And when you see the russian no more than a girl on the ad worn cruel by fear of want, why always the urge to Fuck an attractive stranger?

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

I wish it mattered the snow weren't fallling when It's this warm. Wish my romantic antics didn't mean this wasn't over. It is.

Thursday's not yet through

Music, music, music. Listen all day, listen all night. Until listening just becomes the thing you do when you can't be doing. Headphones at work, critiques of the jukebox when drunk, commuting encased in sound.
Too much music starts to feel empty with no action to back it up. Like that low feeling when you realize the booze just won't get you drunk the way you like to be.

Last night I found a small box with a fukuoka return address awaiting me in the mail on my return to the apartment, new dj for hire within.

Magical Realism sans Optimism

It's possible to argue that fairy tales as they were stood as the first incarnation of the various forms of fantastically-flecked forms of realism that have come since their introduction. I have been reading Neil Gaiman's recently-published collection of "Short Stories and Wonders", Fragile Things, and, having taken notice of this very overtly demonstrated debt to Bradbury, have been doing a little thinking about Bradbury's style of writing in opposition to the Magical Realism of someone like Marquez.
Bradbury took the perceived realities and the real anxieties of passing into an age of science and a realm of new unknowns and paired them with the inexplicable logic of dreams and fear. Marquez took the realities of a world moribund with culture and a dearth of channels for advancement and mixes the mundane with the fantastic. Aside from the fact that the two writers were working in two separate cultural milieus as they developed their styles, as just described, the important difference between the two writers is that Marquez, in the prosaic-world-turned-fantastic, maintains a humorous sense of optimism and humanity even when faced with the intrusion of the uncanny. Bradbury's world of the inexplicable-turned-prosaic does not bring optimism to the feast. In Bradbury's stories it is not in our own world that we find ourselves witness to wonders, and those wonders his characters do witness are not bound to our comforting calendar of holidays.

Gaiman's Fragile Things is a very enjoyable read, each story short and to the point. The brevity of the writing at times seems to give away that the story is predicated more on a writing exercise than on a well-executed idea, but his imagination and sense of the macabre (and the various ways antedeluvian language can be used to evoke said atmosphere) make that critque a petty bone to nitpick.

He's a Bradbury crossed with a Barker- but his worlds are more banal than Bradbury's and his writing is not anywhere near as chaotically meandering as Barker's.

I want to hear the chris connelly box set.

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

Tape Recorders

I ran across an article on CNET's editorial column "MP3 Insider" this morning about the magic of introducing kids to hands-on, physical-mechanism-based recording tech. I myself grew up in a house that was never bereft of a television set, setting me apart from my forebears in that I considered such mass-mediation of reality standard. But, like my forebears, I was able to see the evolution of the the mediated world from one where color TV and new forms of celebrity struggled to become pervasive to today's world wherein all markets are niche markets and shopping, information, and entertainment are interchangeably and ubiquitously available- a world in which the the information stored on on any medium has completely abjured once and for all any formal marriage to to the form of its packaging. We are living in a world of virtualization, we've been taken off the gold standard of the physical restraints of form and storage, and now our access to music, movies, et al is only going to become more and more closely instant. Kids today simply assume Moore's Law as to make its observation redundant.

In the article mentioned above, the author recounts explaining to his toddler what a tape recorder is and does. I remember the hours I spent with my series of cheap tape recorders, all of which I ran into the ground, one after the other, recording a constant productive stream of radio programs, sounds, and songs. I suppose all I really wanted to do here is reminisce and wax a little nostalgic on those days 20 and more years ago when it took me no effort at all to extend my self and my mind out into the world of things that could be molded and created with a little piece of cheap, portable, and customisable recording equipment.

I wonder where those tapes are now.

All the Happiness

The feeling of relief and finally-vindicated conviction following the massive shift in government from the rule of the deceptively-named "conservative" radical right to the mooshy center (or, I guess, what passes as a left these days) following the recent midterm elections has been echoed by the full spectrum of people that I meet throughout my day. Yeah, sure, "we won." Yeah, sure, now we can get back to thinking about our venal social structures in our superior, all-inclusive way. Yeah, sure, maybe we'll move away from pure emotional manipulation, smear, and total obfuscation of fact as we legislate a kinder, more liberal society. (the maybe is a little more, er, substantial on this count, if I were to hazard my opinion.)
I'm not kidding- I really do think "we won". I really do think that we should allow gay people to enjoy unsegregated the benefits of marriage, I REALLY do think it's time, as it has been for a long time, to simply come back to the false Christian fundamentalists with reason and a fat shut up in favor of real inclusive civic thinking and a government that is run by an ideology that responds to the lives of its constituents as opposed the lock-step march of a government that suffers from the idolatry of an ideology that puts the whole round world in a small, steel box out on the sand.
But, wow, geez- where the fuck was "we won" before the outgoing regime got in, made their money, and got out? Where was our enlightened public before we had our new regime of surveillance? Where were those votes when all of this could have been prevented?
Oh, what? They were voting the outgoing regime in?
So we swing to the left for a decade or so. And, as the Dillinger Four so aptly put in on their "Midwestern Songs of the Americas": drown in a culture of peace/you turn your back to the beast/it's so easy to do/it's so easy
And recent resurrection rockers (over 20 years since their last release goes the unverified recollection of something I skimmed in a headline the other day) The Who once sang something that just hasn't stopped reverberating in my mind's ear. Something about us not getting fooled again? Something?
Oh, fuck it. Let's go shopping and get married.

One Bottle, One Bottle of Pearls

Trusty Pallor

My day got rained out- woke up with that cold that's going around, went home around 1, and actually slept solidly until 5 or so. Drifting in unknown territory here, trying to plan on starting one thing, unable to do so yet... These days spent unsure and vacillating are difficult.
Off to meet the band- we're looking for a drummer.
Here's something I put together a few months ago. Unfinished, but nice. It's quiet, so turn it up.

You'll need Pando to get it, which I think is neat.

Today is Election Day

Today is election day here in the США, 米国, Los E.E.U., or however YOU pronounce the name of our kickass megapower when you speak the coolest word in your backwater banana republic's language. I am going to vote. Apropos of election day, I present to you the liberal drinking game via bordom.net.You can also read about my day at the google image story generator:
Here.

That's all I have.
That, and this picture of George Washington's wooden face.

Fuckin' Around With Linux

Yeah, that's what I've been doing today. My trusty old Gateway is the Guinea Pig for bootdisk distros of media-oriented Linux.

Sexiness

The boy wants the girl, but she is not on a to-do list, she is not on a christmas list, she is not on a grocery list. His desire is command-line, base-level, bypassing, autonomic yet insistent. He wants the girl and it is all he knows and yet he also does not know he wants her.

She is not a bottle of detergent. She is not on a manifest. She is not on a bill of lading.
The girl wields her antipathies and her friendships with easy boisterousness. The girl does not proceed like the clawing frightened girls who find their flower and pick it, hold it trembling in a gilded wilt before them as they run as though they run carrying an olympic torch.
The girl knows that love is not like power lifting. It is not coming in first. It is not getting ahead.

Love and sex are in the hips, in the hips and the ass, in the easy downward tug of the breasts, the tug on the eyes, on the breath.
Sexy is in the breath inhaled and made sweet, on the cigarette inhaled deeply. Sexy is in the breath exhaled and made perfect.

The boy acts without knowing himself. He is not at play, he is not at work, he is under no code of obligated conduct. Her shape is cast in old maths, she is an anoetic idea. He tells her that he wants her, and there is no failure.

If she remains unflappable there is no failure, no anamnesis calling them to their reservation at the tables of the concrete and away from the worship of her breathing, yes or no.

電気グルーヴ: VOXXX

Yesterday (actually, a few days ago now since I started this post in a head tornado of a hangover on Sunday) I listened to the entirety of 電気グルーヴのVOXXXって言うCD.
Prior to this, honestly the only Denki Groove I had heard was the post-quits remix compilation "The Last Supper," scattered mp3s, and 石野卓球のPost-Denki Groove debut album KARAOKE JACK.  I loved The Last Supper, hooked by the sample-driven madness of Cornelius' remix of Gari-Gari-Kun and the LFO-controlled filters on the nonsensical rhythm synth loop present throughout the song on the last supper and that notice I took has kept me ever curious as to the sound of album 電グル.
Denki Groove embodied a ださかっこいい (cool by virtue of its contrived lack of cool) aesthetic in highly produced, dense electronic dance music that was liable to change at any moment from a bizarre sports commentary skit by two fictional moron announcers whose enthusiasm is clearly out of proportion to what they are calling plays on to a seriously deadly bassline banger.  Very DJ-based dance, arpeggiated, rhythm sequencer-driven, Denki Groove was a pair of producers amazingly in their element among knobs in need of twiddling, irreverent self-referentiality, and abhorrence of even a moment's silence.  In attestation to the international vanguard nature of this band, the songs, vocoded or dry, are sung in Japanese, English, and German.
Highlights: Eine Kleine Melodie (see POLYSICS' "Black Out Fall Out" on For Young Electric Pop for another Japanese treatment of this careening-through-an-echoing-joy-at-the-speed-of-light sound), the fucking rhythmically bizarre Edisonden (Edison Electric) (utilizing war-era Japanese TV and Commercial Jingle samples, informational tapes, vocoder, shouting rap-like choruses that preceded Li'l John by about 10 years and still win out in technique and complexity, and straight electronics and drum loops), and Themes from the Invaders, which starts with a fake commentary and dives into a clean and slow bass drum groove narrated by an alien who alternately introduces himself as an alien to the people of the world, invents a new word for hello combining "Hello" and "konnichiha", introducing himself as the invader who invented that word, and invents a new food that he invites the people of the world to try (it has a cream flavor and it only costs 400 yen).  Needless to say, the people of the world cheer.  I love this band.  Technical masters who are completely at home out of their minds.

Fuck Yeah

New HESO does DEBUT!

Cha Cha Cha-
There is a new issue of HESO available, to which your friendly planetary Igor Olestra is a contributor.  Swing by and check it out, order a copy.  It's easy.

what I could do with is scotch

and some time to drink it and then remember myself.

What the reading eye has seen of late.

"Léger died a communist, having fallen once and for all for the greatest charlatanism of all time. It may be that like many artists, he was stupid."
-Sergei Dovlatov,
The Suitcase;
"Léger's Jacket"

In that same passage he describes the communist Norman artist's life in a nutshell, a pistachio nutshell- one of the red ones, obviously. He is described as a man, like any one of us. Like all of us, he struggles, in Dovlatov's depiction, to be the man he is to become. In comparison with Mayakovsky, who struggled with art and shot himself, Léger survived in some memories and in some respects. Dovlatov seems to have come by a jacket he wore, and now I know about him because of what he wrote. If we are to believe Seryozha, Léger had the dream to paint on railway cars, a dream that, half a century later, was finally authored by NYC punks. The man seems to be the birthing soup of a now-ubiquitous idea of graffiti, carried out by and large in the final analysis, however, by people who still are not very bright.
All our small ponds are lined up in such confusing adjacencies. The celebrity of rebellion and successful complacence strobed alternately provides such inconsistent lighting by which to make out each puddle's address.
History is the Minnesota of the psyche.

Baudrillard, the narcissist, said that good and evil advance in tandem, separate- and I say that so does everything else. Algren said of Chicago "You'll know it's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures." History is cellular and closed by circles, just as confused by the aging the mystery of being inflicts on it as we are. Morons have their heroes and their archetypes and their canon as well as the intellectuals (and who, as that neutral event-spacer and place marker time goes on, can tell the difference by the results achieved by either?), and strange middling characters have their own, picked between the two, but these are cul-de-sacs adjacent to one another in the strange becoming we call time's advance.