Levi Justin Rogers

The Following is a public service announcement from the Utah Tourism Agency

 

Welcome to the state of Utah!

 

You might have just gotten lost on your way to Vegas from Denver, but we don’t think it’s an accident.

 

You’ll love our world famous postmodern architecture and French cuisine.

 

Our picturesque mountains and wide-open desert.

 

We have rocks so red they entirely sway the political leaning of our state

 

We have so much desert, we make Saudi Arabia look like the Pacific Northwest

 

 

But come,

Visit the city of Lehi, a quaint little European town famous for their Belgian waffles and crepes

Or take a romantic boat ride down the canals of Orem.

 

Come on out to the Great Salt Lake and lounge on our fly ridden, rocky beaches. Is that a woman’s hand on your thigh? No, it’s a dead birds spine.

 

If you like women, well then you’re in luck, because its true you can marry as many as you want, as long as at least one of them is below the age of

 

18 feet of snow is how much snow we get in Utah and that’s just before thanksgiving. Have back problems, well good luck shoveling.

 

Visit the bohemian town of Sandy where hippies and crust punks alike decorate the streets with Rembrandt-like graffiti.

 

Did I say graffiti? I meant to say ads for breast implants!

 

Did I say hippies? I meant to say people who drive hummers.

 

Like alcohol? So do we, which is why we made sure you can purchase alcohol at any of our three state-run liquor stores. Besides Sunday they’re open at least 12 hours a week.

 

We’ve also made sure that you can no longer get daily discounts on liquor or higher than 3.2 alcohol percentage in your beer, because we want everyone to see how great our Wasatch mountain river water makes the beer taste.

 

Sure, you could go skiing on the mountains or climbing in the desert, but who wants to do that when you could be waiting in line to get your very own nude Republicans calendar signed and autographed by Glenn Beck himself, while he holds a baby, an American flag and a shotgun in the same hand.

 

Do you like socialism? Liberal politics? You’ll love our progressive legislature, run by some of the most forward thinking individuals since the USSR.

 

These rich white men always have the best interests of the people in mind, especially the poor.

 

Do you like shopping centers and strip malls that look exactly like other shopping centers and strip malls halfway across the country

 

 

Do you like diversity? Or handguns? Well we only have lots of one of these and I can guarantee you that most people are scared more by one than the other.

 

Our state symbol is the beehive, because we’re the only state north of Guatemala to have, that’s right, killer bees.

 

Are you 16 and looking to get married? Come to Utah!

 

The 24^th of July is more of a celebration than the fourth of July, but neither of these are anything compared to the amount of fireworks that’ll shoot off in your head when you discover the T.V. show Touched by an Angel was filmed right here. 

Acetaminophen

 

The bottle says four

in the morning, two

before the dawn hits mother,

 

nature—cracking grey branches.

Skeletal. Stretched.

A conceit picked up

by these arthritic arteries

 

thumb towards heaven

the blood drains

 

I want it to stay

there, right there

but I might need six more in the chamber till it thins,

thins like it’s December first

 

All wind and no hair.

run a comb through.

nothing sticks. Maybe

 

ten mixed with a tenth

times two. This skin—

permeable, a grater,

 

To: the blowing dark air, only colder, larger

            with more slits

acetaminophen can’t thicken

 

I don’t want to remember

 

Let’s all do oxycodone in December

Spit our blood to make a mural.

 

 

On May 15^th mewithoutYou released their new album “Ten Stories.” For many old mewithoutYou fans the album is a welcome return to their former raucous post-hardcore sound. Lyrically, mewithoutYou has never been better. Aaron Weiss’s lyrics are complex, poetic fables, but still retain a fairy-tailish simplicity. The poetic wanderings of Weiss’s continue to make mewithoutYou what they are today. At once confessional and mystic, concrete and wandering.

The best song on the album is undoubtedly “Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume,” which not only highlights Aaron’s lyrical genius, but brother Michael’s and Kleinberg’s guitar skills and Mazzota’s wonderful drums. There’s even a Sausurre reference to the sign and signified in the song for the nerdy English majors out there (don’t worry about it). “Provisionally eyed, practically alive,” Weiss sings “Mistook sign for signified, and so sins have tried to run him off a cliff like Gadarene swine.”

We were able to get an interview with front man and singer Aaron Weiss about the new album and touring in their bio-diesel veggie bus.

Tell me about the inspiration behind the new album.

Well, I can’t say exactly what inspired everyone else’s contributions, but I can say a bit about mine. The beginning of the story was loosely based on a true event, a menagerie train crash where a tiger opted out of escaping. Once I heard that, I figured the rest of the narrative would come relatively easily. Also, our cat Blizzard had kittens as the band was writing the songs. Having them around the house put me in a silly mood, and kept animals on my mind.

Do you consider Ten Stories a return to the previous Mewithoutyou sound?

Yes, to some extent. Mind you, we’ve always tried to challenge ourselves & change with every record, so I don’t think we really have a single sound that we could return to – but some of the stylistic elements we had abandoned with our previous release are revisited on the newest one.

What is your favorite new song on the album?

At the moment probably the one called “East Enders Wives.”

Have you made a conscious effort on the last two albums to write fables instead of exploring more personal issues? It seems you’ve moved away from a more confessional writing style to third person storyteller.

I can’t remember how conscious an effort it was, but I agree that things have moved away from a confessional style and toward fables – but of course that doesn’t mean I’m not still exploring personal issues…they’re just veiled nowadays, but thinly so.

Maybe a tired question about the whole Christian thing, but I know some Christians have criticized your use of Sufi imagery and stories on the last album, how do you see yourself balancing different religious ideas and stories in your writing?

I don’t think that’s a tired question at all – I think it’s a great question. Unfortunately, I don’t really know the answer. I’m not sure I understand what I’ve been writing about all this time, or even my own intentions or thought processes.

Are you guys still touring around in your veggie bus?

Yes, we’ve had the same bus for the past 6 years or so, but used vegetable oil is hard to come by these days.

I admire your honesty and interactions with fans at the show, is it ever annoying to have fans coming up all the time asking you questions? How do you deal with it?

I’m afraid I’m pretty easily bothered, and find some way to be dissatisfied with almost anything that happens. If I have too many interactions at a show, yes, it can  be draining – but if no one wants to talk, that can be upsetting in a different way. But as for how to deal with it (with either, for that matter), my main trick for maintaining some semblance of sanity is to let go, to whatever extent possible, of any agenda I might bring to a given interaction.

 

mewithoutYou will be playing at In the Venue on July 20^th at 6 p.m with Kevin Devine, Buried Beds, and local Salt Lake band L’anarchiste. Tickets are $12.50.

I have chosen to keep the WordPress title caption for my first post because I will probably never write a sentence that says HELLO WORLD! with an exclamation point again. The days are rare and the mornings few when I wake up and think to myself HELLO WORLD!

In an effort to actually make something out of my writing I have started this blog. I used to have a blog, it was an old clunky thing, rarely updated, limping along like a sad old dog ready to be shot. So I shot it. And made this new thing so I would look more professional. If that’s possible.

Here is where you will find my poems, writings, newspaper articles, and rough chapters for books I’m working on.  Read on, if you will, if you won’t, that’s okay too I guess.

Cheers,

Levi