotica few humans have observed. There are wired couples. Not high. These children are roped in magnetic loops and are mechanically vibrating to the pulse of anti-age music. I am the author of Kasmir. It is my highest grossing art. I am the author of The Embassy. Another world, located across the street and several floors underground. The Embassy is the host world. Kasmir is its progeny.
Jon Leon, Tract, Dusie Press Books, 2006.
"I feel like the poems in HOT TUBE work better with their form than the poems here do, but regardless this is some great stuff. There's some sort of weird de-hierarchization of events that Leon accomplishes by abandoning any transitional words and occasional parts of speech to fragment an event into an excess. Dirty and fun and political? I think so." - Mike Kitchell
Jon Leon, Right Now the Music and the Life Rule, Sunset Debris Intl, 2006.
"A collection of women and one man, description, lust, music, the unbearable lightness, her large bag." - Mike Kitchell
"Mankind compiles work began in 2009 with the titular suite, (“Don’t write to me about art please. Tell me you want to fuck me.”) and includes poems composed in the proceeding years under the titles “The Painting Show,” “Die With These Bitches,” “A Locket,” and “Midriff.” The book also includes a new set of recent poems “Love of Destiny,” “Archipelago,” “Fucking Working Youth,” and “Graphic Realism.” It is assuredly the sexiest darkest book I’ve ever written. Read it because it’s about your life."
Four Poems by Jon Leon
THE HOT TUB
I strip and enter a hot tub. Blue tiles line the walls. I drink some vodka from a vodka
bottle. I take a picture of some groupies. I lie back into a lawnchair my head vibrating.
Something like a prism shoots up my spine. I see the sun through a tree in the distance.
Everywhere I’ve ever been is like this. I spill a Bellini halfway blinded by the glare. Then
a stud gets up naked to the waste. He slowly parts with the cloud of immersed bodies. I’m
like what the fuck. This is a surprise.
KOKOMO
The street is lined with shops and trees. A blimp passes by over head. The beach is
covered with tanned bodies. A dolphin’s fin flashes by. I walk up to a hot tub and dive in.
Some people from Parsons are there. Then we are so hot we go up to the air conditioning
unit. It smells like freon and I’m sort of high at this point. I pour an Albarino into some
girl’s American Apparel strapless rouched bodysuit and lightly tongue her asshole.
Basically we’re drunk. All I see is rainbows until I snap out of it. Electronic cars hanging
from the ceiling. We’re in love with steam, sunsets, and déjà vu.
OBSESSION
Better collars. The shape of the sky above The Beverly Hills hotel. Red lights. I look at
my shoes in the lobby of another hotel. Sitting there thinking lucite thoughts on wooden
ships. Replicate the hook in me. Skip the mall for Inside Edition. I’m with Tatiana buzzed
staring at wood paneling in a basement somewhere. 111 to Palm Canyon Drive. Cory
Kennedy eats a pizza. My whole life I’ve lived here. Playing with bamboo.
EVEN DECADES
I’m lounging in a hot tub on the top of a mountain next to the tennis courts overlooking
the entire state. I think about how breathtaking the view is as I sip on Fresca. The water is
version of serene I have to reorient myself to. Rhonda is across from me and she has the
pinkest nipples I’ve ever seen. Her face is so mellow as her breasts float atop the
undulating jets. I can’t think of a competing bliss. We listen to Kenny Loggins mp3s,
strip, and do it in the clubhouse. Then walk out to the patio and yell beats to the falconer.
She does pilates while I stationary marathon.
THE TIME OF THE SEASON by Jon Leon
I'm lying in a waterbed. On the glass-topped table next to me: the journal of Alix Roubaud and a gun. I haven't touched the gun, I haven't read the book. I'm listening to "Roses" by White Ring. I feel like I'm overdosing on Nicorette. I spit the gum into a champagne flute and pick up Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Ellis. I read 3 pages, and then I read 3 pages from Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and then I wander the apartment, kind of dazed, and put in a DVD of Dawn of the Dead. I watch the entire movie and drink 2 cans of Coca-Cola and eat ricotta, fig, and onion bruschetta. Some California strawberries. I'm feeling sort of high, but I didn't do any drugs. I'm listening to the track by White Ring and willingly shift into a trance. I look at thathipsterporn.tumblr.com. There are babes and dudes all over it and then a picture of Kobe Bryant in a mist of confetti, a giant 24 facing the camera. A champion. I thought about a lot of stuff, but all I'm really in a position to do right now is smoke kush. I don't have any kush though, so I think some more, although I find it difficult to concentrate. I think about how when there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the Earth. The dead in Dawn of the Dead converge on a shopping mall where 4 alive people retreat in posh isolation. I think about how their living room is fairly smart and attractive, and how I'd like to live in the suburban mall with them. I also think about MacArthur Park for some reason. I'm in MacArthur Park staring at a guy staring at a fountain eating a popsicle. I walk down 6th street and buy a taco, then I buy a $5 pair of sneakers. I don't know what the fuck is going on, whether it's a farm, a ranch, or a street – what country it is. I buy a DVD of a movie that hasn't come out yet. When I get home I take a bubble bath. I peer into the skyline of downtown Los Angeles and then I smoke what feels like a hundred American Spirits and read a book called The Merchant Bankers, gaze listlessly at a gold Wells Fargo marquee. That was another time. Today I'm overdosing on Nicorette, not reading the journals of Alix Roubaud, staring at the gun, tangentially thinking about some Robert Heinecken pictures I viewed at Cherry & Martin called Hite Hustler Beaver Hunt. 1 I think about pussy. I can't do anything else so I pick up a book next to me with the title Sex and Rockets about a guy who dropped out of school to build explosives in Pasadena and invoke a siren named Cameron through a magickal process. I look at this book a while and put it down because the writing in it sucks. I can't figure out the masturbation scenes with L. Ron Hubbard and the eccentric babes who believe in the magic. I believe in the magic though. The magic that is spun from the energy where I am. I understand that my life's purpose is to invoke a zone of pleasure through language and ritualistic sex that feels borderline, darkly. It feels good. That is why I continue to do it. I get into an American car and drive into the city. I invoke that zone.
Jon Leon: Adults Only
"They call me an American poetry bad boy. The groupie of the grotesque. Because I move like a mist, seeking the border that seeks to contain me. I stand at a metro platform, my life's possessions in a bag the size of an attaché, and catch the blowback of a life encased in the tyranny of pulp. A pulp novel called Soft Thighs written for adults only in the year of the stag. I throw down the book and finger the tear in my lamb's wool sweater. The sweater that smells like the jade room at a Korean spa, like the ambience of finery worn by the whole of the zeitgeist.
100 Questions to Jon Leon - Novembre Magazine
"Fanta is eternal": James Copeland on Content and Jon Leon
Jon Leon: Marque of Goodness
Jon Leon: if we were immortal: Slater Bradley at Team Gallery
Jon Leon's blog
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