Watched Derrida today. A passage that was quoted in the narrator's voiceover as Derrida toured the prison in South Africa where Mandela was held prisoner reminded me of Eliot's Gerontion. The passage was regarding the origin and the consequence of the self- that the self is the origin of violence, that it perpetuates violence always in its demarcation of itself from the other from whom it must defend. And Eliot popped into my head with his "In the juvescence of the year came Christ the Tiger," a line that's hung with me but has never found a meaning for me. Here something seemed to connect, though, with the idea that Christ, (I regard Christianity and its stories the same as I regard the myths of the Greeks or the sutras of the Buddha or any other stories popularly regarded as digestible repositories of complex thought alone, I am not a Christian of any stripe) in his role as the perpetual and familiar foe of Christians, entrenched the self by being the spectacular foe of so many. As a spectacular Other, the tortured death he endures in the story is the crowd's affirmation of itself as opposed to its otherness. The torture they inflict on him is a violence necessitated by the reaffirmation of the Separate othernesses of the crowd and of Christ. In a funny turn, the incomprehensible axiom "Christ died for our sins" takes on a new meaning, signifying that his execution allowed the perpetuation of sin, allowed the perpetuation of selves, and thereby allowed and necessitated the perpetuation of violence. This simultaneously gives a nod to the fact that the self was allowed in this single symbolic act (among many such acts perpetrated daily) to continue with no end in sight and that in the act, with such perpetual life of the self guaranteed, guaranteeing constant devouring and destruction of the Other. Hence Christ the tiger.
That was the connection I made.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Male-Valence
A friend confided to me recently that he believed that life was not simply illusory, but was deceptive, dishonest, mendacious, malevolent. Not simply constructed and confusing in a nearly zen buddhist sort of way, but actively obsfuscative. I don't know if I can agree with him. There is a strong binary construct at the heart of the argument- the construct of victim versus villain, life versus the individual. There is a veil separating the two, creating a relationship that necessitates strife and confusion to reproduce itself. As agent of thought, as one who gestates thought, who carries ideas, is spoken by language, is expressed by opportunity to react, the individual is married to this multi-valent approach. When he expresses it he gives life to it. He reinforces it, or the possibility that it is true, by being its agent and by not being that which oppresses him. It is a malevolent multi-valence- a male-valence. It is a tautological stance that guarantees its own outcome. Certainly life can be unfortunate, but malevolence requires interpretation and anthropomorphic qualities. If you are unable to find happiness within an interrelationship of various positve/negative binaries with the outcome being a positive or negative reading termed happy/unhappy, perhaps one should adjust or abandon one of those dualities, or abandon the happy/unhappy duality altogether.
Where does one begin to draw the line between a self that is distant enough from the total reaction to that self's actions or for whom the totality of other reactions originated by the selves of others is a completely overwhelming force to such an extent that it appears that there is an outside pressing inside? Is it even possible to take possession of actions or reaction within a milieu that existed presumably prior to your participation- after all you are the result of a coupling, which was the result of other couplings and other social arrangements before that. And, at such a point, does not the interpretation of such an invasion (though invasion already be charged with a value) constitute a new action that demands its progeny? It would seem that the very act of possessing a point of view can function to make true almost anything at all at the basic level of reality.
As such, the point of view purports to construct in abstract permanence in the memory of its holder an absolute notion of any given moment. This memory is never again accessible to the possessor of the point of view, nor is it ever accessible to any others- the self changes and interpretations change and, after all, we are never fully here and now but always becoming and living in some other fragments of improved memories. Our memories are never free from interpretation and the shortfalls of recall. They are always a shorthand that leaves out the totality of an experience for the sake of easy recall, so that it is not necessary to live the whole moment again, so one does not have a map of the united states the size of the united states.
As the possessor of a point of view, however, one has the certain confidence that, though these memories are never again accessible to the possessor in perfection, nor are the experiences ever in any form communicable to another, for the concrete self certain things happened in history, that there is somewhere a real and permanent mark of action that took place and a continuity within which the self is functioning. This space is narrative, private, and historical. That all have access to such a space that is their own, or rather is there in relative mimesis of others' histories and narrative conventions functioning to place the self historically yet sealed off from the apparently common histories of others means that there is a conceptual location within which one can say, "Life is deceptive" or "Life is honest." This space is only a notion, marked only by the confidence that it is there and that it contains a story. It is never written, nor is it ever visible to anyone, including the self that is its proprietor, for the events on which it is predicated can never be revisited and can never be seen except from the point of view of one's own eyes or the point of view of how one imagines the eyes of others would see.
Inside this space, or by referring to this space one can say, "I am put upon." One can say "I am blessed." "I am happy." "I am unhappy."
Outside of this space there is a breakdown, there is no narrative and one can merely pose the question. "Am I happy?" "Am I unhappy?" It becomes impossible to value one's experience.
No one exists purely in one of these spaces or another- that is, the experiential and the narrative, rather there is a constant interchange and inter-referentiality to experience, a reinforcement of experience and action that creates continuity and the apparent existence of succession or descendance from one thing to another, as there is the perception of some form of repetition of what has come before in every moment.
So, in the end, I cannot agree that life is dishonest. To do so I would have to agree that there is an answer or an outcome to the question or story of what life is answering in an attempt to become finite- I would have to agree that there is a true end to all things. I would have to believe in finite and universal answers- products of subscription to a system of authority that do not require understanding. Answers are clerical. To rely on a foregone conclusion, a clerical technicality, is only to plug a hole in the story of one's understanding of, in this instance, the motivations of the abstracted life. Since all narratives occur in a private space, one eventually has to admit that one is providing oneself with the premise. Consequently, if one is to provide oneself with that premise and not admit to it, one fulfills the premise- one is dishonest and one lives that way.
I cannot agree that life is dishonest because I am incapable of knowing if that is true.
Where does one begin to draw the line between a self that is distant enough from the total reaction to that self's actions or for whom the totality of other reactions originated by the selves of others is a completely overwhelming force to such an extent that it appears that there is an outside pressing inside? Is it even possible to take possession of actions or reaction within a milieu that existed presumably prior to your participation- after all you are the result of a coupling, which was the result of other couplings and other social arrangements before that. And, at such a point, does not the interpretation of such an invasion (though invasion already be charged with a value) constitute a new action that demands its progeny? It would seem that the very act of possessing a point of view can function to make true almost anything at all at the basic level of reality.
As such, the point of view purports to construct in abstract permanence in the memory of its holder an absolute notion of any given moment. This memory is never again accessible to the possessor of the point of view, nor is it ever accessible to any others- the self changes and interpretations change and, after all, we are never fully here and now but always becoming and living in some other fragments of improved memories. Our memories are never free from interpretation and the shortfalls of recall. They are always a shorthand that leaves out the totality of an experience for the sake of easy recall, so that it is not necessary to live the whole moment again, so one does not have a map of the united states the size of the united states.
As the possessor of a point of view, however, one has the certain confidence that, though these memories are never again accessible to the possessor in perfection, nor are the experiences ever in any form communicable to another, for the concrete self certain things happened in history, that there is somewhere a real and permanent mark of action that took place and a continuity within which the self is functioning. This space is narrative, private, and historical. That all have access to such a space that is their own, or rather is there in relative mimesis of others' histories and narrative conventions functioning to place the self historically yet sealed off from the apparently common histories of others means that there is a conceptual location within which one can say, "Life is deceptive" or "Life is honest." This space is only a notion, marked only by the confidence that it is there and that it contains a story. It is never written, nor is it ever visible to anyone, including the self that is its proprietor, for the events on which it is predicated can never be revisited and can never be seen except from the point of view of one's own eyes or the point of view of how one imagines the eyes of others would see.
Inside this space, or by referring to this space one can say, "I am put upon." One can say "I am blessed." "I am happy." "I am unhappy."
Outside of this space there is a breakdown, there is no narrative and one can merely pose the question. "Am I happy?" "Am I unhappy?" It becomes impossible to value one's experience.
No one exists purely in one of these spaces or another- that is, the experiential and the narrative, rather there is a constant interchange and inter-referentiality to experience, a reinforcement of experience and action that creates continuity and the apparent existence of succession or descendance from one thing to another, as there is the perception of some form of repetition of what has come before in every moment.
So, in the end, I cannot agree that life is dishonest. To do so I would have to agree that there is an answer or an outcome to the question or story of what life is answering in an attempt to become finite- I would have to agree that there is a true end to all things. I would have to believe in finite and universal answers- products of subscription to a system of authority that do not require understanding. Answers are clerical. To rely on a foregone conclusion, a clerical technicality, is only to plug a hole in the story of one's understanding of, in this instance, the motivations of the abstracted life. Since all narratives occur in a private space, one eventually has to admit that one is providing oneself with the premise. Consequently, if one is to provide oneself with that premise and not admit to it, one fulfills the premise- one is dishonest and one lives that way.
I cannot agree that life is dishonest because I am incapable of knowing if that is true.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Are you in New York? Can you drink? So can I! I'll show you!
Check out the link in the sidebar and buy Igor a drink, mateys. He could use one!
-the management.
-the management.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
A Night that Does Not Bear Repeating Repeated in the Image
This night was stunning visually, apparently. I was unable to rouse for the entirety of the following day, poisoned by the high living, the hail of punches and the search for Koreatown Jenny. Koreatown Jenny we did not find. Repentence paid a somber visit to our bedsides. I lay in frightened repose at the courtesy.
That's The Tim making upset and me making my Jonah Hex face.
That's The Tim making upset and me making my Jonah Hex face.
Plasma Clear
Rhyming practice now.
Dropping words like turds in fourths and thirds
and all this time you thought it was going to be easy
Did you have time to blink? A spot to think?
Been watching novels fly by my mind's eye and gypsies wobble by the payphones by a conversion van that just died. They wobble vicious drunk and answer cell phones and sip from thin brown bags and drip spit foam.
Been turning music into digits and then back again.
I've been wobbling myself and craving oxygen. Craving a catalyst, reading Craigslist. I've been contrived at being trite and being sincere. I've been desperate and affable as a willing ear. I've been laughing off the end of the year.
I've been going thin with projects that I run from to other talents and I've been spitting out the butt-ends of half finished comments. I've made headlong slips into merriment and I've been deliberate. I've done the hokey pokey and put only one foot in it.
and all this time you thought it was going to be easy.
I have a few friends and I've had a few beers and all the same, caught in a leer, it's never easy, not even when it's plasma clear.
Want to see someone get past the end of world nights if that's even what she's having, talking herself down until she finds a place worth landing.
Had a meeting with black beetle written glyphs on his back just under skin
we go we light small fire, we meet them there we make small thunder
we play at going louder we dress up like gunpowder with a swagger and a shatter or a hairline fracture on the champagne flute at the party where they let us in
we make strong magic we wobble on legs of aspic and put the strong smile big teeth up in front
to take the heat
Like Dr. John, we walk on gilded splinter
full of shit, sir
indeed.
We hope, we try, to grow on you like a weed.
Dropping words like turds in fourths and thirds
and all this time you thought it was going to be easy
Did you have time to blink? A spot to think?
Been watching novels fly by my mind's eye and gypsies wobble by the payphones by a conversion van that just died. They wobble vicious drunk and answer cell phones and sip from thin brown bags and drip spit foam.
Been turning music into digits and then back again.
I've been wobbling myself and craving oxygen. Craving a catalyst, reading Craigslist. I've been contrived at being trite and being sincere. I've been desperate and affable as a willing ear. I've been laughing off the end of the year.
I've been going thin with projects that I run from to other talents and I've been spitting out the butt-ends of half finished comments. I've made headlong slips into merriment and I've been deliberate. I've done the hokey pokey and put only one foot in it.
and all this time you thought it was going to be easy.
I have a few friends and I've had a few beers and all the same, caught in a leer, it's never easy, not even when it's plasma clear.
Want to see someone get past the end of world nights if that's even what she's having, talking herself down until she finds a place worth landing.
Had a meeting with black beetle written glyphs on his back just under skin
we go we light small fire, we meet them there we make small thunder
we play at going louder we dress up like gunpowder with a swagger and a shatter or a hairline fracture on the champagne flute at the party where they let us in
we make strong magic we wobble on legs of aspic and put the strong smile big teeth up in front
to take the heat
Like Dr. John, we walk on gilded splinter
full of shit, sir
indeed.
We hope, we try, to grow on you like a weed.
Tim's new friend
Tim has a great job. Yesterday he got to make friends with veteran smart guy Cornel West.
Check the pictorial evidence.
(After you've gone through all his other great pics, it's at the bottom left of the page)
Check the pictorial evidence.
(After you've gone through all his other great pics, it's at the bottom left of the page)
Hush Money
It was a compromise, and I hate compromises, but that's America for you. "Next time you will be able to do as you please" - That's the song. It's a dastardly lie, but to palliate it you are given hush money.
Henry Miller, p. 15 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Henry Miller, p. 15 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Monday, May 02, 2005
Electronic Trinket
Last night I went overboard and now my insides are like a chimney coated with fat and creosote. It's a muddy tinderbox inside my heart!
I won an iPod shuffle in a raffle at the NYU computer store.
The e-mail I sent out to my department at school follows:
Electronic trinket for sale- 1 unopened 512 MB Apple iPod Shuffle (C), 99
USD retail value
Features include:
-Learn to accept those things you cannot change and master your stress!
Surrender to chaotic forces unleashed by ruthlessly minimal and highly
significant Apple design by way of absolute uncertainty as to what song
will play next. Song 1 or song 125? Don't these songs have names? The
Shuffle (C) cares not! You and your nostalgia are insignificant!
-You will have the opportunity to smell the iPod Shuffle (C) at any time
it is in your possession.
-This thing can be worn about the neck if you hang it there. Other
hanging possibilities include:
hanging from a doorknob, hanging from a lamp, hanging from a hat-rack,
hanging from a hook, all made possible by 17th century lanyard (TM) naval
technology and gravity.
-Obstruct the passage of visible spectrum light, hide things that are
smaller than the iPod Shuffle (C) from view!
-Place it anywhere
-Can be lost in seconds
-Learn what "near cd quality" means to Apple and condition yourself not to
mind it!
-Maintain the appearance of minimum necessary consumption levels, cash in
on heightened social capital
-Provides hours of valuable gadget operation experience
-lack of display lets you learn what it's like to listen to music in the
dark
I came to own this thing by entering a raffle at the NYU Computer Store.
If you would like to own it, you are welcome to contact me and arrange to
give me 80 of your United States Dollars, transforming them into my United
States Dollars and transforming my iPod Shuffle (C) into your iPod Shuffle
(C). If you would like, I can give it a much fancier name, thereby
increasing its value and rarity. In such an event you may give me 100
United States Dollars to claim ownership of it. This will probably never
happen to you again.
Prof A. raised 2 very good points:
1) is it unethical to profit from raffle winnings?
2) Can I live with the guilt of being the arbiter of a greater likelihood of victimization by thieves an iPod conveys to its possessor?
1) I think I can profit from raffle winnings as long as I do not seek to make more than the item is worth and people know that I came by the item(s) free. This places the buyer in an empowered position to make a decision without coercion and aids in validating the sale contract.
2)iPod is strong magic- People should know this. Caveat Emptor! Other things that one should hesitate to buy are:
monkey's paw, gift of magi, radium, diamond bridgework, unholy reliquary collections, controlled substances, spear of destiny, Brooklyn Bridge, old sushi
It is only with such a caveat attached that I sell this item.
I won an iPod shuffle in a raffle at the NYU computer store.
The e-mail I sent out to my department at school follows:
Electronic trinket for sale- 1 unopened 512 MB Apple iPod Shuffle (C), 99
USD retail value
Features include:
-Learn to accept those things you cannot change and master your stress!
Surrender to chaotic forces unleashed by ruthlessly minimal and highly
significant Apple design by way of absolute uncertainty as to what song
will play next. Song 1 or song 125? Don't these songs have names? The
Shuffle (C) cares not! You and your nostalgia are insignificant!
-You will have the opportunity to smell the iPod Shuffle (C) at any time
it is in your possession.
-This thing can be worn about the neck if you hang it there. Other
hanging possibilities include:
hanging from a doorknob, hanging from a lamp, hanging from a hat-rack,
hanging from a hook, all made possible by 17th century lanyard (TM) naval
technology and gravity.
-Obstruct the passage of visible spectrum light, hide things that are
smaller than the iPod Shuffle (C) from view!
-Place it anywhere
-Can be lost in seconds
-Learn what "near cd quality" means to Apple and condition yourself not to
mind it!
-Maintain the appearance of minimum necessary consumption levels, cash in
on heightened social capital
-Provides hours of valuable gadget operation experience
-lack of display lets you learn what it's like to listen to music in the
dark
I came to own this thing by entering a raffle at the NYU Computer Store.
If you would like to own it, you are welcome to contact me and arrange to
give me 80 of your United States Dollars, transforming them into my United
States Dollars and transforming my iPod Shuffle (C) into your iPod Shuffle
(C). If you would like, I can give it a much fancier name, thereby
increasing its value and rarity. In such an event you may give me 100
United States Dollars to claim ownership of it. This will probably never
happen to you again.
Prof A. raised 2 very good points:
1) is it unethical to profit from raffle winnings?
2) Can I live with the guilt of being the arbiter of a greater likelihood of victimization by thieves an iPod conveys to its possessor?
1) I think I can profit from raffle winnings as long as I do not seek to make more than the item is worth and people know that I came by the item(s) free. This places the buyer in an empowered position to make a decision without coercion and aids in validating the sale contract.
2)iPod is strong magic- People should know this. Caveat Emptor! Other things that one should hesitate to buy are:
monkey's paw, gift of magi, radium, diamond bridgework, unholy reliquary collections, controlled substances, spear of destiny, Brooklyn Bridge, old sushi
It is only with such a caveat attached that I sell this item.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Saturday, April 23, 2005
The National: Alligator, Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing
The National: Alligator
The impulse when you come across something new is to try to hear something you've heard before. Your brain tries to put the pieces it finds into some understandable order. This recording is no exception. What do I want to compare this sound to? To the understatement and rhythm of Joy Division, to the repetitive prettiness of early Crooked Fingers. But there's a new complexity, there are epic, open spaces in the music where shit just goes nuts- pianos, guitars, background singers mixing with the lead. There are instances of delicate guitar work that eschew the whole Joy Division esthetic. Vocals like Neil Diamond, Ian Curtis, and Elvis packed together with lyrics which are the chronicle of a weird normality, a quotidian gothic. It's a recording that pulls you in to a new place, refracts you through a neglected facet of reality and makes you listen to accounts of things that simply refuse to rely on stock phraseology. Familiar words abut, and though the words are common enough, something in the arrangement requires all the power of your attention, like you've just walked in to a room where your best friend in the 4th grade is sitting there, unaging, in conversation with your grown children. Both are intimately familiar, but why HERE, why LIKE THIS?
What fury, what beauty. It's good.
Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing
I've been humming a lot of these songs and singing them to myself for the past couple of years. Now, finally, the cd is out and other people can get ahold of this great album and get hooked on these songs of obsession and love noir. Bluesy, garagey, pained, exalted. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great nod to both the femme fatale and Gary Numan. She Used to Be my Baby is frenzied in its remembrance of one who got away and took a chunk with her. Every time I hear the words "She used to be my baby, she loved me maybe", I don't know whether to smile in the solidarity of shared experience or sit back and wonder one more time what the hell that one WAS thinking, really. Stripped. Filthy. Tight. Smokey. Just listen to this record.
The impulse when you come across something new is to try to hear something you've heard before. Your brain tries to put the pieces it finds into some understandable order. This recording is no exception. What do I want to compare this sound to? To the understatement and rhythm of Joy Division, to the repetitive prettiness of early Crooked Fingers. But there's a new complexity, there are epic, open spaces in the music where shit just goes nuts- pianos, guitars, background singers mixing with the lead. There are instances of delicate guitar work that eschew the whole Joy Division esthetic. Vocals like Neil Diamond, Ian Curtis, and Elvis packed together with lyrics which are the chronicle of a weird normality, a quotidian gothic. It's a recording that pulls you in to a new place, refracts you through a neglected facet of reality and makes you listen to accounts of things that simply refuse to rely on stock phraseology. Familiar words abut, and though the words are common enough, something in the arrangement requires all the power of your attention, like you've just walked in to a room where your best friend in the 4th grade is sitting there, unaging, in conversation with your grown children. Both are intimately familiar, but why HERE, why LIKE THIS?
What fury, what beauty. It's good.
Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing
I've been humming a lot of these songs and singing them to myself for the past couple of years. Now, finally, the cd is out and other people can get ahold of this great album and get hooked on these songs of obsession and love noir. Bluesy, garagey, pained, exalted. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great nod to both the femme fatale and Gary Numan. She Used to Be my Baby is frenzied in its remembrance of one who got away and took a chunk with her. Every time I hear the words "She used to be my baby, she loved me maybe", I don't know whether to smile in the solidarity of shared experience or sit back and wonder one more time what the hell that one WAS thinking, really. Stripped. Filthy. Tight. Smokey. Just listen to this record.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Some CL ads I recently authored
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/clt/69707630.html
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69490174.html
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69478070.html
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69490174.html
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69478070.html
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Who fucking knew?
Fountains of Wayne do a cover of These Days. It's good. I'm not sure if anyone did it before her, but I know it as a Nico tune off of Chelsea Girls. Who knew?
My Dutch Wife!
My Dutch Wife!
Wild Anniemals Need Vodka, Are Very Polite
I just put on Magazine's "Permafrost," and as soon as the chorus line "I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost" came up, I remembered I ought to write about my vanilla-mediated run-in with that cruel arctic clime last Thursday.
Saw the American debut of Norway's Annie at the glamorously packed Tribeca Grand Hotel by way of a free invite from a friend of a friend. Annie is a dancey, Kylie Minogue-y, Discoteque debutante with songs and moves endearingly clumsy and, as such, weirdly sexy. Imagine being Tom Hanks with Darrel Hannah nude as Venus standing in your living room making little girl noises and weird overtures to sex that you're not sure she- or you- understands. What is happening? You ask yourself. Then the mermaid pulls out a giant bottle of vodka and proceeds to drink half of it during her 5 or 6 song set. It's finally happening! the Tom Hanks you is forced to conclude. What do you do next? You scream "Play Heartbeat!" and attempt to dance ass to hip with the other early adopters, industry insiders and other types of sweating bodies while holding a messenger bag that you should have dropped off before going anywhere that night. Had a great time. Annie and her band do a good mix of European Giorgio Moroder disco revival replete with vocoders, Kylie Minogue coquetteishness, innocently direct overtures for sex and silly metaphors for aforementioned having lots of sex (see "Bubblegum"). Many thanks to my companion that evening, whose veteran scenester pushiness and unameliorated excitement at the prospect of seeing live music despite many unmoving bodies standing between her and the stage has imbued her with superpowers that turn her finely-lathed frame into some kind of mass surgical instrument/crowd drilling tool. Without her I would surely have pussed out and stood way back in the bar looking uncomfortable.
Annie was very polite.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
A short note on personal responsibility
I just read that when John Lennon heard of Elvis's death, he was quoted as saying "Elvis died the day he went into the army."
We each have a responsibility to pax in perpetuity, do we not?
We each have a responsibility to our art.
We each have a responsibility to pax in perpetuity, do we not?
We each have a responsibility to our art.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
why there are no guilty pleasures
Guilt is social. Pleasure isn't. Nothing is intrinsically guilt-inducing. Guilt is the internalization of external standards of moral trespass. Pleasure is automatic and can happen in absolute solitude, internally. A guilty pleasure is a combination of the internal self and external, social self, and it requires a decision, conscious or unconscious, to bring the detriment of guilt upon yourself. Guilt is the acceptance of a constructed social burden.
Guilt also differs from regret, because there are no overtly moral "should" or "should not" overtones, only "it would have been better" or "it would not have been better" given the particular context of reflection.
Guilt also differs from regret, because there are no overtly moral "should" or "should not" overtones, only "it would have been better" or "it would not have been better" given the particular context of reflection.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
The Ease of Summer
Sam Prekop/Who's Your New Professor
Thrilljockey
Sam Prekop drives a big Mack truck of skill and arcane science through the leaden latent summer air like a faith healer through flesh. The summer. Remember those days of short pants, breasts, and near-naked spontaneity that taught you to ride a bike, that taught you to count your near friends and your free times dear, that taught you to throw a frisbee amid transplanted city girls on the Great Lawn at Central Park? Remember the simple slide into evening viewed through a slice of cooling humidity in the air? Remember easy living?
Deep in your heart, you know life isn't that simple, but if you take it fast enough and with enough gusto, if you take it all of an experiential piece, you can play along with yourself, pretend all those eighth-notes and off-beats, the algorithmic thrumming of your soul, the train under the street, the millions of obligations forgiven and enforced all around you really are simple and wonderful of themselves. With Who's Your Professor, Prekop brings all that to you at one more remove, stylizing it with his desperate-yet-unfettered aspirated vocals and refining it invisibly for you to take in the ludicrous gestalt of life refined as an essence for the ear, eighth-notes, off-beats, and high-energy jazz-hinting flourishes all. The very muted electronics and the unmistakable production give you at one and the same time the impression that it's a work of staggering simplicity and subtle, tweaked genius. And the guitar solo that reserved the long banquet hall for a couple of hours at the end of Dot Eye lacadaisically shoots a long snort of beatific lightning into your lobes. Imagine a "She's Not There" Carlos Santana working an electric guitar alseep inside a Picasso hanging on a wall inside the dream inside Garcia-Marquez's Eyes of a Blue Dog.
And I haven't even figured out what he's singing yet. This album is getting played all spring, all summer, all "all night," to invoke the poetic time/space the Breeders sing about on Last Splash. This is one for the record books.
Thrilljockey
Sam Prekop drives a big Mack truck of skill and arcane science through the leaden latent summer air like a faith healer through flesh. The summer. Remember those days of short pants, breasts, and near-naked spontaneity that taught you to ride a bike, that taught you to count your near friends and your free times dear, that taught you to throw a frisbee amid transplanted city girls on the Great Lawn at Central Park? Remember the simple slide into evening viewed through a slice of cooling humidity in the air? Remember easy living?
Deep in your heart, you know life isn't that simple, but if you take it fast enough and with enough gusto, if you take it all of an experiential piece, you can play along with yourself, pretend all those eighth-notes and off-beats, the algorithmic thrumming of your soul, the train under the street, the millions of obligations forgiven and enforced all around you really are simple and wonderful of themselves. With Who's Your Professor, Prekop brings all that to you at one more remove, stylizing it with his desperate-yet-unfettered aspirated vocals and refining it invisibly for you to take in the ludicrous gestalt of life refined as an essence for the ear, eighth-notes, off-beats, and high-energy jazz-hinting flourishes all. The very muted electronics and the unmistakable production give you at one and the same time the impression that it's a work of staggering simplicity and subtle, tweaked genius. And the guitar solo that reserved the long banquet hall for a couple of hours at the end of Dot Eye lacadaisically shoots a long snort of beatific lightning into your lobes. Imagine a "She's Not There" Carlos Santana working an electric guitar alseep inside a Picasso hanging on a wall inside the dream inside Garcia-Marquez's Eyes of a Blue Dog.
And I haven't even figured out what he's singing yet. This album is getting played all spring, all summer, all "all night," to invoke the poetic time/space the Breeders sing about on Last Splash. This is one for the record books.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Desperation is my alarm clock
If I say I'm getting up at 7:00, I'll be up at five with the lowing of curses from the payphones outside. The guy on the other end is gonna screw his bro' and they're caught, they're caught. The one on the street says he should never have opened his big mouth.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Kind of an old one about living in Uptown in Minneapolis
Been busy. Haven't been able to post, really. Thought I'd air this one out.
Breathing bits and pieces of heat
Stunned daily
In recovery from and awaiting
Deeply religious experience.
Slack-jawed and vapid
Clawing at walking
And failing
Clawing at drinking
And failing well
Falling well short of expectations
Making do as though it’s the vogue
Clawing at running downhill
Desperate even in gravity’s good company
Failing miserably
And wondering at it
Uptown, you’re a suspect bitch
On Hennepin a spaghetti of veins and ink of
Skinny punk rock pasta
Dimming bulbs
Green as anything
As the people in it
Wet behind the ears
In uptown fallacious
Slumming it
Like a rock star
Here with my membership card
Me and lifestyle, boy
Hand in hand we’ll rock the party
In punch-drunk
Hungover
Uptown
We’re hanging up our watches
And stopping the clocks
Breathing bits and pieces of heat
Stunned daily
In recovery from and awaiting
Deeply religious experience.
Slack-jawed and vapid
Clawing at walking
And failing
Clawing at drinking
And failing well
Falling well short of expectations
Making do as though it’s the vogue
Clawing at running downhill
Desperate even in gravity’s good company
Failing miserably
And wondering at it
Uptown, you’re a suspect bitch
On Hennepin a spaghetti of veins and ink of
Skinny punk rock pasta
Dimming bulbs
Green as anything
As the people in it
Wet behind the ears
In uptown fallacious
Slumming it
Like a rock star
Here with my membership card
Me and lifestyle, boy
Hand in hand we’ll rock the party
In punch-drunk
Hungover
Uptown
We’re hanging up our watches
And stopping the clocks
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
weird cold dream update
Last night I dreamt about reanimated animals made to run around and play just as though they were alive through some revolutionary form of taxidermy. Temporary process and, as no one knew what energy source they were drawing on, no one knew how temporary.
Somehow associated with this was my going to some remote mountain town and tracking down my high school girlfriend, who had a shoebox full of my things and letters she had penned but never sent to me. And a reanimated kitten that, it made sense to think at the time, was reanimated so it could be posed more realistically dressed as a cowboy and riding another animal. It got away and started chasing something. I said, "It's so energetic." She said, "It's not energetic. It's dead."
There were some other things to do with a central-park type place at night, but can't remember them.
Somehow associated with this was my going to some remote mountain town and tracking down my high school girlfriend, who had a shoebox full of my things and letters she had penned but never sent to me. And a reanimated kitten that, it made sense to think at the time, was reanimated so it could be posed more realistically dressed as a cowboy and riding another animal. It got away and started chasing something. I said, "It's so energetic." She said, "It's not energetic. It's dead."
There were some other things to do with a central-park type place at night, but can't remember them.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Sunday, March 20, 2005
the dipshic say the luv won't stop
The folks outside on First Ave
Screaming into the payphones
making their demands
clear as knives
in the name of love
for the love of god
in the name of love
they perpetrate a great deal of need and hate
they won't walk away, each from the other
they're screaming
I'm here
I'm here
you dirty motherfucker
now come pick me up
Screaming into the payphones
making their demands
clear as knives
in the name of love
for the love of god
in the name of love
they perpetrate a great deal of need and hate
they won't walk away, each from the other
they're screaming
I'm here
I'm here
you dirty motherfucker
now come pick me up
Monday, March 14, 2005
if you find that you're unstoppable...
If a blonde girl from Texas
Can wash under my lips
There is only some small piece of future
Before the whole branded world
Falls beneath the total acceptance of my embrace
Can wash under my lips
There is only some small piece of future
Before the whole branded world
Falls beneath the total acceptance of my embrace
Get Used
BoingBoing has pointed this out:
Cory Doctorow: Many readers have written to point out that AOL's new Terms of Service for AIM "include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: '...by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.'"
Wonder what service I'll start using. So much of this depends on a network of friends who actually use the same tech you do. i.e. why cell phones here still suck.
Here's the link.
Cory Doctorow: Many readers have written to point out that AOL's new Terms of Service for AIM "include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: '...by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.'"
Wonder what service I'll start using. So much of this depends on a network of friends who actually use the same tech you do. i.e. why cell phones here still suck.
Here's the link.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Universal Pussy
If I might-
Chicks on Speed made a really great song, but, if I might, with Universal Pussy, on 99 cents, they show that they maybe didn't know how they came about all their other great songs before that 2003 album.
It's a great song. It's a great in-your-face thing. The production tells me, as a home electro entrepreneur, that the chix are re-learning their whole schtick. It's good and it's heartening.
Hooray for chicx.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Lktrk
A neon cross with an erection
let this be my reflection
a representation of the divinity of my hard-on for you.
Number 1!
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Why Nabokov Means Bad News
David Byrne showed some Powerpoint slides created as satires of the information-expressing capabilities of Powerpoint that were expressing the plots and nuances of great works of literature and culture in Powerpoint's unrefined, low-resolution style. They were funny. One of the works he picked to flash up on the screen before us before moving on was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It was nearly incomprehensible.
Before I go any further, Nabokov is pronounced Na-BOE-kuv, with the second vowel stressed and long.
I mentioned that I thought the slide was incomprehensible in my consumer culture class on Thursday, prompting the question from the prof as to whether I had ever read the book. I said that no, I hadn't, that I'd read a part of it, but for the most part I have a special aversion to Nabokov. But I wasn't able to say this before a certain female in the room spoke up with her ringing endorsement of the text as a wonderful piece of lit.
My aversion to Nabokov is not a direct result of his work in and of itself. It is more to do with the type of women he seems to appeal to and therefore tends to remind me of. What type of woman is this, you ask? It is the woman who knows exactly what she is doing. She lives for power in any situation and eschews all sincere contact. She lives for attention and the manipulation of any situation for maximum long-term attention and the reception of maximum personal benefit by means of that long-term lavishing of attention. They are the women who want to be Lolita, who, above all else, though they don't know it themselves, though they simply have an overpowering sexual appetite for him, want to destroy Nabokov, the man who sees through them and thus is the only man with power over them. Men like these are the only ones that such women will actively pursue.
I'm going to go have a beer. Ciao.
Before I go any further, Nabokov is pronounced Na-BOE-kuv, with the second vowel stressed and long.
I mentioned that I thought the slide was incomprehensible in my consumer culture class on Thursday, prompting the question from the prof as to whether I had ever read the book. I said that no, I hadn't, that I'd read a part of it, but for the most part I have a special aversion to Nabokov. But I wasn't able to say this before a certain female in the room spoke up with her ringing endorsement of the text as a wonderful piece of lit.
My aversion to Nabokov is not a direct result of his work in and of itself. It is more to do with the type of women he seems to appeal to and therefore tends to remind me of. What type of woman is this, you ask? It is the woman who knows exactly what she is doing. She lives for power in any situation and eschews all sincere contact. She lives for attention and the manipulation of any situation for maximum long-term attention and the reception of maximum personal benefit by means of that long-term lavishing of attention. They are the women who want to be Lolita, who, above all else, though they don't know it themselves, though they simply have an overpowering sexual appetite for him, want to destroy Nabokov, the man who sees through them and thus is the only man with power over them. Men like these are the only ones that such women will actively pursue.
I'm going to go have a beer. Ciao.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
David Byrne- I ♥ Powerpoint
Tonight I went to see David Byrne give a presentation on the medium of Powerpoint. His stance was that as long as the powerpoint was just a background, that it wasn't being allowed to dictate the thought that was being presented or overly condense it, that it could be a freeing medium in that it could contain so many products of other forms of software presented, within its low-res limits, in unconventional ways potentially.
There were some pricks who stood up and asked a few untoward and hostile questions, but I think he took them with aplomb. Standing outside with friends before heading to a pub to eat, he came out, walked over to his bike, locked to a signpost, unlocked his bike, and walked with a group of self-important hoity-toits to some reception. I heard myself say "Thank you, Mr. Byrne." He looked over and said, "Thank you."
A few minutes later I realized I had 1) spoken to David Byrne as he was unlocking his ten-speed and 2) called him "Mr. Byrne." It sounded funny, but I wanted to show the guy respect.
There were some pricks who stood up and asked a few untoward and hostile questions, but I think he took them with aplomb. Standing outside with friends before heading to a pub to eat, he came out, walked over to his bike, locked to a signpost, unlocked his bike, and walked with a group of self-important hoity-toits to some reception. I heard myself say "Thank you, Mr. Byrne." He looked over and said, "Thank you."
A few minutes later I realized I had 1) spoken to David Byrne as he was unlocking his ten-speed and 2) called him "Mr. Byrne." It sounded funny, but I wanted to show the guy respect.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
The Block
Allison Goldfrapp, I'd like to hear you say there's no time to fuck to my face.
Thank you for appearing on my iTunes at this particular moment.
On an unrelated note, either I am subconciously aware of what my computer is doing judging by the noise of disk activity or by newsensory awareness of some other sub-real form of heat it is emanating, or I am TELEKINETICALLY AFFECTING THE RANDOM PLAYBACK OF ITUNES.
AmAnSet on my iTunes now, just when I was thinking of them.
Tim and a Sabrina stopped by for a couple of early morning hours. The chilling was good. That beautiful kraut is always a new kind of treat with knives out. Or the same kind of treat with knives out every time.
I spent most of the evening reading before they got here, and I think I'll finish the article I was working on before I finally do retire this early Sunday morning. Maybe I'll go have a diner breakfast at the crack of dawn before I do, though.
The block and the distance around it and how fast I can go on my bike. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid, thinking on my bike, in something like a square mile around my house in the East Bluff. It only just now, as I was going to write about something else, occurred to me that maybe all that time spent out in the city alone was maybe a little odd for a kid, with 90% of my time out of the house spent happily daydreaming and moving.
But, before I do forget
the block as a space with corners drawing long, boring lines in total ignorance of the violent broken-mirror trees irrupting and turning fractally up and down through the visible air and the invisible mud, lightning striking twice but always decapitated while the neutrino sees nothing
but what block do these desirous creatures crawl around in flat slicks of colors and musk, marking them with the meant fingerprints that I wish I had been there first to paw on them?
Thank you for appearing on my iTunes at this particular moment.
On an unrelated note, either I am subconciously aware of what my computer is doing judging by the noise of disk activity or by newsensory awareness of some other sub-real form of heat it is emanating, or I am TELEKINETICALLY AFFECTING THE RANDOM PLAYBACK OF ITUNES.
AmAnSet on my iTunes now, just when I was thinking of them.
Tim and a Sabrina stopped by for a couple of early morning hours. The chilling was good. That beautiful kraut is always a new kind of treat with knives out. Or the same kind of treat with knives out every time.
I spent most of the evening reading before they got here, and I think I'll finish the article I was working on before I finally do retire this early Sunday morning. Maybe I'll go have a diner breakfast at the crack of dawn before I do, though.
The block and the distance around it and how fast I can go on my bike. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid, thinking on my bike, in something like a square mile around my house in the East Bluff. It only just now, as I was going to write about something else, occurred to me that maybe all that time spent out in the city alone was maybe a little odd for a kid, with 90% of my time out of the house spent happily daydreaming and moving.
But, before I do forget
the block as a space with corners drawing long, boring lines in total ignorance of the violent broken-mirror trees irrupting and turning fractally up and down through the visible air and the invisible mud, lightning striking twice but always decapitated while the neutrino sees nothing
but what block do these desirous creatures crawl around in flat slicks of colors and musk, marking them with the meant fingerprints that I wish I had been there first to paw on them?
Friday, February 25, 2005
shut up
If it is a magic moment that you are looking for, you’re not going to find it, I tell myself. I’m going to do better to enjoy a cup of coffee and stare at your white shoulders where your sweater falls away from them, to imagine I can smell the flawlessness of that skin, smell the change over time as my eyes map from shoulder to neck, from white skin to freckle to bra strap, the color and the textures change. I don’t see myself when I see you, I don’t see. Inside the gestalt under an awning shade, your hair, curls and circles and shades and smells and intents, recovering myself unwillingly only piecemeal, a last handshaking carrier signal that maintains my vision as a thing in the swim, stuttering I-I-I-I, would you shut up already?
What’s your favorite color? Have you ever been to Buffalo? There are any number of things I don’t believe you can tell me, that I don’t believe I would understand if you tried. Giving up on magic moments, don’t want to communicate. When your sweater falls away from your shoulder and makes a thing called my smile the best I can do is commune.
What’s your favorite color? Have you ever been to Buffalo? There are any number of things I don’t believe you can tell me, that I don’t believe I would understand if you tried. Giving up on magic moments, don’t want to communicate. When your sweater falls away from your shoulder and makes a thing called my smile the best I can do is commune.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
winterback
my eyes felt like wet batteries, and piss on you, and reasonable people shouldn't agonize over what's going to happen next
all around me the women are taking the reigns, and I am taking the reins, and I am hauling my ass to the internet to read why bother
because, just like the next person, I can pick myself up and leave
I'm gonna put this party in a box and keep it till there's a reason to take it out again
take it out when I'm feeling younger and my eyes aren't rusted and there's not the smell of algae
all the free booze in the world
all the free booze in the world
won't buy me a good time next time
all around me the women are taking the reigns, and I am taking the reins, and I am hauling my ass to the internet to read why bother
because, just like the next person, I can pick myself up and leave
I'm gonna put this party in a box and keep it till there's a reason to take it out again
take it out when I'm feeling younger and my eyes aren't rusted and there's not the smell of algae
all the free booze in the world
all the free booze in the world
won't buy me a good time next time
Now, stay drunker longer and with less fuss!
And, you know, if that's not your thing you can avoid a hangover, too. the devil is in the details
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Under Big Thumbs
I still feel the threat of nuclear annihilation
I really think this fear has been put on the back burner recently. Nukes still exist, right? Can you imagine that there was a time when you didn't have to have a sickly patch of non-reciprocal total death woven into your reality quilt?
The media give almost no indication of any state of reality, only a relation of a few people to it from the point of view of a few, maybe the same few as the first few, maybe not.
But I'm not worried about any of the shit I'm supposed to be worried about, I guess.
I really think this fear has been put on the back burner recently. Nukes still exist, right? Can you imagine that there was a time when you didn't have to have a sickly patch of non-reciprocal total death woven into your reality quilt?
The media give almost no indication of any state of reality, only a relation of a few people to it from the point of view of a few, maybe the same few as the first few, maybe not.
But I'm not worried about any of the shit I'm supposed to be worried about, I guess.
Monday, February 21, 2005
...I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.
In time for Presidents' Day Hunter Thompson has left us.
I opened the only book of his that I own, his novel The Rum Diary and just opened it to the middle and read the first passage I found and that was the heading for this entry.
"...because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached." (121)
Hell's Angels changed me. Who of the living occidental boys is still with us? Who of acumen and vitriol?
Into an age darkening, the call is out for some who will point their fingers at the heart of our malaise, to channel the shit and razors of our epoch and articulate them into speech.
Who of these living is left?
Lights are going out. Americans wanted.
Image from BoingBoing.
I opened the only book of his that I own, his novel The Rum Diary and just opened it to the middle and read the first passage I found and that was the heading for this entry.
"...because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached." (121)
Hell's Angels changed me. Who of the living occidental boys is still with us? Who of acumen and vitriol?
Into an age darkening, the call is out for some who will point their fingers at the heart of our malaise, to channel the shit and razors of our epoch and articulate them into speech.
Who of these living is left?
Lights are going out. Americans wanted.
Image from BoingBoing.
居酒屋！居酒屋！居酒屋！
Last night Tim and I shared two pitchers of Sapporo at my favorite joint in this whole city, ケンカ (Kenka), an honest-to-goodness 居酒屋 (izakaya) on St. Mark's. Loaded and full, and ridiculously cheaply so, the night spun out relaxedly from there.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Coercion of the Corpus, Cake Mixing the Mind
I was reading Warren Ellis today about music and musical knowledge, about being the Beatles, about being Phil Spector. Last night I was walking home from a pointless trek in the cold (I went out, knew I wouldn't stay out, knew I couldn't drink, but went out anyway) thinking of selling all my synths and effects and patch cords and software and whatever because there just aren't enough hours in the day to be musically creative and to read, to just get off one's ass and head out onto the street. I thought I was just an enthusiast. But that "Mind Gangsterism" Ellis talks about is the thing I think I could really put my finger on if I just sat down with the chance to do it. How do you do it when you have school, friends, and this shit that just stares at you telling you you should be using it if you have it? I guess you stop drinking.
Friday, February 18, 2005
I have written a plan for what is supposed to happen next
And it involves procuring some of this for my very own. I met a girl who didn't believe in the restorative powers of vitamins. I challenge you to lose faith in the restorative power of very disturbed girls from outer space. The becoming-Matt of the cosplay girls, the becoming-cosplay girls of Matt. Thanks to Manny for the link.
n-1
1 and 2. Principles of connections and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.
"...Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us."
"...The becoming-wasp of the orchid and the becoming-orchid of the wasp."
Non-sequiturs from A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari.
How am I feeling? Social. A bottle of wine, a gushing surfeit of friendships, new modes, extending pseudopods, people everywhere. How could I leave New York?
I am also coming to realize that it's not so bad to be a student, and that on my own terms. Tomorrow I'm having my first bowl of pho since last May or June. And that on my own terms.
I'm gestating a few things.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Voices of the Deep
During dinner at Nyonya last night, a great Malaysian place on Grand between Mott and Mulberry, I interrupted conversation with the lovely jungen fraus not once, but twice to take calls from people I haven't heard from in a long time. A call from a very Khoroshaya Deva put me off balance. Why then? Why not all the other nights when I could have easily taken her call since I last saw her in December (November??)? I'll be putting a call in to her today on my way to school.
I got the DD-20 Giga Delay pedal. Fucking with the delay intervals on this while simultaneously modulating the delay interval on the delay effects already built into my keyboard should produce interesting waves of sound, new universes, new modalities. I may become a plant. If you believe in rock 'n roll, can music chain your mortal soul to the mortal coil of a peony, make corn blind, grow a mustache on rocks? Are we out of jazz? Have I caught something?
In related news, I read Deleuze and Guattarri's "Rhizome" from 1000 plateaus yesterday, volume 2 of their "Capitalism and Schizophrenia."
Noise, cascades of sound and we abandon depth perception.
I got the DD-20 Giga Delay pedal. Fucking with the delay intervals on this while simultaneously modulating the delay interval on the delay effects already built into my keyboard should produce interesting waves of sound, new universes, new modalities. I may become a plant. If you believe in rock 'n roll, can music chain your mortal soul to the mortal coil of a peony, make corn blind, grow a mustache on rocks? Are we out of jazz? Have I caught something?
In related news, I read Deleuze and Guattarri's "Rhizome" from 1000 plateaus yesterday, volume 2 of their "Capitalism and Schizophrenia."
Noise, cascades of sound and we abandon depth perception.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
It is passing?
the songs are maturing like wine, the mother-slime floating on their surfaces, and in the outside world I need a haircut
Monday, February 14, 2005
Every worm to his taste. Some prefer to eat nettles.
The end of a day that has been slightly more productive than those recent ones I can compare it to. I'm sipping on some Suntory Single Malt 12 year whiskey. I'm at the beginning of chapter 5 of Tanizaki Junichiro's Some Prefer Nettles. The whiskey is working like the worm in the proverb upon which the title of the book is based, burrowing into me with its must and memory, and Henry Valentine Miller's words ribbon up to me from inside that barrel that gives scotch its color and flavor. "Now works the calmness of Sheveningen as an anaesthetic." Happy Henry Valentine Miller's day, for today would have been better served to have him its inspiration, that last living boy in the occident, than any of these paper sweethearts applying themselves to love's ministrations with the terror of failure in their veal-white hearts. Do people still fuck? Do people still not fuck? Has it all become a matter of course?
And here I go, periodizing fucking. What an asshole.
A Laz for a willing lass, this boy is trying to come back to life. That will be my personals ad.
Apparently they still fuck in Scotland, if I can invest my faith in the poet of Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat's lyrics to Loch Leven: "A flash of sun between her thighs/a perfect black shape to protect my eyes". Or how about Glue's Sex without love is a good ride worth trying/but love without sex is second only to dying?
I had my first exposure to Pulp yesterday, thanks again to Val, and the healthy sexual abandon of A Different Class floored me. Never since Kahimi Karie's What Are You Wearing? had I listened so avidly to a description of a girl in her delicates set to music so raptly and, unlike with Kahimie Karie, never had I believed so deeply that not a word was cheapened by irony.
Clarity, do you remember when I wrote for you "Silly A-ha, nothing or a cup of coffee instead," and all the same that coffee still gave me the shakes and my room was still a mess, and still I missed you (because here I am a full-body aneurysm of love twisted up like a balloon animal and I'm writing ad copy)?
Bearding at the ancestors, the pentagram hung between my antlers, the white girls coming and going, the yellow girls with their infinite kindness you're never sure are there at all, all this squinting at the second hand to try to make them out in their passing instants, watching to see if the sheets change. The whiskey, in any event, has always been good.
It's raining, it's a mess, but the week is underway and it's wonders are promised. And that is almost better than the whiskey.
And here I go, periodizing fucking. What an asshole.
A Laz for a willing lass, this boy is trying to come back to life. That will be my personals ad.
Apparently they still fuck in Scotland, if I can invest my faith in the poet of Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat's lyrics to Loch Leven: "A flash of sun between her thighs/a perfect black shape to protect my eyes". Or how about Glue's Sex without love is a good ride worth trying/but love without sex is second only to dying?
I had my first exposure to Pulp yesterday, thanks again to Val, and the healthy sexual abandon of A Different Class floored me. Never since Kahimi Karie's What Are You Wearing? had I listened so avidly to a description of a girl in her delicates set to music so raptly and, unlike with Kahimie Karie, never had I believed so deeply that not a word was cheapened by irony.
Clarity, do you remember when I wrote for you "Silly A-ha, nothing or a cup of coffee instead," and all the same that coffee still gave me the shakes and my room was still a mess, and still I missed you (because here I am a full-body aneurysm of love twisted up like a balloon animal and I'm writing ad copy)?
Bearding at the ancestors, the pentagram hung between my antlers, the white girls coming and going, the yellow girls with their infinite kindness you're never sure are there at all, all this squinting at the second hand to try to make them out in their passing instants, watching to see if the sheets change. The whiskey, in any event, has always been good.
It's raining, it's a mess, but the week is underway and it's wonders are promised. And that is almost better than the whiskey.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
there was a party
There was a party last night. I went. Now I'm home. Time marches on and I am very little changed. I'm feeling rough.
From a party
Mike Doughty is opening for Polyphonic Spree on V. Day in Brooklyn. I'd like to go, but don't think I will.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Thursday, February 10, 2005
never anything but happiness
I am becalmed.
I imported some photos to my pasokon tonight, and in looking through them, inadvertently scrolled through the recent ones back into the first I imported, ones from my first trip to Minnesota. It doesn't take much study here, now, to look at the face of that beauty I once called mine to see that there was never anything called love in those eyes, never anything called happiness.
But, onward.
Today I read Habermas. More Habermas. Before that, before I left the house, I opened "Little Birds" by Anais Nin and got a boner for a few minutes.
This evening? Coffee and talking with a pretty girl, beers with comrades in scholarship.
Tomorrow, class, and who knows what else?
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Flickr has changed
Flickr.com has changed its photo sharing site so that you can only post photos to your blog if you make them public through their service, and then only if you use the automated posting function in Flicker, which posts every photo as a link back to flickr. You can edit this out of the HTML, but that's annoying.
soon this will all be up on my own domain.
If it ever gets finalized. Is it supposed to take a week to transfer ownership of a domain registration?
soon this will all be up on my own domain.
If it ever gets finalized. Is it supposed to take a week to transfer ownership of a domain registration?
The Joy of Being Chosen
The caption reads "The Joy of Being Chosen."
I think this also applies in NYC.
The last thing
I have one more thing I'm going to say before I sleep.
It is this:
I have serious misgivings about girls who a) look really sexy and b) look like they're having a really good time in their photos on Friendster and Myspace. The reasons are as follows:
a) I have the strong suspicion that they do not need more friends if they are already sexy and having a good time, but are instead trying to cultivate some kind of cheap celebrity, and b) they are dumb sluts. b can usually be corroborated by the profile.
Ok!
It is this:
I have serious misgivings about girls who a) look really sexy and b) look like they're having a really good time in their photos on Friendster and Myspace. The reasons are as follows:
a) I have the strong suspicion that they do not need more friends if they are already sexy and having a good time, but are instead trying to cultivate some kind of cheap celebrity, and b) they are dumb sluts. b can usually be corroborated by the profile.
Ok!
Deep Six
Deep Six on Big Black's "The Hammer Party" caught my ear and put me into about 30 minutes of Big Black today. It begins with "He was a plug-ugly son of a bitch." Not much call to use plug-ugly these days. Gonna try to work that one into conversation.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Almost nothing like it
I have gone from really horny to really depressed. I drink, I drink, I drink because when I don't I don't I don't I get really depressed and overstimulated. I am going to experiment and see if I go crazy by the end of the week with no drinks. I was such a productive hangover yesterday.
Val really liked "Excuses for Travelers" by Mojave 3. They are a very good band, but mainly just because "Excuses for Travelers" was such an unforgettable fucking album. It is quite possible everything in that band's members' lives led to that band making that album. It is quite possible it is all downhill from there. But you would have to be a linear time fascist who liked excuses for putting people down if you thought that. Having been a traveler in need of excuses, I really related to this album. I still feel like one of those. I feel like a fish in the desert. I want a drink of whiskey.
Val really liked "Excuses for Travelers" by Mojave 3. They are a very good band, but mainly just because "Excuses for Travelers" was such an unforgettable fucking album. It is quite possible everything in that band's members' lives led to that band making that album. It is quite possible it is all downhill from there. But you would have to be a linear time fascist who liked excuses for putting people down if you thought that. Having been a traveler in need of excuses, I really related to this album. I still feel like one of those. I feel like a fish in the desert. I want a drink of whiskey.
Astrological Police Blotter
When I was 16, jupiter was not only rising, but found already quite high, smoking crack in the red-light district in the 10th public housing development, completely missing his rendezvous with venus who was going down in the 10th house of ill repute and wrecking any chance I had to see tits for the first time. Jupiter is now in the house of detention.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
誰も知らない
昨夜友達と最近出た”誰も知らない”って映画の見に行った。すごく長くて、あまりポイントは無くてちょう疲れた。本当に悲しかったでも。ただ、終わりで何か話しはまだ終っていないみたい。実はさしぶりに日本の映画見に行くのは楽しかったから、映画はちょっとつまらないとはいえ昨夜の方は良かった。その上、何も飲まなかった。じゃ、これからちょっと読まなきゃ。もう、日曜日と思わなかった。
Thursday, February 03, 2005
27 Jennifers
Woke up early, tuned in to the Air America webcast, first thing I got (after commercials) was Mike Doughty singing 27 Jennifers. Mike Doughty's stuff (he has a new one coming out, I guess, Skittish is his old one, and there are a couple of live ones- smof and smang, etc.) is something I want, also. Good, good stuff. So much commodified beauty in the world a man is not permitted to buy.
You can get to Mike Doughty at this link.
And, if you're like me, you'll be watching to see if they archive his performance here.
You can get to Mike Doughty at this link.
And, if you're like me, you'll be watching to see if they archive his performance here.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Switzerland Revokes Ban on Absinthe
Anyone feel like a trip to Switzerland? How about the Czech Republic? Slovakia? (the Slovak girls are hotter.)
Guardian story here.
Guardian story here.
Music that I want
Gros- Radio Islas
Alva Noto- Transrapid, Transspray and Transvision EPs
Keith Hudson and Friends- The Keith Hudson Affair
Bibio- Fi
Now, how do I muster the scratch for these things? Anybody got a lead? Anybody know a guy?
Oh, and I'm (at least temporarily) implementing RSS feed capability to the blog. I guess if you have an atom reader it was always syndicated. The link is in the sidebar.
Alva Noto- Transrapid, Transspray and Transvision EPs
Keith Hudson and Friends- The Keith Hudson Affair
Bibio- Fi
Now, how do I muster the scratch for these things? Anybody got a lead? Anybody know a guy?
Oh, and I'm (at least temporarily) implementing RSS feed capability to the blog. I guess if you have an atom reader it was always syndicated. The link is in the sidebar.
Medi- Medi- Kay- Kay- Shun
In a short search for feelgood, I discovered that there was the equivalent of approximately one and a half shots of Jack Daniels in my hip flask tonight. And I still can't concentrate and feel awful lonesome. But, I press on! There is a presentation to make in tomorrow's class with Aurora, and I must prepare! No matter that I haven't been able to think about it all day. (I've been fucking around with newsreaders and whatnot in the name of research, instead.)
I just learned that zaftig means:
of a woman : having a full rounded figure : pleasingly plump
Juicy.
I just learned that zaftig means:
of a woman : having a full rounded figure : pleasingly plump
Juicy.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Nostalgia Making Me Twisty
The Promise Ring playing on my stereo, me thinking of my good friend Josh who turned me on to them a few years ago, flashbacks of all those car rides in the Kiso Valley with Davy as my copilot.
Talk talk talk.
And thank you, Nami. My guitarist/singer/artist friend Nami drew this. I thought of this the other day when caffeine made me think I want antlers.
Talk talk talk.
And thank you, Nami. My guitarist/singer/artist friend Nami drew this. I thought of this the other day when caffeine made me think I want antlers.
The Four Lit Chambers of My Heart
Some scenes from Gadi's b-day last night. Not much I can say right now. The mind is sluggish. The spirit, however, is quickened.
Monday, January 31, 2005
I love to love you, lover- and your horns
About 30 minutes ago, reeling from a strong cup of coffee, a strange feeling came over me. I wanted to have antlers.
Any fans of Laibach out there?
As I write this, I just recalled that Nami had sent me a portrait of me with a deer above my head. I need to get that framed.
Antlers. Yeah.
Any fans of Laibach out there?
As I write this, I just recalled that Nami had sent me a portrait of me with a deer above my head. I need to get that framed.
Antlers. Yeah.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Some old records, some new ones
Alright on Top: Luke Slater
This came out in '02 and doesn't get enough play in my collection for the simple reason that the cd refuses to import into my iTunes. It could be a non-redbook cd, deliberately damaged by the record company to discourage digital duplication (without a complete barcode identifying what it is, some computer drives won't recognize the disk properly, while cd players can read it just fine). It doesn't seem like something Mute would do, though, so I remain baffled.
Anyhow, this remains the most exciting electronic dance release I've heard in the past, uh, 3 (!) years since it came out. Time is flying, musical trends fade in and out, but like the emergence of an old-growth forest, quality releases in any medium are eked out only occasionally and after many permutations. Blah Blah blah.
I like this cd.
Eveningland: Hem
The singer's voice has a clarity that is softly penetrating. Quiet and beautiful, it goes through walls like a wistful x-ray, like a ghost. I've seen these guys twice, and, I don't know how it's possible, but the songs are even more fluid and cut from velvet when they play live than they are recorded. Who is actually that good at what they do anymore? These guys are. The first song is a bit evocative of Cowboy Junkies' version of Sweet Jane, but that's a beautiful song, too, so rather than the identification of influence somehow diminishing the merit of a particular work, the amount of beauty in the world is actually multiplied in a mystically mathematical fashion. Guaranteed to edge out the ugly in at least one corner of your life for the duration of the disc.
Wonder, light snow, wine
We're having a heat wave. It's in the thirties now, light flurries, pleasure in walking home at night.
The day was spent in Queens, off the island. My arms and hands are made of electricity and pillows. I buzz from wine and the unflinching smiles of voluptuous women.
In Queens:
The way home:
Pleasant pleasures, a cheap beer near 42nd Street and salty popcorn. Into bed, then, I suppose?
The day was spent in Queens, off the island. My arms and hands are made of electricity and pillows. I buzz from wine and the unflinching smiles of voluptuous women.
In Queens:
The way home:
Pleasant pleasures, a cheap beer near 42nd Street and salty popcorn. Into bed, then, I suppose?
In the Voluptuary
Marked down on the list, she's in. On stationery, on whatever, on hides. What angles could be played softened to organ music, everything's going to swim in curves for years and years-- perpetual motion played out without agenda. I'm recruiting for my voluptuary. Around around around around around and around the way, hey.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Suntory Yamazaki and Pretty Ladies
I highly recommend sipping Suntory Yamazaki Single Malt and exhibiting your sparkling, rapaciously debonair worldliness in the presence of pretty ladies (make an allowance for a casual soft boner, be awash in the warmth and lack of real wants). What pleasant time it makes for the passing!
what happened to Tyrone Slothrop?
I did not traipse across the DMZ dressed as a bomb, ripped from the fabric of linear reality by drugs and the nefarious plans of corporate, international industrial cartels and their theft of my personhood. I don't think I am deeply, in a very repressed way, intimately associated with any industrial plastics. I don't pretend to understand everything Pynchon was saying- I still couldn't understand Miller when I finished Gravity's Rainbow- I hadn't truly lost my fucking mind yet when I got to the final page of that book- but here's the impression I did retain:
Tyrone Slothrop, sold at birth to the international chemical cartels, still in some way under their sway during and after the war by a)being put in harm's way as a soldier in a war that was a veiled economic exercise, an illusion, and b) being used to find the V-2 without his own knowledge. At the end of the book, and again, I read this awhile ago and was lost during most of it, Slothrop dissolves. His corporeal Slothropness "finally flies apart," to paraphrase herm. He gets washed out in the pattern as it becomes larger and more incomprehensible, as his own nature is diminished more and more in importance as the plot that has controlled his life becomes clearer (and infinitely larger) and as his usefulness disappears. He melts into the pattern of his surroundings.
In the wash of so much information, such a total mediation of his life, he actually ceases to exist, he becomes indistinguishable from the plots he's been a part of.
Do you ever get to feeling that way?
I'm overstimulated. And I may have completely misunderstood and misremembered Pynchon, to boot. The uncertainty of it all!
Tyrone Slothrop, sold at birth to the international chemical cartels, still in some way under their sway during and after the war by a)being put in harm's way as a soldier in a war that was a veiled economic exercise, an illusion, and b) being used to find the V-2 without his own knowledge. At the end of the book, and again, I read this awhile ago and was lost during most of it, Slothrop dissolves. His corporeal Slothropness "finally flies apart," to paraphrase herm. He gets washed out in the pattern as it becomes larger and more incomprehensible, as his own nature is diminished more and more in importance as the plot that has controlled his life becomes clearer (and infinitely larger) and as his usefulness disappears. He melts into the pattern of his surroundings.
In the wash of so much information, such a total mediation of his life, he actually ceases to exist, he becomes indistinguishable from the plots he's been a part of.
Do you ever get to feeling that way?
I'm overstimulated. And I may have completely misunderstood and misremembered Pynchon, to boot. The uncertainty of it all!
Friday, January 28, 2005
One more mention re: the poet who is the subject of the previous post
"I know that she exists
But where is she upon this earth
as the whores keep finding me?"
But where is she upon this earth
as the whores keep finding me?"
Fate, I know you deliver what you can
Sitting here this morning, thumbing at random through Bukowski- reread the same poems I read yesterday.
"The girls in pantyhose wait,
they await the proper time and
moment, and then they will move
and then they will conquer"
He said.
He and I enfeebled by Lolita, fatigued by the indefatigable ideal that draws your eyes up a skirt and down a shirt
and even if you could have it
you're just going to want a pizza later
Oh, Buddha, where are you now? The burning house smells of ripe cunts. And it burns and burns.
"The girls in pantyhose wait,
they await the proper time and
moment, and then they will move
and then they will conquer"
He said.
He and I enfeebled by Lolita, fatigued by the indefatigable ideal that draws your eyes up a skirt and down a shirt
and even if you could have it
you're just going to want a pizza later
Oh, Buddha, where are you now? The burning house smells of ripe cunts. And it burns and burns.
Who's new?
My thanks to Val for turning me on to M. Ward. My thanks to Al.B.Sure! for the alleged new Beck Material. It has made for an enjoyable early morning.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Of Shit and Tea
I don't know why I'm remembering this now, but I had a conversation with a roommate in Chicago a couple of years ago about Starbucks' Chai tea. I thought it was funny that Chai is just how you say "tea" in Russian (which is probably derived from Chinese). Therefore, when you say you want Chai tea, you are saying you want tea tea. My roommate then told me that a word that sounds a lot like "tea tea" is the word in hindi for shit.
Hooray!
Hooray!
Do you have what it takes?
Siegfried Kracauer, in his book The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, an examination of the rootless, salaried life of the new class of office workers in the Weimar Republic, writes in an early chapter about the process of selecting employees for work in the new consumer culture.
Kracauer wrote a few things about life in the image, and I was particularly moved by his statement in another article that, to paraphrase, the goal of photojournalism is to capture that part of the world which can be photographed, hinting at the ideology implied in the very technology of the camera (who was it that wrote about the cult of the immediately ascertainable fact?). This ideology is all but transparent to us, but it potentially organizes our worldview because we afford the scientific camera so much authority. In reality, of course, photographs are narrative, and our experience of reality is not necessarily so. Can you photograph that look of endless love one certain someone gave you a long time ago? Can you photograph how your mind is chaining together all of your experiences with the taste of wasabi ice cream, with the dirt smell of New York air?
In this chapter, he asks a hiring clerk at an office what he looks for in an applicant.
The conversation:
"I ask him what he means by pleasant- saucy or pretty. 'Not exactly pretty. What's far more crucial is... oh, you know, a morally pink complexion.'
I do know. A morally pink complexion- this combination of concepts at a stroke renders transparent the everyday life that is fleshed out by window displays, salary-earners and illustrated papers. Its morality must have a pink hue, its pink a moral grounding. That is what the people responsible for selection want. They would like to cover life with a varnish concealing its far-from-rosy reality. But beware, if morality should penetrate beneath the skin, and the pink be not quite moral enough to prevent the eruption of desires!" (38)
Funny that this was written in that lull between tempests called the Weimar Republic.
What record will be kept of the critiques of the ideological image being propagated in the vast dark stretches of Jesusland? Is anyone going to remember any of this?
The ipod will live as kitsch, where will the frightened Jesus go?
Do you have what it takes in America? Are you morally pink? Are you well-scrubbed? Are you for the Whites or for the Reds?
Kracauer wrote a few things about life in the image, and I was particularly moved by his statement in another article that, to paraphrase, the goal of photojournalism is to capture that part of the world which can be photographed, hinting at the ideology implied in the very technology of the camera (who was it that wrote about the cult of the immediately ascertainable fact?). This ideology is all but transparent to us, but it potentially organizes our worldview because we afford the scientific camera so much authority. In reality, of course, photographs are narrative, and our experience of reality is not necessarily so. Can you photograph that look of endless love one certain someone gave you a long time ago? Can you photograph how your mind is chaining together all of your experiences with the taste of wasabi ice cream, with the dirt smell of New York air?
In this chapter, he asks a hiring clerk at an office what he looks for in an applicant.
The conversation:
"I ask him what he means by pleasant- saucy or pretty. 'Not exactly pretty. What's far more crucial is... oh, you know, a morally pink complexion.'
I do know. A morally pink complexion- this combination of concepts at a stroke renders transparent the everyday life that is fleshed out by window displays, salary-earners and illustrated papers. Its morality must have a pink hue, its pink a moral grounding. That is what the people responsible for selection want. They would like to cover life with a varnish concealing its far-from-rosy reality. But beware, if morality should penetrate beneath the skin, and the pink be not quite moral enough to prevent the eruption of desires!" (38)
Funny that this was written in that lull between tempests called the Weimar Republic.
What record will be kept of the critiques of the ideological image being propagated in the vast dark stretches of Jesusland? Is anyone going to remember any of this?
The ipod will live as kitsch, where will the frightened Jesus go?
Do you have what it takes in America? Are you morally pink? Are you well-scrubbed? Are you for the Whites or for the Reds?
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
4 months or so
4 months or so and I'll be out of this city, hopefully happy in what I'm doing. Hell, I'd stay in this city if I could find something I was happy in doing.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Don't want to
I have to go to my internship tomorrow, and it's making it really hard for me to go to bed. I hate going to sleep when I know I have to do shit I don't want to do in the morning.
I've been so fucking depressed.
Fuck.
I've been so fucking depressed.
Fuck.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
I lean and sing born to run
And I sing it fucking well.
Herm was weaned too late in life. Persists the healthy hankering for cottage-industry body-manufactured sustenance. Boobs.
I don't particularly like this song, but there was triumph in this moment.
Snow
It snowed a lot yesterday. Staying indoors today. Not hung over, feeling good again.
I will stay indoors and watch alias from bed all day. I went to a little party of a friend of Shannon's last night that was supposed to be a housewarming, I guess, but was just kind of a gathering of people who didn't really know each other very well watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I left after an hour because I was still non-functioning after karaoke Friday night (and, of course, beer).
Love,
Matt
I will stay indoors and watch alias from bed all day. I went to a little party of a friend of Shannon's last night that was supposed to be a housewarming, I guess, but was just kind of a gathering of people who didn't really know each other very well watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I left after an hour because I was still non-functioning after karaoke Friday night (and, of course, beer).
Love,
Matt
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Boring
Turning three directions
look down, look down
there you are three miles alluvial below yourself
moving in all the wrong directions
so much bigger than yourself as a pinpoint of fucking lightning
moving backwards with a knife
moving backwards with your teeth because that's all that survives the heat
thermal vents, ocean floors, ragged claws, beaten tatars
destroy the past
destroy the past
destroy the past
look down, look down
there you are three miles alluvial below yourself
moving in all the wrong directions
so much bigger than yourself as a pinpoint of fucking lightning
moving backwards with a knife
moving backwards with your teeth because that's all that survives the heat
thermal vents, ocean floors, ragged claws, beaten tatars
destroy the past
destroy the past
destroy the past
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
the weeping machine
yeah, the weeping machine makes the other thing, makes the thing that does not weep, like a husband makes a wife/like salty makes sweet/like a wrong makes a right
I need you
tremblefaster, gangrenous you
I'm not made of putty
I shouldn't have been
I shouldn't have
I made a thing that made you
made you a thing that fits in a place against my clack-clacks
snuggle my ribs
I made myself
to undo myself
I made a thing of me to make a thing of you
now who's left to want us?
I need you
tremblefaster, gangrenous you
I'm not made of putty
I shouldn't have been
I shouldn't have
I made a thing that made you
made you a thing that fits in a place against my clack-clacks
snuggle my ribs
I made myself
to undo myself
I made a thing of me to make a thing of you
now who's left to want us?
Shoes Update
In the movie Koufuku no Okane, directed by SABU (who also directed Japanese anxiety zeitgeist masterpiece Monday), the protagonist, a man who walks through a large city and comes across all manner of desperate characters, meets an old salaryman about to jump off a bridge who gives a speech about how he can't stand himself because he's a boring person, has no friends, and can only speak keigo (Japanese polite speech). He leaves his shoes on the bridge where he jumps.
God, shoes are sad.
In brilliant other news, I start at MTV today with my internship. I also just got an e-mail from N- of P-Heavy fame and spent a good half-hour replying to her. Last night's gathering in Brooklyn was a success, and the frozen end of the night at the sake bar was a very chill and pleasant nightcap, but chill in a warm and cozy kind of way, not the locked-in-ice bring-the-tatars-to-their-knees kind of way that makes sleeping under an electric blanket such a wonderful pastime these days.
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is by far the best Wes Anderson has done. It is staggeringly, achingly sorrowful. Murray is Murray, but he captures something we're all feeling now- that detached, dreamy thing. Don't read further if you haven't seen it, but the characters' constant recreation of their ideal selves as image is so now. The metaphor of their continuing breakdown in the ability to create even the image of a utopian reality cuts my legs out from under me. The uncertainty of living in an age defined by a cult of science is expressed exquisitely. And it's funny. Thank you, Wes Anderson and cast.
God, shoes are sad.
In brilliant other news, I start at MTV today with my internship. I also just got an e-mail from N- of P-Heavy fame and spent a good half-hour replying to her. Last night's gathering in Brooklyn was a success, and the frozen end of the night at the sake bar was a very chill and pleasant nightcap, but chill in a warm and cozy kind of way, not the locked-in-ice bring-the-tatars-to-their-knees kind of way that makes sleeping under an electric blanket such a wonderful pastime these days.
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is by far the best Wes Anderson has done. It is staggeringly, achingly sorrowful. Murray is Murray, but he captures something we're all feeling now- that detached, dreamy thing. Don't read further if you haven't seen it, but the characters' constant recreation of their ideal selves as image is so now. The metaphor of their continuing breakdown in the ability to create even the image of a utopian reality cuts my legs out from under me. The uncertainty of living in an age defined by a cult of science is expressed exquisitely. And it's funny. Thank you, Wes Anderson and cast.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Saturday, January 15, 2005
And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
Asians of gossamer
you horny valkyries
I make a whisper's passage
over the sharp tines
of you sharp stars
and a quiet show of a quiet death of 100 cuts
without pain
you horny valkyries
I make a whisper's passage
over the sharp tines
of you sharp stars
and a quiet show of a quiet death of 100 cuts
without pain
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Go see these guys.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
"Folker", Track 4 "Lookin' Up in Heaven"
This song has gotten me every time I have listened to it.
I went lookin' up in heaven but you wasn't anywhere in sight/they asked me stick around but without you it just wasn't right
Maybe I'm being overly sentimental or crazy, but I about weep every time Paul Westerberg sings these lines.
And, reminiscent of "Summerteeth" by Wilco, the song where the protagonist's shoes get cold while his black shirt cries, in this recent Paul Westerberg masterpiece we have this line:
Sunday evening I get the blues/someone's sleeping in her (their?) tennis shoes
What the hell is it about shoes that is so damn sad?
I'm a maudlin bastard.
...the corpse on reprieve in all of us.
I was reading an article last night entitled "Cultural Studies and Forensic Noir" by one Thomas Doherty (Title: Cultural Studies and 'Forensic Noir.' , By: Doherty, Thomas, Chronicle of Higher Education,00095982, 10/24/2003, Vol. 50, Issue 9), and this gem of a blurb popped out at me. He's actually referencing another author, Indiana University's James Naremore, who is in turn quoting film critic Andre Bazin. And I'm quoting all of them, with no context whatsoever. What a romantic, visceral, corporal thing to say, though.
This reminds me that I was also reading The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard the other day, a jaunty, mindfucking little read that threatens to agree with you on everything so completely that you nearly return to an egoless pre-Lacanian continuousness with your environment that you only had at that magical moment you got squeezed into your casing from momma's meat grinder so many years ago (if you're me, that's 28 tomorrow).
Anyhow, the reason that this reminds me of Baudrillard is that he is talking about the collision of a system that denies the existence of death (the antiseptic, self-proclaimed generator of only good, justice, and life system of the modern capitalist West on the march) with one that is willing to "gift" its own death to it, such as happened in the suicide/attack on the WTC. A system anchored to the ideological position of life and life only experiences a rupture in reality that is traumatic. If we get Lacanian, we can say that all attempts to represent and thereby understand and master the moment of trauma fail, because reality defies all representation. The inability to represent the reality of the original trauma coupled with a recall of the original trauma creates further trauma, which induces further representation and attempts to patch reality and master the source of angst. Hal Foster wrote an article, I think it was called "Death in America" or something like that (I read it for class last semester, as well as most of the stuff I'm quoting here), about Warhol and his traumatic realism- the repetition of flawed and disturbing images such as a car crash, Marylin Monroe (suicide), a skull (portrait of everyone on earth). In that article he talks about attempts to innoculate ourselves against trauma through repetition of its images, while at the same time those flawed images create the trauma of missing the essence of the original traumatic event. Baudrillard says that when a system is willing to "gift" death to a system in denial of death, the system in denial of death begins the process of manufacturing death and death alone. When society attempts to innoculate itself against death and trauma by repeating the trauma, by expecting trauma, it begins to take on an eschatological imperative to avoid being surprised by the eschaton.
Happy new year, everyone. I love you.
This reminds me that I was also reading The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard the other day, a jaunty, mindfucking little read that threatens to agree with you on everything so completely that you nearly return to an egoless pre-Lacanian continuousness with your environment that you only had at that magical moment you got squeezed into your casing from momma's meat grinder so many years ago (if you're me, that's 28 tomorrow).
Anyhow, the reason that this reminds me of Baudrillard is that he is talking about the collision of a system that denies the existence of death (the antiseptic, self-proclaimed generator of only good, justice, and life system of the modern capitalist West on the march) with one that is willing to "gift" its own death to it, such as happened in the suicide/attack on the WTC. A system anchored to the ideological position of life and life only experiences a rupture in reality that is traumatic. If we get Lacanian, we can say that all attempts to represent and thereby understand and master the moment of trauma fail, because reality defies all representation. The inability to represent the reality of the original trauma coupled with a recall of the original trauma creates further trauma, which induces further representation and attempts to patch reality and master the source of angst. Hal Foster wrote an article, I think it was called "Death in America" or something like that (I read it for class last semester, as well as most of the stuff I'm quoting here), about Warhol and his traumatic realism- the repetition of flawed and disturbing images such as a car crash, Marylin Monroe (suicide), a skull (portrait of everyone on earth). In that article he talks about attempts to innoculate ourselves against trauma through repetition of its images, while at the same time those flawed images create the trauma of missing the essence of the original traumatic event. Baudrillard says that when a system is willing to "gift" death to a system in denial of death, the system in denial of death begins the process of manufacturing death and death alone. When society attempts to innoculate itself against death and trauma by repeating the trauma, by expecting trauma, it begins to take on an eschatological imperative to avoid being surprised by the eschaton.
Happy new year, everyone. I love you.
Friday, January 07, 2005
ok, so the first one did post.
but the second post was better and longer, so I'm leaving them both up.
Stomach Flu
I have a feeling that what I came down with yesterday was not food poisoning, as I had thought, but the dreaded stomach flu that's been going around. I spent yesterday moaning and feverish, having weird totalitarian dreams of reality as a gestalt wherein I could never be well again because it wasn't part of the total picture, and every shift or movement I made in the bed to make myself feel better was followed by the admonishment that I was still well within the limits of reality's plan, and it by no means excused me from the execrable position of being sick. Somehow I had aligned myself with a political party of pure evil. It made no sense.
This is the second time I am writing this post. The first time, something went wrong and the post never went through when I hit the publish button.
I went to Virgin after applying for an internship with the City of New York. I picked up the new Paul Westerberg, "Folker," and a Kreidler cd I'd never heard of called "Weekend." For Kreidler highlights, see "coldness" on "Appearance and the Park," and the one with Momus on their self-titled album, the title of which escapes me now.
While reading a blog recommended to me by a hirsute friend by way of his own blog, I was reminded of a story I've related to no one save my mother. A few weeks ago, right before the Ted Leo concert at the Bowery Ballroom, I was walking around the block to waste some time. Who should approach from the opposite direction, but Teddy Leo himself. I started and made to say something, but then came up against the surreal fact that TED LEO DOESN'T KNOW WHO I AM. So we just kind of looked at each other suspiciously while trying to act like we weren't paying any attention to one another.
I am still not 100%. I can't seem to eat anything. On the plus side, the body under stress seems to have ways of dealing with privation you can't tap into when healthy. I can only hope my testicles aren't being slowly reabsorbed into my body for sustenance.
Another strange story to relate. A year ago this week or so I was in Jamaica, I was in love, and my mother was getting married. I danced on an outdoor pool deck in bare feet until they bled. The day after I got back I puked and roasted with fever all day. Till now I thought I had gotten food poisoning from a bad McDonald's strawberry shake gotten the night before. I'm wondering, though, if I haven't stumbled onto some grim somatic ritual my body observes the new year with. Right before my birthday I spend the day emptying of anything nourishing POST HASTE. I need to find another "old reliable."
At least this illness has given me the impetus to knock it off with the drinking for awhile, already.
I suppose I could spend the rest of this post complaining about the emasculation of living in NYC. But I won't.
This is the second time I am writing this post. The first time, something went wrong and the post never went through when I hit the publish button.
I went to Virgin after applying for an internship with the City of New York. I picked up the new Paul Westerberg, "Folker," and a Kreidler cd I'd never heard of called "Weekend." For Kreidler highlights, see "coldness" on "Appearance and the Park," and the one with Momus on their self-titled album, the title of which escapes me now.
While reading a blog recommended to me by a hirsute friend by way of his own blog, I was reminded of a story I've related to no one save my mother. A few weeks ago, right before the Ted Leo concert at the Bowery Ballroom, I was walking around the block to waste some time. Who should approach from the opposite direction, but Teddy Leo himself. I started and made to say something, but then came up against the surreal fact that TED LEO DOESN'T KNOW WHO I AM. So we just kind of looked at each other suspiciously while trying to act like we weren't paying any attention to one another.
I am still not 100%. I can't seem to eat anything. On the plus side, the body under stress seems to have ways of dealing with privation you can't tap into when healthy. I can only hope my testicles aren't being slowly reabsorbed into my body for sustenance.
Another strange story to relate. A year ago this week or so I was in Jamaica, I was in love, and my mother was getting married. I danced on an outdoor pool deck in bare feet until they bled. The day after I got back I puked and roasted with fever all day. Till now I thought I had gotten food poisoning from a bad McDonald's strawberry shake gotten the night before. I'm wondering, though, if I haven't stumbled onto some grim somatic ritual my body observes the new year with. Right before my birthday I spend the day emptying of anything nourishing POST HASTE. I need to find another "old reliable."
At least this illness has given me the impetus to knock it off with the drinking for awhile, already.
I suppose I could spend the rest of this post complaining about the emasculation of living in NYC. But I won't.
I don't think it was food poisoning.
I think it was this nasty stomach flu that's been going around. Must have picked it up in the plane. This time last year I was in Jamaica, my mom was getting married, I was very fat (I'll try to find a picture), and as soon as I returned home I had a mysterious case of "food poisoning," also after a ride in a plane. It makes me wonder if I didn't actually get the stomach flu then, too. And these incidents are almost exactly a year apart. I need to find a more pleasant "old dependable."
Ok, no pictures of really fat Matt.
Now I have to campus or something and start doing research on the media and its presentation of authority in crime dramas. I don't know if it's because I don't feel 100% or if I just don't want to do it, but I have an overwhelming urge to just go to the Virgin Megastore and shop for cds. Maybe there's room in my life for both things to happen. I can only hope.
Reading a blog recommended to me by a hirsute friend, I was reminded of a story I told no one but my mother about- a few weeks ago, right before the Ted Leo show at Bowery Ballroom, I was walking around the block to kill time, and there, walking down the street toward me, alone, was Teddy Leo. I almost said hi or something, but then I had that surreal moment where I realized Ted Leo doesn't know who I am!. So we just both eyed each other suspiciously. Alright, now into the shower. Now onto the street. Food.
Ok, no pictures of really fat Matt.
Now I have to campus or something and start doing research on the media and its presentation of authority in crime dramas. I don't know if it's because I don't feel 100% or if I just don't want to do it, but I have an overwhelming urge to just go to the Virgin Megastore and shop for cds. Maybe there's room in my life for both things to happen. I can only hope.
Reading a blog recommended to me by a hirsute friend, I was reminded of a story I told no one but my mother about- a few weeks ago, right before the Ted Leo show at Bowery Ballroom, I was walking around the block to kill time, and there, walking down the street toward me, alone, was Teddy Leo. I almost said hi or something, but then I had that surreal moment where I realized Ted Leo doesn't know who I am!. So we just both eyed each other suspiciously. Alright, now into the shower. Now onto the street. Food.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Food Poisoning/Welcome Back to NYC
Last night I went out to eat at an Irish pub, ate a burger, and have been completely useless all day. Food poisoning.
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