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.