Dear NASA,

If intelligent aliens should ever send a delegation to earth, it occurs to me that the Japanese would make excellent envoys of humanity.

1) Their culture is fascinated by novelty and innovation. Any peculiarities of the alien form or culture would be therefore more appreciated and embraced. In fact, you'd probably see a new fad in Tokyo of dressing more like the Betelgeusians by the end of the day.

2) The Japanese tendency towards proper etiquette is well-known. (We wouldn't want any British yobs chucking lager cans at the landing craft, for example). We could count on them to at least make a decent showing of human propriety.

3) They have a wonderful tolerance to the grotesque. This is the culture that has given us the terms manga, guro, yaoi, seppuku, and hentai tentacle rape. The aliens could be bloated, screeching sacks of bilious ooze-- I doubt one of the delegates would even raise an eyebrow.

4) You know as soon as they cast eyes on any sort of interstellar craft, within days they'd have a plan to make one smaller, cheaper, and more fuel-effective, thus ensuring humanity's place in the competitive spaceship-market.

5) The collective cultural memory of Japan has already experienced the shock of meeting "aliens", thanks to Admiral Perry landing on the island in 1853. The disorienting steps of meeting highly technologically-advanced "outsiders" are therefore not going to pack quite the same wallop.

What do you think?

I Am Going to Go Through These Fucking Walls

There's another scene in The Men Who Stare at Goats I wanted to tell you about, the first scene, in fact. It opens on a tight close-up of this older army guy, grizzled and grey in the mustache, looking really intently at something.

"Boone," he says, face wicked with sweat.

"Yes sir?"

"I'm going into the other room."

And he gets up from his desk and charges pell-fucking-mell right at the wall, charging with the purest of Intention. And he hits the wall and WHAM, back he goes, sprawling onto the ground.

"Dammit," he says.

Okay, so yeah, that's pretty much what we would expect would happen. But then you have the course of the whole movie, all of George Clooney and Ewan McGregor's ramblings and so on. And in the very last scene (I'm spoilering this shit, look askance if you have a delicate constitution) we see McGregor staring death-rays at a wall, now compleat with mustache of his own, get up and charge pell-fucking-mell right at a similar wall.

Guess what happens this time. (It's literally probably better in your head than it was on-screen).

Anyway, my point is that I feel like I'm staring at walls right now. I'm staaring and staaring and my blood vessels are about to go critical, but that's the necessary part. Because by God, I am going to go through these fucking walls. And I'm not even going to knock them down, because that's cheating, that's bullshit. I'm going to go right through them.

Oh heavens, I am well and truly sick. My head is a veritable swamp of mucus.

So it occurs to me that control is a human invention. To say that everything is under control is that everything is artificial, stilted, jammed, and a whisker away from going completely disastrous. If you really wanted to reassure someone, you could tell them that nothing is under control, because then everything is flowing smoothly and nicely along their natural lines. Nobody with any kind of agency (and therefore greed) has a say in the show.

To try and direct things is to set yourself up for failure. What you can do is look where things are going, or where they want to go, and ride along the top of that like a surfer. No surfer would ever try and tell a wave to move away from the shore. He or she acquiesces to the larger movements, the larger forces, and so travels much faster than is ordinarily possible. If you get really good at it, you look like some sort of genius force of nature, but really all you're doing is riding waves.

I Remember Summer

And love, it would seem, is a skill.

I walk through these summer nights with you

Telling you about my favorite mystery,

Of a cherry petal snowfall

In the hottest days of June

There are some voices, some singers

Who can pull you through time into

A faded and dusty aching feeling

Through the decades you go spinning backwards

Open your heart, it's about to begin

And listening to the radio by the open window

You beam out your purity to the stars

And the unimpeachable feeling

They had it right, it's like white lines

Of rain slashing through a dry night

And if someone did it once,

They did it for everyone, we have all succeeded,

We are all sent reeling, we are all caught up,

And nothing, no nothing can stop us now.

Confession Time

Looking back on it now, I realize:

From roughly the ages of 16 to 25, I couldn't stand myself. There were, of course, periods where everything aligned and the river flowed nicely out of myself and into the air around me, but for the most part, I wanted desperately to crawl out of my own skin. I tried about as hard as any Scorpio can try (which is pretty hard) to eliminate myself, in various ways. I tried not talking to anyone, I tried writing down on paper over and over again how despicable I was, I tried literally starving myself (that was fun), moving far away from people, and so on.

I realize now that I wasn't becoming clear, which is what I wanted-- all that shit just made me dark and sludgy, which only made me want to disappear further. I thought I was killing my ego, but I was only feeding it.

Because there are many disciplines which focus on the dissolution of the ego. From everything I've seen and heard, it's a marvelous, refreshing experience. My artistic hero, John Frusciante, talks constantly about nothingness, emptiness, channeling spirits. The Tao is all about naturalness, the empty cup.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I now think happiness will help you fit into the currents of the air, not sadness. I could've said this at any point growing up, but I wouldn't have believed it. Anyway, it makes me want to apologize to all my friends for all the times I thought I was being humble, but actually I was being a self-absorbed little shit. I'm sorry, everyone. I promise to try and channel light for myself and for all of you from now on.

Humor LAWL

This is ripe for abuse if anything is, it's PETA's blank template for "cruel" KFC signs:

http://signgenerator.kfccruelty.com/index.asp

And here are some I came up with:

(Bonus audio version of the last one! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxeOmD_nVrM)

Not-Quite-Night-Yet

Here, read this hilarious page, it's fandango:

Twilight Parody

It's All Happening Now

What a strange day. I woke up with one of those strange hangovers, the ones that make me feel happy and calm and clear and loving. I felt harmless and helpful.

I should have known, though, that when I feel unprecedentedly strong, that's the universe's cue to present me with a new challenge. In this case, the suddenly-unavoidable need to find a new place to live.

I had been, I think, quietly asking the universe to make this necessary for me for some time now anyway. "Well, it's not so bad," I would say, and it wasn't. But it also wasn't ideal. It was toxic and depressing in a lot of ways. I wasn't doing my best, afraid to be complete. I was falling into a vaguely miserable, but comfortable rut. So my conscious was saying, "It'll do," while my subconscious was saying, "Make it impossible for me to remain as I am, please." And now my wish has been granted.

Which means that it is time to rock and roll on all levels, as I did when I first moved to this city June 1st, and again at the end of that summer.

The first step, I think, is to get rid of all superfluous physical items. Goodwill is about to get some stuff. Oh man, this feels scary and refreshing at the same time.

Open heart, open hands, open mind.

Mental Progress, or Clarity no. 2

When I was growing up, I thought that love and sex were mutually exclusive. The impression I got was that sex was basically greedy, animalistic, callous. Love was emotional but sterile. In other words, to love someone basically doomed you to a lifetime of writing them letters from the other side of the room, lest your noble intentions be sullied, blah blah bullshit.

This now strikes me as... well, just completely wrong, and so very damaging. You might as well cut your brain in half with a knife as think along such divisive lines. Again, it's the yin and the yang. They aren't far apart, but constantly touching and flowing into each other. A person can be two things at once, and the body and the soul and the mind aren't enemies, for heaven's sake, they're friends. They can all operate at once, synergize. Christ. It's so obvious. I wish I could've processed this about a dozen years ago or so, but better late than never, I guess.

Postscript provided by Of Montreal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSZKbvsWNK4

I used to think in black

While at my country seat

Now I'm peaking in so many ways

The gloom is in retreat

Yeah, the dark epoch is over

I found my efeblum

Then passed Ernst's mausoleum

Defended by a rook

Who shot a look so virulent

It pierced me like a hook

The palaver of solipsists

Exploding in my skull...

Yeah and we both despise

All of the academic swine

Who made the author of "Discuss Ulysses" benign

So what if Wednesday finds us

Wearing rabies parachutes?

Foaming like the melody,

A single fairy flute

The atmosphere is viscous,

We're sticking to the brine...

Yeah and we both despise

All of the academic swine

Who made the author of "Discuss Ulysses" benign

When the lanterns fill with finches

So begins the brawl

Their brains are like porcupines

And mine's a paper ball (x2)

I know they don't understand

They don't get us at all

Their moss mangles polyanthus

And mine's a paper ball

Song Time

Inspired by one of John Frusciante's inimitable covers, here's my version of "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her":

And the man doing it 100x better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCmrKgjRb1c

In Which I Explain My Blog Title

Pro-prologue:

Sometimes the coincidences begin to pile up. Jung wrote about this in his essay on synchronicity.... like one time he had a patient who told him a dream about a rare scarab beetle, whereupon he looked out the window to notice one knocking against the glass. He opened the window, grabbed it, and presented it to his patient, who had a lot of veils dissolved in that moment, or so he tells us.

Prologue:

Where do we keep our best selves, and is there even such a thing? I look inside myself and see a landscape. Not static, but fluxuous. (Yes, I invented that word). Sometimes the sky is an enormous space of clear air, sometimes it's a suffocating atmosphere of total drear. Where do I keep the little glowing cells? I know they're in there, I've felt them. Under the earth, hiding behind blades of grass? Sometimes I feel absolutely angelic, like I could photosynthesize, and then next week I'll feel paltry, craven, weak, cruel, small.

OK Then:

I have a theory that people are basically either energy batteries or energy sinks. You can't stay one for long. You can change from one to the other slowly or quickly, from minute to minute, or even faster. The bright animals are suffused with a surfeit of light energy, which is designed to infiltrate the system and activate the people around them. The dark animals are basically holes in the air. They suck up the energy around them. It's not their fault, necessarily, although some people get awfully good at being energy sinks. Like they base their self-concept as someone who depresses others, and they (erroneously) think this lends them individuality and interest.

This is such a basic duality that I think it holds true across most cultures and times. You move up, you move down. Bright or dark. Levity, or else gravity. You commune with angels, or you commune with demons. (If you want to just regard a Taijitu for a while, it'll explain all this far better than I ever could, just sayin'.)

The Travails of Morrissey, pt. 2

Barbarism begins in the theater... and a crack on the head is, indeed, what you get.

Small Dog Ahoy!

Good dog. Except when she gets into my room and eats my headphones (twice now).

Dammit, everyone, I'm ordering you to listen to this. It's the instrumental track from Otis and Carla's "Tramp", on Stax Records. If those fucking drums don't get you out of your seat, you have no blood in your body and I'm ashamed to know you.

Click Here!

See, this is what I mean when I say it's hard for me to get into contemporary music sometimes, because no one is doing THIS anymore. This is the lost art of sounding like three shots of whiskey and a punch to the gut.

The Men Who Glare at Stoats

This afternoon, I went to go see The Men Who Stare at Goats, the movie about the US government's involvement in paranormal/psychic activity on the parts of their soldiers. I actually really liked it. Basically, it starred Jeff Bridges as a Vietnam soldier who, after a near-death experience on the battlefield, decided that conventional warfare tactics were limiting, constrictive, and inadequate. So he chucked the whole boot-camp paradigm and spent some time among California's more... free-thinking citizens. George Clooney starred as Bridges' star pupil, and it had Ewan McGregor as a reporter tracing their histories.

It was obviously set up to be funny, more so than I had actually been expecting. Because there are themes to the film that I think are... well, pretty fucking important, actually. I mean, the central idea to the movie is that soldiers, of any nation, are not being allowed to live up to their potential. Bridges talks about the need to create a force of "warrior-monks", a cadre of people who employ unconventional battlefield tactics such as a fierce love of peace, generosity of spirit, compassion, empathy, and the finely-honed ability to fall in love with anyone, instantly, given the need.

The antagonist of the movie is the desire on the part of other characters to use this spiritual power for the same old bullshit motives, government contracts and and personal gain. (One of the best parts of the movie came from a crew-cutted Halliburton-like dickhead and his entourage of armed goons, who displayed rampant fear of attack and itchy trigger-fingers-- not from enemy combatants, but from rival American contractor companies. Watching identical mercs in polo shirts, sniping at each other from behind Chevy Tahoes, over who was going to be the first to build a Starbucks in Baghdad, was about as close as the film got to a Joseph Heller-like sense of true venom and bite-- Milo Minderbinder in Iraq.) Kevin Spacey played the main creep, and the man's such a good actor that he could basically show up and fiddle with his watch for a half-hour and be enthralling. (Sadly, the movie doesn't give him a chance to exert himself much past this).

Like I said, it's funny. But it also sort of twinges something inside you, or at least it did me. Watching George Clooney wander around, sure of himself on some strange level, while simultaneously stumbling into blockheaded moves and acting irrationally, seemed to draw some parallel to all the people I've ever run into who had something to teach me. Or even myself, at my most open. I mean, have you ever felt like you were a singular entity, shaped of some potent material, ready to channel a cosmic necessity, and then you locked your keys inside your car? But it didn't really matter, because that shit just happens and you have to be bigger than that. And the movie drew a pretty fine line between Clooney just being full of hot air, and showing flashes of something that indeed make him a little more than ordinary. There's one scene where he and Ewan McGregor are sitting besides a busted car, waiting for help. Ewan McGregor's flipping a coin out of boredom, and Clooney's calling heads or tails, three or four times in a row, right each time.

"What's your record for this?" McGregor asks.

"Two hundred and forty-six. Tails," responds Clooney, who is of course right again.

It's a small moment, and there are several like it, but it's pretty significant in its impact. For all of Clooney's foibles, he's right just often enough for you to wonder. If you'll forgive me a pretty big stretch, it's a lot like religion. From what I've seen (and lived), most of it is puff and blow, a lot of entrenched cultural hokum. But there's also little kernels of truth in it, the underlying kind of thinking that can get our collective heads out of our collective asses. So yeah, it's funny to watch Jeff Bridges telling a hand-picked group of military recruits that their first official assignment is to dance to Billy Idol. There's a lot in the movie that's worth a good hoot and snicker. But when I stop to consider the idea of teachers, of governments invested in training people to emit light... I mean, Christ, couldn't we use more of that?

In other news, I need a decompression chamber of a kind that hasn't been invented yet. I often think that if I ever have to truly detox from a chemical substance, I'll have had some good practice beforehand. It's a paradox: abstention is a kind of immersion.

This Alarming Man

Cruelest, yet funniest comment I've heard so far about Morrissey's onstage collapse:

"English blood, Irish heart, Taiwanese lungs."

Sigh.

This picture. It saddens me.

This was the guy in charge, right here. Khaki hat with silhouette of breed of pet dog. Black shorts with black socks. Eagle-emblazoned socks. Matching Crocs. Damn, that is one sharp-looking tourist.

These multiplicitous dots,

Bright small specks,

Have O such a space to fill.

Each warm red point

Inside my body

Is fooled into distance by all other points.

So saith Valery, the poet.

He was speaking of great distances,

Which in the body, I think,

Mimic those outside the body.

By as far as we fail to reach others,

So do we fail to reach ourselves.

People are not points,

But create them.

And we etch our lines from point to point

Like breathing constellations.

This Machine Schools Fascists

I said Got-DAMN! Senator Franken (D-MN) (yes, the guy the Republicans threw everything against, for increasingly apparent reasons) is on some kind of roll lately. Whatever this guy drinks for breakfast, I want some. Here he is absolutely destroying attorney Mark de Barnardo, who was defending Halliburton's sanction of the drugging and gang rape of one of their female employees:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6kiZIlMFto

And then today, I found this-- it's Franken schooling some poor Hudson Institute shill, regarding bankruptcies caused by extreme medical expenses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgqqSHr0wVA

About which all I can say is, it's a good thing she was sitting down. He's making Obama look awfully puny and conciliatory at this rate. Franken '12, I say.

Welp. I have just found the most unintentionally-hilarious painting of all time:

"Marcus Curtius" by Benjamin Robert Haydon

You can read more about this remarkable disaster of a man here:

"A Genius for Failure"

"To pass the time, I led the other airport patrons in a game of existential charades. This is like regular charades, except you attempt to convey vague philosophical concepts with your body instead of just simple nouns and verbs. I was particularly impressed by an older gentleman's portrayal of "nothingness," wherein he kept pointing into an empty thermos he was holding. A diapered two-year-old helped his mother characterize "existence before essence" by spontaneously reaching into his diaper to display its contents. As a finale, I did my impression of "absurd infinity" by lying on the floor, extending my arms and legs to form a figure eight, and bleating like a frightened sheep. Many of the patrons shouted out things such as "lunacy" and "madness," but none ever guessed correctly."

http://www.whiteshoe.org/archive/010423pilot.html

Eric Idle needs to stop.

I feel presumptuous, questioning the motives or actions of someone who is, without argument or equivocation, enshrined in the absolute comedy empyrean. The man, I hardly need to remind you, gave us "Wink wink, nudge nudge" as well as brave Sir Robin. And "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". If none of these have ever tickled your funny bone then you are pretty much a complete loser.

But for the love of Terry Gilliam's animated God, he needs to give it a rest. There's something depressing, something I find really disheartening, in Idle's relentless flogging of the Python mythos for various mass-media projects. I don't care if he relies on the reputation of his previous work-- holy Christ, is he ever entitled. But by continually churning it up, repackaging it, and presenting it in new (actually not-so-new) guises, he's watering down one of the things that made Python so incredibly... incredible.

After The Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python Tour, The Greedy Bastard Tour, Spamalot, and the Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy) cavalcade, not to mention Python getting its own Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor, it's all no longer even close to strange. It's certainly no longer surprising. (Well, obviously. That happens to all work, given time. But I think you get my point). The original motivation behind Python was an exasperated raspberry blown at the boring, repetitive structure of scene, setup, punchline, scene, setup, punchline. Not to mention the almost surreal levels of inanity in the British power and social structure. In a nutshell, it was supposed to be subversive, bizarre, flirting with inaccessible. All the writers of the show were determined to avoid the knee-jerk, catchphrase writing they had been exposed to growing up.

But now, well, look:

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/theater/reviews/08python.html

Oh goody! "An Evening Without Monty Python"! Another chance to hear the same damn sketches over and over and over again, stripped of context and pigeonholed into the exact same fucking format they were trying to break in the first place. The reviewer seems to get the exact same sense of vague nausea that I do off the whole thing, citing Terry Jones: "The fact that Pythonesque is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed."

I'm being hidebound and reactionary, I can tell. My nose is pointing up towards the ceiling. But look at Michael Palin. You wouldn't exactly imagine "An Evening With Michael Palin: He Does His Compere Impression For an Hour and a Half". Or the Spanish Inquisition Revue. Nope. He dropped the whole thing, worked on "Ripping Yarns" (well worth a look in its own right), and is now primarily known for his funny and engaging travelogues. Point is, he's doing his own thing. Terry Gilliam works on his ever-so-slightly unusual films. Graham Chapman died. All original, fresh moves. But Idle's still mining the same ore. At this rate, I sullenly (with the tinge of satisfaction everyone gets from being in dudgeon) predict the Meaning of Life off-Broadway show, musical, dance cycle, placemat, or home entertainment board game.

Neal Cassady's Hammer

As some of you may know, I've spent a number of years now reading up on Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty, aka Cody Pomeray, aka Hart Kennedy, Speed Limit, Houlihan, the Holy Goof, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about his trope, in later years, of carrying around a small sledgehammer which he would flip, toss, and juggle. It became his signature trick, and he was rarely seen without it.

Ken Kesey mentions Neal on one occasion hooking down speed in an quiet parking lot and, while the rest of his crew are busy elsewhere, carrying on a faux-sportscast event, hammer careening through the air. "How's that for reflexes? One-thirtieth of a second, maybe less! Champion sinews and synapses... One, two, three... he's well on his way to breaking the record! Is this boy never satisfied? No applause, please-- it's an act of devotion..." and so on and so on. John Barlow, sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead, talked about how Cassady would listen to jazz on headphones late into the night, stripped to the waist, pouring sweat, while the hammer became a "lethal blur" flying around him. And of course Thomas Wolfe mentions it when he first meets Cassady in an abandoned building in San Francisco where the Merry Pranksters were holed up.

Anyway, what's my point? Well, it's that everyone seemed to have their own take on it. Prankster Ken Babbs said he thought at first that Cassady was just dicking around, but then realized he was using it the way a juggler or an athlete would-- to stay "trim, alert, ready". Kesey, who expounded to the Pranksters the idea of being separated from the real world by a 1/30th-of-a-second lag in the senses, used Cassady's hammer-tossing as a way to continually test one's reflexes, to see how much time one could shave off the lag. (He also said that when Cassady missed the catch-- kerblamm, the hammer would hit the floor-- it wasn't an accident, that Cassady was attuned to some emergent bad vibes and was trying to break them up). John Allen Cassady, his son, said that Neal loved flipping pencils or sticks for his and his kids' entertainment, seeing how many times he could catch them in a row before missing and starting over at "one". (He also notes that, given Neal's legendary consumption of amphetamines towards the end of his life, he probably had to have something on hand to play with to keep his revved-up limbs busy).

I think they're all valid. It was just something that Neal did, that you could read into any way you liked. This seems to be the teaching method that catches on the fastest and endures the longest. Action-- praxis-- was Neal's real legacy. He didn't really write much down, but yet he was absolutely inspirational for two separate cultural movements, because of what and who he was, and what he did. He was an unassailable fact in the vivacity of his existence, and people latched on to it, and read from it, and formulated what they needed from it. This holds true today. You can read messages, I am almost completely convinced, in the patterns of clouds, in the conversations of strangers, in the patterns of rubbish on the street-- if you want to. Any goddamn thing we encounter has a message, a story, and a lesson. Our existence is a book of greatest subtlety with, I would imagine, roughly six billion different interpretations, and more being added all the time.

Ambient Music

I recorded a new thing today. I decided my guitar had ghosts and voices in it that needed to come out. So I shook it awake, and this is what it sang:

Click to download

This is me being completely honest for 3 minutes 4 seconds.

Organic Systems

Constructed space vs. natural space.

In a completely organic environment, chaos is more readily accepted and incorporated. You can go completely berserk in a grassy field and not have much of an effect. But if you go completely berserk in an office building you can do much more "damage".

Organic systems aren't so much defined by this "working"/"not-working" dichotomy. A piece of technology is sleek, hard-edged. Binary. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, the problem is located, isolated, and deleted.

...It occurs to me that perhaps our computer systems and so forth are merely the first step towards the creation of an organic system. A forest seems like a good example of an organic system. Huge, consisting of many smaller entities (almost holographic, in that each part is a reflection of the whole, or stands for the whole: synecdoche), with multiple redundancies.

Now, that's the part that I think ties the two different worlds together. Remember that phrase I put here earlier, "graceful degeneracy"? It's the idea that if some parts fail, the system will continue. Likewise, one tree can fall, no big deal for the entire forest. It's the idea of having a system that is large enough, soft enough around the edges, that a part of it can fail or be excised, and the rest will simply adapt.

I wonder-- is the creation of artificial material part of "nature"? It must be, since even the most unusual plastics or polymers are merely rearrangements of pre-existing material. So really, downtown Manhattan is a "natural" phenomenon... perhaps more frightening is the idea of "sterility", absence of life. We are, as we know, host to legions of bacteria and various little harmless organisms. So maybe, when we contemplate the vaguely horrifying "lifeless" feel of a cubicle or a Wal-Mart, it's the millions of tiny cries of protest coming from these animalcules in our intestines.

I Have Found the World's Least-Effective Ad

Why in the hell would they use a picture like that? I'm straight and even I want to suck that guy's dick. It is this complete and utter disingenuousness on the part of the movement that leads me to believe in some sort of conspiracy.

Random Wikipedia finds:

Best new phrase, from the "Fault-tolerant system" page: "graceful degradation", apparently the property that allows a system to keep functioning normally in the event of a failure.

A phenomenon attributed to quark matter, given that the baryon density is high enough and the temperature is below 10^12 kelvins: "color superconductivity".

A hypothetical particle consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks:

A "strangelet". ("Oh, honey, come look at the adorable strangelet! What's that scamp done now? Why, he's instigated an 'ice-nine' type of catastrophic scenario. The little dickens.")

I Suppose it's Allegorical

As anyone who's ever owned a puppy will tell you, they are a mess. A primal engine of entropy on four legs. They can't help it. They must go, do, interact, with all the curiosity, tenacity, and aggression they can muster, which is a lot. So you can't be overly fastidious around one.

A lesson I learned today. The little scamp that occupies the apartment decided recently to investigate my closet, which, as I am not the neatest of men, had quite a pile of clothes collecting in it.

So moved must she have been by the spectacle of my unwashed togs that she was inspired to leave more than a little of herself behind.

This, of course, was unimpeachably natural and unimpeachably disgusting. (Lock your doors, I hear you crying even now. Can't, I reply. My bedroom door won't shut all way. Hell if I know why). I decided to chuck a few items of clothing that I deemed duly doomed by doggie detritus.

Now, I am loath (there's an understatement) to throw some old things away. If I have deemed them helpful, useful, emotionally resonant or particularly faithful, I find it harder to part with those items than I do with most people. The clothing I tossed were undeniably old campaigners. One was a plain black-and-white shirt with a Japanese ideogram on it. (I can tell it now-- reliable sources ID'd it for me as the character for "love", but I always claimed ignorance whenever anyone asked its meaning, because I would've been embarrassed to be walking around with a shirt that said "love" on it. Silly, really). The other was a pair of green twill pants, and by God, I'll swear by the seven seas of Rhye they were some of the best pants a man ever had. But their time had come. They were worn out, faded, ripped, and displayed some truly gargantuan holes around the general buttock-area. They were only a few tenacious stitches away from being disparate pieces of cloth, instead of a singular article. So it really was time, aided by dog's unerring instinct...

I suddenly realize that it may have been that skulking ginger bastard of a cat instead. If that yowling little son of a whore was responsible for ruining two of my most-loved duds, I'll make it my mission to somehow shit on his head in reparation.

I know I've been showing this to a lot of people, but if you haven't seen it yet, man, check it out. This will probably be my favorite thing that Trent Reznor has ever done (I'm not craaaazy about the man's work, but I respect his aesthetic). T-Rez leads the gang through "Night Clubbing" while Bela Lugosi in sideburns makes Bryan Ferry sound overwrought.

"Oh, isn't it wild?"

There's something really special, to me, about the setup they've got going here. It's amazing how sound technology has evolved to the point where you can get this sort of pristine intensity and precision, all while playing to like 12 people. I mean, to get that guitar to squall like that in the old days, you'd need half a dozen effects pedals, a cranked-up stack, and enough volume and feedback hum to bristle Zappa's soul patch. Here it's a tiny little set-up, like a very small hurricane. Yeah... music for small rooms. I still think it's an interesting challenge. How can one fill the space with music, but still allow enough room to move through it?

The Graveyard and the Ballroom

So a few days ago, I watched Anton Corbijn's film Control, about Ian Curtis (primarily) and Joy Division (by extension).

I thought it was good if you knew about the band. If you'd never heard of Joy Division, then I'd imagine the film would come off as still sad and affecting, but kind of a snooze. Everything in it was filtered through a stark, but somehow luxurious black and white look. The emotional content was passed through a similar filter-- dialogue was muttered under the breath, all poses crisp and obviously staged. The ultimate effect was stiltedness, distance-- which I imagine was meant to echo Curtis' feelings of isolation and emotional pain.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to (since I've been listening to some classics of the genre) talk about the movement that seems to be called post-punk, and one band in particular's album, The Graveyard and the Ballroom.

The group is called A Certain Ratio (certain bands' propensities for messing about with Nazi ide- and terminology remains consistent). They rose up in the formidable shadow of Joy Division, sharing a link through Factory Records.

Their sound was somewhat similar, but different enough to allure. Whereas Joy Division had a hollow, booming sort of sound, A Certain Ratio fell firmly on the kinetic side of angst. Just take a listen to the opening track, "Do the Du":

http://theguydeborians.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/do-the-du/

(And honestly, if you could only listen to one Certain Ratio track, this would definitely be it, at least off of Graveyard and Ballroom). The hollow, declamatory vocal delivery is there, and a corpulent, aggressive bassline, but Joy Division never flirted with this kind of spidery funk. The guitars chatter away at the edges like St. Vitus-ing skeletons and some sort of listless chorus keeps up the handclaps. The overall effect is like getting beaten with a chain-link fence. Meanwhile, singer Simon Topping lists off his lobotomized series of visceral observations and complaints, like Jeffrey Dahmer writing a goodbye note to his girlfriend. ("My heart was just/ An open sore/ Which you picked at/ 'Til it was raw").

Not a song that goes down easy. More of a formaldehyde cocktail, really. The second half of the album showcases a live set, where the band was opening for Talking Heads. The melodies are somewhat lacking-- or, in some cases, not really there-- but of course I doubt they're meant to be. It's all about that scritchy beat and war-zone guitars. Highly recommended for fans of Factory Records, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and anyone who likes hyperactive gloom (and I do mean gloom-- listening to "Crippled Child" all the way through is like listening to Caligari's somnambulist spell out your personal demise). It's got teeth, and to quote Ian Curtis, "And we could dance!"

There are things in my room and they aren't people.

I can't see them as well in the daytime.

The sun washes out their faint light.

They come and go and stick to the corners and fill the pools.

They avoid the hazy heat of the city's daytime.

They curve around the sharp lights of electricity.

They shimmer in the realm of the unknown.

They are more comfortable in the night's vivid impressions

And they're teaching me to be too.

Message from Mali

I want to tell you a story. A few years ago, I was at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee. I think it was the second day into it. I had been walking around the grounds for hours, the heat was pushing the 100's, and there was dust everywhere. I was undernourished and overstimulated. Beat, in other words.

But that evening, I found this little, out-of-the-way tent removed from the main action. Inside, I saw a black couple on stage, both wearing sunglasses, surrounded by their band.

This, I would later learn, was Amadou & Mariam. But at the time I wouldn't have the faintest idea. What I did soon realize is that the band could fucking groove. The guitars were spiky and cyclical, and the rhythms were like somebody who took every disco beat ever and then stripped, painted, polished and revamped them for maximum urgency and ass-shaking abandon.

I stood there, soaking in the first ripples of their sonic wave, and suddenly I realized I was bouncing up and down on the heels of my feet. I didn't want to-- like I said, I was tired. Nor did I intend to bob my head, clap my hands, snap my fingers, or finally dance like an over-medicated chihuahua. I really didn't feel like doing any of that. But I had to, man. The fuckin' music had got ahold of me.

This is our couple under discussion:

and they are awesome. Our Mr. Amadou Bagayoko met Ms. Mariam Doumbia at Mali's School for the Young Blind in Mali's capital, Bamako. After realizing they shared an interest in music, the young couple grew up, fell in love, got married, and started playing the kind of spicy Mali soul-blues groove that could grow grass on dancefloors.

I have their debut album, Dimanche a Bamako:

And I only have one complaint about it. You notice that rather conspicuous "GUEST STAR MANU CHAO" sticker on it? Well, the guest star has a nasty habit of hogging up the scenery. Anyone familiar with Chao's sound on Proxima Estacion: Esperanza will recognize this album right off. The incongruous snippets of dialogue, the ping-ponging guitar dioramas, the tinny, toy-like drums that sound like they come out of a wind-up fast-food prize-- yup, they're all here, and in my opinion they detract.

Well, maybe the production sound is exactly what it's supposed to be. If this were an overblown monster of a trance-beat beast it would have no innocence. (I've noticed the music of King Sunny Ade, another Afro-beat phenom, has a similar modesty. Music like this is intricate and organic, of a more quiet grandeur. A tree instead of a skyscraper).

That being said, if these two ever come to your town, see them live. You won't regret it.

Life as a Search

You need different things. And not all of them can be found as one person.

Eventually, you have to change your mind. You can either change your own mind, or wait for time to do it for you.

By "change" I don't mean you decide that one option is, in fact, better than the other. By "change" I mean effect a revamping of the mental processes in toto. As I said, this can be done by you. I suspect that to truly change your mind you must first change your body. You might have to change your surroundings, change your posture, change your chemical balance, change your breathing. The body is now stimulated, changed into something new, and the mind follows.

When you look around, after having changed your mind, you might discover that the previous tenant of your mental map has acquired a lot of stuff, both physical and not, that the new mind isn't crazy about. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of acquired stuff can often overpower the fragile glow of the changed mind. The new mind looks around, decides it isn't worth it, and sinks back into the morass.

This is why we have symbols as ancient as the Phoenix, and as contemporary as Dr. Who. Both of these creatures act, die, change, and move on.

Many little cells on our bodies are dying, constantly. Maybe we are aware of this on some level. Maybe these little speckled dots, falling away, soak us lightly with the impressions of mortality. The human-being-as-comet conceit, it occurs to me, was noted by Sylvia Plath in her poem "Night Dances":

The comets

Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off--

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Brief Poems

I.

Putting on indifference like a shabby coat

I didn't want to ignore you

But you made it so necessary

II.

A wolf at the door

Come to whet the white capstone

Of his ugly fangs

III.

I walked into my room today,

And reeled under the sudden weight of blood,

Of salt, the smell of skin

Host only to your dark forces.

Turn around slowly, and retrace your shape

Many little slivers, all of you

Time is our only hurt

And unhappiness our only shame.

Hygenic Creative Channels

I went to meet my friendly local State Farm representative today, which made me feel like kind of an idiot. Where do you work, Starbucks, Have you gone to college, Kind of, 401k, Not Really, What do you like to do, Things. I always get uncomfortable when I have to give anyone a life-synopsis, especially anyone in any sort of official position. What do I really like to do? Drink lots of coffee, draw on newspaper on my wall and pretend I'm drawing on the wall itself, justify dancing by myself in my room by calling it "kinetic trance therapy" (it kind of is), look up people's astrological signs on Wikipedia, come up with ideas and then never implement them, wonder whether I'm getting better or worse, commune with the entropy that one can only truly sense at 2 a.m., etc. etc.

But the main struggle is the feeling, lately, that I have nothing to offer. And this insidious bastard is one of those annular brain-traps where thinking makes it so. Nothing to offer, not to friends family teachers audiences lovers anything. Self-pity! Awesome!

Well, maybe some light entertainment is in order. Here's me taking an impromptu spin through "Baby You're a Rich Man":

Also, look at these goddamn beautiful pictures:

And finally, here is a picture of a duck having a party. Hee. :)

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

One of the pleasures of my life as I've grown up, I realize now, is watching my friends become more and more comfortable with their beauty. Photographs might be inherently misleading or illusory or incomplete-- but they are awfully handy. Looking back at old pictures, I see people of raw potential, a little washed out or blurry around the edges. As they've grown older, they come into focus better, look more like themselves. And the transformation in them is amazing to see. (Plus, now that we've moved out of the Scylla-and-Charybdis-like assaults of public schooling, I think we're all a little less on the defensive which allows us to melt and flow and open up, disclosing the distinctive lights and colors of our personalities [sound familiar, Ade?]). I've heard, on several different occasions, friends of mine remark that their groups of friends are really beautiful people. And I must now concur.

The Iggiot

So last night I downloaded some new music, all in a similar vein:

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division - Closer

Depeche Mode - Violator

New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies

Iggy Pop - The Idiot

All characterized by their icy, heavily processed sounds and feelings of a) despair, b) measurably more gorgeous and cinematic despair, c) suave self-absorption, d) propulsion created by tension, and e) methodical restriction, respectively.

I should mention that I had to furrow my brow over some of those adjectives. Because they're hard to sum up. As parts of the same family, they have a common thread, and it's hard to describe any of them without invoking the others. Each of them was a landmark in its own way, channeling a little more of a single, distinctive spirit.

But it's The Idiot I want to talk about, if only because I know its story better. In the mid-to-late-70's, both David Bowie and Iggy Pop were in exile, trying to get away from Los Angeles and their respective drug problems. Iggy was looking for direction, no longer the lead gunslinger for the mighty Stooges. Bowie was trying to coalesce his new ideas, which included the kosmiche sounds of Kraftwerk, the pervasive feel of the city of Berlin, and his thoughts on narrowly escaping his own personal cocaine hell. This gave him plenty of inspiration, but his pen was dry.

Iggy, on the other hand, was ready to hit the studio and start cranking. So, in an interesting form of symbiosis, Bowie produced Iggy's The Idiot, using the recording process as a sort of test-run for ideas he would develop further on his own Low. As a result, the album sounds virtually nothing like you would expect from one of the godfathers of proto-punk. (The album bears no resemblance to the Dostoevsky novel of the same name, but the bookish Bowie shared an affinity for it with Iggy and co-producer Tony Visconti). The album is all cold anguish and robotic stridence. Iggy sings most of his vocals in a kind of somnolent chant, making him sound intense and vacant at the same time (and did this have an effect on the vocal style of Joy Division's Ian Curtis? You can bet the autobahn it did. As a matter of fact, it was The Idiot that was found spinning on the record player when Curtis' body was discovered, dead by suicide in his kitchen. Eerie). 

I mean, look at the album cover:

Caught in a stiff, affected pose, Iggy looks like a figure from some 1920's expressionist cinema. And where the hell is he? The moon? The background is almost completely blank, dreary, grey. He might be sporting a pair of quintessentially-American denim jeans, but the pop-shouldered jacket is his new persona-- something that doesn't really fit. Streaks of white are falling, probably snowflakes, putting him outside in a cold environment-- outside, without a home, wandering around, probably lost. The picture is perfectly descriptive of the lonely, brilliant music inside. Highly recommended.

(For a much more authoritative take on The Idiot, as well as subsequent activity on Iggy's part, all as a part of David Bowie's oeuvre, check out the excellent Bowie in Berlin by Thomas Jerome Seabrook. In addition to The Idiot, it's chock full of information about some of Bowie's best work, including Station to Station, Low, and "Heroes").

Earlier, Happier Sights

Myspace and other social networking sites are so dangerous because they let you peek at snapshots of people you shouldn't peek at snapshots of. For instance, I've recently been perusing pix of an old flame... no, that language is too flippant. She's the first girl I ever really cared about romantically, and rather than sending her a message (unwise for reasons I will get into later, or perhaps you already know), I'm venting about it on my blog, because what else is it for...?

Begin at the end. It ended badly. I was completely unprepared-- for anything. My mind began whirling, I was choked with fear. I couldn't explain anything. I had to run away. The more I tried to explain myself, the worse it got. I could see her eyes go from soft warmth to hurt, hostile confusion. This made me even more afraid, which in turn further affected my ability to communicate, etc etc. Every time I saw her after that, she wouldn't even acknowledge me. That really, really hurt. 

She used to be, and perhaps still is, the person who could make me laugh the most. I told her once that if it were just her and me in a room that was completely bare except for a pencil, say, or a table, within five minutes we would be using it to crack each other completely up. I didn't laugh so much around anyone else. She had a completely freewheeling sense of humor that picked you up and dragged you along for the ride. We would make puns, outrageous stories, read Craigslist personals ads in ridiculous voices and collapse giggling. We would put the Beatles on the stereo and see who could come up with the most outlandish dance moves. We didn't give a fuck.

She was brainy and well-read. I told her about David Foster Wallace, she told me about Dave Eggers. She loved David Bowie, Modest Mouse. She introduced me to Kanye West's "Gold Digger". We made each other mix CD's. Hers were fantastic, mine probably less so. Certain songs still make me think of her, of course... "Crimson in Clover", Iron and Wine's "Such Great Heights", "Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer)".

I remember a lot of rainy nights. I would get a call or a text, whatever, and drive over. A lot of times I would run, in long strides, up to the door, just wanting to get there as fast as I could. Her place was warm, heated by air from a grate in the floor. A lot of late nights and water beads on the windows and invented drinks in glazed cups. The soft light of her bedroom, some gauzy fabric over the lamp.

She was awfully patient, too. The first time I kissed her I was incredibly, unbelievably nervous, shaking like a leaf. She took it in stride. I, defensive creature, moved along at an incremental pace. She didn't mind. I took to sleeping, fully clothed, on her floor, then beside her, reassuring myself that it wasn't all that serious. Casual, really. Just happened to be sleeping here beside you... gee, what are the odds... (What a dork). As the nights wore on, I got more comfortable kissing her and touching her, content to do nothing else for what seemed like hours, and maybe was. I got familiar with the phenomenon of music going through my head. Sometimes I could hear David Bowie singing "Ziggy Stardust". Sometimes I would see weird visions flash through my head as we revolved around each other. I remember once seeing fields of mushrooms, all of them a different vibrant color.

The mornings were fantastic. We would take turns trying to heave ourselves out of bed, roused by a cell phone's alarm clock, and then the other would make a grab, a kiss on the neck, and we were delayed for another ten minutes. She sang silly, operatic versions of "Morning Has Broken" and "Folsom Prison Blues". I told her once that I thought the perfect day would be to wake up next to her, over and over. We made tea and curled up blearily on couches in the cool morning. 

Hard not to live in the past when days like those are only a thought away. Even to look at pictures of where she is now makes me wriggle with happiness. I hope, I truly would love, if we could talk and be friends again someday. Maybe, maybe not. Move on.

Waking, I Post

I don't know how to describe the feeling I get when I wake up from a dream so vivid, so abundant, so eminently weird, that I just know it could be a short story or a novel, and then I realize it might never be. I dunno, have you ever had a dream like that? One where you even love the characters in it, imaginary though they may be?

Apparently, Rod Serling (of "Twilight Zone" fame-- you know the guy-- cigarette, dark suit, head tilted, lip slightly cocked in an ominous manner-- "A dimension not of SIGHT or of SOUND but of MIND.") got plenty of his ideas from nightmares. Of which I've had more than a few in my time as well.

Right now I'm listening, for the first time, to Miles Davis' apparently much-maligned "On the Corner" album. I like it. Thick, funky, aggressive, clanging sludge. Reminds me of a funny joke:

Knock, knock.

"Who's there?"

"Miles Davis."

"Miles Davis who?"

"Fuck you, whitey."

Flickering Animal

For a blog entitled "Bright Animal Rampant" (an optimistic gesture), I haven't written very many optimistic posts. I don't know that this one will be much different... but of course the important thing is to keep going, to process, to move through the procedure even if the present is unpleasant.

It seems dangerous to me to acknowledge weakness or vulnerability overmuch. Or darkness, for that matter. Because to me, what is dwelled upon grows. This places me in a tricky spot because I want to admit to sadness, dejectedness, occasionally swarming misery. Who wouldn't. But when I say it, or find those who say it for me, it's like saying You've Won. Another reason why I was hesitant to embrace "OK Computer", which lately seems like a really good microcosm for most of my emotional gestalt. If I listen to these songs of icy dislocation, keening desire, sleepy helplessness, of course that's how I feel. But do I want to bring that into focus? It's like naming a demon-- in doing so, you conjure it up. Better, maybe, to keep it only ever on the periphery of your vision. You know it's there, but if it's never in your face, you can only ever move around it. Parallax. Or some such.

My Tired Lung

I think-- and I've talked to a lot of people about this-- music doesn't hit all the people all the time. Sometimes a band records a song and you're not ready to hear it until 20, 30, 40 years later. Your ears and brain just aren't set up to receive it yet. I think about this a lot because I don't like to listen to music right when it comes out. I like music with a little age on it, for some reason.

Anyway, this obscure introduction is basically just leading up to me saying that I've been listening to a good bit of Radiohead recently, basically one of the most gargantuan bands in the world for most of the 90's-- and thus, one I've consciously eschewed. Not entirely-- I really liked most of "The Bends" when I first heard it, especially "High and Dry", which to me seemed warm and accessible and sympathetic, not like the music I imagined a group called Radiohead would make. Anyway, lately I've been taking another sonic tour through "OK Computer", which I didn't like as much as "The Bends" on first listen (for obvious reasons). 

I particularly like the second half of the album. It's a little more tuneless, but that actually works, because all the songs tend to melt and flow into each other, making the songs more a big, flowing whole. "Karma Police" is very White Album-ish and "No Surprises" is so incredibly arresting with that little glockenspiel-like intro.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can finally, now, listen to the album, rather than popular perception of the album, which colors my feelings more than I'd like. If something is too popular, I'm not really listening to it, I'm listening to people listening to it. In the words of some great thinker whose name escapes me (maybe Goethe), "Let us space".

Guess what, all of that was just an introduction for a cover of "My Iron Lung". By yours truly!

(I had to kind of chop it and switch it up and improvise it and mess it up. Don't expect perfection).

The Speed of Light

First of all, I'd like to recommend that everyone take a few minutes to check out Bryan "Formerly of Roxy Music" Ferry's quietly pained take on Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street", the bright spot amongst Ferry's unfortunately uninspiring and misleadingly-titled 2007 release "Dylanesque":

You got a lotta nerve, to say you wanna click this link

(I would also recommend that you look at anything else besides the video while the song is playing, because it's about as dull as anyone could possibly make a video. I can literally sum it up in two words: "Girl, walking". My don't I feel acerbic right now).

I would also like to invite everyone to consider the following interesting series of facts, taken from The Elegant Universe:

1) Every object in the universe is traveling at the speed of light.

2) Most of this speed is taken up in the fourth dimension (time), which explains why most objects appear to be traveling at much slower speeds when we look at them.

3) The more of this cumulative energy you expend on moving through space, the less energy there is to spend on moving through time. What this means is that the faster an object moves through space, the slower time goes for that object.

4) Objects traveling at the maximum speed through space (and only photons can do this) travel at the minimum speed through time, which is none at all. In other words, for a photon, time stands still. Any photon bouncing around the universe is exactly as old now as it ever was.

I hope you get the gist of this-- it's such a simple idea, but hard to phrase clearly. Pretty staggering, no? One of my co-workers, ever the practical girl, asked if this couldn't be the universe's ultimate youth-preserving treatment. All you would have to do is travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and stretch out your life considerably.

Of course, once I explained that speed also increases your density we discarded the idea as impractical. (This is another great side note: the faster an object goes, the greater its density. Any object which could travel at the speed of light would become infinitely dense, thereby requiring an infinite amount of energy to move at that speed. The only reason photons can get around this weight restriction is that they are massless particles [which by itself is more than enough to blow my mind]. It doesn't matter how many times over their mass is multiplied, it's still zero, and so the intrepid photon can haul its quantum ass faster than any second-rate speed demon, Speedy Gonzales, the Flash, and Neal Cassady included).

I Probably Need Therapy

Intentionally advancing in the night

overcome and turned to water

not stone but water

Put on a sexual mask

and slip through a mesh,

defenses dropping and raising

over and over

Erotic paralysis and mild scorn

geologic compulsion and

inviolate decay,

don't you just wish

dream of candles and gas masks

interlocking fingers and 

flowers on tables, selfish panic,

lazy terror

dropping beads of sweat onto an

electrified mesh floor

hands and knees, a four-point

pillar

to be a Cambodian petal in a 

sanguine swelter. The envy.

Slaughter cows and sheep. Dash

them on rocks, slice them with

your fingers.

Lightly licking your face's skin curve

There are dragons underneath

the earth, in caves, in tunnels

"He turns into a right bastard

when he doesn't get his way"

Poppy eyes but a putrid smile.

Untitled

Turn memory off

We plant radishes and love

We burn, more so

 

Slowly sleeping

Revolve around me, your pivot point

Here meaning comes after

 

If we turn meaning on

Green fingers in the earth turn blue

It's what you need, it's you

 

Here is the further

It's you, it's you

Nothing between us but leaves

 

Yes, we make good, we run

I take days to arrive

Only we could leave Saturn behind

 

I replace you with all metal

Emptying on the grass

Explain me once again, it's you

 

Here now comes after

Some caught our sorrow

It's eternal, it's you

 

Empty you keep me

Brought me here after

Here in your furor

 

All life will come after

Ashamed by my own desire

Here it will come to be

 

Now all your guns are taken away

Ah, take them, leave them

Martyr your hate, given anew

 

It's what you need, it's you

I wrote this one night while listening to Sigur Ros. I tried to turn the lyrics (which I couldn't understand) into intelligible lines, not really caring about meaning or coherence. Imagine my surprise when the lines turned out to be, in my opinion, highly cohesive. Anyway, it's hard for me to tell, but I think this poem is about the organic nature of love, how emotions and love can be cultivated like plants, and how you might sacrifice that organic, earthy feeling for the metal and plastic of animosity or nationalism or some such.

Breakin' Glass

Here we have the immortal "Breaking Glass", re-imagined as a sort of John Lee Hooker/ZZ Top shuffle... I got this idea after staying up too late one night.