lower east side demise

Mornings and Churches

The sky here in Manhattan has that blue-r than blue island quality to it this morning, and my walk home brought me past some archival footage of churches.

This photo was taken with my lovely phone.

Apologies for crookedness.

The Ghosts of Loves Unfinished

"Know this thing for certain," these the first words he forms in his mind as though they could be spoken when he wakes in the dark, though he does not actually speak, "Dreams will always betray you and how you think things are going."

When for weeks life was workaday, now those things whose constance was assured and assented to have been summarily brought back under review by the subconscious committee and rejected for fitness in one decisive motion.  In a meeting held as he slept, no less.

His compromise with life is to operate on scale.  His new job could be worse than it is.  The fact that it is better than his last job gives him a solace that will, for a time, function in lieu of success.  His wife is loyal and loves him honestly.  When he imagines his wife's love and the love of the woman he had let come before as neutral red foam bars rising up from the ground beside each other as though they are part of a bar graph quantifying and comparing the two varieties of intimacy and relationship, the sum total of his wife's kindness and honesty stands very noticeably taller than hers, the one he had committed to before,  she who was brilliant but prone to boredom, who had been very adept at digging him hollow like a native's canoe when his jokes and drinking were no longer funny and paddling him ably up shit creek.

Dreams will not re-read the pages of chapters written to their finish and ask what might have been.  Here the length and breadth of the betrayal of a dream is limited to wistful remembering, a fresh taste of the variety of loneliness that that one left you with unameliorated by time or rationalization.  The worst these dreams can do is sit on your chest like a succubus until you've shaken their weight off.  But that weight will always come off.  Demons you have exorcised will drop in for tea now and again, after all, but abide by a politeness not observed in that first breaking and entering.

When dreams team with the phantasms of loves that end by no impetus more robust than circumstance, however, there is the formula that dissolves the palliatives binding prosaic life like an enzyme, a perfect equation suited to the task of digesting the patchwork of acceptance of the way things have become until it appears ragged as resignation.

The dream brought her to him again, she whom he had been happy enough to see off, in whose bon voyage he carried little enough outward culpability, in the acceptance of whose departure he bowed to finance and a nascent career he wasn't particularly interested in.  She, too, young as she was, shrugged off the blow, apparently.

"I'll never know." he speaks aloud this time, lying on his back.

Greater than the hunger that is now awakening in his belly, and harsher than the weird lack of the caffeine his waking mind is beginning to crave, he feels the want to stop the feeling that he's been absolutely thorough in his life only in the pursuit of the wrong thing.

Almost all of his regrets begin with ellipses:

...and that's why I have to go to work in an office every day.
...and that's why I've never been published.
...and that's why I'm not free now to do what I want.

Only one of them, this morning, begins with gold blonde hair and eyes as big and blue and portending of a coming lack as they were once present and tangible in one summer in his life.  Only one of them makes him crave to hear French spoken to him early in the morning as he heard again as he was sleeping that night.

"J'embrasse, mon petit coeur."

Technorati Tags: Fiction

Murakami Magically Comes Around

I've said before that I could never tell if Murakami, with all his meticulously cataloged insight into people, was just fucking with us as he wrote each of his dull and unflinching, non-plussed heroes into some diamond-studded corner of miracles to let amazing experiences wash over them without blessing them with a single iota of an outlook-bending epiphany of self-awareness before eventually killing them. My struggle with Murakami has always been over that: Does he champion an insidious point, or is he winking and laughing as he plays the infidel, dishing up his perfectly socialized characters inured to their impossible fates by boredom in order to injure our own sense of order? Is the meat of his insight served not from the charming, off-beat magic of his fantasy worlds, but instead from the infuriating repetition of menu items, sandwich contents, beverage counts, technical recountings of deeds done and only thought about as weird fate closes in on a character not so much hapless, but wholly unmotivated to question or attempt to thwart his or her own end?

Well, I had given Murkami up for a fantastic nihilist, one whose charming descriptions of horrible fates wholly unavoided in some way advocated complacency. That was the conclusion I had come to even though it was thinking on his books that first brought to my mind the concept of didactic wrongdoing.

I'm still not sure exactly where he stands, but I am about 14 chapters into Kafka on the Shore now, and he's addressed this question more or less head-on. The main character, Kafka Tamura, is discussing his opinion of Soseki Natsume's The Miner. In discussion of the hero of that novel, Tamura complains that "...eventually, he gets out and goes back to his old life... But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything... He's totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that."

Aha! Murakami is, at least in some sense, aware of what he is doing! But, the second person in that conversation retorts with:

"But people need to cling to something... it's like Goethe said: Everything's a metaphor."

So which one is Murakami? Is he directly confronting critics like me here and then offering a one-liner pithy rejoinder for how his characters can remain so broken-spirited and Japanese to the end, come what may: talking cats, mad science, or sado-masochism? Or perhaps the metaphor as transparent as that: this character whose lack of ambition is so grating is YOU, social man, and the story I'm telling is supposed to feel wrong. Didactic wrongdoing is such a stretch, though, and it smacks of naive hero-worship of the author who brought me Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood. Murakami could just as easily be as gifted and equally stunted by the violence of his socialization as Dostoevsky, another unflinching diarist of the human soul.

In any event, my curiosity is piqued.

What It Must Be Like to Record on a Quantum Avogadro's Number Track

I don't think I own another record more complexly committed to archival matter than Kahimi Karie's K.K.K.K.K.K.K.

The Weird Passion

In the recent batch of CDs I picked up at my local Virgin Megastore was A Bestiary of by the Creatures, a compilation of Robert Smith contemporaries the Creatures' early catalog of the Wild Things EP from '81, the Feast LP from '83, and the and Miss the Girl and Right Now/Weathercade singles from '83.

The Creatures are Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Banshees drummer, Budgie. Comprised thus of only rhythm and vox, this disc is an exploration of the textures evoked by layering complicated percussive patterns, spectral pads, cross-cultural/multi-lingual vocal samples, and Siousie's dirging... (Ok, I'm picturing Futurama's Zap Branigan saying this) ...eroticism. Listening through to the end of the disc yields the bonus of the final track, Right Now, a surprise horn-adorned jog into sexual immediacy's gape that, despite the horn line, still seems to rely more on vocal texture and drums than anything else to move the song along.

Now, how to describe all this without using all the same stock phrases that all goth reviews have used usque ad nauseum to express just how Siouxsie's choice of phrase and her unmistakable inflection (interspersed with assorted moans and sundry impassioned escaped utterings) combine to impart the certainty of a dire last chance irrespective of her subject matter?

This is a great disc, holding the attention with spare arrangements and experimental instrumentation and Siouxsie's timelessly terrible (in the old-testament sense) sex, a taste nailed on the tongue as she tickles the ears.


Siouxsie Photos

ignored monument to love, 14th st. and 1st ave, 50 degrees, clear skies and sunny.

Trans-Am Wanks Back to Life

As mentioned in the previous post, I picked up Trans Am's new disc the other day. What I like about Trans Am is that even what is apparently simple about their sound is, to the ear, beyond exacting. Trans Am are post-rock wank wunderkinder. They are a band that is just as likely to wow you with the tightness, subtletly, and complexity of their riffs as use their considerable talents for playing their instruments and manipulating the recording process to fuck with you as they explore an exaggerated iteration of some tangent of rock that has been fascinating them. Trans Am is on a two-record hot streak of solid playability. You cue Sex Change in your media util and there is no need to touch, shuffle, skip ahead, or in any other way molest the cool, reptilian confidence of the recording's progress from frame 00:00:00 to finish. Unlike Thrilljockey labelmates and fellow post-rock accused Tortoise or The Sea and Cake, Trans Am has always kept a strongly symmetrical and Krauty backbone to their rhythm section, along with an allegiance to eerie, aetherial synthesizers. The result is that, instead of producing rock music with the mutant shuffle of math and jazz flourishes, Trans Am assembles rhythmic rock songs of a length unoffensive to the pop-trained attention span, but with all the flourish, artistry, obvious skill, and penchant for oscillation between compatible time signatures and heretofore incompatible styles of instrumentation (distorted Vs. clean guitar, et & c.) of prog. Oh, and sometimes they chill you cold like Kraftwerk. The occasionally tongue-in-cheekiness of the lyrics is interestingly backdropped by the evident effort put into their elaborate instrumentation. Their wank is uncluttered and expansive on Sex Change. Particularly noticeable on this release is their development of their surgical metal guitar and their eerie, 70's prog church choruses. Standout track "Shining Path" grinds from start to finish through an aural world of driving light. Final track "Triangular Pyramid" sounds like it must feel to be thrown, as a titan, upon the merciless crags of some ancient mountain range as gold light pours from your god's wounds.

These guys know their shit and they know how to make a great album. Also check out Futureworld, Surrender to the Night, and the amazing paranoia-fest Liberation.