Today a television advertisement told me "kids' pink- it does more than you think.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
The Incredibly Long and Fruitless Commute of Mia De Capatista
Mia De Capatista lived for only one day. She would wake days and weeks before the sun had remembered itself to everyone. There were always two of her, two of her to redouble her worries. There was Mia, rising in anticipation of the repetition of her day, waiting in the performance of her ablutions in chronology's anteroom. There was Mia, proceeding dutifully about her day's ministrations. She was unhappy for two reasons: First, She, though uncommonly talented in that regard, had no one to love. Second, she, being a smart girl, could find nothing to assuage her of the futility she felt when she questioned her creator as to why such a young and vibrant creature should be given only one day whose call to await and whose disappointments and travails to encounter over and over without fail.
She kept a room in an ethereal ghetto called Bronks that flew above an island called Manahatta, which itself floated on the sea- it being the province of all girls with unreal fates. Each morning when her day, who was also her master, would, finally, call, she would emerge from her room dressed and perfected for presentation. She would proceed to a station of the metro and descend on a long and otherwise unridden train alone to the island below. The commute would tax the day of its supply of hours so that it was nearly dusk when she arrived, and she had nothing but drifting piles of tabloid newspapers to, not exactly pass the time, but at least stultify her as she rode. On her arrival she would make directly to a bar in midtowne, the place where she drew her day's pay. There she aided people, with her guile, with elixirs and lethe water, with the loudly trumpeting bloom of her young sex, in forgetting how they had gotten to where they were. She saw people there whose days were each new, pulling them off in new directions (aging them all too quickly, but they didn't seem to mind).
Under this bar, out of the view of the patrons, on a shelf on a level with her knees, were a row of semi-spherical objects twitching in the shadow of a partial obscurity. These were the quaking, undying heads of her suitors, numbering then 18, and there was ever space on the shelf for additions.
Mia's unbearable fate was unique even among those born into the strange prenatal contracts consigning them to the unseen, but not unfelt, shtetl where she lived, for her curse was not limited to having been afforded only one day to live and wait on as a handmaiden. It was compounded by the measures her day and master took to assure that she would never escape him. Her master's penalty for presuming to the station of one of her beaus was a sudden and painless denial of the suitor's body, resulting in a life lived forever after, undying, as a head on a shelf beneath her bar.
Notwithstanding its persistence in visitation or its jealousness of the beautiful 18-year-old Mia, her single day and master's blighted craft was proven all the more diabolical with the observation, as it became difficult to avoid making with detachment once eyes were laid on her, that, with such a curse in place, his Mia was the perfect device for amassing a collection of undying, lovelorn heads that would never fail to appreciate in quantity. Mia, for her part, had a penchant for rescue woven into her character that led men into her trap. It was no secret to her day and master that she wished to hie away from him and begin anew, and those patrons who made the ill-advised transformation from patron to suitor were well aware of her need for this and were drawn by it.
"You only have to be 18 to serve, but I usually don't tell people- sometimes people aren't comfortable with it, you know? But it's OK, you know, because we're talking." She would sparkle with a contained sadness, a martyrdom whose building discomfort only the perpetually young can sustain, flirting.
"I moved out when I was 17, I haven't had it good, but, you know. I'm working for awhile and saving for college," as she would lean closer, her words dreaming the symbols of the future.
If the suitor had found enough of his own unhappiness in the various days he had been given, and if Mia had given him enough drink to forget himself, he might feel called on by his need for ennoblement to rescue the poor, hopeless specimen from her long, hard-luck bad day-the quietly abided fate given to so many pretty girls.
It was unclear what her eternal day and keeper considered the punishable infraction, what signified an irreversible mistake of infatuation, but, ultimately, once a suitor had resolved to befriend the youth with a mind to reforming both his and her lives in the shape of a happy dream, redeeming all with some kind of rescue, His body and all his attachments to the world would vanish in the instant and his head would fall to the the bar he was leaning over, suddenly without the under-standing of its body. Mia would quickly and sadly place the man's head beneath the bar and clean up his traces before other patrons noticed anything, kissing the heavy thing lightly, out of sight, near where she washed the glasses. The confused head, for its part, was ever unable to cry out, deprived of its lungs and voice.
A pretty girl from the home of nightmares, Mia was no different than most. Even as her day gripped her and her prospects, her special awareness of her fate kept her locked within it, and she was forever taking heads and losing loves, wondering when her awful day would end. The heads, with suffocated voices, (if they came to themselves again) were trying to tell her, still gallant in their mission of rescue-
"Mia, tomorrow is over there. Don't come back."
"My love, don't come back."
She kept a room in an ethereal ghetto called Bronks that flew above an island called Manahatta, which itself floated on the sea- it being the province of all girls with unreal fates. Each morning when her day, who was also her master, would, finally, call, she would emerge from her room dressed and perfected for presentation. She would proceed to a station of the metro and descend on a long and otherwise unridden train alone to the island below. The commute would tax the day of its supply of hours so that it was nearly dusk when she arrived, and she had nothing but drifting piles of tabloid newspapers to, not exactly pass the time, but at least stultify her as she rode. On her arrival she would make directly to a bar in midtowne, the place where she drew her day's pay. There she aided people, with her guile, with elixirs and lethe water, with the loudly trumpeting bloom of her young sex, in forgetting how they had gotten to where they were. She saw people there whose days were each new, pulling them off in new directions (aging them all too quickly, but they didn't seem to mind).
Under this bar, out of the view of the patrons, on a shelf on a level with her knees, were a row of semi-spherical objects twitching in the shadow of a partial obscurity. These were the quaking, undying heads of her suitors, numbering then 18, and there was ever space on the shelf for additions.
Mia's unbearable fate was unique even among those born into the strange prenatal contracts consigning them to the unseen, but not unfelt, shtetl where she lived, for her curse was not limited to having been afforded only one day to live and wait on as a handmaiden. It was compounded by the measures her day and master took to assure that she would never escape him. Her master's penalty for presuming to the station of one of her beaus was a sudden and painless denial of the suitor's body, resulting in a life lived forever after, undying, as a head on a shelf beneath her bar.
Notwithstanding its persistence in visitation or its jealousness of the beautiful 18-year-old Mia, her single day and master's blighted craft was proven all the more diabolical with the observation, as it became difficult to avoid making with detachment once eyes were laid on her, that, with such a curse in place, his Mia was the perfect device for amassing a collection of undying, lovelorn heads that would never fail to appreciate in quantity. Mia, for her part, had a penchant for rescue woven into her character that led men into her trap. It was no secret to her day and master that she wished to hie away from him and begin anew, and those patrons who made the ill-advised transformation from patron to suitor were well aware of her need for this and were drawn by it.
"You only have to be 18 to serve, but I usually don't tell people- sometimes people aren't comfortable with it, you know? But it's OK, you know, because we're talking." She would sparkle with a contained sadness, a martyrdom whose building discomfort only the perpetually young can sustain, flirting.
"I moved out when I was 17, I haven't had it good, but, you know. I'm working for awhile and saving for college," as she would lean closer, her words dreaming the symbols of the future.
If the suitor had found enough of his own unhappiness in the various days he had been given, and if Mia had given him enough drink to forget himself, he might feel called on by his need for ennoblement to rescue the poor, hopeless specimen from her long, hard-luck bad day-the quietly abided fate given to so many pretty girls.
It was unclear what her eternal day and keeper considered the punishable infraction, what signified an irreversible mistake of infatuation, but, ultimately, once a suitor had resolved to befriend the youth with a mind to reforming both his and her lives in the shape of a happy dream, redeeming all with some kind of rescue, His body and all his attachments to the world would vanish in the instant and his head would fall to the the bar he was leaning over, suddenly without the under-standing of its body. Mia would quickly and sadly place the man's head beneath the bar and clean up his traces before other patrons noticed anything, kissing the heavy thing lightly, out of sight, near where she washed the glasses. The confused head, for its part, was ever unable to cry out, deprived of its lungs and voice.
A pretty girl from the home of nightmares, Mia was no different than most. Even as her day gripped her and her prospects, her special awareness of her fate kept her locked within it, and she was forever taking heads and losing loves, wondering when her awful day would end. The heads, with suffocated voices, (if they came to themselves again) were trying to tell her, still gallant in their mission of rescue-
"Mia, tomorrow is over there. Don't come back."
"My love, don't come back."
Thursday, January 12, 2006
H_________d
Thank you, Mr. Tweedy, for:
his goal in life was
to be an echo
the type of sound that falls around and then back down
like a feather
but in the deep chrome canyons
of the loudest manhattans
no one could hear him
or anything...
He slept in the mountains
in a sleeping bag underneath the stars
he would lie awake and count them
but the great fountain spray
of the great milky way
would never let him
die alone
(so he said)
remember to remember me
standing still in your past
floating fast like a hummingbird
his goal in life was
to be an echo
the type of sound that falls around and then back down
like a feather
but in the deep chrome canyons
of the loudest manhattans
no one could hear him
or anything...
He slept in the mountains
in a sleeping bag underneath the stars
he would lie awake and count them
but the great fountain spray
of the great milky way
would never let him
die alone
(so he said)
remember to remember me
standing still in your past
floating fast like a hummingbird
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
what's been happenin'
I've been writing quite a few poems, working on some fiction, listening to Belle and Sebastian, negotiating the formation of a Smiths cover band, buying and selling books far in excess of my ability to read them, much less process the worlds and the implications of the points of view within. I've been listening to Japanese rock (Toddle, Ogre You Asshole, Niumun), still turning people on to The National.
Now Playing If You Find Yourself Caught In Love from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
I'd like to go to a reading or two, put my average heart on my what would be, but for my exceeding naivete and self-centered nature, average sleeve. As it is, any readings/slams/etc I attend I would have to attend with the mismatched pair of my average heart and these threadbare and motley sleeves of pointless ostentation.
Now Playing If She Wants Me from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
I found the book unreadable- it was either me or the translation- but there is an Oe Kenzaburo book, I think it's a short-story collection- called "Help Us to Overcome Our Madness." I like to think about the title when I think about how 95% of what I do, at least, even at its most sincere, is bailing water from my unnecessary blunders, or the unthinking creation of new subtle barriers to sincerity.
Now Playing You Don't Send Me from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
Above all, people need a long time, even to get it wrong.
Dostoevsky was an interesting one, one of these freaks of empathy able to flesh out all the furthest folded reaches of the human soul. You don't see many authors like him anymore, strange in this age of total information awareness, stranger when you contrast this age with his natal era. A lot of my favorite authors seem to work up to a single idea as they plow and occasionally plod through their careers, book by book. Ellis? How many times did he write American Psycho before he wrote it?
Who else? I don't know. Perhaps I'm talking out of my ass.
Now Playing I'm A Cuckoo from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
Here's to winning!
Now Playing Nothing In The Silence from the album "John Peel Radio 1 Session " by Belle & Sebastian
Now Playing If You Find Yourself Caught In Love from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
I'd like to go to a reading or two, put my average heart on my what would be, but for my exceeding naivete and self-centered nature, average sleeve. As it is, any readings/slams/etc I attend I would have to attend with the mismatched pair of my average heart and these threadbare and motley sleeves of pointless ostentation.
Now Playing If She Wants Me from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
I found the book unreadable- it was either me or the translation- but there is an Oe Kenzaburo book, I think it's a short-story collection- called "Help Us to Overcome Our Madness." I like to think about the title when I think about how 95% of what I do, at least, even at its most sincere, is bailing water from my unnecessary blunders, or the unthinking creation of new subtle barriers to sincerity.
Now Playing You Don't Send Me from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
Above all, people need a long time, even to get it wrong.
Dostoevsky was an interesting one, one of these freaks of empathy able to flesh out all the furthest folded reaches of the human soul. You don't see many authors like him anymore, strange in this age of total information awareness, stranger when you contrast this age with his natal era. A lot of my favorite authors seem to work up to a single idea as they plow and occasionally plod through their careers, book by book. Ellis? How many times did he write American Psycho before he wrote it?
Who else? I don't know. Perhaps I'm talking out of my ass.
Now Playing I'm A Cuckoo from the album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian
Here's to winning!
Now Playing Nothing In The Silence from the album "John Peel Radio 1 Session " by Belle & Sebastian
Friday, January 06, 2006
Police Cat!
Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles, police cat, is remembered today at a memorial service being held at Walton Mortuary from 10 am until 1 pm. Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles was best known among the force for his sense of humor, his tendency to step on all the cop radio buttons and siren controls when the officers he was partnered with were alseep in the cruiser.
Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles was also part of a controversy several years ago, as it became clear that, when women officers became pregnant and before they left for maternity leave, the cat would have to go on sabbatical, so as not to infect the expectant with cat scratch fever or rare, mood-altering toxoplasmoids from his filthy kitty law enforcement paws.
Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles, you will be missed.
Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles was also part of a controversy several years ago, as it became clear that, when women officers became pregnant and before they left for maternity leave, the cat would have to go on sabbatical, so as not to infect the expectant with cat scratch fever or rare, mood-altering toxoplasmoids from his filthy kitty law enforcement paws.
Tyrone "Harry Potter" Buckles, you will be missed.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Scenes from a diorama of tomorrow's world
...We piled into great earthships, huddled knees to necks in fast to-home ships, away, heavy with the promise of promise and promises to keep. No more the music of the spheres whose cadence to careen to, undulatory threads of light worn on our skins, but to the basics, to the beginning. To the brown nucleus we rushed, heeding light's pure admonitory instruction now understood: now not inviting, not beckoning, not free of encoding, but clearly, the stars were screaming, "flee- exeunt- away- to the mud, away from the stars."
The backwards fired light of a ship fired homeward burned some of us on the front, for our wistfulness drew us aft to see off our youth, and some of us on the back, for we were making already for bed.
Our flagship, our rusty hurtling can, was abbreviated in its regression full on the side, T-boned by the white, white moon, our earth mother's swat. Her empty nest was not advertising rooms for let, and the USS Heavy Retarder's trajectory was elided. She foundered side over side and hurt, but yet into the marble we first crouched on, Terra Firma. Goode Olde Worlde.
None were allowed by fortune to die on the Heavy Retarder, but we did find ourselves forever changed crashed deep in the mud of our first genesis, aching and sleeping in the awning of mud and, finally, lowered expectations. Those sons and daughters of heaven who found heaven too resplendent slipped, gymnosporous, into the eternal nap of a race's final convalescent groan for the sentenced duration of 1,000 forevers, free, at last, of the crushing expectations of mad and empty, needy and clinging, endless, endlessly promising and omnipossible space.
We and custom slept ever more deeply into the, conversely, crowded mud, we dull and slower children of heaven, we, promise's prodigals cast off.
The backwards fired light of a ship fired homeward burned some of us on the front, for our wistfulness drew us aft to see off our youth, and some of us on the back, for we were making already for bed.
Our flagship, our rusty hurtling can, was abbreviated in its regression full on the side, T-boned by the white, white moon, our earth mother's swat. Her empty nest was not advertising rooms for let, and the USS Heavy Retarder's trajectory was elided. She foundered side over side and hurt, but yet into the marble we first crouched on, Terra Firma. Goode Olde Worlde.
None were allowed by fortune to die on the Heavy Retarder, but we did find ourselves forever changed crashed deep in the mud of our first genesis, aching and sleeping in the awning of mud and, finally, lowered expectations. Those sons and daughters of heaven who found heaven too resplendent slipped, gymnosporous, into the eternal nap of a race's final convalescent groan for the sentenced duration of 1,000 forevers, free, at last, of the crushing expectations of mad and empty, needy and clinging, endless, endlessly promising and omnipossible space.
We and custom slept ever more deeply into the, conversely, crowded mud, we dull and slower children of heaven, we, promise's prodigals cast off.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
The most interesting thing about Madonna's career ...
The most interesting thing about Madonna's career is that she was a primadonna before her career even got off the ground.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Friday, December 23, 2005
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Due to Unforeseen Circumstances that Make all Rationalization Bullshit,
I'm posting an essay I wrote that doesn't take into consideration a second level of real suffering brought on by first-level societal moral panic. That is, what sort of discussion do we need to have when the panic of one group puts another in a real tight spot for an indefinite amount of time? It's an incoherent romp through that first level of all o'it, tho. This content will be removed from the web when the extenuating circumstances that prevented, thus far, the intended publication from coming out with its most recent addition are demoted in their bedlamist priority, and all important parties are embraced again by the arms reason and of moral panic's resolution.
Pop Life and the Ergonomics of Dread
Pop Life and the Ergonomics of Dread
Monday, December 19, 2005
Is the Heart the Only Dynamo?
"Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes all the conditions are right, but no catalyst steps in to perfect the potentialities. Sometimes the most important variable/vector that people leave out of their master plans is time, circumstance in sequence..."
Murakami sat down with two sweating dai-bins of Kirin 一番 (Ichi-ban) in a sack and three small glasses (juice glasses?) his jeans were new, and he was wearing a warm-looking cardigan sweater. He pulled one of the bottles out of the perfectly ordinary brown paper sack, popped the top off with a church key he had secreted in his front jeans pocket. He had been listening to me spout advice from the kitchen where he had been making and consuming ham sandwiches for one hundred forty-three millenia, sandwiches with individually-wrapped pieces of cheese and white bread gravid with mayonnaise. Sometimes they were egg salad sandwiches, but the activity and the devourer remained constant. Tanizaki was just outside the room on the balcony, sitting by a low table in his 甚平, (Jinbei), looking out over Manhattan. I couldn't tell if he was listening.
"I'm just trying to wean us off of our old relationship. I know it will take some time, if it works, but the key is to seep into her slowly... normally..."
His strategy.
"Like water into rock- reminds me of something a poet once wrote," I began, taking another opportunity to be verbose, "We are the ghosts of water, hiding in rock... something about geodes and the works of man on man. There was a nice metaphor comparing having teeth in one's head to being in possession of a rock full of knives."
My friend was becoming impatient with my need to get off topic, and Murakami sipped his beer resignedly.
"We know you're talking about yourself," he chastened.
He was right. If Murakami only taught me one thing, it was to just write it all down. All of it. No one wants to be tortured mid-pow-wow with the wishful remembrances of half-poems you only thought about writing. But give anyone all of anything that occurs to you anytime and you have a career.
I've failed as a writer.
My friend:
"You see what I'm saying, though? You know I'm not necessarily talking to hear advice?"
One version of poetry holds that the simple observation of completeness is itself a work of art. Beheld with those eyes, all is complete in an instant, and all judgment is exchanged for forgiveness. God, to see with the mercy of the sculptor's eyes, he who sees the embryo of genius already embedded in simpleton stone.
"I know. Go on."
But it was Murakami who picked up the thread of conversation, refilling our glasses in the golden light of the afternoon, hypnotizing with that light made more golden as it passed through the beer he had raised to his lips, light pressed also through the slow fluid silicate vessels we saw as solid, yet invisible, objects.
"It's true, what I think he's getting at, though. Whether or not it works, in the end, well..."
He paused to enjoy the cold beer in his mouth immensely. The "he", of course, was referring to me.
"In the end, I suppose there's not always anything you can do about it either way. Do you really want to be invested in something like that?"
He directed the question to my friend.
I knew Murakami would show his colors eventually, finally betraying his serenity for a willful and trite nihilism, but I didn't relish being lumped in with him like that, having him use me to justify him.
But the respect I felt for him, I had to make some final show of deference before giving up on him entirely.
"Is that really your lesson, Haruki, if I may call you that?"
He winked.
"...Or are is your serenity an act of didactic wrongdoing? Is your quietude and your opposition to response, surprise, all of it, supposed to feel wrong? You sit there eating sandwiches and drinking beers, so many hundreds of them since I've known you, and you can tell me what each of them was made of, how fat the dew collected on the outside of the glasses. Goat-men, dreams, fealty to loss, fealty to victimhood- you die in such extravagant wonderlands. Methinks you don't protest too much"
Murakami put his glass down on the table, only partially to the left of a ring of condensation already evaporating and losing its definition. He smiled and opened the other bottle, poured again. There was no man here, here instead was a method writ large, a temple of impossible alien machination on a dimly-lit planet. Were these things (the bend of the elbow, the massive, that is heavy, grin, the precision) intelligence or its ancestors? Human kin or monument?
He said nothing.
Tanizaki, without turning, put down the glass of sake he was sipping and began a discourse on the value of- the PRESENTATION of- the unseen.
"Junichiro, we've read your "In Praise of Shadows." We are trying to uncover things here as they are, not as we imagine them to be."
My friend was smoking now, pausing after the smoke had filtered into his lungs, and exhaling. "I don't know. I don't want to make a big deal of this, I just want it to go right. There's no reason to get hopes up when what I want might not even be the best thing. I'm not looking for advice."
"She is uncommonly beautiful, though, is she not?"
I had built up a fantasy of the girl in my mind, and she was tits and ass, she was cleavage and the power invested in that space, she was the bounty of youth and adventurous mercy between refractory periods. That is to say, I didn't know this girl.
"Don't go the way Murakami might be telling you to be ok with going, whether or not he'll tell us if he's for or against us. The industry of the will, uh, that is, desire becomes the driving, justifying force in all human relations only willingly."
Tanizaki: "You love to hate yourself. Finish a poem for once, or admit that, for you, divorce from achievement is itself achievement and that it leaves you sated. The things you say make no sense, otherwise."
My friend had begun to read. The last afternoon sun had slid a ransom note beneath the door. Tanizaki may have fallen asleep immediately following his outburst.
Fearing the worst, fearing Murakami might go back into the eternal kitchen and stand by the sink eating sandwiches, fearing my friend might leave to brood elsewhere without resolution, I recited loudly:
I need you,
but impassively.
I have made the decision
to need the regard
of your softened aspect.
Desire is the single motive force
but willingly.
"That is, it is only agency and ownership of events, right or wrong, that let anything really happen as opposed to simple occurrence."
Murakami:
"But, you were saying, Time is the most important unacknowledged medium for love?"
"I'm saying that you have to take up agency, and that a part of that is acknowledging the possibility of loss, but not resignation to it."
"But what was the metaphor you used earlier? 'Getting the message of love from one heart to another is like making a cross-country telephone call- something with enough juice has to push that lightning across the miles of wires, the miles and yards of days/weeks/years before it arrives... Is the heart the only dynamo that can power the message across so many invisible miles of years strung out above our heads? Do you expect a guided stroke of lightning to the center of some distant vision's chest?' The way you talk, it sounds like all is lost before it's begun."
"Murakami is dishonest." Thoughts of "shit, he's used me again" began to convince me I, too, was a passive nihilist, but I pressed on.
"I would like to quote Mayakovsky, though he destroyed himself- another act of didactic wrongdoing, but forgive him for being in some fashion right in this instant-
The bull of the days is skewbald, the cart of years is slow. Our god is speed. The heart is our drum.
"I'd say history is full of the sentiment that the heart is dynamo enough."
More beer all around, we stand and shout BONZAI!, Clapping after, and the evening begins.
"And some prefer nettles." muttered a sleeping Tanizaki, who would wake up the next day to divorce his wives and build his houses into literary perpetuity.
Murakami sat down with two sweating dai-bins of Kirin 一番 (Ichi-ban) in a sack and three small glasses (juice glasses?) his jeans were new, and he was wearing a warm-looking cardigan sweater. He pulled one of the bottles out of the perfectly ordinary brown paper sack, popped the top off with a church key he had secreted in his front jeans pocket. He had been listening to me spout advice from the kitchen where he had been making and consuming ham sandwiches for one hundred forty-three millenia, sandwiches with individually-wrapped pieces of cheese and white bread gravid with mayonnaise. Sometimes they were egg salad sandwiches, but the activity and the devourer remained constant. Tanizaki was just outside the room on the balcony, sitting by a low table in his 甚平, (Jinbei), looking out over Manhattan. I couldn't tell if he was listening.
"I'm just trying to wean us off of our old relationship. I know it will take some time, if it works, but the key is to seep into her slowly... normally..."
His strategy.
"Like water into rock- reminds me of something a poet once wrote," I began, taking another opportunity to be verbose, "We are the ghosts of water, hiding in rock... something about geodes and the works of man on man. There was a nice metaphor comparing having teeth in one's head to being in possession of a rock full of knives."
My friend was becoming impatient with my need to get off topic, and Murakami sipped his beer resignedly.
"We know you're talking about yourself," he chastened.
He was right. If Murakami only taught me one thing, it was to just write it all down. All of it. No one wants to be tortured mid-pow-wow with the wishful remembrances of half-poems you only thought about writing. But give anyone all of anything that occurs to you anytime and you have a career.
I've failed as a writer.
My friend:
"You see what I'm saying, though? You know I'm not necessarily talking to hear advice?"
One version of poetry holds that the simple observation of completeness is itself a work of art. Beheld with those eyes, all is complete in an instant, and all judgment is exchanged for forgiveness. God, to see with the mercy of the sculptor's eyes, he who sees the embryo of genius already embedded in simpleton stone.
"I know. Go on."
But it was Murakami who picked up the thread of conversation, refilling our glasses in the golden light of the afternoon, hypnotizing with that light made more golden as it passed through the beer he had raised to his lips, light pressed also through the slow fluid silicate vessels we saw as solid, yet invisible, objects.
"It's true, what I think he's getting at, though. Whether or not it works, in the end, well..."
He paused to enjoy the cold beer in his mouth immensely. The "he", of course, was referring to me.
"In the end, I suppose there's not always anything you can do about it either way. Do you really want to be invested in something like that?"
He directed the question to my friend.
I knew Murakami would show his colors eventually, finally betraying his serenity for a willful and trite nihilism, but I didn't relish being lumped in with him like that, having him use me to justify him.
But the respect I felt for him, I had to make some final show of deference before giving up on him entirely.
"Is that really your lesson, Haruki, if I may call you that?"
He winked.
"...Or are is your serenity an act of didactic wrongdoing? Is your quietude and your opposition to response, surprise, all of it, supposed to feel wrong? You sit there eating sandwiches and drinking beers, so many hundreds of them since I've known you, and you can tell me what each of them was made of, how fat the dew collected on the outside of the glasses. Goat-men, dreams, fealty to loss, fealty to victimhood- you die in such extravagant wonderlands. Methinks you don't protest too much"
Murakami put his glass down on the table, only partially to the left of a ring of condensation already evaporating and losing its definition. He smiled and opened the other bottle, poured again. There was no man here, here instead was a method writ large, a temple of impossible alien machination on a dimly-lit planet. Were these things (the bend of the elbow, the massive, that is heavy, grin, the precision) intelligence or its ancestors? Human kin or monument?
He said nothing.
Tanizaki, without turning, put down the glass of sake he was sipping and began a discourse on the value of- the PRESENTATION of- the unseen.
"Junichiro, we've read your "In Praise of Shadows." We are trying to uncover things here as they are, not as we imagine them to be."
My friend was smoking now, pausing after the smoke had filtered into his lungs, and exhaling. "I don't know. I don't want to make a big deal of this, I just want it to go right. There's no reason to get hopes up when what I want might not even be the best thing. I'm not looking for advice."
"She is uncommonly beautiful, though, is she not?"
I had built up a fantasy of the girl in my mind, and she was tits and ass, she was cleavage and the power invested in that space, she was the bounty of youth and adventurous mercy between refractory periods. That is to say, I didn't know this girl.
"Don't go the way Murakami might be telling you to be ok with going, whether or not he'll tell us if he's for or against us. The industry of the will, uh, that is, desire becomes the driving, justifying force in all human relations only willingly."
Tanizaki: "You love to hate yourself. Finish a poem for once, or admit that, for you, divorce from achievement is itself achievement and that it leaves you sated. The things you say make no sense, otherwise."
My friend had begun to read. The last afternoon sun had slid a ransom note beneath the door. Tanizaki may have fallen asleep immediately following his outburst.
Fearing the worst, fearing Murakami might go back into the eternal kitchen and stand by the sink eating sandwiches, fearing my friend might leave to brood elsewhere without resolution, I recited loudly:
I need you,
but impassively.
I have made the decision
to need the regard
of your softened aspect.
Desire is the single motive force
but willingly.
"That is, it is only agency and ownership of events, right or wrong, that let anything really happen as opposed to simple occurrence."
Murakami:
"But, you were saying, Time is the most important unacknowledged medium for love?"
"I'm saying that you have to take up agency, and that a part of that is acknowledging the possibility of loss, but not resignation to it."
"But what was the metaphor you used earlier? 'Getting the message of love from one heart to another is like making a cross-country telephone call- something with enough juice has to push that lightning across the miles of wires, the miles and yards of days/weeks/years before it arrives... Is the heart the only dynamo that can power the message across so many invisible miles of years strung out above our heads? Do you expect a guided stroke of lightning to the center of some distant vision's chest?' The way you talk, it sounds like all is lost before it's begun."
"Murakami is dishonest." Thoughts of "shit, he's used me again" began to convince me I, too, was a passive nihilist, but I pressed on.
"I would like to quote Mayakovsky, though he destroyed himself- another act of didactic wrongdoing, but forgive him for being in some fashion right in this instant-
The bull of the days is skewbald, the cart of years is slow. Our god is speed. The heart is our drum.
"I'd say history is full of the sentiment that the heart is dynamo enough."
More beer all around, we stand and shout BONZAI!, Clapping after, and the evening begins.
"And some prefer nettles." muttered a sleeping Tanizaki, who would wake up the next day to divorce his wives and build his houses into literary perpetuity.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
The Actor Lead Crystal
The actor Lead Crystal stopped me in the doorway to my apartment. He was desperate, he was broke, he was down to his last, he told me, couldn't I, with my wristwatch and my easy smile, couldn't I spare a dime for a laborer in the ur-culture industry. I paid him no mind, slipping past him into my building. I could already hear him, in his good announcer's voice, accosting the next joker on his way home.
It's true that I remember him. I was 10 when I first saw "What the Blazes is Glory?" , and I was hooked. I saw all of his films, as a matter of fact, even "Didn't Know I was Dropping In," the flop that rested atop his career like the cast iron lid of a cistern. Those were different times, different days, right before Social Software and then the personal feeds. In those days Lead Crystal would never have been asking for change. I- hundreds like me, even- would be begging him for his autograph, some artifact to somehow connect his lifestyle and panache to the average Joe Gonowhere.
You have to laugh to yourself when you look back at how things were always more innocent then, before, back when. It's hard not to believe in progress when there is always the notion that, somehow, with all the changes that come around, everyone, from your grandparents to you, looks back with the same forgiving and nostalgic eyes. Remember movie stars? Remember going somewhere, to someone else, for a taste of the good life?
Once inside my apartment, I sat down at my dressing table and put on my stage makeup, made a few adjustments to my hair, tinted my irises for best capture on fiber optic, took a deep breath, tried to imagine me coming home from work, and set the webcams rolling. There I was, coming out of the TV, the soundtrack to my evening routine a new one that had just arrived that morning. I ate some food, made some witty and embittered comments while reading the news, put the dishes away. Leila came over around 8:45, we patched her feed into mine, and we did our best us, careful of the contractual agreements regarding time at center stage, number of lines granted to each of us, made sure we mentioned our sponsors, etc.
I put it to her pretty naturally, I'd say. One of my best performances. Had to remember to put it at the top of my profile feed in the morning when I headed off to the cinema for work. For flair, at the very end, I thought it would be interesting to portray what Lead Crystal might do in this situation. I adjusted my smirk, the contemptuous offhandedness with which I handled Leila, to how he would do it, wondering how the numbers would come back or if the machines or anyone else would notice the change, stop buying my sheets or my condoms, whatever.
"Baby, you mean so much to me. Look at me, baby." I told her as we were falling asleep.
"Look at me, sweetie." She murmured, snoring.
Lead Crystal was asleep in my doorway in the morning as I straightened my tie and headed to the theater. Some people just can't keep up, the poor bastard, can't just see that the world that gave them their heyday is over. I gave him a stern look of pity, pausing a minute as though I was thinking something. As I turned to go, he opened his eyes.
"I made you people, you know."
When I got to the theater the first thing I did was check to see if my ratings had flickered along with the shift in my performance last night, but there was nothing. No sign I had done anything different.
Huh. To all appearances I was performing as my best "me" the entire time.
My phone rang. I answered it. "Oh, Leila!"
That was when I was really starting to fall for her, couldn't stop with the affectionate talk.
"Look at me, baby!"
It's true that I remember him. I was 10 when I first saw "What the Blazes is Glory?" , and I was hooked. I saw all of his films, as a matter of fact, even "Didn't Know I was Dropping In," the flop that rested atop his career like the cast iron lid of a cistern. Those were different times, different days, right before Social Software and then the personal feeds. In those days Lead Crystal would never have been asking for change. I- hundreds like me, even- would be begging him for his autograph, some artifact to somehow connect his lifestyle and panache to the average Joe Gonowhere.
You have to laugh to yourself when you look back at how things were always more innocent then, before, back when. It's hard not to believe in progress when there is always the notion that, somehow, with all the changes that come around, everyone, from your grandparents to you, looks back with the same forgiving and nostalgic eyes. Remember movie stars? Remember going somewhere, to someone else, for a taste of the good life?
Once inside my apartment, I sat down at my dressing table and put on my stage makeup, made a few adjustments to my hair, tinted my irises for best capture on fiber optic, took a deep breath, tried to imagine me coming home from work, and set the webcams rolling. There I was, coming out of the TV, the soundtrack to my evening routine a new one that had just arrived that morning. I ate some food, made some witty and embittered comments while reading the news, put the dishes away. Leila came over around 8:45, we patched her feed into mine, and we did our best us, careful of the contractual agreements regarding time at center stage, number of lines granted to each of us, made sure we mentioned our sponsors, etc.
I put it to her pretty naturally, I'd say. One of my best performances. Had to remember to put it at the top of my profile feed in the morning when I headed off to the cinema for work. For flair, at the very end, I thought it would be interesting to portray what Lead Crystal might do in this situation. I adjusted my smirk, the contemptuous offhandedness with which I handled Leila, to how he would do it, wondering how the numbers would come back or if the machines or anyone else would notice the change, stop buying my sheets or my condoms, whatever.
"Baby, you mean so much to me. Look at me, baby." I told her as we were falling asleep.
"Look at me, sweetie." She murmured, snoring.
Lead Crystal was asleep in my doorway in the morning as I straightened my tie and headed to the theater. Some people just can't keep up, the poor bastard, can't just see that the world that gave them their heyday is over. I gave him a stern look of pity, pausing a minute as though I was thinking something. As I turned to go, he opened his eyes.
"I made you people, you know."
When I got to the theater the first thing I did was check to see if my ratings had flickered along with the shift in my performance last night, but there was nothing. No sign I had done anything different.
Huh. To all appearances I was performing as my best "me" the entire time.
My phone rang. I answered it. "Oh, Leila!"
That was when I was really starting to fall for her, couldn't stop with the affectionate talk.
"Look at me, baby!"
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Baby in the needle field
Here's a story told through google images about a baby unleashed, unswaddled!
Neat Link Via Create Digital Music: Turn Your iTunes Library into a Sonic Signature
Via Create Digital Music:
I ran across this today and immediately had to try it myself. I'll be posting a link to my own digital signature shortly. Suffice it to say, it reveals things about you that you might not have known- like what you were listening to a whole lot before you started listening to most of your music on your ipod.
Enjoy.
Turn Your iTunes Library into a Sonic Signature:
Jason Freeman, a professor and musician from Georgia Tech, wrote a Java application which scans your iTunes library and creates your own "signature" out of small audio samples from your songs. From reading his technical docs, it's more sophisticated than you'd think -- the program finds your most played songs and then uses an FFT to merge spectrally similar audio, mixing down your audio smoother than a baby's bottom.
It takes a little while to render and you have to sign a Java security license, but the results are brilliant! Our music collections can pretty accurately describe who we are and the ITSM does an amazing job at boiling me down to 47 seconds of glory. Something tells me that posting your own audio signature is the next big thing to hit
MySpace...
iTunes Signature Maker
Press Release
Ed: I know Jason from a while back, and this sounds like just the wacky development I'd expect from his past efforts -- cool, Jas-- er, Dr. Freeman!
See also Jason's auralization of Gnutella searches, which creates total sonic chaos out of peer-to-peer files, algorithmic audio mixing, and even an interactive Net instrument you can play in your browser. (The others can be downloaded.) Thanks for the heads-up, Jordan! -PK
.
I ran across this today and immediately had to try it myself. I'll be posting a link to my own digital signature shortly. Suffice it to say, it reveals things about you that you might not have known- like what you were listening to a whole lot before you started listening to most of your music on your ipod.
Enjoy.
Turn Your iTunes Library into a Sonic Signature:
Jason Freeman, a professor and musician from Georgia Tech, wrote a Java application which scans your iTunes library and creates your own "signature" out of small audio samples from your songs. From reading his technical docs, it's more sophisticated than you'd think -- the program finds your most played songs and then uses an FFT to merge spectrally similar audio, mixing down your audio smoother than a baby's bottom.
It takes a little while to render and you have to sign a Java security license, but the results are brilliant! Our music collections can pretty accurately describe who we are and the ITSM does an amazing job at boiling me down to 47 seconds of glory. Something tells me that posting your own audio signature is the next big thing to hit
MySpace...
iTunes Signature Maker
Press Release
Ed: I know Jason from a while back, and this sounds like just the wacky development I'd expect from his past efforts -- cool, Jas-- er, Dr. Freeman!
See also Jason's auralization of Gnutella searches, which creates total sonic chaos out of peer-to-peer files, algorithmic audio mixing, and even an interactive Net instrument you can play in your browser. (The others can be downloaded.) Thanks for the heads-up, Jordan! -PK
.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Stuff that is hardcore and essential
I just updated my spanking new Firefox 1.5 browser with some excellent extensions.
First, I installed the Sage, basically eliminating my need to use a second newsreader (I've been using the excellent netnewswire lite) to keep up on all the music/culture blogs I would never remember to hit if I didn't have it etched in silicon somewhere. It updates all the entries and shows them to you in your browser window. The Downloadthemall extension is invaluable, after browsing to your favorite new music blogs, for sucking everything down at once and listening at leisure.
First, I installed the Sage, basically eliminating my need to use a second newsreader (I've been using the excellent netnewswire lite) to keep up on all the music/culture blogs I would never remember to hit if I didn't have it etched in silicon somewhere. It updates all the entries and shows them to you in your browser window. The Downloadthemall extension is invaluable, after browsing to your favorite new music blogs, for sucking everything down at once and listening at leisure.
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