Hi Nora! No more blind dates for me, man. I’m going on strike. Rooftops in NYC on Spring Break are mighty dangerous for this type. I felt like a kite trapped in the dendrites of a tree. I think his brain was thoroughly adled by the heat. We went and saw a Frida/Diego exhibit at the Museo Del Barrio, and he said (he likes to hold forth), “I don’t know, Max. I have some reservations about a few of these portraits. They still look like they appear airbrushed on the side of a van.” The date was over at that point, I only blame myself, I blame myself that he sounds so much like Simon. That was my Spring Break for ya, oh yeah, I also overboiled some potatoes, you know how I get, drinking loads of flat champagne, reading in bed, day dreaming about the leftovers from a party the previous night. I was the left overs from the previous night’s party. But left overs are kind of funny, don’t you think? Fuck, where were you? I’m supposed to go to Disneyland (Spring Break never ends!) next week with S and his new Cuban babe, what’s-her-face, since it’s been her lifelong dream (an ironic one, I hope) to visit all that milk and honey. He says I’m not to make any raft/Elian jokes in her presence. Also, I’m not to remind him that you’re Cuban too and that the two of you (probably) rest on opposite sides of the bar according to the order “Cuba Libre” (well, I made that up, but I’ve got my gut feelings). I’m at The Albatross. Sorry, I couldn’t wait for you to get back into town. I completely forgot that I went to the movies today, that...

Nora, How funny to learn that autumn is an Edward Gorrey illustration, the trees on my street are the bad switches that bad children get for Christmas. Only one day, trained on self-abuse, I came outside and discovered these two men carrying huge leafy green evergreens and placing them in front of the naked dendrites. The sound of one laughing, they’re filming a movie in the wrong season. Did I ever tell you about the time I pissed on the singing tree as an inebriated freshman at UCSD? It was truly satisfying. Sure, it doesn’t quite hold up under the staggering weight of some of your stories. Like the time you wrote that one Sylvia Plath paper two weeks in advance of the due date. I know! Please tell me again about the time you dropped acid with that one guy, what’s his name, Phil (or, as you prefer, “Philly” — in the dotty parlance of your chosen profession); tried dancing it off at a rave at Cloyne, but then decided your energy better directed toward writing those four papers “just” waiting in your inbox, back at that beautiful loft high up in the trees on Virginia Street on the north side of campus — Once inside you’re fooled into believing that you’re staring out to the street from inside the hull of a boat. Anyway, you said something about tractors that left a few questions and this bastard of morningside heights a bit restless. PS: Would this be the appropriate time to tell you about the time I lingered overlong under that man hole window, after leaving one of those notorious poetry tutorials? I caught your profile, thought of Disneyland, thought of wishing to be the mail man and then you sneezed/appeared momentarily...

Hello there, The weekend was really strange, but I haven’t yet hermetically sealed it in tupperware containers for easy transport. The Radiohead review was pretty much right on, except that I would have made a bigger deal about the saxophone. I wish you had been here earlier. Tried to mend a dispirited tire to within an inch of losing everything I’ve got on file. Exhibition of boring male-type destructiveness. Upset some birds. I feel dispossessed. I’m a terrible mechanic. I’m a very angry god. I don’t care how appealing you find me. Chary beauties with nerdy aviator glasses just are, perhaps. It makes sense that no one will ever know about us. I would say let’s meet up for a drink but you know. Only that I need to hear from you, ice plant, and it always makes me happy. Why the interest in The Immoralist? The sparrows tell me your secrets, the jacaranda is your bold kimono. Til then,...

Heya Nora, thanks for thinking of me. I’m old enough to be your dirty uncle. I just purchased my ticket home on the 19th of Dec. until Jan 2. Listen, short-stack, we should hang out soon. I’m not teaching this semester (enforced sabbatical) which means I’m ready for you to show me the seedier side of things sometime. And I don’t mean late night photos of some other guy sucking on your foot. What passes for painting these days. Though it’s no small consolation to note your unease over referring to it as a self-portrait (which one, christ), keeping me up late at night while I’m trying to grade papers is unkind. As I write this, I have a very serious face. Last night I watched Twilight Part Deux and read the Duino Elegies at the same time. Is it possible that both could make me feel the same thing? I must be irreparably broken, but then angels and vampires do have some things in common. Exile, right?...

Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977. Rathr than attempting to objectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poetry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cultural subversions. Bifo, who worked on Radio Alice was interviewed by Carlos Ordonez at the recent conference on Autonomy (’After Marx, April’) in London. The interview was conducted in English. The autonomia movement in Italy during the seventies emerged from the new proletariat of disaffected and unemployed youth, workers and intellectuals creating a radical opposition to institutional politics. ‘Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power. In biology an autonomous organism is an element that functions independently of other parts. Political autonomy is the desire to allow differences to deepen at the base without trying to synthesize them from above,to stress similar attitudes without imposing a general line, to all parts to co-exist side and side in their singularity.’ Sylvere Lotringer ‘The Return of Politics’ ‘Autonomia’ issue of Semiotext(e) Q: How did Radio Alice begin, and what experiences did it attempt to address? Radio Alice started in February 1976 with people who came from the experience of Poterio Operia, a leftist revol~tionary group and people involved in the movement of Autonomia. We did not think of Radio Alice only as a political means but, first ofall, as a possibility of organising the experiences of a homogenous community. We were speaking of little groups – feminists, gays, workers. I emphasize this \’little group\’ character because we did not conceive ofthe radio as a political organisation that has to \’state decide\’...