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.