# Christian Molenaar


## Posts

- [2025](https://christianmolenaar.com/2025-2/): I started the year with no greater plans than a set at the Brown Building alongside Amy Cimini and Sean Jones playing my songs for voice and cello. Somehow that turned into a full twelve months of gigging and recording, the busiest year I’ve had post-lockdown. Below, the highlights (and lowlights):
- [Comic as Christmas](https://christianmolenaar.com/comic-as-christmas/): Merry Christmas from Babs, aka Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.
- [Fragment](https://christianmolenaar.com/fragment/): Mr Callanan felt homely. There was a good fire burning in the grate and he knew that it was cold outside. He had been about town all day shopping with Mrs Callanan and he had met many friends. These friends had been very friendly, exchanging the compliments of the season, joking with Mrs Callanan about her number of parcels, and pinching Katsey’s cheek. Some said that Katsey was like her mother but others said she was like her father — only better-looking: she was a rather pretty child. The Callanans — that is, the father and mother and Katsey and […]
- [Late Season](https://christianmolenaar.com/late-season/): Stay yet, pale flower, though coming storms will tear thee,My soul grows darker, and I cannot spare thee.
- [tall:shadow @ Aztlan Libre 12/13/25](https://christianmolenaar.com/tallshadow-aztlan-libre-12-13-25/): Coinciding with Tall Can’s recent release from prison, Aztlan Libre’s fifth annual El Barrio No Se Vende show offered the perfect opportunity to showcase his photography documenting the restoration of the Chicano Park murals.
- [Pilostyles Wildflower](https://christianmolenaar.com/pilostyles-wildflower/): 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖛𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝖔𝖑𝖉 𝖑𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖑𝖞 𝖇𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖘 𝖚𝖕 𝖔𝖓 𝖙𝖊𝖑𝖊𝖕𝖍𝖔𝖓𝖊 𝖜𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖊 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝖜𝖍𝖎𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖗 𝖉𝖊𝖒𝖔𝖓𝖘 𝖞𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖍𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖙 𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖑𝖊𝖙’𝖘 𝖘𝖊𝖙 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖕𝖎𝖌𝖘 𝖔𝖓 𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖊
- [Two Poems for Thanksgiving](https://christianmolenaar.com/thanksgiving-day/): One day is there of the seriesTermed Thanksgiving DayCelebrated part at table,Part in memory. Neither patriarch nor pussy,I dissect the play;Seems it, to my hooded thinkingReflex holiday. Had there been no sharp subtractionFrom the early sum,Not an acre or a captionWhere was once a room, Not a mention, whose small pebbleWrinkled any bay, —Unto such, were such assembly,‘Twere Thanksgiving day. Emily Dickinson, “Thanksgiving Day” The early inhabitants of this continent / passed through a valley of ice two miles deep / to get here, passed from creature to creature / eating them, throwing away the small bones / and fornicating […]
- [Los juegos de territorio no se vende](https://christianmolenaar.com/los-juegos-de-territorio-no-se-vende/): Two shows in a small world
- [From Ashes Like the Phoenix](https://christianmolenaar.com/from-ashes-like-the-phoenix/)
- [Territory Games](https://christianmolenaar.com/territory-games/): I had the distinct honor of playing guitar for Territory Games, the self-titled debut of Nathan Hubbard’s new cross-border quintet, out today from Castor&Pollux.
- [Hotfoot @ Vernacular New Music 11/18/25](https://christianmolenaar.com/hotfoot-vernacular-new-music-11-18-25/): Back in June, Nathan Hubbard assembled Dan Clucas and myself to record nine tracks of obnoxious avant-jazz a la Naked City or Universal Congress Of. You’ll hear that album eventually, but if you had made it out to Sun Space in north LA last night you could have heard it all twice.
- [Sandpiper Ensemble @ Panama 66 11/16/25](https://christianmolenaar.com/sandpiper-ensemble-panama-66-11-16-25/): This was the gig Max had actually asked me to play before September’s mission materialized, so this gig’s been on the calendar at least since… August? You’d think given the amount of time I’d be supererogatorily prepared. You’d think that!
- [The Scavenger Hunt](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-scavenger-hunt/): William T. Vollmann, The Rainbow Stories
- [11/11/25](https://christianmolenaar.com/11-11-25/): Autumn of 1925 saw my existence in decline. Then I killed some guys and it was downhill in a wagon with no brakes from there.
- [Void of Horn](https://christianmolenaar.com/5208-2/): …and not to steal my own thunder, but my piece “Void of Horn” for flute, concertina and organ is available on the excellent new compilation Antihistamine 2025 from Vermont’s Histamine Tapes.
- [Folies Meurtrières](https://christianmolenaar.com/folies-meurtrieres/): My new album Folies Meurtrières is out today.
- [November 6, 18—](https://christianmolenaar.com/november-6-18/): They (writers) publish books for the pleasure of seeing them printed and bound, without remembering the saddest aspects of their lives will end up contained in those pages.
- [Established](https://christianmolenaar.com/established/): But Ivanov said ah, love, and Ansky, in his fashion, also said ah, love. So over the next few days he set out in tireless search of Nadja Yurenieva, and at last he found her, wearing her long leather jacket, sitting in one of the lecture halls at the University of Moscow, looking like an orphan, a self-designated orphan, listening to the rousing remarks or poems or rhymed nonsense of some pretentious idiot (or whatever he was!) who recited with his gaze fixed on the audience while in his left hand he held the silly manuscript that every so often […]
- [The Great Flood](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-great-flood/): Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.
- [November 3rd, 1952](https://christianmolenaar.com/november-3/): You looked at the hills and they were rolling hills that made you wonder who you were and how you got here. The hills had no more connection to your life than a calendar with a picture of hills, old rolling hills set above a river, fixed to some kitchen wall.
- [An Offering](https://christianmolenaar.com/an-offering/): For a time, Sherry was the only girl available at the Honey Route. The regulars weren’t spending so freely, and it was down to guys who stopped by, passing custom, the kind who, once they’d come in and gotten a beer in hand weren’t going to blink. Every Monday a trucker named Clark, the liquor delivery guy, called in. A while back he’d said to her, It wouldn’t take you a minute to pack your bag — it isn’t as if you’ve got much stuff — and you could come away in the truck with me. The delivery drivers do […]
- [The Encircling Never](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-encircling-never/): The bartender reached for a freshly washed glass and shook the droplets of water from it. He reached for the bottle of gin and poured.
- [He Said She Said](https://christianmolenaar.com/he-said-she-said/): He could imagine, he said, that on the last day his father had been unable to get up and had only crawled around in his room. Quite aside from his madness, the weeks of strictly refusing nourishment had made him incapable of standing erect. “Toward the end he had no strength at all left, Doctor,” the prince said, “no strength at all.” It had not been hard, the prince had said at the time, to imagine, as he looked at his father laid out in the pavilion, all that his father had endured “in order to have the privilege of […]
- [The Same River Twice](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-same-river-twice/): They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.I wept as I remember’d how often you and IHad tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
- [Make Yourself At Home](https://christianmolenaar.com/make-yourself-at-home/): On September 14, 1307, the king sent sealed messages to all the bailiffs and seneschals of the realm, ordering the mass arrest of the Templars and the confiscation of their property. A month went by between the issuing of this order and the arrest on October 13. But the Templars suspected nothing. On that October morning they all fell into the trap and — another enigma — gave themselves up without a fight. In fact, in the days before the arrests, using the most feeble excuses, the king’s men, wanting to make sure that nothing would escape confiscation, had conducted […]
- [An Unfamiliar Place](https://christianmolenaar.com/an-unfamiliar-place/): On October 10, near the Pemex soccer fields, between the Cananea highway and the railroad, the body of Leticia Borrego García, eighteen, was found, half buried and in an advanced state of decomposition. The body was wrapped in an industrial plastic bag, and, according to the forensic report, the cause of death was strangulation with a fracture of the hyoid bone. The body was identified by the girl’s mother, who had reported her disappearance a month before. Why did the killer bother dig a little hole and try to bury her? Lalo Cura asked himself as he poked around the […]
- [The Food Shed 10/8/2025](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-food-shed-10-8-2025/): Shadow Ticket finally dropped today and you know I was always going to be a day one buyer.
- [October 7, 1849](https://christianmolenaar.com/october-7-1849/): At forty, in Baltimore. Filthy, starving, drunk and/or with delirium tremens, crying out at unseen creatures.
- [Run Off](https://christianmolenaar.com/run-off/): Holme looked at him. Then he said: I’m huntin a woman.
- [I'm Not Sure Any More](https://christianmolenaar.com/im-not-sure-any-more/): I can’t forget anything. That’s my problem, or so I’ve been told. I am the mother of Mexico’s poets. I am the only one who held out in the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in. I stayed there on my own in the Faculty, shut up in a bathroom, with no food, for more than ten days, for more than fifteen days, from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September, I think, I’m not sure any more. I stay there with a book by Pedro Garfías and my satchel, wearing a little white blouse […]
- [September 28](https://christianmolenaar.com/september-28-1891/): Poet, critic and “father of imagism” T. E. Hulme died 108 years ago today.
- [New Corduroy](https://christianmolenaar.com/new-corduroy/): Fall had arrived, and a feeling of hope and freshness suffused the city. The sky was a vivid, seersucker blue. I was finished with my first day back working with Marvin and Eric at Bowery Film, strolling under a canopy of green leaves that were big and floppy, a few gold or ruby-red around the edges, one twirling downward as I crossed Washington Square Park. The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the […]
- [Welcome Home](https://christianmolenaar.com/welcome-home/): Here Trenmore glanced quizzically at his friend, and again Drayton blushed. Viola, however, was far too intent on the burglar’s tale to give heed. ”That must have been before my brother and Mr. Drayton opened the vial,” she observed. “How did you come—“ ”I’ll get to that in a minute, lady. We’d missed the bottle some way, and the old guy was scared to look any further that night. Next day, though, I goes back on my own, just for a glance around, and there was the front door of your house, Mr. Trenmore, standing wide open. ‘Dear me, but […]
- [Two Nights](https://christianmolenaar.com/two-nights/): A week ago while eating In-N-Out, Max Turner Oestreicher found an extremely large french fry.
- [Facts](https://christianmolenaar.com/facts/): Perhaps, thought Tancredo, it was best to confine oneself to the pleasure of objective, brief facts. On September 17, after four hours of deliberation, Virginia McCallister, also known as Viviana Luxembourg, was sentenced to twenty years in prison, pending any new charges. The defendant didn’t cry when she heard the sentence.
- [Summer Stars](https://christianmolenaar.com/summer-stars/): Maybe it was secretly a blessing that night when you couldn’t see the Big Dipper.
- [Never Learn](https://christianmolenaar.com/never-learn/): It was at Victor’s Café, on Rue St. Sauveur, on September 11 in 1983. A group of masochistic Chileans had gathered to remember that dismal day. There were twenty or thirty of us and we were scattered around inside the café and at the outside tables. Suddenly someone, I don’t know who, started to talk about evil, about the crime that had spread its enormous black over us. Please! Its enormous black wing! It’s clear we Chileans will never learn.
- [Send the Word Over There](https://christianmolenaar.com/send-the-word-over-there/): One evening, as we were absorbed in these peaceful pursuits, Martinetti informed us that the moment had come. A challenge had been sent to the Canal gang, and they had accepted. The battle was to take place on neutral ground, behind the station. That night, at nine.
- [End of the Line](https://christianmolenaar.com/end-of-the-line/): On Saturday the 6th of September, 1913, Dr K., the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company, is on his way to Vienna to attend a congress on rescue services and hygiene. Just as the fate of a man wounded on the battlefield depends upon the quality of the first dressing, he reads in a newspaper he has bought at the border-post of Gmünd, so too the first aid administered at everyday accidents is of the greatest importance for the casualty’s recovery. Dr K. finds this statement almost as disquieting as the reference to the social events which will […]
- [A Little Disturbed But Making It Through](https://christianmolenaar.com/a-little-disturbed-but-making-it-through/): Dragging around some miserable wifeon a real hike, straight up a cliffof corn, holding onto silk husksfor dear life—it’s a little oddto vacation as your mistress, and asthe only one licensed to drive, butno one seems to mind. A littledisturbed but making it throughSwelling up before noon, I dreamtmy abalone ring came apartLive fish and shell peeled offmy finger, in a retail storeof which you were the owner.This day smells like toast. Maggie Nelson, “September 2”
- [September 1, 2025](https://christianmolenaar.com/september-1-2025/): I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in […]
- [A Thirsty Month](https://christianmolenaar.com/a-thirsty-month/): “Pearl, don’t go, where are you going?”
- [August 29](https://christianmolenaar.com/august-29/): At dawn the beach is full of seagulls. Along with the seagulls, there are pigeons. The seagulls and pigeons stand at the water’s edge, staring out to sea, motionless except for the occasional short flight. There are two kinds of seagulls: big and small. From the distance the pigeons look like seagulls too. Seagulls of a third kind, only smaller. From the mouth of the port, boats set out, leaving behind them a dark wake on the smooth surface of the sea. Last night I didn’t sleep at all. The sky is a pale and liquid blue. The edge of […]
- [August 26, 1880](https://christianmolenaar.com/august-26-1880/): At last, it seems, Something Has Been Done. The meeting last night was quiet and brief; we were of one mind, except for Judge Holloway. We have sent for a man, a Marshal, and have obliged ourselves to open our pocketbooks in order to offer him a very large sum of money monthly. He is Clay Blaisedell, at present Marshal in Fort James. I know little of his deeds, except that it was he who shot the Texas badman, Big Ben Nicholson, and that his name at present is renowned — names such as his flash up meteor-like from time […]
- [Wed. August 20](https://christianmolenaar.com/wed-august-20/): Gawddam, what a lineup. Love Combat’s “first date of 3-day tour.” Ambitious run, real weekend warrior shit…
- [My Three Wives](https://christianmolenaar.com/my-three-wives/): Though marriage by some folks Be reckon’d a curseThree wives I did marry For better or worse–The first for her person, The next for her purse,The third for a warming-pan, Doctress, and nurse.
- [Dehydrogenase Gang](https://christianmolenaar.com/dehydrogenase-gang/): Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, August 16, 1905
- [Djéliya](https://christianmolenaar.com/djeliya/): At some point a group of international film producers asked Jay if he would compose the score for Djéliya, mémoire du mandingue, the new film by Burkinabé director Boubacar Sangaré.
- [August 15](https://christianmolenaar.com/2495-2/): From the first to the fifteenth of August there was a heat wave, and two more victims were found. The first was thirteen-year-old Marina Rebolledo. Her body was discovered behind Secondary School 30, in Colonia Félix Gómez, a few yards from the state judicial police building. She was dark, long haired, slightly built, five foot two. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on at the moment of her disappearance: yellow shorts, white blouse, white socks, and black shoes. The girl had left her house, at 38 Calle Mistula, in Colonia Veracruz, at six in the morning to walk […]
- [Milton Babble](https://christianmolenaar.com/milton-babble/): Inasmuch as the term concept at present is taken to designate “properties, relations and similar entities… expressed in language by a designator of nonsentential form” and necessarily to involve “an analysis of the nature of a referent,” the term itself can serve most appropriately as the point of entry for a discussion in which I shall be concerned chiefly with contemporary aspects of the question at issue. For the essential elements of the above characterizations, involving the correlations of the syntactic and semantic domains, the notion of analysis, and — perhaps most significantly — the requirements of linguistic formulation and […]
- [Not Something I Ever Knew](https://christianmolenaar.com/not-something-i-ever-knew/): Andrea senza errori, he was also called. What that means is that he never made a single mistake, when he was drawing.
- [They Shock Horses, Don't They?](https://christianmolenaar.com/they-shock-horses-dont-they/): The first execution by electricity has been a horror. Physicians who might make a jest out of the dissecting room, officials who have seen many a man’s neck wrenched by the rope, surgeons who have lived in hospitals and knelt beside the dead and dying on bloody fields, held their breaths with a gasp, and those unaccustomed to such sights turned away in dread.
- [The Saints of Solana Beach](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-saints-of-solana-beach/): From Kathy Acker’s diaries, c. July—August 1972, while living in Solana Beach just before meeting Peter Gordon.
- [Reasonably Sure](https://christianmolenaar.com/reasonably-sure/): Existence, or at least a minute part
- [Drudgery Beneath a Fervid Sun](https://christianmolenaar.com/drudgery-beneath-a-fervid-sun/): July 20th — A drive yesterday afternoon to a pond in the vicinity of Augusta, about nine miles off, to fish for white perch. Remarkables: the steering of the boat through the crooked, labyrinthine brook, into the open pond, — the man who acted as pilot, — his talking with B— about politics, the bank, the iron money of “a king who came to reign, in Greece, over a city called Sparta,” — his advice to B— — to come amongst the laborers on the mill-dam, because it stimulated them “to see a man grinning amongst them.” The man took hearty […]
- [Plan B](https://christianmolenaar.com/plan-b/): Stores are bottlenecks, being distribution centers and not that numerous. You kick them in the balls when you attack their distribution centers. Their stock price drops at news of such attacks, and they have no way to counter that. And their valuations are already at historic lows. Of course police might arrest and prosecute, but that doesn’t bring the share price back up. A hundred thousand dollars of physical damage can leverage a hundred million dollars in lost asset value. Big pension funds notice there’s a problem and move their monster assets elsewhere, then endowments and trusts and universities and […]
- [P.I.D. Blues](https://christianmolenaar.com/p-i-d-blues/): Poster by Jill Kroesen advertising the Monday readings at St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, July 1975, featuring Kroesen, Pooh Kaye, Leonard Neufeld, Peter Gordon, Kathy Acker (as The Black Tarantula), Peter Seaton and Ed Friedman.
- [Hotter](https://christianmolenaar.com/hotter/): It was getting hotter.
- [Angels](https://christianmolenaar.com/angels/): The lassitude of angelsis one thingbut how the gold got undertheir skin I don’t know
- [Quitting Time](https://christianmolenaar.com/quitting-time/): Today I left the job at which I’ve worked for the last two years, one of the more dysfunctional I’ve held besides the barbecue place boasting a back-of-house fight club, though of course I’d be lying if I pretended the last few weeks at the up-to-present job haven’t been pleasant, though of course I’d be lying if I pretended it was so for any reason besides the prospect of my freedom on the horizon, though of course I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t writing this in the afterglow of Chinese mai tais at my going-away dinner—
- [It Explains So Much](https://christianmolenaar.com/it-explains-so-much/): The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.
- [Memory Lane](https://christianmolenaar.com/memory-lane/): One begins to realize that our national middle-class hunger to return to two decades of Depression, world war, Prohibition, Racism Unadmitted, Covert Fascination with Sex, Deadly Innocence, Isolationism, Provincialism, and Deprivation Remembered as Good Old Days has become a cultural sickness.
- [Bravery, Dash](https://christianmolenaar.com/bravery-dash/): In the Middle Ages learning, and even literacy, were not considered necessary acquirements for a great lord. The qualities expected of him were bravery, dash, a certain magnificence and easiness of style, perhaps the practical sense of a man of the world, but not learning. Such men set the pace for lesser landowners, and their style tended to be imitated even by those who had made money as lawyers, merchants, or sheep farmers. The reactions of one particular gentleman, as reported in the early sixteenth century, were reasonably typical: “I’d rather that my son should hang than study letters. For […]
- [Spaceguard](https://christianmolenaar.com/spaceguard/): Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers — a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.
- [Something Like a Storm](https://christianmolenaar.com/something-like-a-storm/): On the night of June twenty-ninth a great noise wakened the besieged, followed by a rolling of drums: the enemy had managed to explode the first mine beneath the walls, blowing up a lunette and burying twenty-five soldiers. The next day, towards six in the evening, something like a storm was heard to the west, and in the east a cornucopia appeared, whiter than the rest of the sky, with a tip that extended and retracted. It was a comet, which upset the soldiers and led the local inhabitants to lock themselves in their houses. Over the next weeks other […]
- [Homonym](https://christianmolenaar.com/homonym/): One evening, I had walked with him to his hotel on Boulevard Raspail, for it was less and less often that he slept in the studio. He’d pointed out that the hotel was only a hundred yards away from the one he’d lived in when he first came to Paris and that it had taken him almost thirty years to travel that short distance.
- [Courage](https://christianmolenaar.com/courage/): The day of the opening of the trial, June twenty-fifth, was fair. The heat was intense.
- [Nobody Likes It](https://christianmolenaar.com/nobody-likes-it/): Lest the reader imagine that I am letting my fancy free to infer Penner’s early attitudes from his later and more rounded nature, I shall quote here some of the first scrawly-handed entries to be found in his diaries. He began his records early and continued them until his unfortunate demise. There is an astonishing continuity of content and tone to them over the years, despite the changes of style we might expect, along with Penner’s mounting maturity and enlargement of learning. The late journals of his middle (and last) years are increasingly devoted to philosophical reflections. What Luther Penner […]
- [Babylon by Bus](https://christianmolenaar.com/babylon-by-bus/): ᴛʜᴇ ᴋɪᴅ: Twenty-five dollars gets us going a ways, forty would get us a room for the night. I had to use that other twenty you gave me for cigarettes and a Red Bull for my girl. She was about to pass out. ᴛʜᴇ ʀɪᴅᴇʀ: But I already gave you money for your motel. ᴛʜᴇ ᴋɪᴅ: Like I said, man. I had to use it.
- [Souvenir](https://christianmolenaar.com/souvenir/): I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.
- [Yeah, There Was Always Going to Be a June 5, 1968](https://christianmolenaar.com/yeah-there-was-always-going-to-be-a-june-5-1968/): My telephone rang in the middle of the night,
- [Dogs Are All the Time Licking My Hand](https://christianmolenaar.com/dogs-are-all-the-time-licking-my-hand/): Harper (1966)
- [Should He Remember?](https://christianmolenaar.com/should-he-remember/): May 30, 1593. Eleanor Bull’s Tavern, Deptford Strand.
- [Blooming](https://christianmolenaar.com/blooming/): That’s me in mourning. When is it? May the twenty-second. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry, his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out.
- [The Mortician in San Francisco](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-mortician-in-san-francisco/): This may sound queer,but in 1985 I held the delicate handsof Dan White:I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milkwas made monument — no, myth — by the yearssince he was shot.
- [Afterwords](https://christianmolenaar.com/afterwords/)
- [May 19, 18—](https://christianmolenaar.com/may-19-18/): “I’m thinking about writing a book,” I said, “a book that would be a sort of symptomatic journal of my disease that could serve as a source of information for doctors and literary types both. This idea came knocking at my door as twilight fell… I let it seduce me as though I were just another conquest… Even though I know that writing a book is the greatest shame than an original mind can bring upon itself.”
- [How the Years Condemn](https://christianmolenaar.com/how-the-years-condemn/): Those Darn Gnomes’ first album The Years turns a decade old today. In honor of our least-loved record, please, hit play on a forgotten experimental metal oddity and take a look back at the early days of a local band at a key point in their (so-called) development.
- [A Movable Festival](https://christianmolenaar.com/a-movable-festival/): May-day — I forget whether by Zenobia’s sole decree, or by the unanimous vote of our community — had been declared a movable festival. It was deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to clear away the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring out a few of the readiest wild flowers.
- [Mustered](https://christianmolenaar.com/mustered/): Donald Barthelme, “The Expedition”
- [The Witches Tower 3/5/25](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-witches-tower-3-5-25/): Ryan asked me to play this show and the very next day had to back out upon realizing he’d double-booked himself to sit in with Swing Kids in LA the same night. Obviously I wasn’t going to begrudge him taking the bigger gig, but it did leave the question: how the hell do you play at the Witches Tower?
- [Everything Turns to Bile](https://christianmolenaar.com/everything-turns-to-bile/): …The doors and the ground are unstable, shifting… And yet something makes you want to go further, to see if you’ll have the strength to retrieve your reason from the wreckage. Reason can easily become an obsession, as good humor and sleep are for neurasthenics. All you can think of is your reason. Everything’s out of kilter. It’s no joke.
- [There Was Fear](https://christianmolenaar.com/there-was-fear/): 3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the […]
- [Much Too Young, As They Always Say](https://christianmolenaar.com/much-too-young-as-they-always-say/): Nearly all the larger buildings in W. and the surrounding area, the school, the railway station in Haslach and the turbine powerhouse, which supplied the entire district with electricity, had been designed on the drawing board of Ambrose and constructed under his supervision. He had died of a stroke, much too young as they always used to say, on May Day, 1933. He was found in his workplace, collapsed over the blueprint apparatus, a pencil behind his ear and a pair of compasses still in his hand. W. G. Sebald, Vertigo
- [Psychodontics](https://christianmolenaar.com/psychodontics/): “Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next,” you cry, with a laugh.
- [The Torment of Another’s Grief](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-torment-of-anothers-grief/): After a Canzoni by Pound, After a Ballata by Dante Ezra Pound might be stalking me from the past.
- [Ever in Good Stead](https://christianmolenaar.com/ever-in-good-stead/): April 26. I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
- [April 24, 18—](https://christianmolenaar.com/april-24-18/): Have I already mentioned that I had a myopic relative who worked as an eye doctor and who fished with a tall reed, looking through opera glasses? His near-sightedness imposed a necessary punctiliousness to his movements and even intentions. As a result, he was meticulous in all things. I inherited his enormous delight in neatness. Seeing is already a pleasure, of course, but clarity makes it a pleasure twice over. Would that I could use microscope lenses as my spectacles. Winter always enticed me to the windows of my room, to watch the sad lives of the townspeople blanketed in […]
- [Natural Light](https://christianmolenaar.com/natural-light/): He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture — as he said — natural light. One shouldn’t even hear the click of the Rolleiflex. He would have liked to conceal his camera. The death of his friend Robert Capa could in fact be explained, as he saw it, by this desire, the giddiness of blending into the surroundings once and for all.
- [Formalities](https://christianmolenaar.com/formalities/): …on April 21 I submitted to the governor of Kumamoto a detailed protest, in much the same terms as below, and also requested that he promptly relieve me of every main and subsidiary duty pertaining to my office. On June 7, however, this memorial was sent back to me on the grounds that a prefectural office could not concern itself with the matter therein since it was urged in opposition to the law of the land.
- [Easter, 2025](https://christianmolenaar.com/easter-2025/): I have met them at close of dayComing with vivid facesFrom counter or desk among greyEighteenth-century houses.I have passed with a nod of the headOr polite meaningless words,Or have lingered awhile and saidPolite meaningless words,And thought before I had doneOf a mocking tale or a gibeTo please a companionAround the fire at the club,Being certain that they and IBut lived where motley is worn:All changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.
- [No Relation to His Earlier Work](https://christianmolenaar.com/no-relation-to-his-earlier-work/): “…he showed little interest in the work Madame Curie was doing at the time. His attention was focused on the other side of the marital bed, so to speak. He was interested in Pierre Curie and his last project. Do you know how Pierre Curie died?”
- [The Sundered Realms](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-sundered-realms/): Here let thy clemency, Persephone, hold firm,Do thou, Pluto, bring here no greater harshness.So many thousand beauties are gone down to AvernusYe might let one remain above with us.
- [Sunny Day of a Green Spring](https://christianmolenaar.com/sunny-day-of-a-green-spring/): RIP Amparo Dávila, who died on this day five years ago.
- [April 15](https://christianmolenaar.com/april-15/): Met her today point-blank in Grafton Street. The crowd brought us together. We both stopped. She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a […]
- [The Facts of Life](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-facts-of-life/): As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.”
- [Dead Can Dance](https://christianmolenaar.com/dead-can-dance/): Journal entry for April 13th: Day like any other.
- [The Gates of Dawn](https://christianmolenaar.com/the-gates-of-dawn/): He stared at her without speaking for fully half a minute and then he nodded. “And what day is this, Jane?”
- [Untitled 6108](https://christianmolenaar.com/untitled-6108/): And blowing the most recent Pynchon news out of the water, Penguin Random House announced today the October 7th publication of Shadow Ticket, Pynchon’s latest novel.
- [Modern Art](https://christianmolenaar.com/modern-art/): I looked at the façade of the clinic through the slightly fogged window of the taxi and understood that what lay behind it, more than anything, even more than madness, was solitude, which is perhaps the subtlest or at least the most lucid of the forms that madness can take.

## Pages

- [Blog](https://christianmolenaar.com/blog/)
- [Home](https://christianmolenaar.com/): Christian Molenaar is a multi-disciplinary artist from San Diego, CA. His extensive body of work has incorporated film, painting and music, including appearances on nearly 200 recordings in a wide variety of styles as well as performances in multiple countries. His work often includes hand-built electronics and instruments in a broad array of stylistic influences from free improvisation and harsh noise to American primitivism. His work has been featured at the Festival de Cannes and covered by NPR, The Wire, The Needle Drop, PopMatters and more.
- [Links](https://christianmolenaar.com/links/)
- [About/Contact](https://christianmolenaar.com/contact/): Christian Molenaar is a multi-disciplinary artist from San Diego, CA. His extensive body of work has incorporated film, painting and music, including appearances on nearly 200 recordings in a wide variety of styles as well as performances in multiple countries. His work often includes hand-built electronics and instruments in a broad array of stylistic influences from free improvisation and harsh noise to American primitivism. His work has been featured at the Festival de Cannes and covered by NPR, The Wire, The Needle Drop, PopMatters and more. As a musician, Molenaar has performed with Patrick Shiroishi, Tatsuya Nakatani, Martín Escalante and […]
- [Discography](https://christianmolenaar.com/discography/): Other Appearances


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