Coerce You

New Blog Location

2007-07-15T08:21:00.000-05:00

Coerce You is now located at Http://coerceyou.com. This site will remain as an archive of the first 2 1/2 years of Coerce You.

The National: Boxer

2007-05-24T07:30:00.001-05:00

Review here.

Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt OR God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

2007-04-18T06:21:00.000-05:00

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died this past week, but it is not true to say that we suffered a terrible loss with his passing.

There can be no question that his passing will be noted. If not all of us collectively, I, at least, will certainly miss him. But Mr. Vonnegut described to us throughout his life the one true, terrible loss we all suffer without exception. His work was an obituary he wrote to us over and over to remind us of a thing that was already gone, but one that he exhorted us to become aware of. His reminders were intended to move us, finally, to take the steps in our power to gain that thing back.

Our true loss is our discarded humanity. It is our shared international cultural goal to slip out of the bonds of kindness, rationality, and responsibility to one another faster than the next human in the race. In short, our terrible loss is our missed chance to be good.

We should be bereaved to see our curmudgeonly kind man of letters pass. He treated us as a friend, and we need as many of those as we can get. But do not take off the black crepe when the customary time for mourning a man and a friend has elapsed. Mourn then that in his stead among men of letters in our day there are few but dandies. Mourn then that among men of peace there are few with influence. Mourn then that, because of this, once our selfishness has seen to it that we’ve used up the means to support everything we’ve become, once we’ve surpassed our capabilities to replenish all the clever devices that support who we are, and once our balance of mutual enmity passes into a permanent and irreconcilable surplus- our computers, our stereos, our printing presses, our guitar amplifiers, our televisions, our automobiles, our trains, our refrigerators, our airplanes, our libraries, our roads, our post offices, our museums, our clean water, our food, our stories, our poetry, our art, our love, our families, our cultures, our cities, our civilisation- all of this, even the letters that make up the words you’re reading now, will probably be irretrievably lost.

And then, Goddamnit, stop mourning. Be different. Be kind. Be good. We don’t have any more time to waste.

Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut! Would that you could have said at the end, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” Would that it might one day be true.

April 18, 2007
New York

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.

2007-04-13T06:44:00.000-05:00

Hi-ho.

We knew a time like this would come to pass. It wasn't the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. who left us with our contemporary literary dandies in lieu of Voices. That is a parting gift we have left ourselves.

It is late now to remember to thank you, but thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.

2007-04-11T19:39:00.000-05:00

2007-03-21T18:17:00.000-05:00

lower east side demise

Mornings and Churches

2007-03-18T07:30:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-07T06:56:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-03-06T19:26:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-04T10:03:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-04T08:34:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-03T13:49:00.000-05:00

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

Trans-Am Wanks Back to Life

2007-03-02T07:55:00.000-05:00

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.

Wonderful

2007-02-22T07:29:00.000-05:00

Ah, router troubles have ended. The long, local freakout appears to be ended. I picked up a few albums in recent days:

Mythmaker:Skinny Puppy
A Bestiary of:The Creatures
Sex Change:Trans Am
Telekon:Gary Numan

Reviews to follow. I feel like I've been cooped up in a box the size of a peanut. My mind is the magazine, my mouth is the AK- watch me spray. Ya'll.

Of Robots, Once Judged

2007-02-10T13:20:00.000-05:00

I'm a little late getting to the criticism of the recent auto manufacturer advertisement featuring an assembly line robot being fired. The critical party has already kicked off with a fervor that has apparently produced results, but I'm still going to weigh in with my two cents. The argument and the results that it achieved were neither the argument that needed to be raised as a result of the commercials, nor were the results that were achieved appropriate.

The furor that was portrayed as erupting in the popular media over the recent ads, these ads having been first unveiled during one of the many big games of one of the many incarnations of the (!Sports Bowl!), were raised by an organization for the prevention of suicide whose charter includes, not surprisingly, raising awareness of and increasing prevention of suicide. Their primary beef with the ad in question is that in the course of the advertisement's short storyline, a redundant robot, unable to find fulfilling or fitting gainful employment following getting the pink slip for workplace incompetence, throws itself off a bridge, kissing all prospects a wistful goodbye in the hopes of a shameless oblivion.

The offended organization objected to the ad based on the portrayal of suicide. The auto manufacturer made an amendment to the end of the ad in question in response, removing the automaton's final act of surrender from the short story arc of the commercial spot's montage.

In the new version of the commercial, the robot does not "kill himself", but the overarching message of the commercial's plot remains intact. That is the insidious thing.

The commercial's portrayal of a robot being fired from its assembly line job for a single act of incompetence most willfully calls to mind the original automation of operations this conglomerate of conveyance manufacturers' undertook- the push for automation that vaporized Flint, Michigan, the story of which is recounted in filmmaker Michael Moore's breakthrough documentary, Roger & Me.

In the commercial, human and robot coworkers alike, apparently working in a peaceful and accepting harmony, look on sorrowfully as the management types eject the robot from employment for dropping a screw. This creates the first false impression of the ad, the impression that humans and robots on the assembly line are equals and can and do recognize each other as such, in spite of the acrimonious history between workers and management over the introduction of automated labor devices to the factory setting.

Workers and robots are not on an equal footing. For one, robots are obviously not human. They do not have human needs such as the need to eat or the need to support a family. They do, however, displace workers who, for a few generations were brought up solely to work in the plants of the auto manufacturers.

The second false impression created by the commercial is the apparent legitimization of the company's hiring and firing practices. In the commercial, the management is seen to be fair, in that it runs its business according to the same middle class values as its human workers- when someone is incompetent, they are not allowed to ascend to the acme of success, but are instead penalized with redundancy. However, can it be said that this company's drive toward profit for a few, one that cost so many livelihoods, was legitimate in its execution? Can it be said that the automation of the assembly lines and the ensuing loss of jobs was predicated on the same values as the middle class laborers whose lives were altered?

The third false impression perpetuated by the commercial is that the replacement of the workers and the atomization of the community the company supported, apparently undertaken under the directives of middle class values, was legitimate intrinsically, and not undertaken irresponsibly because automation was based on rags-to-riches, hard work will get you everywhere middle class values.

Overall, the commercial also serves to trivialize the induced sublimation of Michigan's prospects from stuff to vapor in its portrayal of human workers comfortably working alongside their replacements as though it is a natural state of things that has always been accepted. One of the very gripes brought up in Michael Moore's documentary Roger & Me was that this manufacturer attempted to herald its commitment to progress once before with an Epcot-like display of humans and robots working happily side by side singing some song about, essentially, moving forward at the cost of the human laborers' own displacement. In poor taste then, and no less so now, It's obviously not something that the company has put to bed as far as talking points and the influence of public opinion are concerned.

Robots cannot kill themselves. To suggest that they can and that it is funny is to mock the plight of the mob of unemployed laborers this company created. Robots would never feel pressed to review that as an option, unlike the laborers their implementation displaced.

2007-02-06T10:13:00.001-05:00

2007-02-06T10:11:00.001-05:00

San Fran in the morning.

Tata Steel

2007-02-04T09:25:00.000-05:00

Tata Steel, as mentioned in the article the fellows from New York Reggae band Steel Pulse will link you on your mellow way to, has acquired Corus Steel. No word on whether the Tatas will seek to acquire New York Reggae band Steel Pulse, but it is a sure bet that members of New York Reggae band Steel Pulse would like to acquire some tatas. Am I right, fellas? Am I right?

pete's place

2007-02-03T23:48:00.001-05:00

pete's place

One Thing, Having Occurred to Me...

2007-02-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

A thing occurred to me altogether of a sudden whilst I stood singing in the shower this morning:
The National's "Baby We'll Be Fine" is an update of the Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed". Oh, holiest of shit.

Tighten the Bunions, Screw Down the Tennis Shoes, Make Fast Loose Tread

2007-02-02T06:41:00.000-05:00

So, into Friday. Are our teeth loose yet? We're burning up on entry to R&R, and I'm so tired I can hardly see straight.

Lambchop's Damaged came out in August of 2006. You might remember it as "The Summer What Meltede My Face Like Soe Muche Gumme, Oy Vey, What Withe Alle This Uff Da Heate."

I personally thought the summer before was worse, but then I didn't have an air conditioner that summer.

I have made this Lambchop recording a part of my daily ablutions. I know what you might be thinking- "What, another band that started with an adjusted country twang and has since shot well into the experimental left field? I have a LOT of Wilco records, thank you."

Well, alright. However, if you travel that pernicious path, traveler, you will not know the rich sentimental tonality of Kurt Wagner's nearly spoken, rumbling musings. You will not be treated with intimacy by the wry sense of humor that is the spool of yarn from which the songs are darned. You will not meander, fork in hand, through this garden to the feast of non-sequiturs, surprise revelations, instantaneous understandings of things past, that a story as then currently unfolding brought to the singer's memory.

It was the final track on the record that came on my headphones during a shuffle play sometime in the recent few months that remembered the album to me- the track "The Decline of Country and Western Civilization". It's a surprise cloudburst, erupting from a clear atmosphere of noise into something so dramatic it ought to be on stage evoking tears from the aristocracy. But, then, I'm a sucker for songs that subjugate all the most evil tendencies of humanity in order to tell an object of affection how good-looking they are.

This is a drum. Today you can buy it from Musician's Friend for $69.99 in American Currency (or the approximation of said currency floating in digital internets your web browser draws pictures of when you log on to your bank account).

When you hit this, everything becomes more awesome. That especially applies to rock band practice, which we had last night, and which included a guy who was nice enough to hit- not one of these, but a whole set of them- not once, but many, many times. I needn't tell you how much more awesome everything became with each successive strike of drumstick to drum. When you're a member of a band that has been seeking a drummer for a couple of months following the departure of your original drummer after your first show at the now-defunct Siberia, you get a real hard-on for having a drummer in band practice. Everything just fell together with the drunken synergy of a group of people who are on the same page, squeezing the juice that is music from our respective instruments like so many fucking amazing oranges into very tastefully designed juice glasses- perhaps the kind one might buy at Crate & Barrel.

I have been a fan of the glassware for sale at Crate & Barrel for some time. Very classy.

Man, my ears are ringing.

In addition to the above-mentioned Lambchop record, I have also been hearting Destroyer's Rubies by Destroyer. Hearting is something my girlfriend says, and it's pretty cool. It's when you replace your blood with something else, and your heart pumps that through your circulatory system, instead. Did you know that there is about 60,000 miles worth of tubing that comprises the human circulatory system? Needless to say, Destroyer's Rubies is really tired. Sorry, Destroyer's Rubies- you're going around a few more times, I'm afraid.

It's Friday, ya'll. Catch the girls, kiss them and make them cry.

GEARHORNY

2007-02-02T06:15:00.000-05:00

Witness, the new offering from Keiyo Organ (KORG to the uninitiated), available in May. Rarr! The R3.

The Activity that Necessitates Women Covering their Heads

2007-02-01T07:03:00.000-05:00

Last night I braved the straits of late adolescence and shambled to Sin-e here on the Lower East Side to take in a performance by one Joel Bravo and his Sex with an Angel.

In the early morning of the religions we know (the Christian religions) women were bade cover their pates, tresses, for fear that the greater beings watching them from Heaven, the Angels, would become so tempted by the shine and sway of woman's hair that they would lose their heads and give the earth girls the shag they were so obviously gagging for.

Early in the world we didn't widely have condoms. So, when the Angels would knock the bottoms out they hoes, they hoes would sometimes give birth to monsters and demigods- the giant Cyclops, for example.

No such monsters will issue from the efforts colliding in the union of Mr. Bravo's lush musicality and his current willing cadre of fellow traveler musicians. It was a brilliant end-cap to a disappointing night of pseudo-irony and the poorly executed inside jokes of privileged white kids a bit drunk with a little bit of musical knowledge, flush with a willing scene of kids excited to be out and sexy, and just enough self-awareness to know they thought it was funny they were scamming folks out of $8 at the door. To summarize- Joel Bravo/Sex with an Angel: Talented. Opening bands- Fucking idiots, working through some identity stuff, sons of nobility.

Keep it up, Mr. Bravo. Your theatricality is sincere. Your backup singers- (and I wouldn't just say this because one of them is my roommate)- a superb group that keep your vision vast and pretty. Thanks for getting up on the stage, playing a well-executed set, and not overstaying your welcome. Thanks for trying. Your effort is evident.

Belvedere is to Tactical Disadvantage as Retirement in Resplendence is to the Ghetto of the Now

2007-02-01T06:32:00.000-05:00

Consigned to the ghetto of the present, it is obvious to me that our forebears could have gotten nothing done had they been prescient.

Or, then again- look at the psychopaths littering the path of prescience throughout written history. Mojave 3 has a song, Return to Sender, goes something like "The word on the street/is that hell is complete/when you think that you know where you're going."

But whose hell would that be? Suppose that depends on who the "you" is in the song. Did you force everyone into 5-year-plans or gulags? Did you find it to be a good idea to gather all your bits of science like kindling to build a burning black hole the size of a quarter on Long Island?

Memory is a prism, a honeycomb of mirrors- looking down the right rabbit's cubbyhole can steel you at the crucial hour or break you on the jagged ends of doubt.

Curse|Oath

2007-01-30T06:20:00.000-05:00

Oath: 1. a. A solemn or formal declaration invoking God (or a god, or other object of reverence) as witness to the truth of a statement, or to the binding nature of a promise or undertaking

Curse: 1. a. An utterance consigning, or supposed or intended to consign, (a person or thing) to spiritual and temporal evil, the vengeance of the deity, the blasting of malignant fate, etc. It may be uttered by the deity, or by persons supposed to speak in his name, or to be listened to by him.

She was enamored with the curses she learned in her Spanish class. There was one she felt particularly privileged to know, something to do with cutting the candles at- what was it? What ceremony? Your funeral? Your wedding? Your birthday? Already my bland ethnocentrism, my midwestern-ness was creeping in to my fourth-level understanding of my 3rd-generation daughter of Little Italy girlfriend's 3rd-level understanding of her Spanish instructor's 2nd-level understanding of pinto beans, sea breezes, things more passionate, less rational, more colorful- ah, again, I'm there again- in the way of everything Latin.
I see small plates. I see women.

I see women everywhere.

And that was a curse. That was the curse she told me about, over and over again, excited, incredulous.

"Can you imagine saying something like that?"

No, no- we didn't have the tools. I was too tired, for one, and my language didn't rest on an old tapestry of traditions, symbols stretching back to cave walls that became wine cellars. I spoke English- I had long summers, I had miles of cornfields I never worked in a day in my life, big meals that came from boxes or needed salt. On top of that, I needed sleep. It was college. I always needed sleep. I was none too quick on the uptake. What was I taking up? Where would I be going with it?

Maybe it was on my graduation from high school that my family took me to dinner at a big German restaurant in Peoria built to look like a castle, decorated darkly and heavily with German antiques up and down every floor. It really was a castle. There was a long wooden buffet table, one of very dark wood, behind me. Upon it stood a candelabra whose every candlestick at one point during the meal suddenly snapped in half with a crack. Did one of those halves land on my shoulder? Had I missed something, some missile in the form of a champagne cork that had made its miraculous mark above and behind me as I sat eating something German?

That was the instance I would remember when she would tell me about the curses her Spanish instructor would teach to her class.

She was a sad one. I was a sad one. We lived our lives like they were curses. I wonder if she ever got happier.

We mocked real human suffering with the zealous, excited abandon of the village's tolerated ignoramus, with our youth, with our fascination with curses- with the way we lived our life with our mouths turned down like our life itself was a curse. Like something that twisted in our fresh viscera then would be big outside of us and our getting bigger, big enough that God would listen.

Life could have been weirder then. We didn't have much to be sad about.

And then we become a little older, and hopefully not as sad, and remembering the girl that scared you with her bohemian wreck of a lifestyle becomes the project that requires seriously undertaken veracity. Not romantic, not painful, but an act of witness. The labor comes through more as an oath, a testament that things are in this world, a slightly funny, backhanded smile at your own expense that is a record and also a redemption.

Eventually, you tell yourself, you learn not to manufacture your woes.

To the center

2007-01-29T20:12:00.000-05:00

Halfway through Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, and I'm at the point where the tease of fairy-tale wonder is rearing its erection. (ah! but too late! Too late again, Haruki! Why do you insist on page after page of descriptions of your meals???)
All the way through glass two of a nip of Suntory Yamazaki 12-year, and I am at the point where fairy tale wonder is wreaking havoc on my liver.
The day came to it's Monday's end with all possible haste. I am here, and here I will remain until laundry calls me to even more prosaic duty.
I'm reduced to observing things, merely observing things.
I am elevated to an appreciation of Lambchop's Damaged robust as Babe the Blue Ox, and a full hand higher if it's an inch.
I don't mix my metaphors- they mix reflexively, like verbs in sing-songy languages. Not passively like in my surgical English.

DJ For Hire

2007-01-28T12:26:00.000-05:00

DJ For Hire: S/T

It's good to step out of a scene obsessed with itself, good to get away from feeling bored, good to get away from conceits like status, nostalgia, the dictates of history, and the rules of composure. It's good because once you're there, you can't go back.

Try this:
Turn on your CD player or boot your computer. Put the DJ For Hire S/T in the tray. Load up the playlist in your digital playback platform of choice. Back away. You can't.

Big hooks and guitar virtuosity layered over waves of noise and distortion- oases of directed chaos between stretches of sparse pop- have obscured the way back to the affect of disaffected malaise. Tiny notes in furious succession beating needlepricks of color on your tympani are heralds for the hum washing up behind.

The excitement that I felt, signing up for a rotation as a DJ at my college radio station, as I was pulled off the axis of corporate radio and major label distribution, stemmed from my discovery of a universe of finished, real, fantastic music that was living, breathing, and throwing parties without so much as a "how's your father" to any judge but enjoyment, wherever it happened to be executed. Cities as nearby to me then as Champaign, Illinois and as distant from where I was, but just as cut off from much else (excepting the Vast Expanse) as the towns I was living in (Omaha?), were the physical site of cultural frontiers, epicenters of changes that scared the limits of the mind into retreat.

From the first notes of DJ for Hire's opening track, Pensive Purple Porpoises, there's that same taste of fresh discontinuity with everything you've unwittingly become comfortable with. The break is there in the Japanese influence of many notes plucked from guitar strings in succession, the break is there in the narrative themes that backbone the songs. My Grandmother Hitchhiked in the Sidecar of a Nazi BMW R-75 Military Motorcycle points to the wonder that could at anytime spring from prosaic roots. Track Bum is an energetic standout showcase of guitar virtuosity and a boisterous anti-apology for prolonged insouciance. Passion without conceit, the music of Fukuoka, Japan's DJ for Hire carries that weird change of kilter that brightens you awake with the youth hidden in what you know. Fukuoka, Japan, home to DJ For Hire, is now hard-coded into the authoritative astral version of google maps under the search strings "where it's happening," "Where it's at," and "that ain't no bullshit."

Look for them on itunes or at their website.

Things Are Qualitatively Different

2007-01-28T11:53:00.000-05:00

You can now direct your browsers to coerceyou.com, foregoing the inclusion of .blogspot. from the address of Coerce You. Questions/comments, direct them to the usual channels.

2007-01-27T12:29:00.001-05:00

Propellers: Fernand Leger

A few hiccups

2007-01-26T07:52:00.000-05:00

The next few days will probably see a few lapses in content- not to worry. I'm figuring out how to get this thing hosted on my own domain, so please bear with me. Soon you'll be able to just head to coerceyou.com, leaving the ".blogspot." out of the equation.

Culture: The after the fact

2007-01-24T08:46:00.001-05:00

Culture: The after the fact ostensibly meaningful configuration of necessitated daily practice.

They Were Mercenaries Under Contract to Cheap Thrills

2007-01-23T07:59:00.000-05:00

The mob was a thrifty lot. They didn't get their rocks off unless there was going to be a landslide. They didn't go for broke, they went for insolvency. They didn't spill blood unless they were going to wash the streets with it, do the dishes with it, brush their teeth with it, pour it on their Wheaties-- their Wheaties poured from a novelty oversized box from CostCo. That's the kind of crowd this was. They took their thrills in bulk.

"Life is short," they chanted. "You have to sweeten it through concentration." They lived it like it was vanilla extract- sweet, sweet nectar, 90% alcohol. They lived it like it was cologne: a few fragrant ounces to cover the smoke of whole tens of years going up with the glory of roman candles bought by the shipping crate. Also 90% alcohol. They lived it like they could hardly stand up. They could hardly stand up.

Everything was shocking. Nothing was shocking. You couldn't put anything past these rubes. They saw you coming- They saw you going. Occasionally you saw them going. On the sidewalk.

Forget double-fisting, they drank with their feet.

They lived fast- forget horse pills, they wanted cheetah pills.

They hung so loose they couldn't tie their shoes.

Their double dates made Mormon Moonie weddings look like a fallout shelter under a battered woman's halfway house. At the end of the world.

They were mercenaries under contract to cheap thrills- thrills so cheap, they'd go dutch twice in one date.

Their orgies ended at 2- why go all night long when they could get it done in half the time?

They didn't drink like it was going out of style. The only drank when it was out of style.

Their ladies had been around the block more than once. Mostly in order to find an ATM to pay the cabbie.

They didn't buy rounds of drinks, they bought crescents.

They lost their virginity on the way to the prom to save time.

The abducted my kid sister in Saskatoon, and by the time I caught up with them her hair had turned a premature off-white, old-ish before her years.

Talk was cheap, so they talked a lot- and that's how they convinced my kid sis to ride with them- to give them a ride- to the next drinking establishment.

They were mercenaries under contract to cheap thrills. They answered to no one between the hours of 6 am and 9 pm.

2007-01-21T21:17:00.001-05:00

We need a drummer

2007-01-21T15:13:00.001-05:00

Broadway N/W stop, Astoria, Queens. On my way to practice. We still don't have a drummer. Anybody know someone?

Surrendering to the Lure of the Great Known

2007-01-21T12:22:00.000-05:00

The meeting occurred like every moment that changes life. It began as though it had been planned. No one was aware it was happening until someone lost an eye, or brushed a nipple, the gist being that it resulted in that deformation of a moment commonly packaged under the nomenclature "impropriety".

So, in the moment after he had glanced at a new placard pasted up on the plywood shell of some new scaffold, overcome in that moment of marketing genius when the second and third glances at the shirtless girl photographed there, while failing to produce a better or more substantial view of the breasts she so provocatively managed to cover with an arm while still granting the voyeur full access to the knowledge that her breasts were very significantly present (very significantly), in that moment when he was contemplating the contradiction that had arisen between his desire to understand why he would be driven into a state of limitless potential action by this particular variety of beauty despite all that he knows that he has already and his awareness of his knowledge of the sudden object of his desires in reality (the Russian is no more than a girl, her beauty is cold in its perfection, her eyes are round and staring, bold but lacking the investment to care enough to know they are bold, her cheeks- the perfect skin is so new- are high, and fear of want and early, perpetual envy have made her limitlessly cruel in her new and weaponized beauty-it's clear!) and his surrender to this evoked desire, in that moment when he is overcome by the urge to fuck an attractive stranger, the woman who is not his girlfriend recognizes him.

They knew one another in earlier days, and the two were strangers then- both to each other and to themselves. They ended as strangers, and only strangers, can end. They parted vaguely, and on good terms.

So it was a few drinks later, she was telling of trying to make it as a writer in a bar he had chosen and, until then, had kept familiar only to himself, and they were distracting themselves by faking wonder at the truths, witnessed or passed to them through hearsay, that were so much stranger than the fiction they churned out- the fiction that they secretly felt revealed how paltry their talent, as well as the world's real need for writers, really was. That's what they were doing with all those words. Faking wonder and keeping secrets, dancing a long white lie and spending time with an extravagant wastefulness unbefitting of their station.

She, being a woman, beautiful, had the more interesting story.

"I had a friend, someone I had met through the club somehow..."

He knew about the loose association of drunks and part-time recidivists to respectability she mingled with from before, from when it could be said he knew her, the changing cloud of bleariness and impressions of social memories she referred to as the "club". He had been a droplet in one of those nimbuses at some indeterminate time in the infinite before, himself, around when he met her, though it wasn't how he had met her.

"She was a "dancer"," she spoke so that he could hear the quotes, "and she just lived to have fun. She had tried going to school, she had moved around, she had "serious" "relationships"," again with the audible quotes, "and eventually she learned she had to live with herself as someone who realized she only enjoyed one thing or hate herself for the rest of her miserable life."

"I can imagine the conversation you were having. The cockfight of sincerities, I call it. I'm trying to work it into a story. It's where two drunks meet and try to out-sincere each other with vasty declarations of common bonds. Always amusing. Always amusing in hindsight."

At the word cockfight, her eyes raised at the same time as her glass.

"I suppose we're having one of those right now?"

"No, but I think we're moving in that direction. So, finish your story."

"So, she realizes that, for better or for worse, and she knows it's shallow, she knows there is a world of depth to be reached just by acknowledging one iota of the contrivedness and eventual emptiness of the life she is living... the only thing she enjoys doing is stripping, being sexy in a totally contained environment set aside for nothing but. All she cares about is having fun and that's all she thinks is fun."

"That's it?"

"That's it. And then one time I run into a friend of hers, she comes up in conversation, and all anyone can say is that they think she moved home. Or somewhere equally conceptually far away from here and now."

The warm reciprocation of description, of aiding in adding to the narrative was kicking in, so he threw in,

"Forever. That's it."

She used it.

"Forever. That's it. And do you know why?" She ended her sentence like she was sharing a secret. She was getting a bit sincere.

"Pregnancy? Death in the family? Nervous breakdown?"

"Nope. One day, for no reason, she started to get nauseous when she was cold. Not even cold, really. She'd get nauseous when she had a chill. At goosebumps. And that was it. She couldn't parade her terrific tits out in front of anyone anymore."

She, the attractive stranger, the woman who was not his girlfriend, had had really terrific tits. She still did. He had always remembered them and her own fondness of them and awareness of just how terrific they were with a wistful sort of sentimental horniness. He liked that she was letting it happen that the two of them were able to share that memory together again, finishing the story like that, with those words and with her terrific tits right there at the table with them as a visual reminder.

She put her glass down. She had those lips that were red without lipstick when she was a little flushed, a little excited. She stared a little past nothing, pursed her lips and blew.

"And then one day you stop being able to enjoy the one thing you love," she said as though writing it down. Speaking in the expository style.

They both sat still for a moment and really thought about how lousy and undeserving they were as writers, then about their age, and then their peers.

"Stupid." He said.

Stupid that someone would live so willfully shallow a life, stupid that life would reciprocate by demolishing the foundations of that contrivance. Stupid how the two of them suffered for their romantic ideas of success as writers among their small professional circle of the envious.

They reserved a split second of guilt and reassurance for crimes as yet uncommitted, then the teenage gameshow wash of surrender to pounding hearts and mystery outcomes hidden in boxes. Mystery mostly hidden in shaved boxes, with a trim of light blonde hair.

The Lonely Nature of Episodic Existence

2007-01-21T11:49:00.000-05:00

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

The cliche when reviewing the work of New York City writer Amy Hempel is to praise her sentences, to turn in orbit on her tell-tale calling card turns of phrase, to always take pains that the praise lays on the concise wit of what she says. Though not without merit, and certainly not undeserved, this criticism should be put to assay, for we may look at her incontrovertible appeal in another, perhaps more proper, way.

The appeal of the writing of Amy Hempel is inherent in its shocking accessibility, the surprise of the moment when the prosaic narration makes the concatenation of outwardly unrelated cause and effect a matter of fact, the only available taxonomy of the world the narrator describes, if the reader were to be held faithful to the evidences her narrators make available, despite the oft disconcerting, nearly non-sequitur-esque jumps between squirm-inducing memories or events and the emotionless realizations that make up a person's duties as curator and office manager of the independent self.

There, in the cuts between the realms of adjacent sentences, therein the reader will find the factor that cements the appeal of Hempel's writing. The quality of the sentences that leaves readers in a reel is the brutality of distanced adjacency.

from April 27th 2006 Powell's interview: "I don't know that I'm not good at as much as I'm not interested in the big picture in any given story. I like the moment the thing changes. I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself."

It is because of the reward the reader feels following along with her often ill-elucidated mise-en-scenes when the endorphins and hormones drop from the normally responsible hand of the all-controlling ego to the carpet of the bloodstream that Hempel is able to bring us along to the aftermath of her events. Lesser writers would have to explain themselves, would be chastised for opening a story mid-plot and never stopping to fill the reader in. It is because of this that I think it is possible that Hempel misrepresents herself in- or that the reader could misread the meaning of- the quote from the Powell's interview above. She absolutely does love the aftermath of the event more than she prefers to describe it, but she is more intent on illiciting the aftermath of the event, the reaction, in the reader than writing it.

The aftermath of all events in Hempel's stories are emotional, internal, ruminative. The solitary and terrible matter-of-factness with which her narrators deliver their deadpan realizations or conclusions is bell-jar like. Lonely. The reason Hempel can avoid laying out every architectural detail of the physical aspects of one of her stories is that they are meant to function as memories, they are meant to knock the wind out of us using the same internal cues our memories might- they are stories told as we remember our own stories. Milemarkers are stuck haphazardly along the mutable forks of the paths and they show nadirs and acmes of fear, love, hate, surprise, disappointment. It's how she circumvents heeding her own discouragement below, taken from the the same Powell's interview referenced above:

"Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.

There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I'm not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone's life better, or make anyone's day better? And I don't mean the writer's day."

Hempel's characters move in montages of huge snippeted group conversations among old friends and easy neighbors and intuited, half-described, alluded revelations of internal significance. On the first page of the novella Tumble Home contained in this collection, she sums up her guiding principle, or the concept the awareness of and the struggle with which guides her writing:

If I understand it, the Western Tradition is this: Put your cards on the table.

This is easier , I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less-- not more-- careful. We can say everything.

Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. (233)

Hempel writes straight ahead, finishing most of her stories in a single stroke, leaving the impression that each one was more like a single extended coup de grace than a telling of events yoking the service of more than one set of punctuation marks. The loneliness of the world of dying friends, remembrances of near-drownings on illicit escapades with married men, the obsessively compulsive companionship of dogs, the solitude of coming to conclusions while mired in quotidian tasks or old age: these intimate the actions and the chronologically verb-laden events that predicate the pen coming to paper. She withholds nothing of importance in her brevity. That she struggles with the appearance of a simple, resigned retelling of the tortures of the many kinds of solitude a human being can experience and wish to alleviate speaks the silences and gaps and pauses and cuts not hopeless, but tellable, personable. The stories are sad, but for this author are points of connection.

2007-01-20T17:11:00.000-05:00

2007-01-05T18:52:00.000-05:00

Excited to get hold of a loft this weekend to finally start making my room a livable space. Been so goddamned long since I've lived in one.

2006-12-20T13:27:00.001-05:00

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

2006-12-19T22:39:00.001-05:00

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?

2006-12-15T10:15:00.001-05:00

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

2006-12-14T23:17:00.001-05:00

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

2006-12-14T07:36:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-13T12:33:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-12T06:39:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-11-29T23:59:00.001-05:00

I want to hear the chris connelly box set.

2006-11-15T18:46:00.001-05:00

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

Tape Recorders

2006-11-13T17:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-10T06:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-10T06:06:00.000-05:00

Trusty Pallor

2006-11-08T18:54:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-07T06:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-05T17:52:00.000-05:00

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

2006-10-15T08:04:00.000-05:00

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

2006-10-05T06:36:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-06T23:25:00.000-05:00

New HESO does DEBUT!

2006-09-01T20:45:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-24T17:33:00.000-05:00

and some time to drink it and then remember myself.

What the reading eye has seen of late.

2006-08-16T06:53:00.000-05:00

"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

2006-07-28T07:16:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-30T06:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-29T23:33:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-29T23:00:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-06-26T13:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-26T12:46:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-06-25T16:44:00.000-05:00

2006-06-25T12:03:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-06-23T06:16:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-22T00:26:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-20T00:50:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-06-19T21:24:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-06-19T20:55:00.000-05:00

2006-06-19T20:45:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-08T23:42:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-07T04:34:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-06T21:20:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-06T12:23:00.000-05:00

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.

- - &

2006-06-06T12:15:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-05T01:34:00.000-05:00

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

wireless midi keyboards

2006-06-05T01:28:00.000-05:00

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

Things Get Realer

2006-06-04T17:37:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-01T19:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-07T08:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-28T05:38:00.000-05:00

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

The Persistence of the Word

2006-04-28T05:25:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-23T10:29:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-04-12T07:22:00.000-05:00

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

Arab Strap at Southpaw, 4/7/06

2006-04-09T18:44:00.000-05:00

The Crazy Field

2006-04-03T05:55:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-04-02T22:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-20T07:06:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-16T07:15:00.000-05:00

"Pop the glock" by Uffie.

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

Something I have to mention

2006-03-16T07:08:00.000-05:00

Dr. Octagon Returns.
"Our operators are masturbating."
Deets here and here.

Technorati Tags: Hip Hop, rap

2006-03-08T22:22:00.000-05:00

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)

2006-03-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-26T15:12:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-02-26T13:29:00.000-05:00

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?