My last day at work for the week before i head for the holidays. Looking forward to rest and recovery.

And when you see the russian no more than a girl on the ad worn cruel by fear of want, why always the urge to Fuck an attractive stranger?

The previous post was a drunken rant on the state of the environment.

I wish it mattered the snow weren't fallling when It's this warm. Wish my romantic antics didn't mean this wasn't over. It is.

Thursday's not yet through

Music, music, music. Listen all day, listen all night. Until listening just becomes the thing you do when you can't be doing. Headphones at work, critiques of the jukebox when drunk, commuting encased in sound.
Too much music starts to feel empty with no action to back it up. Like that low feeling when you realize the booze just won't get you drunk the way you like to be.

Last night I found a small box with a fukuoka return address awaiting me in the mail on my return to the apartment, new dj for hire within.

Magical Realism sans Optimism

It's possible to argue that fairy tales as they were stood as the first incarnation of the various forms of fantastically-flecked forms of realism that have come since their introduction. I have been reading Neil Gaiman's recently-published collection of "Short Stories and Wonders", Fragile Things, and, having taken notice of this very overtly demonstrated debt to Bradbury, have been doing a little thinking about Bradbury's style of writing in opposition to the Magical Realism of someone like Marquez.
Bradbury took the perceived realities and the real anxieties of passing into an age of science and a realm of new unknowns and paired them with the inexplicable logic of dreams and fear. Marquez took the realities of a world moribund with culture and a dearth of channels for advancement and mixes the mundane with the fantastic. Aside from the fact that the two writers were working in two separate cultural milieus as they developed their styles, as just described, the important difference between the two writers is that Marquez, in the prosaic-world-turned-fantastic, maintains a humorous sense of optimism and humanity even when faced with the intrusion of the uncanny. Bradbury's world of the inexplicable-turned-prosaic does not bring optimism to the feast. In Bradbury's stories it is not in our own world that we find ourselves witness to wonders, and those wonders his characters do witness are not bound to our comforting calendar of holidays.

Gaiman's Fragile Things is a very enjoyable read, each story short and to the point. The brevity of the writing at times seems to give away that the story is predicated more on a writing exercise than on a well-executed idea, but his imagination and sense of the macabre (and the various ways antedeluvian language can be used to evoke said atmosphere) make that critque a petty bone to nitpick.

He's a Bradbury crossed with a Barker- but his worlds are more banal than Bradbury's and his writing is not anywhere near as chaotically meandering as Barker's.

I want to hear the chris connelly box set.

Doing good. Want to make bleeps like the one's bubbling in my head.

Tape Recorders

I ran across an article on CNET's editorial column "MP3 Insider" this morning about the magic of introducing kids to hands-on, physical-mechanism-based recording tech. I myself grew up in a house that was never bereft of a television set, setting me apart from my forebears in that I considered such mass-mediation of reality standard. But, like my forebears, I was able to see the evolution of the the mediated world from one where color TV and new forms of celebrity struggled to become pervasive to today's world wherein all markets are niche markets and shopping, information, and entertainment are interchangeably and ubiquitously available- a world in which the the information stored on on any medium has completely abjured once and for all any formal marriage to to the form of its packaging. We are living in a world of virtualization, we've been taken off the gold standard of the physical restraints of form and storage, and now our access to music, movies, et al is only going to become more and more closely instant. Kids today simply assume Moore's Law as to make its observation redundant.

In the article mentioned above, the author recounts explaining to his toddler what a tape recorder is and does. I remember the hours I spent with my series of cheap tape recorders, all of which I ran into the ground, one after the other, recording a constant productive stream of radio programs, sounds, and songs. I suppose all I really wanted to do here is reminisce and wax a little nostalgic on those days 20 and more years ago when it took me no effort at all to extend my self and my mind out into the world of things that could be molded and created with a little piece of cheap, portable, and customisable recording equipment.

I wonder where those tapes are now.

All the Happiness

The feeling of relief and finally-vindicated conviction following the massive shift in government from the rule of the deceptively-named "conservative" radical right to the mooshy center (or, I guess, what passes as a left these days) following the recent midterm elections has been echoed by the full spectrum of people that I meet throughout my day. Yeah, sure, "we won." Yeah, sure, now we can get back to thinking about our venal social structures in our superior, all-inclusive way. Yeah, sure, maybe we'll move away from pure emotional manipulation, smear, and total obfuscation of fact as we legislate a kinder, more liberal society. (the maybe is a little more, er, substantial on this count, if I were to hazard my opinion.)
I'm not kidding- I really do think "we won". I really do think that we should allow gay people to enjoy unsegregated the benefits of marriage, I REALLY do think it's time, as it has been for a long time, to simply come back to the false Christian fundamentalists with reason and a fat shut up in favor of real inclusive civic thinking and a government that is run by an ideology that responds to the lives of its constituents as opposed the lock-step march of a government that suffers from the idolatry of an ideology that puts the whole round world in a small, steel box out on the sand.
But, wow, geez- where the fuck was "we won" before the outgoing regime got in, made their money, and got out? Where was our enlightened public before we had our new regime of surveillance? Where were those votes when all of this could have been prevented?
Oh, what? They were voting the outgoing regime in?
So we swing to the left for a decade or so. And, as the Dillinger Four so aptly put in on their "Midwestern Songs of the Americas": drown in a culture of peace/you turn your back to the beast/it's so easy to do/it's so easy
And recent resurrection rockers (over 20 years since their last release goes the unverified recollection of something I skimmed in a headline the other day) The Who once sang something that just hasn't stopped reverberating in my mind's ear. Something about us not getting fooled again? Something?
Oh, fuck it. Let's go shopping and get married.

One Bottle, One Bottle of Pearls

Trusty Pallor

My day got rained out- woke up with that cold that's going around, went home around 1, and actually slept solidly until 5 or so. Drifting in unknown territory here, trying to plan on starting one thing, unable to do so yet... These days spent unsure and vacillating are difficult.
Off to meet the band- we're looking for a drummer.
Here's something I put together a few months ago. Unfinished, but nice. It's quiet, so turn it up.

You'll need Pando to get it, which I think is neat.

Today is Election Day

Today is election day here in the США, 米国, Los E.E.U., or however YOU pronounce the name of our kickass megapower when you speak the coolest word in your backwater banana republic's language. I am going to vote. Apropos of election day, I present to you the liberal drinking game via bordom.net.You can also read about my day at the google image story generator:
Here.

That's all I have.
That, and this picture of George Washington's wooden face.

Fuckin' Around With Linux

Yeah, that's what I've been doing today. My trusty old Gateway is the Guinea Pig for bootdisk distros of media-oriented Linux.

Sexiness

The boy wants the girl, but she is not on a to-do list, she is not on a christmas list, she is not on a grocery list. His desire is command-line, base-level, bypassing, autonomic yet insistent. He wants the girl and it is all he knows and yet he also does not know he wants her.

She is not a bottle of detergent. She is not on a manifest. She is not on a bill of lading.
The girl wields her antipathies and her friendships with easy boisterousness. The girl does not proceed like the clawing frightened girls who find their flower and pick it, hold it trembling in a gilded wilt before them as they run as though they run carrying an olympic torch.
The girl knows that love is not like power lifting. It is not coming in first. It is not getting ahead.

Love and sex are in the hips, in the hips and the ass, in the easy downward tug of the breasts, the tug on the eyes, on the breath.
Sexy is in the breath inhaled and made sweet, on the cigarette inhaled deeply. Sexy is in the breath exhaled and made perfect.

The boy acts without knowing himself. He is not at play, he is not at work, he is under no code of obligated conduct. Her shape is cast in old maths, she is an anoetic idea. He tells her that he wants her, and there is no failure.

If she remains unflappable there is no failure, no anamnesis calling them to their reservation at the tables of the concrete and away from the worship of her breathing, yes or no.

電気グルーヴ: VOXXX

Yesterday (actually, a few days ago now since I started this post in a head tornado of a hangover on Sunday) I listened to the entirety of 電気グルーヴのVOXXXって言うCD.
Prior to this, honestly the only Denki Groove I had heard was the post-quits remix compilation "The Last Supper," scattered mp3s, and 石野卓球のPost-Denki Groove debut album KARAOKE JACK.  I loved The Last Supper, hooked by the sample-driven madness of Cornelius' remix of Gari-Gari-Kun and the LFO-controlled filters on the nonsensical rhythm synth loop present throughout the song on the last supper and that notice I took has kept me ever curious as to the sound of album 電グル.
Denki Groove embodied a ださかっこいい (cool by virtue of its contrived lack of cool) aesthetic in highly produced, dense electronic dance music that was liable to change at any moment from a bizarre sports commentary skit by two fictional moron announcers whose enthusiasm is clearly out of proportion to what they are calling plays on to a seriously deadly bassline banger.  Very DJ-based dance, arpeggiated, rhythm sequencer-driven, Denki Groove was a pair of producers amazingly in their element among knobs in need of twiddling, irreverent self-referentiality, and abhorrence of even a moment's silence.  In attestation to the international vanguard nature of this band, the songs, vocoded or dry, are sung in Japanese, English, and German.
Highlights: Eine Kleine Melodie (see POLYSICS' "Black Out Fall Out" on For Young Electric Pop for another Japanese treatment of this careening-through-an-echoing-joy-at-the-speed-of-light sound), the fucking rhythmically bizarre Edisonden (Edison Electric) (utilizing war-era Japanese TV and Commercial Jingle samples, informational tapes, vocoder, shouting rap-like choruses that preceded Li'l John by about 10 years and still win out in technique and complexity, and straight electronics and drum loops), and Themes from the Invaders, which starts with a fake commentary and dives into a clean and slow bass drum groove narrated by an alien who alternately introduces himself as an alien to the people of the world, invents a new word for hello combining "Hello" and "konnichiha", introducing himself as the invader who invented that word, and invents a new food that he invites the people of the world to try (it has a cream flavor and it only costs 400 yen).  Needless to say, the people of the world cheer.  I love this band.  Technical masters who are completely at home out of their minds.

Fuck Yeah

New HESO does DEBUT!

Cha Cha Cha-
There is a new issue of HESO available, to which your friendly planetary Igor Olestra is a contributor.  Swing by and check it out, order a copy.  It's easy.

what I could do with is scotch

and some time to drink it and then remember myself.

What the reading eye has seen of late.

"Léger died a communist, having fallen once and for all for the greatest charlatanism of all time. It may be that like many artists, he was stupid."
-Sergei Dovlatov,
The Suitcase;
"Léger's Jacket"

In that same passage he describes the communist Norman artist's life in a nutshell, a pistachio nutshell- one of the red ones, obviously. He is described as a man, like any one of us. Like all of us, he struggles, in Dovlatov's depiction, to be the man he is to become. In comparison with Mayakovsky, who struggled with art and shot himself, Léger survived in some memories and in some respects. Dovlatov seems to have come by a jacket he wore, and now I know about him because of what he wrote. If we are to believe Seryozha, Léger had the dream to paint on railway cars, a dream that, half a century later, was finally authored by NYC punks. The man seems to be the birthing soup of a now-ubiquitous idea of graffiti, carried out by and large in the final analysis, however, by people who still are not very bright.
All our small ponds are lined up in such confusing adjacencies. The celebrity of rebellion and successful complacence strobed alternately provides such inconsistent lighting by which to make out each puddle's address.
History is the Minnesota of the psyche.

Baudrillard, the narcissist, said that good and evil advance in tandem, separate- and I say that so does everything else. Algren said of Chicago "You'll know it's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures." History is cellular and closed by circles, just as confused by the aging the mystery of being inflicts on it as we are. Morons have their heroes and their archetypes and their canon as well as the intellectuals (and who, as that neutral event-spacer and place marker time goes on, can tell the difference by the results achieved by either?), and strange middling characters have their own, picked between the two, but these are cul-de-sacs adjacent to one another in the strange becoming we call time's advance.

Via Chicago

Ah, for piss and promise, you brawling prairie bear- I love you and I'll be home for a visit momentarily. Pour all the pints of the best the midwest has to offer, throw me the rock dressed in black and sincerity for two days straight. What was I thinking when I let go of you? I love flying over the lake and seeing, as Carl put it, the "tall, bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities." Billy Corgan's "City by the lake." Sweet home with the best of the East Coast holding my hand, the two of us wide-eyed.

Pitchfork this weekend, ya'll. In a city so thick with friends and family you, as Todd puts it, can't swing a dead cat without hitting one or the other.

Sometimes You're Far Away and You Know It

Big Black is playing a few songs at the Touch and Go Records 25th Anniversary/Hideout Block Party. That is, they are playing among many, er, shall we say highly fucking notable acts. My friend Steve emailed me last night in conniptions, speculating on the identity of the as-yet-unannounced 25th band. Who else could possibly reunite and play at this thing? If one fantasy is fulfilled, why not two? "Is it The Jesus Lizard?" He asked me. Is it Slint?
Such amazing and abiding anger holds warm in the flat soil in the middle. The kids in Chicago, home of haymarket riots and incendiary Vietnam pop political window smashing, Democratic conventions communist in the even and unweighted distribution of walking papers from this mortal coil, the kids in chicago dress like cops to be cool in black leather cop jackets with the city police flag on the arm. The fertile soil across the middle of this land sprouts small things that are forgetful in their too temporary genesis, the ears of corn go brown and leave a dry husk in lieu of calling card or memory, the beans and the grains live but once and do not spring forth again when their green flames turned autumnal are cut from their toeholds in the black and giving earth. But the heat lapping in humid waves at the eyes to the horizon is an old grudge that surges in time to the cold, industrial beefs we carry in our music, in our industrial beats, and the kids in Chicago are flinging magnetic curses like Carl wrote.
Sometimes I feel old and far away from the shitting river city I was born in, her air thick with the dregs and factory farts of corn squeezings hanging humid over the Illiniois, far from that row of tall wigwams "fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness" on Lake Michigan.
Jesus, to wreck the whole world with a scream caught on tape.

Getting Lost in Astoria

The exclamation point is roughly where the Astoria Boulevard stop is. The little flag at the end of the loopy blue line is where the bar I was trying to get to was located. It took about an hour and we had to pee when we got there. Hell, this is probably still not where these things were located. I seem to remember Astoria Blvd being closer to the park...
Ok, I make no claims to accuracy. The bar was supposed to be on 14th and Astoria. I did not draw a blue line or plant a flag at that point. However, it does sum up basically how we felt getting to the bar, so I will leave this post and map as is to reflect a perceptual accuracy of events.

So Functional, Boredom- Cop-Out/Way of Life

Boredom.
I know you and I love you so well, so dysfunctionally, so intimately. I can sense the petulance in the way you crack the middle knuckles of your middle fingers when you are petulant and I can sense the upward rush of happiness when you crack the middle knuckles of your middle fingers so arthritic with happiness not yet discouraged. Boredom, I feel like I was born conjoined orally to your teat- my every languid year passes with your graffito in the footnote of every long, monochromatic yearbook.
Boredom, I have to tell you, I know what I will be for Halloween this year. I will be Giorgio Moroder. Take me to your patch bay.

Just a couple days and i feel as sloppy and free again as though It's been years since i last worked.

Jury duty is awesome. That is, it inspires a perverse awe to see how the whole thing seems to be aimed at exhausting the juror who got no coffee

How about another one from Vitalic?

Took a field trip to queens last night and wound up in a japanese salon style soiree.

Jury Duty is Just My Job, Ma'am- I am Just Doing My Job

Sweet. I have jury duty again today.

I will be upholding justice, don't expect any special favors. I have a job to do. George Washington had the skeleton of a bald eagle and wooden teeth. Kris Kristofferson wrote "Me and Bobby McGee" and has the skeleton of a monster truck, but that is still not as Ameri-fuckin'-Can as George Washington's Bald Eagle skeleton. I'm doing this for George Washington's badass skeleton.

Something to do.

Coffee- The Necessity that Works for Good and Evil/Today I Read a New Yorker Book Review

Every night I need a cup of coffee or two to pull me out of my funk/fumbling stultified malaise of sweating languid heart palpitations and get me functional enough to, at the very least, not waste the rest of my early evening almost dozing but not quite. I don't know if it's my diet or if it's the other cups of coffee that I chose to drink throughout the day that are themselves punching the clock and going the fuck home that make me this way every night. Maybe it's the sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen- that job we all seem to have- that makes me the poster boy for zero energy on a given night.
So I have a few strong cups of coffee. I'm right as rain, excepting the slightly grainy quality my alertness takes on for the rest of the night- but then giddy till well after bedtime. What's the point of this description of my banal passage through dusk toward dawn? Nothing, really, but self-reference- as this pointless little blog entry is itself an exhibit submitted as evidence of the aforementioned sipping and side effects.

Alright, I will attempt to add content.

Today I read Louis Menand's New Yorker book review of Robert Greenfield's new bio Timothy Leary. His approach to the subject and the book itself was very pointedly and subtly critical without any superfluous, unsupported outpouring of opinion. I really enjoyed the way he approached the subject in a very apparently studied manner.
I did happen to agree with his summation of the sixties counterculture- that "...personal radicalism, revolution in the head and in the bed, was the safer radicalism." I also will make no effort to hide the fact that I am appalled by society-at-large's reluctance to kill thr idols and society's subsequent willful movement at nearly all times towards figureheads only pseudo-representative of the problems characterising or the solutions called for by a day and age and away from real politics. Because of this, I enjoyed his treatment of the Leary character described in this new biography as a trumped-up phony of sorts, all smiles, magnetism, and bravado and very little longevity outside the momentary appeal of any era's very dated "sexy thought." This appears to be the picture Greenfield attempts to paint as well, judging from Menand's description.

There seems to be an analog between moral panics that provoke consternation, condemnation, and sensation in the news media and these "moral manias" that epitomize mass exodus from established norms. Stanley Cohen, on the first page of the first chapter of Folk Devils and Moral Panics writes that a moral panic occurs when "A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media."

Moral panics are based on reactions to social deviance, and are therefore also causative and not consequent. He writes "The on-the-spot reaction determines whether it is classified as deviant at all, and the way in which the act is reported and labeled also determines the form of subsequent deviation..."

Working forward from the work of Cohen, Goode and Ben-Yehuda laid out their formulation of the exact components that must be present to identify a moral panic in their book, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. These indicators are 1) Concern, 2) Hostility, 3) Concensus, 4) Disproportionality, 5) Volatility. That is, people are worked up about something and they are hostile toward the folk-devil personification of evil types they all agree unanimously are responsible for the concern. Both that concern and their reaction to it is wholly disproportionate to the threat a particular social problem poses, and society's reaction to this perceived threat is just as likely to be distracted five minutes from now as it is to intensify and wane for centuries. Moral panics are at least metaphorically true though not usually actually true as determined by the damning factions' values, perceptions, and fears regarding their own plights.

Cohen, Goode, and Ben-Yehuda give us one angle with which to approach the iconism that encourages conversion to the side of a particular social group or the act of siding with a particular new and deviant leader- if deviance is causative, then deviant behavior can be amplified, reified as the norm to which a deviant can adhere to achieve a certain social value.

This does not entirely explain the phenomenon of figures who spontaneously arise to figurehead deviant movements, nor does it entirely explain the rise of their allure. It must be possible for movements to also be generated from the deviant side in response to existing social conditions. These "moral manias" would be based on a similar set of indicators- most immediately notable being the metaphorical need for a drastic change. It is possible that a person or group is able on some level to identify a lack, but instead of dealing directly with that lack they will grasp at metaphorical solutions, leadership, or alliance while leaving the original problem untreated and largely unchanged.

What I'm describing has already been widely exploited in political communication and propaganda, in the push of one group to influence another by appealing to their known moral standards. When moral standards are spontaneously generated or unexpectedly and popularly produce their opposites, however, it would not be possible to follow the general rules governing propaganda- especially that stating that you cannot encourage behavior that is contrary to the popular undercurrents of society- to influence the actual generation of new deviant mores as they are not yet identifiable in a working form.

Without case studies to apply the indices of moral panic to moral manias, however, the term cannot be proven viable.

I knew I was late on Vitalic

This is great. Video for Vitalic's Poney pt. 1.



And, while I'm at it, I saw this on another blog awhile back- unfortunately I can't remember which- and this just popped up on Pitchfork the other day.

Bastards of Young by the Replacements.

Empowering Substances to Know When They are Abused- And Giving Them a Safe Place to Stay and The Tools to Be Strong

In the heat it might become easy to remember things. That's the way it will seem. But the reality is that it is the solitude- the heat is a red herring.
Nothing but record reviews and the stuff of unrecorded and unmemorable transgressions rattle about in the dark or in the shower or at the desk. It may become possible to list outside possibilities ad infinitum, but there will be no scientific evidence to back the claim.

Everything these days has a feel of osmosis, the penetration and the rearrangement of borders/lines between things the more less happens.



"Puzzles Like You" is the new record by Mojave 3, whose "Excuses for Travelers" still stuns me into a sad stupor. I think these guys are champs with a sophomore slump that has its own Lazarus complex. Their 1st, 3rd, and 5th albums have been real winners, to use the vulgar parlance, but the interim, or "sophomore", efforts between these have been kind of... slumpy.

Observe the three album covers above. Each one seems to have the same sort of abstract curve-shaped thing dominating the theme of the image, a progression from a dense/large abstraction to a tapered and tinily branched end. These are also the three albums that this band has put out that have rocked the most solidly, pardon my French.

Now, examine below "Out of Tune" and "Spoon and Rafter", the second and 4th albums.




Whereas the 1st, 3rd, and 5th records feature cover art that is more or less completely abstract- the closest we come to a concretely identifiable image among the art selected for that group is a sort of zen line drawing thingy- the records that stand out from the Mojave 3 catalog for undesirable reasons feature decidedly more concrete cover images. If Mojave 3 were Boards of Canada, "Out of Tune"'s dreamy distended sunset surfer photo may have signalled warm puffy beat goodness. However, while this is not a bad record per se, it does mark a sort of uncomfortable shifting between the first album's as-yet-shoegazey overtones to the wistful country rock this band now plays so well. That country rock sound on "Out of Tune" is a suit that isn't yet worn as rakishly as it would soon be on the world-weary "Excuses" record. "Spoon and Rafter" was the record they put out with their own newly-assembled/acquired studio, a studio that gave them all kinds of ways to play with toys and studio time they wouldn't necessarily have had access to when making their other records. It features some kind of a bucolic Americana/front-door bless-this-home crochet greeting doilly-style image. It is an image that is complex and vaguely trippy with all its colors and tapering lines, but it is still instantaneously recognizable as a drawing of flowers and a country scene. This is an unmistakable image. It may come as no surprise that this is also their weakest record. (I'm going to be embarrassed when someone emails to tell me I missed the thinly-veiled Uriah Heep "Demons and Wizards"-esque penis or vagina hiding in there.)
In each of their "concrete image" records the band can be heard making an audible effort to further their sound. In each of the "abstract image" records the band is at home with their mastered sound. I don't have any idea what input the band has in their selection of record artwork, but might it be plausible that when the band is most concerned with the outcomes of creative risk it is reflected in the very grounded and worldly cover imagery they choose? Similarly, when the band is at the top of their form and un-self-consciously experimenting to fantastic effect with their sound, might that happy-go-luckiness be reflected in their devil-may-care, cult-of-the-instantly-ascertainable-fact-be-damned choice of wobbly cover art?

"Puzzles Like You" is really good, and it brings me back to a band I had wrongly written off after "Spoon and Rafter." Here's to ups and downs.

The word is cheap when reached for too easily. It isn't a weapon to be drawn from a conspicuous holster, to bludgeon with the constant threat of its significance even when undrawn (a weapon once always a weapon twice, violence and desire breeding and frightening us always with such strong and looming potentials, eh?). I told her instead that a priest would have to exorcise her from my mind if she were ever to be evicted from the folds and trenches where my consideration had burnt for her crude holes and shelves where she could rest as I made my way through every day, such is her possession of me.

I lie, and I say that cooking is apprehended intuitively, that it is an activity that is completely without thought. I say that it is natural and does not carry the onus of having to be learned.

Show me one human being who is not a vain sociopath seeking the meekest and most ineffectual iota of aggrandizement at any and every shamefully inappropriate opportunity, and I will show you the end of my further vainly constructed tautology regarding human nature and the expectations one can hold for the moral performance of the bipeds who share flesh characteristic of swine.

If there is mercy, however, it will come as no surprise that that same human being will imagine the salvation of ameliorative forgiveness- excuse- glowing like the lord in his rose window high in the rafters of his seat in your parish. Prows cutting deep into the narrow and profound channel of the river we imagine our moments flowing together as part of one unifying and continuously cleansing stream of a whole, our rationale is a great ship called progress and it sails with a license to, at last, potentially relent in our constant offenses. That is what can be read on the flag it flies.

I must show mercy and stress that among human beings there are certain populations of monsters, and human beings are not these.

The ship sails with with other cargo on its manifest than excuses like progress and development, such as honesty, a longing for mutual understanding- and it is no surprise that it is armed with these that I face the ship's onboard interlocutor first.

It is true that I want to express my joy of a moment of cooking and acting unthinkingly and unreflectingly-- but the the interlocutor finds the vanity of my timing wants for further explanation.

After three decades and the opportunity to see many peers achieve outward models of success, he and I- the friend with whom I was speaking- are both working with some difficulty at sharing verbally the ardor of taking steps to become outwardly those things we are so at home being inwardly.

At least we will always be innocent in our easy victimhood to our weaknesses. As people, I mean. Perhaps, in the end, too forgiving of ourselves, of course. We happen to snag hang-nailed on nearly unrelated technicalities in the wisdom of life's experience that reassure us that, though we are not where we would like to be, this is not the same as not being capable of being where we'd like to be or being there sometime soon. Perhaps it is also too easy to speak of oneself in a palliative plural.

I lied and said that cooking brought me joy because it simply flowed from the ingredients that were available and the mood and the swing of doors and flip of hair in orphaned breezes in otherwise stiflingly hot rooms, but in that conversation I could not but spend all my attention on the task of seeing to it that the egg noodles did not burn in the frying pan, of taking care that I wasted no precious slices of meat, should they have been pushed carelessly while cooking from the other frying pan where I had seared rings of yellow onion with chicken breasts in fish sauce, pepper, oil, and Sriracha.

Cooking is not apprehended intuitively, to set the record straight, and one should not change the subject and say that it is. One should simply admit that, perhaps, one should be making the same great strides toward change in one's own life as those being discussed as being undertaken in one's friend's life, however terribly painful that revelation may prove.

Other things wrought by my hand and free time

Scouring the web at work today, I found online an archive of the magazine I occasionally write for. Brainchild of Manny Santiago, HESO can be found online by following the link in coerceyou's sidebar. For those who are fans of my writing and its accompanying want, or rather plea, for an editor, the direct link to those archived articles is here. Man, does that guy's head on the DMX Krew cover look like a penis.

Choice Choice Choice - Shake Your Counter-Force

This looks like something that would be fun to get behind and that wouldn't get behind your conscience in twenty years to poke it with the stabby-stabby.

Nocturnally Emanating

Quietly night timing it on the roof deck of a huge city that wasn't done with you till late makes for good google earth night photography.

Cafe, Coffee Quaffs, Coif Checking, Boyee

Sitting in my summer cold weather perch counting the brassy blondes, keeping tabs on the shakes they so let fly in spite of mistaken coiffure.

- - &

Listening to Skoda Mluvit by Schneider TM, true follow-up to o-2's zoomer. Much more lush, droningpsych. Denser. Still !freak epop&clicky!

cool itunes shortcuts

http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/archives/rss_talk/20060602_resync_itunes_podcasts_with_rss_via_the_keyboard.phtml

wireless midi keyboards

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/02/midair/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

Things Get Realer

2 Live Krew Meets Prince and acne giveaway mashup professionalism. So skilled, so many hours in the studio as evidenced by the editing, the granular samples, time fucking, progress checking of the recorded words with skips, repeats, flags that no, that was a sample, that- what you thought for the first second was just a live flow. Deep bass, alternation between a sparse use of sounds that are small and good for echoing in the imaginary spaces inside effects boxes and deluges of rhythm samples. Exciting party music, wanky electronics.
Records this good function to obviate the purpose of the music critic entirely. When there is nothing to embellish or sweeten with undeserved praise, when there is no rapture not simply standing free and unafraid in the world and available to any rhythmically infatuated listening audience, what remains for the critic to do? Sometimes things are good, and then they speak for themselves.
Any fool can look on the grandest temples built by the hand of man and proclaim "they are there," but whom does this benefit? The temples are unperturbed and the time it took to speak those words to the world at large distracted new eyes from their own baptism in awareness.
I am listening to this great fucking record. There's nothing else I can tell you.
Spank Rock.

Comes on, the way you feel, come on, come on

I am not as calm as a bottle of scotch, but a vice in hand and handy supply is a happy peace of mind you only find with a few spare minutes to go out of your way and a few rare dollars to spare.
Instead, I am relearning how to sweat, mercifully alone in my apartment as sky dumps belly on Manhattan in first few humid 24 hour tours of early summer's foreshadows. I am not as calm as a bottle of scotch, to dip in as though dancing, so Instead it is two Löwenbräu hastily and impulsively bought from the bodega on whose rafts I ride out the tumult I feel and the tumult screaming in white sheets like wrathful wraiths more than restive casting shadows at stupid hours.
I hate to be alone.
And with so much yet to do at young to adolescent late hours too early posing as evening but still fooling me who likes to sleep and forget.
Evening, but not even and really never with mornings and days spent lopsided waylaid.

Tall, Willowy and the Violence of Feminine Abundance Manifest Paired as a Vaudeville Duo

The whole thing means that one day our whole form of courtship and the source of all our "coolness" will no longer be accessible to the kids.

Listening to the new AFX now, daring myself to be surprised- prerequisite behavioral mod for folding it into the grey matter- and dropping none-too-subtle references to an amazing album by the Folk Implosion, wherein Lou Barlow slinks with oily pipes "Insinuation really makes it happen"... cha cha cha.

(This one)

April 13

April 13th was Maundy Thursday, the feast day observing Christ's washing of the disciples' feet.

The Persistence of the Word

These hours, ever growing early, so also ever grow later. Merlin lived backwards in time, proceeding forever from an ancient state to a youth unfettered by our amnesiac births. We often, men, not characters in books, point ourselves on a line fixed in a conceptual and unknowable distance for the sake of our narrative conventions. The cult of the goal and the cult of purpose rule the stories we and our neighbors live out, nimbly avoiding any acknowledgment beyond technical instruction that these stories take advantage of arcs, zeniths, nadirs, azimuths. The lines these trains run, these words read in are curved, enclosed, and on occasion memory intrudes strongly and boorishly into inappropriate alphabetized chambers we occupy from morning till night. We live always on both sides of time, and memory, that dream we never wake from, proceeds ad infinitum, not stopped, but occurring as the grain of simultanagnosia in moments we have experienced and must always experience. We live in memory, memory ordered by privelege. Memory informs even the crossing of the apparently airless lock between experience and reaction. We hear the music first always on the ebb, always first meeting the ear at its most dramatic, thunderous, frightening. If you would dare to be so surprised as to forget yourself, hypnotised, moved to dream through your memories as you wake and let unfurl the languages you know according to the naturally inscribed laws of their expression- then you would find in that ebb and decline new grammars which are, to the one, the wake and tumult of retreat from order, but to the other the same declension is the verbing of nouns in a world in reaction unrelenting in moulting its names and the addresses of its names' stations. All tongues fold at the end in clover's fractal, and all fingers persist at the ends of arms in dreams in the extension of impossible motions. All languages, would that you could again forget, fold and bend like protein, each word recalling all the others it is piled upon and beside, advancing concurrent with all events that the word remembers, for the word remembers and is simultaneity.

Off

It's been some time since I posted anything here to coerce you. Those moments when I only want to sit down and write either haven't been coming or happen whilst whiling my time away at work.
No excuses, just talking to talk, to be in the practice.
If'n you haven't seen it, I recommend reading this.

Nassau by the Sea and Cake is one of those singular occurrences in the universe which will never again be repeated. As is the song noodling through my headphones right now, "A Summer Wasting" by Belle and Sebastian. To be an artist, to act always in the feline tense, to never stop in the sightless and distanceless oasis of Eliot's shadow between the deed thought and the deed acted, to act with such continuous suppleness and seamlessness between the self and the works and deeds of your hands and days is on par with the creation of a new class of celestial body, is to ignore all the established rules of physics and introduce a new and independent stranger who only coincidentally resembles some distant and removed cousin to the gluon or some other of the brood of that tiny populace that teems to make up the fabric of all of our assumptions as to the foundation of every reality.

...

A bit of a non-sequitur, but I love electronic music. Aphex Twin, under moniker AFX/Analord has compiled and released on cd a selection of tracks from his recently ended Analord vinyl series. I bit and ordered it. It hasn't arrived yet, but what I've heard of the Analord stuff I've liked very much. I got so excited about that that I got the Family Glue Global Goon album and soaked up the constantly surprising changes in production and sound that are James' trademark. Then I listened to most of the Richard D. James album. Then I spent an hour making popping static noises on my synthesizer.

I am always energized when I hear the stuff Aphex Twin comes up with- I am energized because I am always surprised, I am always faked out at every musical fork in the track, and new things are always proven possible in his production. The possibility, the endless and confusion profligance of possibility available in electronic music is why I love it. It is the possibility to create a sound that has never existed before and to blow your own mind, and if you're lucky, the mind of others with.

Today in history the first shots were fired in the civil war.

Arab Strap at Southpaw, 4/7/06

The Crazy Field

Using rudimentary image-composing skills, this is a visual description of what happens when you notice a crazy person and are pulled into their "crazy field."

Needs a Vacation.

Spent the day today up in the 80s in the Upper West Side. Spring is fully in swing here, all the trees are pushing out into the world with white flowers. The wider avenues up there were breezy and sunny. It was good to be where it is less crowded, where the crazies don't cram themselves will-he-nill-he to not share the streets with working stiffs like you, but actually work to occupy the spaces where you stand precisely. We came back down to the village after our relaxing field trip, found ourselves strolling behind a man holding court alone, arguing with voices, who stopped on the corner to get behind the two of us. Unnerving. As we crossed to the other side of the street to be away from him (on E 5th) he stopped his argument with the unheard suggestion maker, stopped his insistence that he just wanted to go home, that he was going to 233 E 5th St. and taking a left, but not these guys, not these guys- and began thanking us as we walked away. Or thanking something. Or just giving thanks.

Even the relative calm and the enormous palaces of the UWS were a welcome change to a spring that, as every year, finds the streets thronged with folks no longer just surviving a chill, but redoubling their efforts to be in your field of attention, in your space, and as crazy as a phalanx of March Hares.

It occurs to me now to pose the question- does the perennial reemergence of bedlam from hibernation like Persephone from the clutches of Hades come by the nomenclature of the March Hare purely through a flight of Lewis Carroll's fancy, or have Johannes Quotidian Publics throughout the slog of history been given pause to comment on the blossoming madness this season sprouts without fail, ushering the term earlier into the coded parlance reserved for the open secret of naming lunatics than the publication of Alice In Wonderland?

Whatever. Batshit crazies have hatched from their Easter eggs.

Sunday, Sunday- Someone Forgot to Mention You

Good afternoon. Another Sunday has fallen on us, another week has rippled by.
I've been listening to The Juan Maclean, Jimmy Edgar, Number Girl, and, man, man- who else? I'd love to get hold of the new Sondre Lerche. It also occurs to me that I have, late in the game, also been really enjoying Vitalic's OK Cowboy.
The Replacements are getting a best-of together and recording a few new tracks to throw on it, to boot. Mentioned everywhere else, why not here?
My new copy of Solaris came in the mail yesterday by recently passed visionary Stanislaw Lem:

"...Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us..."



My Pitchfork Music Festival tix arrived in the mail on Friday. My paycheck, however, did not.

Balls, what a switch!

What else? What else?

Added links in sidebar to friends of Coerce You, Who Can Get Fucked, Bearclaw, Holy Roman Empire, Wind or Ghost. These guys are such friends to Coerce You that Coerce You is touched. Friends are what make a website that pretends to make a person's individual point of view inherently important really special. You guys make each day pop, and you make me cooler.

Oh, hell yes. Yes. Hell of yes. More as it comes to me.

Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt at Southpaw

Photos of the two Chicago auteurs playing last night at Southpaw sans rhythm or any other backup save each other. Excellent renditions of a few Sea and Cake songs were thrown in along with pretty much the whole new Prekop album. Do Now Fairly Well, Civilise, an oldie that I didn't know the name of but that was familiar to me, Midtown were all taken from the Sea and Cake songbook. The pretty, aspirated vocals, the jazz, the freshly complicated guitar lines, the mutant bossanova made me smile and sway.

This song is sexy.

"Pop the glock" by Uffie.

She's on Myspace I guess. Read about her on Bigstereo.

Last Friday I couldn't get in the shower in the morning. My soap and shampoo were in the downstairs bathroom, and that was where Michael Rother, kraut-rock pioneer of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia (among other things) fame was performing his ablutions, blow-drying his grey hair.

Thursday before that I came home from work characteristically (of late) late, and Michael Rother was sitting on my couch with Josh slouched and watching something about disasters on the History Channel. I then went and had a glass of wine with Josh and Rother in the wine bar downstairs.

Saturday I saw Rother perform with a couple other musicians- one of whom was Ben from Secret Machines, and it blew my mind.

Tonight I came home and small talked with Rother again.

This post is just not bizarre enough to convey how surreal this is to me.

A kraut-rock pioneer, auteur and guitarist behind some of my favorite recordings of all time, has just been hanging out in my house for a week.

"De Luxe" (Harmonia)

Last night's dream was an encounter with the uncanny. In my grandmother's house, standing in the hallway upstairs, I looked into my grandfather's bedroom. There, where I always expect there to be, stood an apparition- but this was of myself, shirtless, long-haired, staring at me exactly as I look today. Seeing this doppelganger filled me with fear, provoking a response that was merely the repeated quaking accusation of its identity. It stood expressionless and stared at me ominously. I gasped the words, "It's me! It's me!", the "it" somehow meaning more than simply that unknown thing that stood before me, but instead signifying some other, more intimately familiar unknown. I struggled to wake as, in my dream, I descended the stair. Downstairs, waiting and staring up at me from the other side of the bannister with the same unnerving look, was the apparition. I could not wake and the phantom would not dissolve until I had come within range of it with my fists. When I swung at it, it vanished, and I awoke.

Meet the Band

You can stand next to the people you may like to be.

Will this change anyone?

A simple equation will tell us.

+


=

or



Clearly, all the results are likely to be mixed, but can be counted on to lean heavily toward confused inner turmoil whilst dressed in suits or outward displays of obvious identity issues.

Who is this guy?

Yeah, it happens to some of the best of us, I guess- putting us out of the running for that select group of people who would simply be "the best of us," the qualifying term "some" mercifully absent from the prologues to their terms of vaguest grouping. Bacchanalia is good for putting yourself outside of the things, the Catholicism, the morbid pasts, the unwhole and unwholesome reflections that revisit from time to time, hiccup memories of a different self set to chastise the current, worldly you in quiet moments when the hive-mind connection isn't being used for downloading porn, loving someone, moving forward. But bacchanalia is a medium, set in place millions of years ago by the ur-cells when they were still thinking about getting together with these "mitochondrian" guys, still considering a strategic alliance to assert their permanent physicality in contradistinction to the spiritual world they were the pumping and oozing self-reflections of. Forgetfulness...
Oh, Lethe.
Step outside yourself and move ahead, but the important step you eventually cut the corners from (speed and sleek achievement of desired effect; as above, so in the corporeal below- remember the cellular dream imperative!): Remember to bring yourself along.

I have left hundreds of impressions on people, I have spoken from my soul over and over as a reflex, but the words press out ahead of my bread-crumb man who sits soaking up the leavings of his yeast brothers somewhere behind the tight column of meanings faster than the light that sighs forward in a free rage from the headlights of the rented automobile we escape in.

I am forgetting things, or people are remembering the parts of me they know are important for me, while I remember only the parts of myself that know where to find my next drink.

Was it in summer of 2004? Who is this man and what is he thinking about? What conclusions did he come to, what thunderclaps did he cleave the virgin souls of the assembled with when he broke his reverie and decided it was time to speak?



It becomes so frighteningly easy, as I become older, to internalize the lack of regard I think others must have for me... no one's listening, and I just have all these sermons on the mount to pass my time discarding. An unremembering shell that my words continue to echo out of in search of new bodies, new lives.

Oh, memory. Will you help me to remember, once in awhile, to stop and talk to myself?

When It Means Something to People

I like when people put something out in the world that means something to them. I like it when they do it only because it means something to them. They do it not because it will aggrandize* (*embiggen) them, but because, hey, here with the going there and waking up sometimes late or sometimes with no place to be, always flush with cash and slick with slit or almost as oft skint and friendless queued up so's to wait for the next do-right to jump the line or line-jumping for ghastly utopian principles that will pay their dividends not in grudges but in pure cash money future for all babes, puppies, and bumblebees kind of world we live in, for some people life just ain't so simple that it's all about constant self-PR work. I like reading something someone wrote that was uncensored and unfiltered from inception to inscription because it was a thought. I like it when someone is so surprised that they have learned something from life that they just say it. I like when this kind of thing surprises someone else, and suddenly two people have a reason to support each other. I like when people can make lasting friends whose acquaintance is valuable beyond expiry and beyond cheap commodity just because of the way one has of batting an eye after their particular fashion in the opinion of another. I like it when people come out of their ruse-goldberg contraptions and show you who they are un-self-consciously, uncalculatingly.

I guess I should get to what prompted me to write this.
I like The Life Pursuit.
I like that when I listen to this record I want to spout about sincerity.

"The Life Pursuit" (Belle & Sebastian)

Similarities

The new Prefuse 73 cd, "Security Screenings", has a cover remarkably similar to the old Coil cd, "Love's Secret Domain".

Just saying.

Compare for yourselves:






Man. Funny how a little trick of meshing neurons will get you back into music you haven't listened to in years. That is all.

We pillory the fading, terminal impulses of the day, for if we shouldn't postpone them once and for all, at the very least we stretch them out that much longer.

Terminator T9 Wants Me to Say "Hangover Home"

Hangover home, exclamation point, it's what my Fighters stick it out, poking tiny buttons better suited for speaking in math (thansk, Rajiohdea), but did I saw taht?

I cunt mean ot.

won't anything come out right again? The tech has its own designs, but whose were they first?

And what will it have me say next?

Rain, My Spending Habits

It's raining this morning in New York. It's early February, and it doesn't look like it's getting cold anytime soon. I used to reassure myself that the climactic change wasn't really happening- it always seemed like the cold bit of winter had just been pushed a month or so further into the year. This year, however, the doomsayers are are attractive to me like a middle-aged fellow's crises-beset divorcee's genuflection at the altar of fresh nubility is to him.
That's right. I am tempted to believe THE END IS NEAR as much as that balding guy who just split with his wife wants to give a girl in high school his wife's cold sores.
Rain is shitty. But, so are the sidewalks, so I guess we need some.

I had a refund for some stuff on Amazon I got to use yesterday- replaced a borrowed book with a nice library copy, hardcover with dust jacket. Got the yet-to-be-released Belle and Sebastian, a new Polysics record (I have Neu! and For Young Electric Pop, but I think FYEP was released under a different title in the states). I also got "Musique Automatique" (Stereo Total)
by Stereo Total, because I couldn't think of anything else to get.

ephemera:
-Craig Finn from The Hold Steady does a cameo on a P.O.S. (Minneapolis Hip-Hop) song.
-Egon Schiele exhibition at Neue Gallery is really good.
-currently reading Innocents Abroad by Twain.

-There is a new Morrissey track leaked
-There is a new Sufjan Stevens track leaked

Definition: BEDIZENED

From the OED- "Dressed up with vulgar finery."

Things No One Would Believe Anyway, or Private Communiques with the Irrational

Among the things no one would believe anyway but pretend to want to:

Astral traveling
meaning in repeating dreams
amnesia
night murmuring
old men who refuse to leave, even beyond the grave
true love
bouncing apparitions
succubi/incubi
your True Age
wives' tales
Peace, Love, Understanding

When It's Pink Instead

The results are still pretty hot.

NSFW video for a cool techno songenfunken. Easy Love the title? MSTRKRFT the auteur? I don't know.

Bukkakemashou!

You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having

I've been listening to Atmosphere's You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having the past couple days. Walking the city on my unexpected week off between jobs, Hockey Hair came on, and the sped-up soul samples grabbed me and the repetitive rhythms slew me.

"You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having " (Atmosphere)

This Video is Awesome

"Sixteen" by Los Super Elegantes.

Me encantan Los Super Elegantes.

Mason & Dixon

I have just finished the greatest book ever written in my lifetime, the constant recollection of which has beaten the reverse panes of my eyes, and, indeed the whole of my insides, with fierce tears left unwept in public spaces for the sake of propriety.

"Mason & Dixon" (Thomas Pynchon)

Today a television advertisement told me "kids' pink- it does more than you think.

The Incredibly Long and Fruitless Commute of Mia De Capatista

Mia De Capatista lived for only one day. She would wake days and weeks before the sun had remembered itself to everyone. There were always two of her, two of her to redouble her worries. There was Mia, rising in anticipation of the repetition of her day, waiting in the performance of her ablutions in chronology's anteroom. There was Mia, proceeding dutifully about her day's ministrations. She was unhappy for two reasons: First, She, though uncommonly talented in that regard, had no one to love. Second, she, being a smart girl, could find nothing to assuage her of the futility she felt when she questioned her creator as to why such a young and vibrant creature should be given only one day whose call to await and whose disappointments and travails to encounter over and over without fail.

She kept a room in an ethereal ghetto called Bronks that flew above an island called Manahatta, which itself floated on the sea- it being the province of all girls with unreal fates. Each morning when her day, who was also her master, would, finally, call, she would emerge from her room dressed and perfected for presentation. She would proceed to a station of the metro and descend on a long and otherwise unridden train alone to the island below. The commute would tax the day of its supply of hours so that it was nearly dusk when she arrived, and she had nothing but drifting piles of tabloid newspapers to, not exactly pass the time, but at least stultify her as she rode. On her arrival she would make directly to a bar in midtowne, the place where she drew her day's pay. There she aided people, with her guile, with elixirs and lethe water, with the loudly trumpeting bloom of her young sex, in forgetting how they had gotten to where they were. She saw people there whose days were each new, pulling them off in new directions (aging them all too quickly, but they didn't seem to mind).

Under this bar, out of the view of the patrons, on a shelf on a level with her knees, were a row of semi-spherical objects twitching in the shadow of a partial obscurity. These were the quaking, undying heads of her suitors, numbering then 18, and there was ever space on the shelf for additions.

Mia's unbearable fate was unique even among those born into the strange prenatal contracts consigning them to the unseen, but not unfelt, shtetl where she lived, for her curse was not limited to having been afforded only one day to live and wait on as a handmaiden. It was compounded by the measures her day and master took to assure that she would never escape him. Her master's penalty for presuming to the station of one of her beaus was a sudden and painless denial of the suitor's body, resulting in a life lived forever after, undying, as a head on a shelf beneath her bar.

Notwithstanding its persistence in visitation or its jealousness of the beautiful 18-year-old Mia, her single day and master's blighted craft was proven all the more diabolical with the observation, as it became difficult to avoid making with detachment once eyes were laid on her, that, with such a curse in place, his Mia was the perfect device for amassing a collection of undying, lovelorn heads that would never fail to appreciate in quantity. Mia, for her part, had a penchant for rescue woven into her character that led men into her trap. It was no secret to her day and master that she wished to hie away from him and begin anew, and those patrons who made the ill-advised transformation from patron to suitor were well aware of her need for this and were drawn by it.

"You only have to be 18 to serve, but I usually don't tell people- sometimes people aren't comfortable with it, you know? But it's OK, you know, because we're talking." She would sparkle with a contained sadness, a martyrdom whose building discomfort only the perpetually young can sustain, flirting.

"I moved out when I was 17, I haven't had it good, but, you know. I'm working for awhile and saving for college," as she would lean closer, her words dreaming the symbols of the future.

If the suitor had found enough of his own unhappiness in the various days he had been given, and if Mia had given him enough drink to forget himself, he might feel called on by his need for ennoblement to rescue the poor, hopeless specimen from her long, hard-luck bad day-the quietly abided fate given to so many pretty girls.

It was unclear what her eternal day and keeper considered the punishable infraction, what signified an irreversible mistake of infatuation, but, ultimately, once a suitor had resolved to befriend the youth with a mind to reforming both his and her lives in the shape of a happy dream, redeeming all with some kind of rescue, His body and all his attachments to the world would vanish in the instant and his head would fall to the the bar he was leaning over, suddenly without the under-standing of its body. Mia would quickly and sadly place the man's head beneath the bar and clean up his traces before other patrons noticed anything, kissing the heavy thing lightly, out of sight, near where she washed the glasses. The confused head, for its part, was ever unable to cry out, deprived of its lungs and voice.

A pretty girl from the home of nightmares, Mia was no different than most. Even as her day gripped her and her prospects, her special awareness of her fate kept her locked within it, and she was forever taking heads and losing loves, wondering when her awful day would end. The heads, with suffocated voices, (if they came to themselves again) were trying to tell her, still gallant in their mission of rescue-
"Mia, tomorrow is over there. Don't come back."
"My love, don't come back."

H_________d

Thank you, Mr. Tweedy, for:

his goal in life was
to be an echo
the type of sound that falls around and then back down
like a feather
but in the deep chrome canyons
of the loudest manhattans
no one could hear him
or anything...

He slept in the mountains
in a sleeping bag underneath the stars
he would lie awake and count them
but the great fountain spray
of the great milky way
would never let him
die alone

(so he said)
remember to remember me
standing still in your past
floating fast like a hummingbird

what's been happenin'

I've been writing quite a few poems, working on some fiction, listening to Belle and Sebastian, negotiating the formation of a Smiths cover band, buying and selling books far in excess of my ability to read them, much less process the worlds and the implications of the points of view within. I've been listening to Japanese rock (Toddle, Ogre You Asshole, Niumun), still turning people on to The National.

Now Playing If You Find Yourself Caught In Love from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian

I'd like to go to a reading or two, put my average heart on my what would be, but for my exceeding naivete and self-centered nature, average sleeve. As it is, any readings/slams/etc I attend I would have to attend with the mismatched pair of my average heart and these threadbare and motley sleeves of pointless ostentation.
Now Playing If She Wants Me from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian


I found the book unreadable- it was either me or the translation- but there is an Oe Kenzaburo book, I think it's a short-story collection- called "Help Us to Overcome Our Madness." I like to think about the title when I think about how 95% of what I do, at least, even at its most sincere, is bailing water from my unnecessary blunders, or the unthinking creation of new subtle barriers to sincerity.

Now Playing You Don't Send Me from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian

Above all, people need a long time, even to get it wrong.

Dostoevsky was an interesting one, one of these freaks of empathy able to flesh out all the furthest folded reaches of the human soul. You don't see many authors like him anymore, strange in this age of total information awareness, stranger when you contrast this age with his natal era. A lot of my favorite authors seem to work up to a single idea as they plow and occasionally plod through their careers, book by book. Ellis? How many times did he write American Psycho before he wrote it?
Who else? I don't know. Perhaps I'm talking out of my ass.

Now Playing I'm A Cuckoo from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian

Here's to winning!

Now Playing Nothing In The Silence from the album "John Peel Radio 1 Session " by Belle & Sebastian

Police Cat!

Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles, police cat, is remembered today at a memorial service being held at Walton Mortuary from 10 am until 1 pm. Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles was best known among the force for his sense of humor, his tendency to step on all the cop radio buttons and siren controls when the officers he was partnered with were alseep in the cruiser.

Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles was also part of a controversy several years ago, as it became clear that, when women officers became pregnant and before they left for maternity leave, the cat would have to go on sabbatical, so as not to infect the expectant with cat scratch fever or rare, mood-altering toxoplasmoids from his filthy kitty law enforcement paws.

Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles, you will be missed.

Scenes from a diorama of tomorrow's world

...We piled into great earthships, huddled knees to necks in fast to-home ships, away, heavy with the promise of promise and promises to keep. No more the music of the spheres whose cadence to careen to, undulatory threads of light worn on our skins, but to the basics, to the beginning. To the brown nucleus we rushed, heeding light's pure admonitory instruction now understood: now not inviting, not beckoning, not free of encoding, but clearly, the stars were screaming, "flee- exeunt- away- to the mud, away from the stars."

The backwards fired light of a ship fired homeward burned some of us on the front, for our wistfulness drew us aft to see off our youth, and some of us on the back, for we were making already for bed.

Our flagship, our rusty hurtling can, was abbreviated in its regression full on the side, T-boned by the white, white moon, our earth mother's swat. Her empty nest was not advertising rooms for let, and the USS Heavy Retarder's trajectory was elided. She foundered side over side and hurt, but yet into the marble we first crouched on, Terra Firma. Goode Olde Worlde.

None were allowed by fortune to die on the Heavy Retarder, but we did find ourselves forever changed crashed deep in the mud of our first genesis, aching and sleeping in the awning of mud and, finally, lowered expectations. Those sons and daughters of heaven who found heaven too resplendent slipped, gymnosporous, into the eternal nap of a race's final convalescent groan for the sentenced duration of 1,000 forevers, free, at last, of the crushing expectations of mad and empty, needy and clinging, endless, endlessly promising and omnipossible space.

We and custom slept ever more deeply into the, conversely, crowded mud, we dull and slower children of heaven, we, promise's prodigals cast off.

Ya'll, yoose can buy this shizz

Hello. I have a cafepress store now.

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The most interesting thing about Madonna's career ...

The most interesting thing about Madonna's career is that she was a primadonna before her career even got off the ground.