Liner Notes

"Poetry. Part lyric essay, part annotated checklist, Andy Mister's LINER NOTES is a meditation on alienation and pop culture, a memoir about forgetting and trying not to forget. Beginning with the Beach Boy's unfinished masterpiece Smile, Mister describes a world populated by ghosts adrift on a sea of drug use, boredom and popular entertainment. In unadorned prose, Mister traces his relationship to the obsessive collection of ephemera and the coterminous feelings of isolation and loss. Like an iPod on shuffle, details of constantly changing urban landscapes mix with song lyrics, and with deadpan anecdotes of death, failure, and memory. In the end a life, like the book itself, is assembled from the detritus of pop culture. "Each billboard is a monument to our ability to believe in anything, at least for a moment. Then it's gone.""I love the blunt care for real time, with all its gaps & noises & bends, Andy Mister takes in the searching, powerful scroll of paragraphs that make up LINER NOTES. Working through the implied vision of an undecided note taker prone to stark assertions and excavating insights to perception, Mister puts songs at the heart of his relationship to language & digs away at the disappearances they reflect in their, and his, histories. 'The world becomes boring when you brush away the detritus' says the same mind that listens to own its aloneness, & desires, evenly, 'to dissolve each distance in distance'."--Anselm Berrigan"Andy Mister's loving and disturbing 'notes' create a complex harmony (sympathy) between public noise and private revelation. In the midst of LINER NOTES we read: 'Childhood is a song I can barely remember the words to. They only come back to me when I am thinking of something else.' that something else is at the heart of this compelling and magical book. Listen!"--Peter Gizzi"--