Wednesday, July 29, 2009

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."

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

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.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

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).

Thursday, July 23, 2009

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":


(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).

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

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.

Monday, July 20, 2009

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.

Friday, July 17, 2009

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.