Myles and Nicoloff

I had heard of Eileen Myles before, but I wasn’t exactly sure from where. For some reason I placed her with the likes of Laura Mullen; a proper name, a white name, an intellectual name. It was windy today, like yesterday and the day before that. I ran toward the closed door at the entrance to 21 Grand in Oakland where Eileen Myles would read after an unknown angsty Michael Nicoloff. Before sitting down I headed straight for the bathroom, and on my way bumped into a greasy-haired woman dressed in a masculine way. She was talking to someone quite far away from the door to the bathroom, but alerted me that she in fact was waiting for it and that I would be in line after her. She looked away. After emptying my bladder I entered the white-walled room and sat in my red metal chair. A baby with the middle name Duchamp introduced Michael Nicoloff, the unknown amateur poet of Oakland who published the chapbook ‘punks’.

Nervously stumbling toward the microphone, Michael’s head hanging low for his entire set. Not once does he acknowledge the presence of his audience, perhaps to avoid an awkward moment or two where he would suddenly gain enough awareness to be embarrassed of his present situation. His eyes glued to his angsty words (punk, fuck you, Satan, Spinoza-sucking, nothing is real, the dick train). Yawn. As soon as he opened his mouth, all of his nothing words fell out in a messy vomitous stream, at 100 miles per hour. Uh, Michael, are you reading for me? Am I supposed to understand you? Or am I just supposed to remark at your impeccable spitting skills? I realize that secretaries who can type more words per minute are valuable to their employers, but I never thought that there was an incentive toward spewing out a high amount of words per minute. Each poem sounds the same, is read in the same monotonous voice, and abruptly ends in such a way that I am delighted to experience silence so that I no longer have to deal with the anxiety-inducing task of attempting to understand a word Michael says. Even Michael’s angsty cliché words must hate him, for they are most likely insulted by his total disregard for the whole thing. In his last breath, his last word, Michael spits out just as fast as anything else, a “thank you”, and runs off the stage.

After eleven minutes of i-pod DJing, Eileen Myles finally entered the spotlight, equipped with a witty prop; a black box. She joked that it had something to do with a bomb and then flipped the case open and grabbed a pile of papers. She began reading excerpts from her upcoming novel Inferno. A dim light shone over her greasy hair as she talked about some slick-haired man she once fucked in New York. I then realized it was she I bumped into waiting for the bathroom. And then just as quickly, I remembered it was her whose name I had come across in high school when I was first exposed to the quiet video works of a youthful Sadie Benning. As Myles continued reading, imagery of New York punk popped into my head, and so did dialogue from Andy Warhol’s from A to B and Back Again. She reads about sex, art, sex with punks, sex with business-men, typewriters, pill-popping prostituting sexy sex lesbian lifestyle, poetry, New York and ultimately this: