'A Real Wide-Open-Type Palette of Dreams': Paul Ebenkamp Readies Readers for Brandon Downing's Mellow Actions

You may be ready for Brandon Downing's Mellow Actions but are you ready for Paul Ebenkamp's review of Brandon Downing's Mellow Actions? At Jacket 2, Ebenkamp takes on the task of psychically-prepping readers for Downing's opus.

Brandon Downing’s Mellow Actions is the latest installment in a body of work notable for its batsoid consistency across realms as diverse as film, collage, and verse. It’s the wish of this reviewer to induce in the reader a sort of psychical readiness to enjoy this book, much like Iannis Xenakis’s miniature zoom-crackle composition “Concret PH” was designed to gird the nerves of picnicking spectators in preparation for Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique” at the 1958 Phillips Pavilion.

Mellow Actions, dedicated as it fittingly is “For San Antonio” — where the Alamo, I believe, “stands,” a fine central Texas metropolis known for its convention centers and a river boardwalk festooned with Anthropologies and P.F. Chang’s — also seems very Taos-y, with ghostly stucco and Kokopelli affectations beaming in the aura of an AWOL spirit animal’s cocky inner shout-outs as they’re thickened and thinned by the American West’s nuclear-test-laced places.

“You’re just a foolish girl character
In milk industry-sponsored playlets
I perform for schools across the urban Southwest.” “So?”

Frightening variants of turgid nougat,
Yellow, ’73, god damn, say
Goodbye to a whole helicopter of bullshit.

With all the sanguine gusto of a super-parasympathetic nervous system that knows neither fight nor flight, Mellow Actions makes for a real wide-open-type palette of dreams; it gave me over to association, waving my receipts around in the night-hot stillness of the San Antonio at the end of the mind. Have you ever found yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain? And did you know that, at its most extreme points, Texas is some 800 miles across?

Iannis Xenakis, “Poème Électronique,” and Kokopelli.... oh my! This and more at Jacket 2. And to see some recently-ish work from Downing, and thoughts on collage, remember this post on the In Clipping Signal exhibition at Spudnik Press's The Annex.