it's good to read diane di prima, especially in times like these. it's also good to google this poem, and find this video of di prima reading it, and a few others, at the last waltz (!!!) of all places
this is also a poem that i've never stopped thinking about since i heard and read it. also it was sampled in a song by the chemical brothers. also also i think it was part of the 'dial a poet' project when it was first established.
Impossible to pithily summarize the force of this artist (in which any isolated "scream" is merely another register of space across a VERY complex vocalic spectrum), but I like this one-liner from RYM: "The world isn't a pretty place and sometimes people don't want to hear the truth." Also, if you live in NYC and have *read* about the 80s/90s AIDS crisis but aren't sure you can *feel* it, listen to her work.
As we embark on this new era of American apocalypse, I have found it helpful to look back at how artists have navigated the bowels of hell before. I find enduring inspiration in Diamanda Galás, especially her album Plague Mass (1991), a live recording of her performance at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a howl of anguish and rage at the indifference and hypocrisy of the church in the face of AIDS. Galás lost her brother, the experimental playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, to AIDS in 1986, and was herself a member of ACT-UP. In Plague Mass, while covered in blood, screeching, ululating, and speaking in tongues, Galás becomes a conduit for the voices of the dead, who in their suffering at the hands of their moralist torturers, remain defiant - “Give me sodomy, or give me death!”
its the best way to consume media. DONT show me a trailer DONT let me read the flap on the inside of the novel DONT tell me there’s even an alien in it. Dont tell me what it’s about just be like “it’s good you should check it out”