I love to love you, lover- and your horns

About 30 minutes ago, reeling from a strong cup of coffee, a strange feeling came over me. I wanted to have antlers.
Any fans of Laibach out there?

As I write this, I just recalled that Nami had sent me a portrait of me with a deer above my head. I need to get that framed.

Antlers. Yeah.

Against the Eighties

Listen to The Hold Steady.

Some old records, some new ones

Alright on Top: Luke Slater
This came out in '02 and doesn't get enough play in my collection for the simple reason that the cd refuses to import into my iTunes. It could be a non-redbook cd, deliberately damaged by the record company to discourage digital duplication (without a complete barcode identifying what it is, some computer drives won't recognize the disk properly, while cd players can read it just fine). It doesn't seem like something Mute would do, though, so I remain baffled.
Anyhow, this remains the most exciting electronic dance release I've heard in the past, uh, 3 (!) years since it came out. Time is flying, musical trends fade in and out, but like the emergence of an old-growth forest, quality releases in any medium are eked out only occasionally and after many permutations. Blah Blah blah.
I like this cd.

Eveningland: Hem
The singer's voice has a clarity that is softly penetrating. Quiet and beautiful, it goes through walls like a wistful x-ray, like a ghost. I've seen these guys twice, and, I don't know how it's possible, but the songs are even more fluid and cut from velvet when they play live than they are recorded. Who is actually that good at what they do anymore? These guys are. The first song is a bit evocative of Cowboy Junkies' version of Sweet Jane, but that's a beautiful song, too, so rather than the identification of influence somehow diminishing the merit of a particular work, the amount of beauty in the world is actually multiplied in a mystically mathematical fashion. Guaranteed to edge out the ugly in at least one corner of your life for the duration of the disc.

Wonder, light snow, wine

We're having a heat wave. It's in the thirties now, light flurries, pleasure in walking home at night.
The day was spent in Queens, off the island. My arms and hands are made of electricity and pillows. I buzz from wine and the unflinching smiles of voluptuous women.

In Queens:



The way home:



Pleasant pleasures, a cheap beer near 42nd Street and salty popcorn. Into bed, then, I suppose?

In the Voluptuary

Marked down on the list, she's in. On stationery, on whatever, on hides. What angles could be played softened to organ music, everything's going to swim in curves for years and years-- perpetual motion played out without agenda. I'm recruiting for my voluptuary. Around around around around around and around the way, hey.

Suntory Yamazaki and Pretty Ladies

I highly recommend sipping Suntory Yamazaki Single Malt and exhibiting your sparkling, rapaciously debonair worldliness in the presence of pretty ladies (make an allowance for a casual soft boner, be awash in the warmth and lack of real wants). What pleasant time it makes for the passing!

what happened to Tyrone Slothrop?

I did not traipse across the DMZ dressed as a bomb, ripped from the fabric of linear reality by drugs and the nefarious plans of corporate, international industrial cartels and their theft of my personhood. I don't think I am deeply, in a very repressed way, intimately associated with any industrial plastics. I don't pretend to understand everything Pynchon was saying- I still couldn't understand Miller when I finished Gravity's Rainbow- I hadn't truly lost my fucking mind yet when I got to the final page of that book- but here's the impression I did retain:
Tyrone Slothrop, sold at birth to the international chemical cartels, still in some way under their sway during and after the war by a)being put in harm's way as a soldier in a war that was a veiled economic exercise, an illusion, and b) being used to find the V-2 without his own knowledge. At the end of the book, and again, I read this awhile ago and was lost during most of it, Slothrop dissolves. His corporeal Slothropness "finally flies apart," to paraphrase herm. He gets washed out in the pattern as it becomes larger and more incomprehensible, as his own nature is diminished more and more in importance as the plot that has controlled his life becomes clearer (and infinitely larger) and as his usefulness disappears. He melts into the pattern of his surroundings.
In the wash of so much information, such a total mediation of his life, he actually ceases to exist, he becomes indistinguishable from the plots he's been a part of.
Do you ever get to feeling that way?
I'm overstimulated. And I may have completely misunderstood and misremembered Pynchon, to boot. The uncertainty of it all!

One more mention re: the poet who is the subject of the previous post

"I know that she exists
But where is she upon this earth
as the whores keep finding me?"

Fate, I know you deliver what you can

Sitting here this morning, thumbing at random through Bukowski- reread the same poems I read yesterday.

"The girls in pantyhose wait,
they await the proper time and
moment, and then they will move
and then they will conquer"

He said.

He and I enfeebled by Lolita, fatigued by the indefatigable ideal that draws your eyes up a skirt and down a shirt
and even if you could have it
you're just going to want a pizza later
Oh, Buddha, where are you now? The burning house smells of ripe cunts. And it burns and burns.

Who's new?

My thanks to Val for turning me on to M. Ward. My thanks to Al.B.Sure! for the alleged new Beck Material. It has made for an enjoyable early morning.

Of Shit and Tea

I don't know why I'm remembering this now, but I had a conversation with a roommate in Chicago a couple of years ago about Starbucks' Chai tea. I thought it was funny that Chai is just how you say "tea" in Russian (which is probably derived from Chinese). Therefore, when you say you want Chai tea, you are saying you want tea tea. My roommate then told me that a word that sounds a lot like "tea tea" is the word in hindi for shit.
Hooray!

Do you have what it takes?

Siegfried Kracauer, in his book The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, an examination of the rootless, salaried life of the new class of office workers in the Weimar Republic, writes in an early chapter about the process of selecting employees for work in the new consumer culture.

Kracauer wrote a few things about life in the image, and I was particularly moved by his statement in another article that, to paraphrase, the goal of photojournalism is to capture that part of the world which can be photographed, hinting at the ideology implied in the very technology of the camera (who was it that wrote about the cult of the immediately ascertainable fact?). This ideology is all but transparent to us, but it potentially organizes our worldview because we afford the scientific camera so much authority. In reality, of course, photographs are narrative, and our experience of reality is not necessarily so. Can you photograph that look of endless love one certain someone gave you a long time ago? Can you photograph how your mind is chaining together all of your experiences with the taste of wasabi ice cream, with the dirt smell of New York air?
In this chapter, he asks a hiring clerk at an office what he looks for in an applicant.
The conversation:
"I ask him what he means by pleasant- saucy or pretty. 'Not exactly pretty. What's far more crucial is... oh, you know, a morally pink complexion.'
I do know. A morally pink complexion- this combination of concepts at a stroke renders transparent the everyday life that is fleshed out by window displays, salary-earners and illustrated papers. Its morality must have a pink hue, its pink a moral grounding. That is what the people responsible for selection want. They would like to cover life with a varnish concealing its far-from-rosy reality. But beware, if morality should penetrate beneath the skin, and the pink be not quite moral enough to prevent the eruption of desires!" (38)

Funny that this was written in that lull between tempests called the Weimar Republic.

What record will be kept of the critiques of the ideological image being propagated in the vast dark stretches of Jesusland? Is anyone going to remember any of this?
The ipod will live as kitsch, where will the frightened Jesus go?
Do you have what it takes in America? Are you morally pink? Are you well-scrubbed? Are you for the Whites or for the Reds?

4 months or so

4 months or so and I'll be out of this city, hopefully happy in what I'm doing. Hell, I'd stay in this city if I could find something I was happy in doing.

The Magic Cone

Better than the Shenis.

Don't want to

I have to go to my internship tomorrow, and it's making it really hard for me to go to bed. I hate going to sleep when I know I have to do shit I don't want to do in the morning.

I've been so fucking depressed.

Fuck.

I lean and sing born to run

And I sing it fucking well.

Herm was weaned too late in life. Persists the healthy hankering for cottage-industry body-manufactured sustenance. Boobs.

I don't particularly like this song, but there was triumph in this moment.

Snow

It snowed a lot yesterday. Staying indoors today. Not hung over, feeling good again.
I will stay indoors and watch alias from bed all day. I went to a little party of a friend of Shannon's last night that was supposed to be a housewarming, I guess, but was just kind of a gathering of people who didn't really know each other very well watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I left after an hour because I was still non-functioning after karaoke Friday night (and, of course, beer).

Love,
Matt

alright

Tonight went alright.

Boring

Turning three directions
look down, look down
there you are three miles alluvial below yourself
moving in all the wrong directions
so much bigger than yourself as a pinpoint of fucking lightning
moving backwards with a knife
moving backwards with your teeth because that's all that survives the heat
thermal vents, ocean floors, ragged claws, beaten tatars
destroy the past
destroy the past
destroy the past

the weeping machine

yeah, the weeping machine makes the other thing, makes the thing that does not weep, like a husband makes a wife/like salty makes sweet/like a wrong makes a right
I need you
tremblefaster, gangrenous you
I'm not made of putty
I shouldn't have been
I shouldn't have
I made a thing that made you
made you a thing that fits in a place against my clack-clacks
snuggle my ribs
I made myself
to undo myself
I made a thing of me to make a thing of you
now who's left to want us?

Shoes Update

In the movie Koufuku no Okane, directed by SABU (who also directed Japanese anxiety zeitgeist masterpiece Monday), the protagonist, a man who walks through a large city and comes across all manner of desperate characters, meets an old salaryman about to jump off a bridge who gives a speech about how he can't stand himself because he's a boring person, has no friends, and can only speak keigo (Japanese polite speech). He leaves his shoes on the bridge where he jumps.

God, shoes are sad.

In brilliant other news, I start at MTV today with my internship. I also just got an e-mail from N- of P-Heavy fame and spent a good half-hour replying to her. Last night's gathering in Brooklyn was a success, and the frozen end of the night at the sake bar was a very chill and pleasant nightcap, but chill in a warm and cozy kind of way, not the locked-in-ice bring-the-tatars-to-their-knees kind of way that makes sleeping under an electric blanket such a wonderful pastime these days.

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is by far the best Wes Anderson has done. It is staggeringly, achingly sorrowful. Murray is Murray, but he captures something we're all feeling now- that detached, dreamy thing. Don't read further if you haven't seen it, but the characters' constant recreation of their ideal selves as image is so now. The metaphor of their continuing breakdown in the ability to create even the image of a utopian reality cuts my legs out from under me. The uncertainty of living in an age defined by a cult of science is expressed exquisitely. And it's funny. Thank you, Wes Anderson and cast.

Happy New Year from the Girls of P-Heavy

And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH

Asians of gossamer
you horny valkyries
I make a whisper's passage
over the sharp tines
of you sharp stars
and a quiet show of a quiet death of 100 cuts
without pain

Go see these guys.

Go see Manny Here (and sift through all the other cool stuff he's got going on there, too).
Go see Herm here.

words

Asians of gossamer, you horny valkyries.

Monkeys Who Smoke

I think these fuckers are alright.

"Folker", Track 4 "Lookin' Up in Heaven"

This song has gotten me every time I have listened to it.

I went lookin' up in heaven but you wasn't anywhere in sight/they asked me stick around but without you it just wasn't right

Maybe I'm being overly sentimental or crazy, but I about weep every time Paul Westerberg sings these lines.

And, reminiscent of "Summerteeth" by Wilco, the song where the protagonist's shoes get cold while his black shirt cries, in this recent Paul Westerberg masterpiece we have this line:

Sunday evening I get the blues/someone's sleeping in her (their?) tennis shoes

What the hell is it about shoes that is so damn sad?

I'm a maudlin bastard.

...the corpse on reprieve in all of us.

I was reading an article last night entitled "Cultural Studies and Forensic Noir" by one Thomas Doherty (Title: Cultural Studies and 'Forensic Noir.' , By: Doherty, Thomas, Chronicle of Higher Education,00095982, 10/24/2003, Vol. 50, Issue 9), and this gem of a blurb popped out at me. He's actually referencing another author, Indiana University's James Naremore, who is in turn quoting film critic Andre Bazin. And I'm quoting all of them, with no context whatsoever. What a romantic, visceral, corporal thing to say, though.

This reminds me that I was also reading The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard the other day, a jaunty, mindfucking little read that threatens to agree with you on everything so completely that you nearly return to an egoless pre-Lacanian continuousness with your environment that you only had at that magical moment you got squeezed into your casing from momma's meat grinder so many years ago (if you're me, that's 28 tomorrow).
Anyhow, the reason that this reminds me of Baudrillard is that he is talking about the collision of a system that denies the existence of death (the antiseptic, self-proclaimed generator of only good, justice, and life system of the modern capitalist West on the march) with one that is willing to "gift" its own death to it, such as happened in the suicide/attack on the WTC. A system anchored to the ideological position of life and life only experiences a rupture in reality that is traumatic. If we get Lacanian, we can say that all attempts to represent and thereby understand and master the moment of trauma fail, because reality defies all representation. The inability to represent the reality of the original trauma coupled with a recall of the original trauma creates further trauma, which induces further representation and attempts to patch reality and master the source of angst. Hal Foster wrote an article, I think it was called "Death in America" or something like that (I read it for class last semester, as well as most of the stuff I'm quoting here), about Warhol and his traumatic realism- the repetition of flawed and disturbing images such as a car crash, Marylin Monroe (suicide), a skull (portrait of everyone on earth). In that article he talks about attempts to innoculate ourselves against trauma through repetition of its images, while at the same time those flawed images create the trauma of missing the essence of the original traumatic event. Baudrillard says that when a system is willing to "gift" death to a system in denial of death, the system in denial of death begins the process of manufacturing death and death alone. When society attempts to innoculate itself against death and trauma by repeating the trauma, by expecting trauma, it begins to take on an eschatological imperative to avoid being surprised by the eschaton.

Happy new year, everyone. I love you.

ok, so the first one did post.

but the second post was better and longer, so I'm leaving them both up.

Stomach Flu

I have a feeling that what I came down with yesterday was not food poisoning, as I had thought, but the dreaded stomach flu that's been going around. I spent yesterday moaning and feverish, having weird totalitarian dreams of reality as a gestalt wherein I could never be well again because it wasn't part of the total picture, and every shift or movement I made in the bed to make myself feel better was followed by the admonishment that I was still well within the limits of reality's plan, and it by no means excused me from the execrable position of being sick. Somehow I had aligned myself with a political party of pure evil. It made no sense.

This is the second time I am writing this post. The first time, something went wrong and the post never went through when I hit the publish button.

I went to Virgin after applying for an internship with the City of New York. I picked up the new Paul Westerberg, "Folker," and a Kreidler cd I'd never heard of called "Weekend." For Kreidler highlights, see "coldness" on "Appearance and the Park," and the one with Momus on their self-titled album, the title of which escapes me now.

While reading a blog recommended to me by a hirsute friend by way of his own blog, I was reminded of a story I've related to no one save my mother. A few weeks ago, right before the Ted Leo concert at the Bowery Ballroom, I was walking around the block to waste some time. Who should approach from the opposite direction, but Teddy Leo himself. I started and made to say something, but then came up against the surreal fact that TED LEO DOESN'T KNOW WHO I AM. So we just kind of looked at each other suspiciously while trying to act like we weren't paying any attention to one another.

I am still not 100%. I can't seem to eat anything. On the plus side, the body under stress seems to have ways of dealing with privation you can't tap into when healthy. I can only hope my testicles aren't being slowly reabsorbed into my body for sustenance.

Another strange story to relate. A year ago this week or so I was in Jamaica, I was in love, and my mother was getting married. I danced on an outdoor pool deck in bare feet until they bled. The day after I got back I puked and roasted with fever all day. Till now I thought I had gotten food poisoning from a bad McDonald's strawberry shake gotten the night before. I'm wondering, though, if I haven't stumbled onto some grim somatic ritual my body observes the new year with. Right before my birthday I spend the day emptying of anything nourishing POST HASTE. I need to find another "old reliable."
At least this illness has given me the impetus to knock it off with the drinking for awhile, already.

I suppose I could spend the rest of this post complaining about the emasculation of living in NYC. But I won't.

I don't think it was food poisoning.

I think it was this nasty stomach flu that's been going around. Must have picked it up in the plane. This time last year I was in Jamaica, my mom was getting married, I was very fat (I'll try to find a picture), and as soon as I returned home I had a mysterious case of "food poisoning," also after a ride in a plane. It makes me wonder if I didn't actually get the stomach flu then, too. And these incidents are almost exactly a year apart. I need to find a more pleasant "old dependable."
Ok, no pictures of really fat Matt.
Now I have to campus or something and start doing research on the media and its presentation of authority in crime dramas. I don't know if it's because I don't feel 100% or if I just don't want to do it, but I have an overwhelming urge to just go to the Virgin Megastore and shop for cds. Maybe there's room in my life for both things to happen. I can only hope.
Reading a blog recommended to me by a hirsute friend, I was reminded of a story I told no one but my mother about- a few weeks ago, right before the Ted Leo show at Bowery Ballroom, I was walking around the block to kill time, and there, walking down the street toward me, alone, was Teddy Leo. I almost said hi or something, but then I had that surreal moment where I realized Ted Leo doesn't know who I am!. So we just both eyed each other suspiciously. Alright, now into the shower. Now onto the street. Food.

Food Poisoning/Welcome Back to NYC

Last night I went out to eat at an Irish pub, ate a burger, and have been completely useless all day. Food poisoning.