1. a. Verbal abuse directed against a person or thing; detraction, calumny, slander. Formerly (also): {dag}an abusive or calumnious speech or utterance (obs.).
b. Abuse or detraction as it affects the person spoken against; the condition of being spoken against; ill repute; reproach, disgrace, notoriety.
2. A cause, occasion, or object of detraction or reproach; a reproach, a disgrace. Obs.
From our good friends at the OED.
Also, this is a good book about the OED:
Friday, November 11, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!
Via Musicthing:
Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!:
Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!:
It's Vemia auction time again. It's a kind of cool private eBay for music geeks. Brian Eno is selling off his beloved (and battered) DX-7, which was presumably used to compose the Microsoft Sound, among one or two other pieces of music. He's also selling a Prophet VS, Jellinghaus DX-7 Programmer and a couple of Mackie Mixers. The DX7 is already at almost £2,000. Other delights include Tim Simenon (Bomb The Bass) selling his 303 and a load of other gear. The auction ends on the 12th November. The Vemia Website is still an absolute nightmare to use and navigate (try to ignore the javascript faults and popups), but it's well worth the effort. There was even a EMS Synthi with a starting bid of £20, but it's already up to £1660...
Monday, November 07, 2005
Abe Lincoln
Friday I picked up Steve Almond's latest short story collection, entitled The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, and burned through it over the weekend. In the main, I would say it is at least as compelling as his first collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, with the same balance of really powerful stories and those that you end up feeling are sort of filler. This is simply the peril of working as an author who walks a very thin line between pure prosaic retelling of easily relatable goings-on and the perfectly-timed emotional switch that provides the strange and surprising, breathtaking insight that pulls the whole experience of reading his stories together. Each episode from the lives related (usually centered around relationships, loss, or love and the coming-to-grips associated with each) is made unique, always reiterating the message that, though, yes, we can all recognize love, heartbreak, loneliness, camaraderie, nostalgia, these states only come to be themselves through very personal and unrepeatable circumstances. Just as musicians are only musicians as a group by accident, huddled together by the independent hands of critics and not by the players themselves, who each have their own personal way of visualizing their music, using their emotions, their own personal goals to arrive at through their art, so lovers and friends are, ultimately, each unique in how they arrive at that definition. In one particular story, Lincoln, Arisen, we see Abraham Lincoln as a montage of his life and the world of his dreams through conversations between he and Frederick Douglass the abolitionist that may or may not be happening.
"There once was a man who found no happiness in his life. He was sad every moment of the day. His duties were many and without mercy. Senators ran to him in anger. Common men blackened their hearts on his behalf. A nation of mothers cursed his name. he hoped to make himself content through an adherence to God's will, but when he examined his beliefs found he held none. His wife went insane, Douglass. His children died like flies. his one love perished." Lincoln's voice deepens and curls, assumes the timbre of a dream. "He behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. His faults were but the shadows his virtues cast. He saw himself grimly advancing on history, but came to understand it was the other way around. He grew bored of his own stories and savored none of his achievements. His single respite was sleep. And then that left him too. Hold me, Douglass. All the strange checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind."
I suppose I don't have anything to say about this passage, save that I was moved brutally by the idea that he behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. In reality, as is recognized by the author in his acknowledgments, the character of Lincoln only feels this way because he feels unrewarded by his path and disappointed. He is not ignorant of his motives. Almond writes in his acknowledgements of Lincoln:
"Let us, in this age of unremitting grievance, choose as he did: to love, to sacrifice, to forgive."
Good God, the responsibility lies with each of us.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Tenderness, you find me with knives in the front and the back
Patience, you steer through the gauntlet of the steady and vengeful third hand
who is not the cheek unturned
and is not the cheek turned.
When you have found his blades' secret points
You answer,
"I am without response in kind."
Patience, your love has no enemies.
Patience, you steer through the gauntlet of the steady and vengeful third hand
who is not the cheek unturned
and is not the cheek turned.
When you have found his blades' secret points
You answer,
"I am without response in kind."
Patience, your love has no enemies.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Big Fuzz, All Action, No Motion
A quick trip to Illinois this past weekend put me in the mood to listen to Hum this week. The psychedelic static space rock has been crunching in my headphones, me doing dumb things like going to work and wondering why I'm doing dumb things.
Downward is Heavenward puts me in a still place in pulsing chaos these many years on.
"Downward Is Heavenward" (HUM)
Downward is Heavenward puts me in a still place in pulsing chaos these many years on.
"Downward Is Heavenward" (HUM)
Go to him
There was a voice that called, but you could not hear it, for there was only a single set of footprints and who got sand on the sheets? It sounded like "I'm sorry" or maybe "I'll be god-damned if I'm going to pay the bill in full before I die."
Herm is at it again.
Herm is at it again.
Technorati Tags: Hearts on sleeves, words, holy animal reliquary
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Monday, October 24, 2005
Some Thoughts on iTunes and the Music Industry
I was talking to a friend last week about a new feature in the new iPod that is being more or less kept secret out in the open, a feature overshadowed by its new gadget-porn video capabilities. While everyone is going gaga for the fact that music videos, porn, and television shows are available watch on the tiny, high-def screens of the new iPods (why anyone needs to watch things this much is beyond me- attention is labor, and you're signing yourself up for lots less downtime with video on your person), another feature was added that few are talking about- the new iPods can record in full stereo.
Time to throw away those portable DAT recorders, everyone. Podcasting is the new bootlegging.
With iTunes set up to suck podcasts down from the web now, with the very popular iPod highly and firmly installed in an eager consumer base, and with the digital method of music delivery taking more and more power away from the giant, vampiric middle men that are the music industry (an industry that doesn't produce music so much as it does a paid bureaucracy that, in the end, really isn't that into music) and giving it to the artists to produce, niche market, and publicize themselves, Apple may very well have set itself in the position as one of the sole entities existent in the music industry once all the majors collapse. As people and artists become more tech-savvy and realize they don't need the labels, iTunes will be there, still, with its handy podcasting capabilities and the viral nature of bootlegs spreading out across the web building artists' popularity. Not a label, but profiting as a distribution point. There won't be an absolute need to use iTunes, but the iPod will be indispensable. In one version of the future, Apple could be all that is left of the music industry.
Now: Playing
Not About Love
from the album "Extraordinary Machine" by
Fiona Apple
Time to throw away those portable DAT recorders, everyone. Podcasting is the new bootlegging.
With iTunes set up to suck podcasts down from the web now, with the very popular iPod highly and firmly installed in an eager consumer base, and with the digital method of music delivery taking more and more power away from the giant, vampiric middle men that are the music industry (an industry that doesn't produce music so much as it does a paid bureaucracy that, in the end, really isn't that into music) and giving it to the artists to produce, niche market, and publicize themselves, Apple may very well have set itself in the position as one of the sole entities existent in the music industry once all the majors collapse. As people and artists become more tech-savvy and realize they don't need the labels, iTunes will be there, still, with its handy podcasting capabilities and the viral nature of bootlegs spreading out across the web building artists' popularity. Not a label, but profiting as a distribution point. There won't be an absolute need to use iTunes, but the iPod will be indispensable. In one version of the future, Apple could be all that is left of the music industry.
Now: Playing
Not About Love
from the album "Extraordinary Machine" by
Fiona Apple
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Self-Employment of the Mind
The days pass lazy like an eye, and it is always easy to find tasks to fill them that do not require you to remember them.
It's commonly held that there is no long-term reward in working for others- the real fulfillment is only cultivated through self-employment, self-reliance, the confident highs extracted from the knowledge of one's own independence.
Of course, self-employment of the conventional variety suffers from the same deficiencies of wage slavery in that it is still a clever passing of time from cradle to grave, delivering a healthy dearth of reasons for carrying on in a culture that still, at least loosely, is based on the myth of progress. Forward motion without goals, without a proper ideology, presents dilemmas to the mind unburdened by sufficient distraction. One successful method for dealing with the outside world of varied ultimate disappointments is to become a hermetic man. Find self-employment in the mind, become a curator of your own private museum of a constant horror.
This method is not uncommon- it is the basis of delusions great and small. When the boundaries perceived do not budge, ignore the fact that you ever perceived anything beyond those frontiers and suppress the moment that you did so. The moment of perfect horror, the moment when you failed to achieve the escape velocity required to lift you from the morass of your life (perceived within the shared and first delusion, progress), that is the moment that will define the curio existence of the hermetic man, that will be the theme of the plan defining the cyclical boundary of the track his life is running on.
The gift of purpose! Even if delusion, what satisfaction one can bring to oneself closing doors and operating on an abbreviated operating system. Authority (the suppression of the knowledge of the lack of omniscience, the invitation to others to populate and cohabitate within the lonely mind), Righteousness (The security guard of the mental Mütter Museum), Ambition (the gift of the whole endeavor and the force assuring the museum stays in operation)- just some of the derivatives of this cottage curio industry's artifice.
On these small stages within these sealed humans all great social action takes place, producing a rich vein of ore for some alien observer to comment on and categorize.
I, for one, fucking love a good cup of coffee in the morning.
It's commonly held that there is no long-term reward in working for others- the real fulfillment is only cultivated through self-employment, self-reliance, the confident highs extracted from the knowledge of one's own independence.
Of course, self-employment of the conventional variety suffers from the same deficiencies of wage slavery in that it is still a clever passing of time from cradle to grave, delivering a healthy dearth of reasons for carrying on in a culture that still, at least loosely, is based on the myth of progress. Forward motion without goals, without a proper ideology, presents dilemmas to the mind unburdened by sufficient distraction. One successful method for dealing with the outside world of varied ultimate disappointments is to become a hermetic man. Find self-employment in the mind, become a curator of your own private museum of a constant horror.
This method is not uncommon- it is the basis of delusions great and small. When the boundaries perceived do not budge, ignore the fact that you ever perceived anything beyond those frontiers and suppress the moment that you did so. The moment of perfect horror, the moment when you failed to achieve the escape velocity required to lift you from the morass of your life (perceived within the shared and first delusion, progress), that is the moment that will define the curio existence of the hermetic man, that will be the theme of the plan defining the cyclical boundary of the track his life is running on.
The gift of purpose! Even if delusion, what satisfaction one can bring to oneself closing doors and operating on an abbreviated operating system. Authority (the suppression of the knowledge of the lack of omniscience, the invitation to others to populate and cohabitate within the lonely mind), Righteousness (The security guard of the mental Mütter Museum), Ambition (the gift of the whole endeavor and the force assuring the museum stays in operation)- just some of the derivatives of this cottage curio industry's artifice.
On these small stages within these sealed humans all great social action takes place, producing a rich vein of ore for some alien observer to comment on and categorize.
I, for one, fucking love a good cup of coffee in the morning.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Friday, October 14, 2005
Homelessness
Further reading today, the essay Shelter for the Homeless by Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) ur-visual culture critic and mass culture critic of Weimar Germany.
The shelter he writes of is that provided to those spiritually homeless denizens of the middle class, those living the lifestyle of the salaried employee. He writes they "are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal to ascertain. (88)" The closest thing they can associate with something "higher" is instead glamour. This shallow version of what there is to attain in life is attained "not through concentration, but in distraction."
The lower middle class escape from their workaday lives, from their horrid existences into the "homeless shelters" of taverns, clubs, department stores, and other houses of social intoxication. They cannot bear their own lives, and so prefer endless distractions, expensive hobbies and entertainment that lets them rub elbows with their image of the lives of leisure of the leisure classes while remaining more or less content enough with their lot to not attempt to actually achieve or usurp the leisure class from its denizens. Kracauer describes this flight into leisure and images of the Weimar middle class as depoliticizing. "The flight into images is a flight from revolution and from death."
The shelter he writes of is that provided to those spiritually homeless denizens of the middle class, those living the lifestyle of the salaried employee. He writes they "are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal to ascertain. (88)" The closest thing they can associate with something "higher" is instead glamour. This shallow version of what there is to attain in life is attained "not through concentration, but in distraction."
The lower middle class escape from their workaday lives, from their horrid existences into the "homeless shelters" of taverns, clubs, department stores, and other houses of social intoxication. They cannot bear their own lives, and so prefer endless distractions, expensive hobbies and entertainment that lets them rub elbows with their image of the lives of leisure of the leisure classes while remaining more or less content enough with their lot to not attempt to actually achieve or usurp the leisure class from its denizens. Kracauer describes this flight into leisure and images of the Weimar middle class as depoliticizing. "The flight into images is a flight from revolution and from death."
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Travels in hyper reality
Doing some research for Manny's monster due in the next couple of weeks on the end of the world, I just finished reading Eco's essay "Travels in Hyper Reality."
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39
Technorati Tags: apocalypse, Eco
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Now tangled in you
Friday, October 07, 2005
The Most Accidental of Tremendous Boobies
I so enjoy this city and the uncounted opportunities it gives for, among so many other desirable things, turning your head innocently at any moment, caught in a world of one's own, on one's way to work, to suddenly plunge the richness of your whole vision into some ample and perfect bosom. Areolas and hosanas, brethren, to the innocent bystander.
Friday, September 30, 2005
This Friday, I wear a new hat?
My experience in the working world thus far, post-grad school, has been a lot like I feared it would be and a lot like it was before. I've been sitting without much of anything to do in any kind of sequence. I've been left to my own devices but regarded questioningly, as those powers who are wonder if they needed to hire me. Today I move to the other side of the office to do some other task I may or may not be required to produce proof of labor on. Money trickles in, money trickles out. It's getting cooler. My joints ache, especially on my typing hands, and I feel the grasshopper of the mind has foolishly used up all his serotonin during endlessly sunny summer days in the voluptuary. A love of sorts perches near my window and watches me lose my taste for excess. The seasons are changing within and without me, and I wonder if I'll ever get to Europe. The days are deceptively endless, and the retarder is heavy with an antenna finger in my third eye. These are the things that humans do, but I have so many questions.
Two Sentence Record Reviews:
Goldfrapp: Supernature.
T. Rex meets Olivia Newton John and Prince (and Eartha Kitt?). Good.
Boards of Canada: The Campfire Headphase
Bibio and Matmos meet BoC. It is clearly wonderful that Varispeed and delay squirts warble their way into this fuzz-trip, deceptively simple sound.
Ladytron: The Witching Hour
My Bloody Valentine and Roxy Music team up with the "If you're 21, you're no fun" krew. Pop a boner in the echoing vocals and pump away with the addition of the rock chug.
Technorati Tags: electronica, record reviews
Thursday, September 29, 2005
I want to read this book.
Deciphering a brave new world:
Legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil considers how artificial intelligence might reshape society.
Legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil considers how artificial intelligence might reshape society.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Blackalicious: The Craft- I Have Ten Minutes
Blackalicious' new project, The Craft, has dropped.
I first heard the Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel on their 2002 outing, Blazing Arrow, and ultra-dense masterwork of collaboration technical layering of tracks, and mixing of soul sensibilities with J5/funk-driven non-syncopated hip-hop. My mind was blown. It was one of the best albums to come out of a summer that gave us Schneider TM's "Zoomer" and Interpol's "Turn On the Bright Lights." The ensuing years haven't, unfortunately, shown us such a glut of quality, powerfully new sounds (I maintain that The National's Alligator remains one of the only albums of the past two years).
This is an album that two prolific and talented genii doted on. It's obvious. Think Funk + Soul + Hip Hop meets 5th dimension and Star Trek. This is an album that will not turn you off, but it is an album that on this second listen, has to be committed to. Xcel's production is tweaked, to say the least- each moment of music contains so much microinformation packed into a reassuring and familiar hip-hop beat that the ear is tempted to pass through the mass of it as the eye over atoms. The album does not appear to have another "First in Flight," a song that immediately and uncompromisingly lifted my attention at a five finger discount on their last album. The Gift of Gab's trademark rhythmic locquaciousness seems to fade into a drone- the spaces where the music's hooks were allowed to take over on the last release don't seem to be rearing their heads on this latest droplet of acrylic.
Keep in mind I am reviewing this record in comparison to my experience of my discovery of this duo- by no means is this album going to be a turn-off in the quality department. It simply doesn't seem to surmount the challenge erected by their last, amazing record, moving musically in nanometers in comparison- lacking the amazing changes and hooks.
Of course, I say this now.
My time is up.
Update:
After another couple of listens, I do have to say that this album is definitely a disappointment in comparison to Blazing Arrow, this record just isn't up to snuff. The trippy 5th Dimension meets Star Trek thing they have going on is cool, and it stands out particularly on the opener World of Vibrations and on The Fall and Rise of Elliot Brown, but most of the record gets lost in conventional beats and a morass of continuously invariably quickened vocals from the Gift of Gab.
[composed and posted with ecto]
Technorati Tags: Hip Hop
Monday, September 26, 2005
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Trying Something New
Just got Ecto to try to beef up my blogging. We'll see how this works out.
Soul Power from the album "Electric Circus" by Common
Soul Power from the album "Electric Circus" by Common
Friday, September 23, 2005
Earthlings colonize the universe with sexual desire:
The Aliens had no idea they wanted it doggy style.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Nerf Balloon Man Treats His Ladies Indifferently
She makes to leave with cold eyelashes, doing not comely. For fair, it is she who may take her leave at her convenience. It computes.
How many steps along in the process further than she does the nerf balloon man behold?
One sees the distance, but one knows one's peg is still planted in the motionless now. He says "the dew on your mascara has gotten fat and tepid, and I feel the gravity of your eyes on me..."
Nerf balloon man spanks her for response, which returns moist and repetitively as it always has. He is behind her again, after all.
"My butterfly, I've fixed you here." Is how he finishes. She, for fair, will be here for years to come.
"You are free, making long at the door, but the danger of bringing your eyes once so close to mine..."
A mouth open is always now, be the eyes however far gone- hers, lovely, not the containment but the expression in wet skin of abundance.
"...I will always come faster than you can go."
How many steps along in the process further than she does the nerf balloon man behold?
One sees the distance, but one knows one's peg is still planted in the motionless now. He says "the dew on your mascara has gotten fat and tepid, and I feel the gravity of your eyes on me..."
Nerf balloon man spanks her for response, which returns moist and repetitively as it always has. He is behind her again, after all.
"My butterfly, I've fixed you here." Is how he finishes. She, for fair, will be here for years to come.
"You are free, making long at the door, but the danger of bringing your eyes once so close to mine..."
A mouth open is always now, be the eyes however far gone- hers, lovely, not the containment but the expression in wet skin of abundance.
"...I will always come faster than you can go."
Monday, September 19, 2005
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Sunday Morning Catches Me Up: Dig Desolation Jones
Listening to a little NPR "On the Media" via podcast.
As for new comics:
Got hold of the first issue of Desolation Jones this week, along with the most recent one, issue #3. Ellis's own commentary on issue #1 can be found here. This is easily one of the most visually captivating tracks on which I've ever set the eye-train running, which it does at bullet speeds. Ish one really put the whole story in place, correcting me on a few misconceptions regarding the plot. Set in some version of the present, not the near future as I had originally thought, L.A. is a sort of open prison for disbarred and out-of-favor members of the world's intelligence community. Jones is former M16, victim and sole survivor of an experiment the depths of the horrors of which have only been partially insinuated called the desolation test. In L.A. he works as a private investigator for this stray dog intelligence community. His existence is hallucinogenic, he is beset by visions and distortions of reality he can't keep at bay- he is the perfect hard-boiled supermodern private dick, a translation of noir into transient modernity. He lives in a world not unlike that encountered in the pages of Algren's New Orleans in A Walk on the Wild Side, a world peopled by the shells of the shells of people, the remainders of those mechanisms that once fulfilled a professional obsession or obligation with all traces of the social dug out of them; these are people who have become forks and who've had a few tines broken off who are then forced to fly back to the world of hugs and brunch. Ellis's theme of hyper-mediation is thoughtfully entertained and expanded in this book. Transmetropolitan explored, in the few compilations I had the good fortune to stumble across a few years ago, what I do not mean to seem derogatory in characterizing as a more superficial exploration of the effects of media on people. In that series, we see the hero, Spider Jerusalem, throwing his hands up in the air as he uses the press to try to get people in the hyper-mediated future to police their humanity and its loss. This book, in the first three issues, seems to be leading us to focus not on identifying with a voice of reason pointing out the decay of people victimised by their own eagerness to be mediated as in Transmetropolitan, but instead on a world without that antebellum voice of reason. This is a world of people ruined by their specializations, people who have tuned in to the million gallons of thought pouring down from the wire and lost vast tracts of themselves because they don't have enough channels in their perception to do something with all information at once. There are no other characters of any other stripe in this book. Though Spider Jerusalem's jaunts were set in the future, the present-day world Michael Jones inhabits is the bleaker, more far-flung.
Pay particular attention to Jones' musing on supermodernism, the mediation of space as a message: You are just passing through, you don't belong here. The characters in this book are a testament to the arrival of our plight in our mediated present- YOU don't belong here. YOU don't belong anywhere. If any part of YOU wants to get through to tomorrow, YOU had best make friends with a profession. And all professions simply use their human mediums to transfer information from one place to another.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Too much good stuff
DMX Krew just released a new cd on Rephlex with very little press. 2xCD entitled "Wave:CD".
Friday, September 16, 2005
Some sounds and interesting stuff (New Boards of Canada...)
New Boards of Canada Track, via Scissorkick.
If you haven't already, you should get hold of the BOC remix of Broken Drum on the latest Beck cd.
Sound wonderfulness from a device called THE INSANIUM.
Spectrasonic releases drum loop collection to benefit victims of Katrina. Page seems to be down, though- maybe bandwidth problems? Here's a story linking to it.
Via Getlofi:
Sounds from hacked Yamaha FM chips here.
If you haven't already, you should get hold of the BOC remix of Broken Drum on the latest Beck cd.
Sound wonderfulness from a device called THE INSANIUM.
Spectrasonic releases drum loop collection to benefit victims of Katrina. Page seems to be down, though- maybe bandwidth problems? Here's a story linking to it.
Via Getlofi:
Sounds from hacked Yamaha FM chips here.
Feeling Shit Getting Multiple with MOOG
Yesterday I Watched MOOG, a recent documentary focusing on the spiritual side of Robert Moog, the man the movie would have you believe invented the whole world's ability to digest the idea of a synthesizer. That would be beautiful if it were true. I wonder if it is. The good people at the Keio Organ Company, also known as KORG, might have something to say about that. At least it never comes out and asserts that he actually invented the synthesizer, an insane proposition that almost everyone is fond of getting behind. Some early synthesizers were actually developed in conjunction with the technology for reproducing the human voice over telephone wires. You think that stuff just happens? That is synthesis, pink one. That's like a vocoder whose distortion we have been taught is simply a signifier of the real, technical anamnesis of the authentic human voice. It's synthesis we've been taught to ignore.
In any event, the movie was good. It focuses on Moog's thoughts on energy and the interconnectedness of all things. He describes his work with the design of synthesizers as a communion between a timeless realm of pure energy and human memory. It is his ingenuity and patience that puts MOOG-branded, oscillator-equipped hash marks on reality, inserts him into the flow of history, into everyone else's history. In naming these machines, as he puts it, it was not his wish to insinuate that the music they made was "synthetic," but that the music was real, that it exists, that it is whole and continuous- every bit as much as the music from conventional instruments. The music was not synthetic, but synthesized- made, irrefutable.
A short conversation excerpted in the movie between Bob Moog and European University professor DJ Spooky explores this same theme of the humanity of synthesized music, the compassion and emotion and the natural flavor it embodies. The Subliminal Kid spoke about his notions on sampling, on the idea that you can take sounds that exists in your memory and as a physical artifact recorded or encoded in something, a sound that remains forever in the time it was recorded (1922, 1950, 2003) and splice all these parts together into a new composition. Memory loses its time-locked sequence, its imprisonment in the past and in its context, its servitude to the limited multi-tasking opportunities provided by THE MOMENT. Notions and concepts remain whole but excerpted, recombined, real and whole and new in a whole new context. Bob saw his own act of bearing witness to the link between concept, URGE, and creation, a process that produced the synthesizers he built and thus enabled musicians to expand their performative capabilities, as a sign of the continuousness of the mental, conceptual realm and the world of the works of hands and days. DJ Spooky saw this same continousness played out in a perceptually adjusted vector, not in the audible expression of the simplest waveforms, but in the recombination through sampling of concepts and energy across time, across format, across the borders between life and death.
In any event, the movie was good. It focuses on Moog's thoughts on energy and the interconnectedness of all things. He describes his work with the design of synthesizers as a communion between a timeless realm of pure energy and human memory. It is his ingenuity and patience that puts MOOG-branded, oscillator-equipped hash marks on reality, inserts him into the flow of history, into everyone else's history. In naming these machines, as he puts it, it was not his wish to insinuate that the music they made was "synthetic," but that the music was real, that it exists, that it is whole and continuous- every bit as much as the music from conventional instruments. The music was not synthetic, but synthesized- made, irrefutable.
A short conversation excerpted in the movie between Bob Moog and European University professor DJ Spooky explores this same theme of the humanity of synthesized music, the compassion and emotion and the natural flavor it embodies. The Subliminal Kid spoke about his notions on sampling, on the idea that you can take sounds that exists in your memory and as a physical artifact recorded or encoded in something, a sound that remains forever in the time it was recorded (1922, 1950, 2003) and splice all these parts together into a new composition. Memory loses its time-locked sequence, its imprisonment in the past and in its context, its servitude to the limited multi-tasking opportunities provided by THE MOMENT. Notions and concepts remain whole but excerpted, recombined, real and whole and new in a whole new context. Bob saw his own act of bearing witness to the link between concept, URGE, and creation, a process that produced the synthesizers he built and thus enabled musicians to expand their performative capabilities, as a sign of the continuousness of the mental, conceptual realm and the world of the works of hands and days. DJ Spooky saw this same continousness played out in a perceptually adjusted vector, not in the audible expression of the simplest waveforms, but in the recombination through sampling of concepts and energy across time, across format, across the borders between life and death.
ADHD
A rundown of a million unrelated things:
Linux for the ipod.
I saw Scarlet Johannsen at Croxley eating 10 cent wings.
Yesterday I got Safety Scissors' Tainted Lunch.
Brian Eno and Cluster's 1977 collaboration, Cluster and Eno has been re-released, so two years after I start looking for it (three?) it is suddenly available to everyone. Hooray.
I am in possession of issue no. 2 of The Winter Men (Зимние Мужчины) and issue no. 3 of Desolation Jones. I read them last night.
There will certainly be more said regarding these.
Can someone please tell me how I can get hold of a copy of Good Sound by Mr. Schmuck's Farm (AKA Schneider TM and a collaborator)? This shit is hard to get hold of if you are me and do not want to order from abroad.
For the time being, that will be all.
Linux for the ipod.
I saw Scarlet Johannsen at Croxley eating 10 cent wings.
Yesterday I got Safety Scissors' Tainted Lunch.
Brian Eno and Cluster's 1977 collaboration, Cluster and Eno has been re-released, so two years after I start looking for it (three?) it is suddenly available to everyone. Hooray.
I am in possession of issue no. 2 of The Winter Men (Зимние Мужчины) and issue no. 3 of Desolation Jones. I read them last night.
There will certainly be more said regarding these.
Can someone please tell me how I can get hold of a copy of Good Sound by Mr. Schmuck's Farm (AKA Schneider TM and a collaborator)? This shit is hard to get hold of if you are me and do not want to order from abroad.
For the time being, that will be all.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Water and Cheese
A quiet evening in a living room, in the apartment where I now reside. Won't find me painting more tonight, I'll let the latex dry another day before I affix the masking tape to the beautful orange walls.
A Tinier World
Blink, Blink:
Your eyes drop twice like ice cubes
and we drop into a tinier world
And you and I and the others simplify
and I'm a martini and you're a gin and tonic and we're all just drinking each from the other
with the customary greeting:
Drink from me, I runneth over.
Your eyes drop twice like ice cubes
and we drop into a tinier world
And you and I and the others simplify
and I'm a martini and you're a gin and tonic and we're all just drinking each from the other
with the customary greeting:
Drink from me, I runneth over.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
a quick list of appropriate protest music
I've been meaning to write this post for about a week, but the new job, the moving, the painting, have all been getting in the way. I am suffering withdrawal from alcohol as I type this, but I am here eating and taking a break from painting for the moment, giving me the opportunity to post. Albums appropriate to the current state of government:
Trans Am: Liberation
Skinny Puppy's single "Tin Omen," done with the help of Alain Jourgenson, auteur of-
Ministry: Twitch, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (and all the other ones pre-filthpig, too, I guess)
Megadebt: Misadventures in Global Desecration
Food For Animals: Scavengers
Ted Leo "The High Party," "Ballad of the Sin-eater"
Free new protest track by TV on the Radio available here.
Short list, but, you know, these things are amendable.
Trans Am: Liberation
Skinny Puppy's single "Tin Omen," done with the help of Alain Jourgenson, auteur of-
Ministry: Twitch, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (and all the other ones pre-filthpig, too, I guess)
Megadebt: Misadventures in Global Desecration
Food For Animals: Scavengers
Ted Leo "The High Party," "Ballad of the Sin-eater"
Free new protest track by TV on the Radio available here.
Short list, but, you know, these things are amendable.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Alarmism
With the deluge come so many new ways for the world to end. Take heart in a new possibility to be right, finally, sexily, with no threat of revisionists hijacking your last words.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Tiny visions of summer
Summer is pulling shut, we've sent the love home and the chlorophyll is seeping away from the surface of things, peeling away as a veneer from the murder beneath. In the soggy south the poor are at each other's throats.
I go to the bar, but I'm tired I will drink water and coke. this weekend I will not drink at all.nor will I smoke.
The Big Easy is underwater. New Orleans has sunk.
Current TV blog coverage here.
Watch your donations, article here.
Excellent interview with Matt Taibbi, formerly of the eXile and, more recently, the New York Press here. Elucidation on the swing right of that free weekly and the disgusting plight of reason under the merciless wheels of ideologically violent christian culture cultists.
I watch the degraded plight of the poor left behind in New Orleans, and a line from the National's "City Middle" keeps running through my head.
"Take me to the nearest major city middle where they hang the lights/where it's random and it's common versus common..."
It is clear and cool in New York City. I am tired and uneasy. Chaos right here in the States is peeling the paint off the illusion of safety, and the poor are left to float downstream.
I go to the bar, but I'm tired I will drink water and coke. this weekend I will not drink at all.nor will I smoke.
The Big Easy is underwater. New Orleans has sunk.
Current TV blog coverage here.
Watch your donations, article here.
Excellent interview with Matt Taibbi, formerly of the eXile and, more recently, the New York Press here. Elucidation on the swing right of that free weekly and the disgusting plight of reason under the merciless wheels of ideologically violent christian culture cultists.
I watch the degraded plight of the poor left behind in New Orleans, and a line from the National's "City Middle" keeps running through my head.
"Take me to the nearest major city middle where they hang the lights/where it's random and it's common versus common..."
It is clear and cool in New York City. I am tired and uneasy. Chaos right here in the States is peeling the paint off the illusion of safety, and the poor are left to float downstream.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Friday, August 26, 2005
Some things I've been thinking myself
The Burning Man festival has always seemed to me to be the ultimate celebration of self-centered behavior, chock full of personal revelations that don't lead to anything. Feelings of being closer to god leading to... nothing! No change, just a return to the grind. God no longer omnipotent but, instead, omnimpotent. I don't get this faux hippie bullshit, revelations not leading you to new heights of understanding of the interconnectivity of all things, just a really far-out way to be into yourself and whatever dramatic, amazing thing you're experiencing... for yourself.(photo found via Warren Ellis' blog)
Mr. Brian Jonestown
Last night on my way to a 2-4-1 happy hour at 151 Rivington we walked past Iggy's, and who should be standing outside broodingly smoking a cigarette in a peasant shirt but the guy from Brian Jonestown Massacre. I proceeded from there to see an entirely shitty apartment in Williamsburg.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Fotki
Son Volt at the South Street Seaport. Hope to have some Ted Leo pics for the free show there this Friday.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
I'm reading The Winter Men
I wandered into Forbidden Planet yesterday to see if the riot of color, fetishized representations of sexy authority and authority confused with sex, and retarded people buying Green Lantern T-Shirts (and not even the old-school, Golden age Green Lantern in a yellow circle on a red background, insignia, either) would overstimulate me into a coma like it's done for the past year or so. It didn't! I ended up picking up two books that jumped out at me, both on Wildstorm. One was Desolation Jones #2, the new series from writer Warren Ellis, and the other a book about the whereabouts of secret Soviet supermen in the present day- The Winter Men. Highly enjoyable, extremely dense. Looking forward to collecting this one.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Podkasting ist rad
For kicks, check out the podcast at Splendid . Also, all entries from 8/12 till this one should be read from bottom to top.
Friday, August 12, 2005
At breakfast we chastise the valkyrie
Having someone else's dreams
drinking someone else's drinks
stuck with your own laundry.
Portishead was rumored to be back in the studio, making dark and fuzzy. Everything in our past is reapproaching; once announced, permanent.
Where is my swiss miss pouring me rivers of warm, fragrant, deep brown coffee from her gravid, gibbous, hell-white cleaves? My parchment-white, hundred-weight serving titaness who shines the light of the world when she turns and bends to pick up my fork.
The breakfast ritual ends in Valhalla with the tipping of maidens and history lessons, shouts of
"Present your singularity!" We begin burned by coffee and we end with our end in the beginning of all things.
drinking someone else's drinks
stuck with your own laundry.
Portishead was rumored to be back in the studio, making dark and fuzzy. Everything in our past is reapproaching; once announced, permanent.
Where is my swiss miss pouring me rivers of warm, fragrant, deep brown coffee from her gravid, gibbous, hell-white cleaves? My parchment-white, hundred-weight serving titaness who shines the light of the world when she turns and bends to pick up my fork.
The breakfast ritual ends in Valhalla with the tipping of maidens and history lessons, shouts of
"Present your singularity!" We begin burned by coffee and we end with our end in the beginning of all things.
Recent Music
Röyksopp: The Understanding
Daddy like. Big, atmospheric sound you can get inside, deep bass, pretty electronics with full, round tones, nice filter sweeps from bwoom to bwaaaaw. Disco exuberance.
Easy Star All-Stars: Dub Side of the Moon
I know this is old. I just heard it a few months ago for the first time, and I really needed to hear it again this week. Hot shit. It is exactly what it sounds like it would be.
La Dusseldorf: La Dusseldorf
I haven't listened to this all the way through yet, but, you know, krauty mechanical sounding stuff from the seventies. "Silver Cloud" tweets happy. "Time" goes on for as long as that expanse goes on, or seems to, burying you in afternoon light. Hooray.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
summer
Everything around me is was and will be drunk for the forseeable future.
I'll tell you anything and forget it just to hear you quote it back to me brand new, like it fell from the perfect slobbering bullhorn lips of the single archetypal orator.
Your thigh landed like a hammer when it brushed against my knee.
I dreamed my back was covered in fur and I spoke in tongues all night last night as I dreamed of your arrival. You are still arriving, arriving two weeks gone, you are scheming for a moment when again you can shiver and rush south like a hot wind of lead. It's not my plan, but still, it is joyous, even if I am disgusted at my own weakness. My hands swim south through you like scorpions, all skeleton, racing like sperm to find you and fix you with the sharpest, hollowest parts of themselves. You arrive banging like a washing machine jumping against the wall, madly humping, love held out over your heart, pointed down your tit like a knife. That's how you get off the bus. That's how you unpack your bags. That's how you insist on reading the story straight, always to the equator, always to the end, the pages tearing where the bones and brads have tacked them, supposedly permanent. Your love becomes a long, singing cleavage as I, the dumb wolf, paw and slobber, the things I've heard men say drooling off my teeth and blackening the pages we have abandoned ourselves to removing, to putting behind us as though we were discarding the shells of aeroplanes.
This isn't our story. This isn't our house. We've been borrowed and told how it's going to end. However many times we run there, however many pages we fix and turn, tearing, we will hit the end aglow like the embers of tuning forks to lie as flat as starfish.
I'll tell you anything and forget it just to hear you quote it back to me brand new, like it fell from the perfect slobbering bullhorn lips of the single archetypal orator.
Your thigh landed like a hammer when it brushed against my knee.
I dreamed my back was covered in fur and I spoke in tongues all night last night as I dreamed of your arrival. You are still arriving, arriving two weeks gone, you are scheming for a moment when again you can shiver and rush south like a hot wind of lead. It's not my plan, but still, it is joyous, even if I am disgusted at my own weakness. My hands swim south through you like scorpions, all skeleton, racing like sperm to find you and fix you with the sharpest, hollowest parts of themselves. You arrive banging like a washing machine jumping against the wall, madly humping, love held out over your heart, pointed down your tit like a knife. That's how you get off the bus. That's how you unpack your bags. That's how you insist on reading the story straight, always to the equator, always to the end, the pages tearing where the bones and brads have tacked them, supposedly permanent. Your love becomes a long, singing cleavage as I, the dumb wolf, paw and slobber, the things I've heard men say drooling off my teeth and blackening the pages we have abandoned ourselves to removing, to putting behind us as though we were discarding the shells of aeroplanes.
This isn't our story. This isn't our house. We've been borrowed and told how it's going to end. However many times we run there, however many pages we fix and turn, tearing, we will hit the end aglow like the embers of tuning forks to lie as flat as starfish.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Son Volt Encores with Cortez the Killer
The ears are still ringing from seeing Son Volt's free outdoor set last night at the South Street Seaport. Being an outdoor show, I had no idea it was going to be so fucking loud. But it was. On the upshot, I can now say I've seen Son Volt, I can say that the new material off Okemah and the Melody of Riot is fantastic (including the psychedelic jammy jam "medication"), and I saw a blistering rendition of "Drown" that made the hair on my arms stand up. They came out for a single-song encore, Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer." They had barely gotten back onstage before Jay Farrar was tearing out the amazing, continuous guitar solo that makes up that song, only occasionally punctuated by haunting lyrics. (He came dancing cross the water...). The new album is a dualdisc, new music on one side, documentary film on the other.
I love seeing truly great musicianship. You couldn't get much tighter than these guys if you were the cooper son of Ra.
I love seeing truly great musicianship. You couldn't get much tighter than these guys if you were the cooper son of Ra.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Friday, July 08, 2005
Giving Birth to Monsters/The Indomitable Nature of Touch
There is a Beulah song, entitled "Calm Go the Wild Seas," that contains the lyric "My prints are unique/you've been touched time and time again."
I like to think that we all function this way, that the events that we are a part of, the actions we take to enable certain things to happen, these stick with us and change us, they shuttle us from then to now. Without them, we wouldn't be anywhen.
These thoughts come back to me in the midst of this prosaic shit and my playing out the part of the downtrodden, when no news is good news. The mail has delivered to me an envelope from Malta containing a postcard advertising the MA Art Exhibition at University of Brighton, the school where my friend Heidi was completing her MA in Fine Arts. The exhibition was entitled "Giving Birth to Monsters." It wasn't a piece of bad news. It wasn't a demand for money. It was a tendril of myself returning home to remind me of who I am and to how many people from out there in the faceless world.
Tender tendrils return to me
touching me
marking trails of toeholds
and fingertips
out in the cold
where in the world
I laid my hands
and left traces indelible
left dents and fingerprints
in my fellow man
that remain
and refuse to be lifted
Thanks for the postcard.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Of $100 Laptops and the Decline of Emor.
Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab is in negotiations with Brazil to provide the country with $100 Linux-based laptops, offering the largely staggeringly poor nation the opportunity to distribute know-how and information to people regardless of social caste, while modern caste-based theocracies like Emor are busy consolidating the power of the state and industry over it and thwarting plans for public-works wi-fi networks (see recent pyrrhic victory of heading off a PBS funding cut only to have a former RNC honcho installed at its head, see freepress for details on the ongoing consolidation of media under fewer and fewer corporate banners). In Emor it isn't enough that you are a human being. It's really quite a handicap. You have to be at the top of the heap and willing to devour as much human flesh as it takes to get there and stay there, either by actively doing or by simply acknowledging that you get ahead while others starve, or you ride the greased ladder to penury and charity before anyone has anything to do with you, before you get that country's hollow hags to look at you. In Brasilia they're giving information, access, know-how to the people, taking them off the gold standard once and for all, closing those cash flow gaps so long convenient to the caste system by ignoring them and moving on to a new currency, one that, even though its adoption was spurred by the need to scrape by and get ahead, is more human. Each person can learn to use the machine, each person's ideas can take form and reshuffle the deck. Access! A country that does not offer its people simply frightened and narrow careerism, cash analogs to human relationships, cash analogs to poetry, cash instead of romance! Cash and the means to get it or nothing at all! A country that does not simply offer protectionist, group-enforced mediocrity! An enormous country.
Would that Emor would recognize the potential of its people with such openness, instead of with restraining, exclusionary fear and in-group schadenfreude. Would that Emor would see its people for people and do a little thing now and then to let the playing field level just a bit.
Would that Emor would recognize the potential of its people with such openness, instead of with restraining, exclusionary fear and in-group schadenfreude. Would that Emor would see its people for people and do a little thing now and then to let the playing field level just a bit.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Friday, July 01, 2005
Senate Approves Repeal of PUHCA
Articles regarding this here and also here. From what the Truthout article leads us to believe, rampant deregulation of the power industry and it's mismanagement by speculators, pyramid schemers, and other types of intestinal paramecia was one of the factors involved in the construction of the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Also influenced were great chroniclers of American life/broken dreams Frank L. Baum, Nelson Algren, and John Steinbeck.
Dead literary hunk, Nelson Algren.
Tall building, the Foshay Tower.
Dead literary hunk, Nelson Algren.
Tall building, the Foshay Tower.
BBC Article On British Author's Book Makes Racist Allusions Connecting Rap Music and Neanderthals ::or:: "I Can See Them Rapping in My Mind"
I especially like the caption under the picture of the rapping guy that says "Have we come very far in the last 50,000 years?".
Booyakasha.
Article is here.
Highlights include:
"Neanderthals would have sounded rather "nasal" in their singing because of their larger noses, Prof Mithen said."
"The Neanderthals would have enjoyed it. They weren't particularly creative people but they would have passed on little songs down the generations."
"It is thought that language, separate from music, developed with modern man's immediate African forebears.
But, according to Prof Mithen, words are not necessary, as long as the tune is good."
"I think they would have particularly liked rap music. It has the sort of effect Neanderthals would have enjoyed."
"I can see them rapping in my mind."
Giving the kids something to do
Bip-Hop, an electronic label out of France, has a nice webzine you can read, among other things.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
People are generally useless, and that's as it should be
I am a media theorist. I'm also a loafer. A guy. A talker. A writer. An electronic musician. A lover.
These things have come about gradually. I'm not actually or intrinsically any of these things out of context.
I also find that, recently, I'm a temporary employee working as an administrative assistant.
On my way to work in the morning I pass all the other people who are probably split pretty evenly between people who are doing a job that is strange to them and outside their area of expertise and those who are doing their job, goddamnit, according to THE PLAN which, goddamnit, exists and doesn't demand contemplation, by GOD. The thing that binds these two groups of people together is the tacit agreement on the idea that people need to serve some kind of purpose in relation to other people. People need a job that assigns them some kind of station.
I don't really get it. Wishful thinking says (and not the morally-degraded notion of wishful thinking that first comes to mind when the term is brought up, the one that is pre-judged as useless because because as things are they can't come to fruition, but just that- thinking that contains an earnest wish) that we should recognize that people are people and they just want to do. As such, those folks who have been specialized out of demand for their talents or those people whose skills set is simply societally redundant to the point that there aren't jobs left for them- these folks should be let to chill on the social dime. A laid-back, non-commercial, non-competitive kibbutz is what the world should be. The truth of the matter is that most people are useless to other people. And they should be. People aren't for other people. So why should a dude such as myself get corralled into fake jobs such as the one I'm doing now just to scrape by when there are so many quality things he is capable of? What the hell am I doing? Overeducated and underqualified and chained to debt. I have to keep looking for better jobs, but the feeling nags at me that there's something in my "me"ness that just isn't commercially viable right now. Can't Uncle Sam send me to the Riviera till something comes up? What does wasting away in an office have to do with the general project of self-improvement? How about a system that apologizes to the individual with perks for not having a use for him or her instead of the individual always scraping to the system- man, that'd be too humane.
I'd really much rather be sunbathing. Or throwing a frisbee. Why can't I get anyone to throw a frisbee this summer?
These things have come about gradually. I'm not actually or intrinsically any of these things out of context.
I also find that, recently, I'm a temporary employee working as an administrative assistant.
On my way to work in the morning I pass all the other people who are probably split pretty evenly between people who are doing a job that is strange to them and outside their area of expertise and those who are doing their job, goddamnit, according to THE PLAN which, goddamnit, exists and doesn't demand contemplation, by GOD. The thing that binds these two groups of people together is the tacit agreement on the idea that people need to serve some kind of purpose in relation to other people. People need a job that assigns them some kind of station.
I don't really get it. Wishful thinking says (and not the morally-degraded notion of wishful thinking that first comes to mind when the term is brought up, the one that is pre-judged as useless because because as things are they can't come to fruition, but just that- thinking that contains an earnest wish) that we should recognize that people are people and they just want to do. As such, those folks who have been specialized out of demand for their talents or those people whose skills set is simply societally redundant to the point that there aren't jobs left for them- these folks should be let to chill on the social dime. A laid-back, non-commercial, non-competitive kibbutz is what the world should be. The truth of the matter is that most people are useless to other people. And they should be. People aren't for other people. So why should a dude such as myself get corralled into fake jobs such as the one I'm doing now just to scrape by when there are so many quality things he is capable of? What the hell am I doing? Overeducated and underqualified and chained to debt. I have to keep looking for better jobs, but the feeling nags at me that there's something in my "me"ness that just isn't commercially viable right now. Can't Uncle Sam send me to the Riviera till something comes up? What does wasting away in an office have to do with the general project of self-improvement? How about a system that apologizes to the individual with perks for not having a use for him or her instead of the individual always scraping to the system- man, that'd be too humane.
I'd really much rather be sunbathing. Or throwing a frisbee. Why can't I get anyone to throw a frisbee this summer?
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Recounting some things, finally just talking about boobs.
I went and saw Elyse play at Lit Lounge last night. Highly enjoyable. She was backed up by Your New Best Friend, a really good band in their own right. I bought a few beers downstairs from the bartender there. They have an interesting system wherein one must pay and order from a dude sitting at the bar and not the barkeep, said barkeep being a warm saccharine plastic tart, white as bone and as thrilling and clean on the eyes as a stick of mentholated gum on the tongue. Her shirt said boy beater. The bouncer-looking fellow received my cash politely and even repeated the order to the girl behind the bar though she was in earshot, though she had been the one I actually addressed with my dipsomaniacal fancies to begin with. What does it mean? I paid the man for the services of a very fine lady.
My enthusiasm got the better of me and I woke up stuttering dumb and probably reeking of alcohol, 3 days of beard growth to corroborate the unblinking cherry tomato eyes I brought to work with me. Not glamorous. The song I'm working on remains unfinished, but closer.
Bearclaw, I learned, is going to be playing at Lit on the 17th, hot on the heels of their recent show with Shellac in Milwaukee.
I have redoubled my job hunting efforts. Idealist.org is pretty cool, as good as a pair of firm space-race rocket cone breasts (the kind that get a slight ski jump bend in the end when they're bare), but not as easy on the eyes. Hell, I guess the only thing this website has in common with a great couple of breasts is that I like both of them.
A friend I met last night at Elyse's show, she of the lovely legs and the catching up over whiskey, confided to me that she met Regina Spektor last night and Regina Spektor has beautiful, otherworldly, astonishing, surprisingly large breasts that no one can take their eyes off of.
Finally, I've decided to become an indian. I figure if it's true that I'm 1/16 native I can probably get membership in a tribe, provided I can determine which tribe it is. If anyone has any resources that would come in handy please help me out by directing me to them. I would also be open to hearing any dirty Kachina doll jokes.
My enthusiasm got the better of me and I woke up stuttering dumb and probably reeking of alcohol, 3 days of beard growth to corroborate the unblinking cherry tomato eyes I brought to work with me. Not glamorous. The song I'm working on remains unfinished, but closer.
Bearclaw, I learned, is going to be playing at Lit on the 17th, hot on the heels of their recent show with Shellac in Milwaukee.
I have redoubled my job hunting efforts. Idealist.org is pretty cool, as good as a pair of firm space-race rocket cone breasts (the kind that get a slight ski jump bend in the end when they're bare), but not as easy on the eyes. Hell, I guess the only thing this website has in common with a great couple of breasts is that I like both of them.
A friend I met last night at Elyse's show, she of the lovely legs and the catching up over whiskey, confided to me that she met Regina Spektor last night and Regina Spektor has beautiful, otherworldly, astonishing, surprisingly large breasts that no one can take their eyes off of.
Finally, I've decided to become an indian. I figure if it's true that I'm 1/16 native I can probably get membership in a tribe, provided I can determine which tribe it is. If anyone has any resources that would come in handy please help me out by directing me to them. I would also be open to hearing any dirty Kachina doll jokes.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
The Musical Baton!
Manny at Sugardisaster hit me this woke-up-late-but-slept-really-great morn with a little thing called a musical baton. The musical baton is this: a set of questions regarding your taste in and current involvement with musique, la musica, ongaku, music. It operates a bit like a chain letter, so you fill it in and pass it on. We are all well socialized in the operation of this sort of conceptual machine. We are so well-oiled. These, for better or for worse, are the ties that bind us to one another.
I give you: The musical baton.
*Total volume of music files on my computer
At this point I have no idea.
BIG YOUTH "Ride Like Lightning: The Best of Big Youth 1972-1976"
Ride like lightning and you'll crash like thunder. Hunnnnnnnnh!
*Song playing right now
I'm at work and I'm a little overstimulated these past couple of days, so I haven't been listening to much music. The last song I really listened to- Sunday, I think- was "Discreet Music" by Brian Eno.
That's a lie. I just remembered that yesterday I got on the train to meet Joe for some Joe at Bread and Chocolate (only to find it closed for construction, its normally open and inviting confines obstructed by the detritus of transformational accoutrements, it's atypically shadowy dining area dancing to the strobe of an acetylene torch) and needed to listen to "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)("I feel numb/born with a weak heart/but I guess I must be having fun")," followed by "The Nice People Argument" by Ted Leo ("And brother, they just won't listen/so you've got to choose your side/all your talk is just so much pissing/if you're just along for the ride"). In fact I just put that on my ipod for another listen. I guess that's what I'm listening to, but I wasn't when I began this. Digitally mediated narration means the end of linear self-description if you're honest.
*Five songs (albums) I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me.
Ok.
Ok.
This is getting difficult. Acts of inclusion are always acts of exclusion. Ask me at any other day and time and my amoebic mind may have encompassed a wholly otherwise distinguished version of the canon. Caveat in place, know that I am cheating as I continue with...
Now that I've done that I know that I've left something out.
Shit.
* Three people to whom I'm passing the baton
Ok. whitehothouse, nightscenestealers, and pyani.
Manny also saw fit to add a question to compensate for the fact the last question was not really a question. The question he put to me was:
* If you could eat any meal of the day with any 3 artists (alive or dead), what meal, what kind of food, and which artists?
1. Dostoevsky, breakfast, Strong black tea, sproti on buttered bread, breakfast at a cafe on a canal in St. Petersburg
2. Henry Miller, Late lunch, cabbage soup followed by several bottles of wine with a view on a park or a plaza or a river or a teeming profligance of life and furtive, living stupidity.
3. Me, Lunch or early dinner, Ramen or some kind of cold -men out of doors. Beer.
That's what I got.
I give you: The musical baton.
*Total volume of music files on my computer
At this point I have no idea.
*Last CD I bought
BIG YOUTH "Ride Like Lightning: The Best of Big Youth 1972-1976"
Ride like lightning and you'll crash like thunder. Hunnnnnnnnh!
*Song playing right now
I'm at work and I'm a little overstimulated these past couple of days, so I haven't been listening to much music. The last song I really listened to- Sunday, I think- was "Discreet Music" by Brian Eno.
That's a lie. I just remembered that yesterday I got on the train to meet Joe for some Joe at Bread and Chocolate (only to find it closed for construction, its normally open and inviting confines obstructed by the detritus of transformational accoutrements, it's atypically shadowy dining area dancing to the strobe of an acetylene torch) and needed to listen to "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)("I feel numb/born with a weak heart/but I guess I must be having fun")," followed by "The Nice People Argument" by Ted Leo ("And brother, they just won't listen/so you've got to choose your side/all your talk is just so much pissing/if you're just along for the ride"). In fact I just put that on my ipod for another listen. I guess that's what I'm listening to, but I wasn't when I began this. Digitally mediated narration means the end of linear self-description if you're honest.
*Five songs (albums) I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me.
Ok.
Ok.
"
1. BRIAN ENO "Another Green World
2. SHELLAC "At Action Park", "Terraform"
3. ERLEND OYE "Unrest"
4. NEW ORDER "Power, Corruption, and Lies"
This is getting difficult. Acts of inclusion are always acts of exclusion. Ask me at any other day and time and my amoebic mind may have encompassed a wholly otherwise distinguished version of the canon. Caveat in place, know that I am cheating as I continue with...
5. ...A Four-way toss-up between TED LEO "Tej(?) Leo/Rx Pharmacists"
HARMONIA "Deluxe"
LES SAVY FAV "Go Forth"
and THE REPLACEMENTS "Tim"
Now that I've done that I know that I've left something out.
Shit.
* Three people to whom I'm passing the baton
Ok. whitehothouse, nightscenestealers, and pyani.
Manny also saw fit to add a question to compensate for the fact the last question was not really a question. The question he put to me was:
* If you could eat any meal of the day with any 3 artists (alive or dead), what meal, what kind of food, and which artists?
1. Dostoevsky, breakfast, Strong black tea, sproti on buttered bread, breakfast at a cafe on a canal in St. Petersburg
2. Henry Miller, Late lunch, cabbage soup followed by several bottles of wine with a view on a park or a plaza or a river or a teeming profligance of life and furtive, living stupidity.
3. Me, Lunch or early dinner, Ramen or some kind of cold -men out of doors. Beer.
That's what I got.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Do not wait for halcyon days
Manny has his hitching pics up, a hello from one of the most beautiful places on earth. A friendly reminder to not let grass grow under your feet.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
A small oasis of sanity
New York passes bill to allow the "morning after" pill without prescription.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=873882&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=873882&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Get Perpendicular On this Fucking Dance Floor
Technology is cool, but not this cool.
Watch hard drives and little magnetic bits break it down here.
I really don't know what to say about this. There's a guy working for Hitachi who was paid to write the line "we need expanded membership, but that would make us flip, causing an end that's too abrupt, because our data is corrupt.
"Hey, is that actuator man?"
Watch hard drives and little magnetic bits break it down here.
I really don't know what to say about this. There's a guy working for Hitachi who was paid to write the line "we need expanded membership, but that would make us flip, causing an end that's too abrupt, because our data is corrupt.
"Hey, is that actuator man?"
Thursday, June 09, 2005
"Neither the Heavens are Humane, nor is life above or below - or within me."
- Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude
"The bull of the days is skewbald
the cart of the years is slow
Our god is speed
the heart is our drum"
- V. Mayakovsky, Our March
Long-suffering Slavs
and Slavophiles
overwhelmed by the menageries
of of shit and divinity
understand very well
rapports as pipelines-
the agency of he who suffers
and his mistress,
the chemical become his mind;
understand very well
that so many angels dancing
on the head of a pin
is dazzling,
but the single angel perched on the needle's tip,
in her rarefied state of companionship,
is an edifying object of study.
She does not dizzy, but appears to illuminate.
He who aspires to intelligence
knows this single angel
better than the passage of years
that has flung him through
his life in hyper-stimulation,
and the scent given off
by the angel's arm on a warm day
comes clearly, and appears true
to one of such heart
who feels so daily confused
and between his positions.
"The bull of the days is skewbald
the cart of the years is slow
Our god is speed
the heart is our drum"
- V. Mayakovsky, Our March
Long-suffering Slavs
and Slavophiles
overwhelmed by the menageries
of of shit and divinity
understand very well
rapports as pipelines-
the agency of he who suffers
and his mistress,
the chemical become his mind;
understand very well
that so many angels dancing
on the head of a pin
is dazzling,
but the single angel perched on the needle's tip,
in her rarefied state of companionship,
is an edifying object of study.
She does not dizzy, but appears to illuminate.
He who aspires to intelligence
knows this single angel
better than the passage of years
that has flung him through
his life in hyper-stimulation,
and the scent given off
by the angel's arm on a warm day
comes clearly, and appears true
to one of such heart
who feels so daily confused
and between his positions.
Sunday, June 05, 2005
the dumb scorch of a distant and very constant sun
My silence has been professionally necessary, as I can now say that all the pieces are in place for the next phase. Suffice it to say that I reel from the dumb scorch of a very distant and constant sun (that speechless gaze), that all mysteries assure us they will only tie their secret knots fast, more tightly and more impossibly to confound the Chinese, and those to my flesh. Sometimes you wake up next to a French girl, and you watch the girl quietly dress and try to sneak out at 5:30 in the morning. You begin to wonder, and the wonder is a signal and you know that the plan is in place and working perfectly. What unknowable ritual is this? Why, when the Americans are content to lie about all morning in hopes something more will be on offer when the world has been warmed and its evening silence is civilized with the madness of motion and conversation (the STUTTERING and the SCREAMING and the constance of emergencies being carted from one locale to another more appropriate in red boxes!)?
I see eyes. Great, blue eyes with the lines of preternatural age that go to water as I feel myself and my questions slacken. It was unnecessary to take the ergot HQ provided, the holistic approach has found the intended visions presenting themselves printed out of air into my thinning arms. She could be a quiet French au pair on a holiday reprieve from her Allentown place of work, she could be a 16-year-old Polish girl from Brooklyn who speaks excellent French and wants to lie to someone.
Send cigarettes. Send money. Send sunscreen. These bottles here have nothing but butts and ashes in them. Send me a diversion, because as she left she left her ring, and I know she'll come back for it. I'll never be told if it was an accident or if she meant it. These questions, as I was warned, are torture. I go to take the coffee cure.
The glamour of my penury, as my job search continues, is hysterical.
I see eyes. Great, blue eyes with the lines of preternatural age that go to water as I feel myself and my questions slacken. It was unnecessary to take the ergot HQ provided, the holistic approach has found the intended visions presenting themselves printed out of air into my thinning arms. She could be a quiet French au pair on a holiday reprieve from her Allentown place of work, she could be a 16-year-old Polish girl from Brooklyn who speaks excellent French and wants to lie to someone.
Send cigarettes. Send money. Send sunscreen. These bottles here have nothing but butts and ashes in them. Send me a diversion, because as she left she left her ring, and I know she'll come back for it. I'll never be told if it was an accident or if she meant it. These questions, as I was warned, are torture. I go to take the coffee cure.
The glamour of my penury, as my job search continues, is hysterical.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Wearied by the ferocious depth of my rest
I awoke to find that all signs point to "yes"
I awoke with hair on my chest and blood in my stool
A vicious coif and morning breath
I also awoke to find that the number of artists in my itunes has reached "1337." I fear to add more. This is a sign of some kind.
I awoke with hair on my chest and blood in my stool
A vicious coif and morning breath
I also awoke to find that the number of artists in my itunes has reached "1337." I fear to add more. This is a sign of some kind.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
My Fever Dream
When I sleep in pain
I dream I am in love
with the unlikliest people
and, dangerously, I awake believing
it's all possible
I dream I am in love
with the unlikliest people
and, dangerously, I awake believing
it's all possible
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Friday, May 13, 2005
I have done it
I finished my thesis yesterday. Throw yourselves upon me, all ye virgins and hot babies or I will make the volcano erupt.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Make Bereev
Go ahead. Make believe you don't think this is the best Weezer since Pinkerton. Rivers is Hollering and belting shit out again. This shit is in earnest.
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