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Yesterday | Mar 18 2003

I, Saddam Hussein, shot a video yesterday. I’ve been talking about this for some time, and I finally did it. In the video I make oatmeal and discuss Robert Nozick’s Experiment Machine. I don’t want to get into what I say about Robert Nozick’s Experiment Machine because that’s going to be in the video, but I will at least mention that in the intro sequence I make a complete ass of myself by dancing around my apartment in my robe to the Oatmeal theme song.

We shot the piece three times, and each time I cooked oatmeal. This added up to a lot of oatmeal, particularly since I was making enough oatmeal for both me and the videographer. Consequently I had to throw out several pounds of cooked oatmeal, which I felt sad about because a lot people go hungry in this world, as I well know.

The other interesting thing that happened yesterday is that I went to a poetry reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. Outside the club I met an old guy named Bingo Zagingo. Bingo had a backwards letter B written or possibly even tattooed on his forehead. He and his letter looked something like this:

Bingo Gazingo

Bingo wanted me to buy a CD of his poetry, which after looking at the CD case I declined to do. “You’re breaking my heart,” he said. “No, that can’t be true,” I said, and then my friends and I walked into the club.

Later, during the open reading, Bingo read some of his poems. My friends hated these poems because the poems were crazy and because Bingo read them in a crazy, histrionic manner. I loved them, however, and for these same reasons. I also loved that Bingo had written the poems on enormous sheets of paper, probably eleven by seventeen inches, using large block letters. These letters were so large that Bingo could only fit perhaps twenty or thirty words on a single eleven by seventeen-inch page. This meant that Bingo had to shuffle through a thick stack of enormous papers just to read a single poem, which as far as I was concerned only added to the luster of his performance.

I don’t want to harp so much on Bingo, but I must say that it bothered me that my friends didn’t like his poems because they weren’t any “good.” I go to open poetry readings specifically to see people like Bingo read their poems, and it always makes happy, even when the poems are awful. It’s as though these people stand naked as they read, and while some of their naked bodies are nice-looking and some are gross, they’re all bodies and for that reason beautiful, which is something that never fails to move me. To put it another way, I would hate to live in a world that only had “good” poetry, whatever that is, or where the people who couldn’t write “good” poetry, didn’t write any, or did but didn’t dare read it anywhere.

The open reading morphed into a reading by a group called Lit! (their exclamation point). The line-up for Lit! included Bob Powers, who writes one of my favorite websites, Girls Are Pretty. Bob read two brilliant pieces, in brilliant fashion. Frankly he rather reminded me of myself, if I’m allowed to say that, in terms of delivery. I really wanted to go up and talk to him after the reading and say something like, “Hi, Bob, I’m Saddam Hussein, and I’m a big fan of Girls Are Pretty.” My hope was that maybe Bob would have heard of me too and that we could have talked about writing, only this never happened because my friends and I left before the show was over.

The Lit! reading was hosting by two women, one of whom I found quite attractive, in part because of her amazing stage presence and sharp wit, and in part because of her body, which is the type of body that always makes me go “yummy” in my head. When I got home I googled her and found that she had written a poem in 1995 called Love Letter to His Dick which is in a book called Verses That Hurt. This got to me thinking about how I’d feel if she wrote a poem about my dick, positive or negative, and that got me to thinking about the wisdom of pursuing her, particularly at this touchy moment in history and whatnot, so I decided against it.

Still, overall it was a great day, one that left me feeling inspired about the future and in particular about art, which besides the people I love is what fills my heart and gives me the strength to go on.