Key Change

Another Fond Farewell

2008-04-30T10:28:00.000-07:00

For various reasons which need not be gone into in any depth in this semi-public venue, but which the astute among you may readily surmise, I will always remember this gentle giant of pharmaceutical research fondly:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24378509/
Adieu, Albert Hoffman.

Wither The Wire?

2008-02-01T04:01:00.001-08:00

i've only seen more than a few episodes of any tv shows for the past four or so years in the past month. and those have all been episodes of the wire. this here is just to publish a mark of some thoughts made in one successive stem.

wire predictions
After noreece the city hall president gains the upper hand politically in the next mayor race due to bond’s mishandling of the clay davis affair, she uses her information about daniels to thwart carcetti’s plans and redirect power within the police department. Templeton’s shortcuts at the newspaper become close to scandal within the office but the sensation surrounding his stories earns him protection from the bosses and eventually success as he betrays his police informant to protect his own lies about the serial killer. Mcnulty’s career ends in ruins just as the wire tap is near closing on marlo, and the scandal cripples daniels, dodging curruptions accusations, in his work to reform the police administration. Marlo does get caught though, caught between too many forces aligned against him. All are enemies now he wears the crown, and his only allies are his troops. He’s got omar, the new day coop, and both legitimate and illegitimate branches of the police operation after him. In the end, one shall knock him down. It could be omar, for an ultra television satisfaction, but I think however marlo falls omar gets downed at last by Michael, although not necessarily outdueled. And in vacuum created through marlo’s death or arrest, Michael’s reputation as omar’s killer lifts him to the crown (note the crown and the no. 1 on michael’s shirt when he visits bunk in the police station). Marlo of course had been a bloody master but he won the western mainly on the false reputation for murdering stringer bell. This season is all about reputations, about perception as information spreads. Michael seems a ripe candidate to be the season’s, and the series’s, heartbreaker. Paws on the puppy. And bubbles saves a life.

The Ecstatic Trail

2008-01-14T22:23:00.000-08:00

Some people get stuck with lice or cursed by psychotic daydreams. My lot is a hairy belly.

I am not a hairy person over all, no back hair for example; just tufted halos around my nipples, a bit on the breastbone. But then this patch on my middle, the hairy belly, a forest fortress round my bellybutton deeper, denser, darker than hair anywhere below my collar.

It’s not quite so much as my head. Not quite, but you can comb it.

Now men do have hair here, plenty of them do. You call it a happy trail. You call it so for it shapes usually a prim lane headed beneath the elastic band of your undies, the trail’s mood gained by its intimacy with these underparts. A smirking reminder it belongs really to the pubic hair.

But my abdomen’s overgrowth enters, for most who find it, rather too far into the obscene. It’s not hard seeing why. Picture a woman whose bush at a beach creeps out a furry full foot atop her bikini bottom.

The sight upsets taste. And in course, my belly hair fairly invited its round of humiliations.

I can remember leaving the shower at a friend’s house when in high school, his younger sister pointing. “He looks like Austin Powers.” Once a woman I’d been dancing with at a Chicago club lifted my shirt suddenly, I guess to check my shape to better judge if she should take me home. As if doubting it existed she tugged the fluff; I shrugged, she shook her head and made a wordless exit. Then at a backdoor barbeque, Fourth of July. There were beers, there were ribs. I prepared to run a race in the grass with Dave Kim. I took my shirt off. “Lars,” said Dave. “Your happy trail is ecstatic!”

Every man’s lot is his, indeed and yet my shame is not of the teasing, nor of the creeping out. The story cannot be made full till I confess that hand I myself laid in the making of the hairy belly, or so I ever suspected.

I was twelve and read in a sex manual that rubbing your hands in a clockwise manner above the pelvic region would help stimulate glands, inflate fecundity. Never mind I had nor use or exchange for intercourtly potential in those days, I did it the next time I masturbated.

I worked that hairless tummy with the one hand and got it ready for the other. And who but knows what my produce did where it spilled that day, but in days that came hairs of aging grew on my skin. Little did first, a trail, even vine, but they flowered, and by grownhood found and filled the shape of that circling hand.

Flimsy biology connects this to this, I know. I not so much believe as like fearing Christians dread it may be so, dread my own accomplice. If I can’t know in fact I did nothing to provoke my rash of lycanthropy, I least know I avoided not every disgrace I could to escape it. Then who again knows what pubescent stirring a warm touch might feed in a changing boy’s follicles?

The magic doubt buries itself in the moment as a scar. If coincidence, yet there it goes, swirling round the umbilical.

Raise Another Glass

2007-11-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

Well, hell, as long as nobody else has any new music, words, or commentary, I'll mark the birth of another grand American creative spirit, whose birthday falls on this day (no, not Lars--his birthday was last week).

You weren't perfect either, JMH, or you might still be among the living. But you sure could wail the heck out of a guitar!

So, fly on, fly on, into stratocaster stratospherics.

Mailer Elegy

2007-11-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

A moment of silence, if you please, for the passing of Norman Mailer, an author and a character that several of us here have long appreciated, a man who will be missed with a voice that could not be overlooked.

A virtual wake may be in order: wherever you may find yourselves at this time, hoist high a drink, give a grin and a wink, and remember a story or a turn of phrase or a moment of outrageous media manipulation of the sort that only Mailer could orchestrate...

Here's to you, Norman Mailer, in some literary pub of the ages in which the old souls gather for camaraderie, unto which they resort for the rubbing of elbows, the sipping of whiskey, and the reciting of well-told tales.

We're all probably out of place, somewhere.

2007-11-07T16:48:00.001-08:00

From Anton Chekov's "An Anonymous Story":

picture from http://filmplus.org/plays/orchard.html

"I keep making plans for our life, plans and plans—and I enjoy doing it so! George, I'll begin with the question, when are you going to give up your post?"

"What for?" asked Orlov, taking his hand from his forehead.

"With your views you cannot remain in the service. You are out of place there."

"My views?" Orlov repeated. "My views? In conviction and temperament I am an ordinary official, one of Shtchedrin's heroes. You take me for something different, I venture to assure you."

"Joking again, George!"

"Not in the least. The service does not satisfy me, perhaps; but , anyway, it is better for me than anything else. I am used to it, and in it I meet men of my own sort; I am in my place there and find it tolerable."

"You hate the service and it revolts you."

"Indeed? If I resign my post, take to dreaming aloud and letting myself be carried away into another world, do you suppose that that world would be less hateful to me than the service?"

"You are ready to libel yourself in order to contradict me." Zinaida Fyodorovna was offended and got up. "I am sorry I began this talk."

"Why are you angry? I am not angry with you for not being an official. Every one lives as he likes best."

"Why, do you live as you like best? Are you free? To spend your life writing documents that are opposed to your own ideas," Zinaida Fyodorvna went on, clasping her hands in despair: "to submit to authority, congratulate your superiors at the new year, and then cards and nothing but cards: worst of all, to be working for a system which must be distasteful to you—no, George, no! You should not make such horrid jokes. It's dreadful. You are a man of ideas, and you ought to be working for your ideas and nothing else."

This May Evolve Into Something

2007-10-25T19:34:00.000-07:00

Running. Feet padding pavement, but nearly not. Of course it hasn't actually, but time has stopped—accelerated and slowed at the same time. Like a train acheving traction on ice now careening, brakes sparking and screaming. Still moving forward.

Government. Job. Others. All seem to oppress. We talk about it. All the time, us. But we also don't pay attention. We've resigned to facts on which we've performed surgery. Possibly due to incompetence, we've now injected puss into them. We've marred them with our cynicism syringe. We've got grand plans to examine, understand and repair. No one is more intelligent, better adjusted or more aware than us. No one comprehends as we do. We do not respect previous generations. We are precious and unique.

A bridge toppled into a river. You couldn't get a call into any of the area's area codes. The cell-phone companies' infrastructure couldn't shoulder the barrage.

It's funny how a person can be whisked away from you. That person ends and immediately after you're informed of that fact, it was meant to happen like that. The person is no longer a being so much as a period of time. People say people live on in your heart, but people would have to "live" in your mind because that's the organ with which we experience memories. But even then, memories are of a certain length. A memory is a recollection of an event or a series of events that took place earlier on.

Teleological. Logical movement toward its end. Of course it is in the last place you look. Of course you, "knew it was under there." Just like you knew it was under every other thing you picked up and once you were informed of its absence; it was meant to be like that.

Periods of time and absence. You are angry for a period of time until that emotion is replaced by this emotion. Despite its replacement, the original emotion remains absent.

The letter (A or B) denotes the isogeny class, and the number is the ordinal number of the curve in its isogeny class

2007-07-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

The following was the text, word for word, of an email I received several weeks ago. Its subject line is the title above. Presumably it was junk. Still I find it rather beautiful, if inert.

Galad is free to do as he will. What were then the alternatives
before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple.

I never quite refused to enter the capsule -- but I certainly learned
about the shakes. In other words, while the factorial is defined only
for non-negative integers, the Gamma function is defined for any
complex number z as long as z is not a negative integer.

The Secret Sayings of Jesus. This test checks the host's interface --
to the 802.

Smart Cards and their Operating Systems (186kb). So is Evelyn Waugh.

This procedure is very extreme and should only be used by advanced
users as the last try before re-installing Windows. This applies
particularly to the fundamental principle of the sanctification of life.
This application shows you most of the features of XPM and its source
can be used to quickly see how to use the provided functions. Unix
and BeOS versions only.

I used static MFC library in the DLL. BorderSize bestimmt, wie dick
der Tabellenrahmen sein soll.

With a heavy thunk the blade buried itself in the door. This test
checks the host's interface -- to the 802.

Although a head taller and fifty pounds heavier, Sturm still felt
like a callow youth beside her. Retrieves a object corresponding to a
specified property with specified search constraints.

Es war nicht zum Aushalten. This applies to names used inside
quotation marks or stored inside variables.

I felt around on the floor beside me, but I couldn't find a torch.

Smart Highlighting can greatly improve the extraction when the object
and background have similar colors or have textures.

His confidence had been destroyed in an instant. The old man waved
his hand.

this will blow abbot + costello out of the water

2007-07-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

Nathan: I'm looking for timmy

Lars: You didn't hear?

Nathan: No why?

SHAKING HEAD

Lars: well.

Nathan: Where is he?

Lars: Well.

PAUSE

Nathan: what is it?

Lars: Well.

Nathan: You don't know where he is?

Lars: Yes of course.

Nathan: Then where's timmy?

Lars: well.

PAUSE

Nathan: well?

Lars: yes.

PAUSE

Nathan: what?

Lars: I said yes.

Nathan: I say where's timmy now?

Lars: Well.

Nathan: Well?

Lars: You got it.

PAUSE

Nathan: What are you waiting for?

Lars: Waiting for what?

Nathan: Are you going to tell me?

Lars: Where's timmy?

Nathan: Yes.

Lars: Well.

PAUSE

Nathan: Well?

Lars: Yes.

Nathan: I don't understand.

Lars: Well well well.

Nathan: Don't make fun of me.

Lars: I'm not. That's all I can say.

Nathan: Why the big secret?

Lars: It's not a secret the whole town knows.

Nathan: Then why didn't I hear?

Lars: I don't know.

Nathan: Where is he though?

Lars: Well!

PAUSE

Nathan: Well?

Lars: It's a long story.

Nathan: Then get on with it.

Lars: I don't know all the details.

Nathan: Then what have you heard?

Lars: Well.

Nathan: Go on.

Lars: No really.

Nathan: really what?

Lars: well.

Nathan: WHERE IS TIMMY?

Lars: WELL!

Nathan: This is so strange.

Lars: Rare, yes.

Nathan: I'm asking you where timmy is.

Lars: Right. Well.

Nathan: Do you even know where timmy is?

Lars: I've told you so.

Nathan: Then where?

Lars: Well.

Nathan: This is hopeless.

Lars: I don't think so.

Nathan: But what can I do?

Lars: Go get a rope or something.

Nathan: To hang you or hang me?

Lars: No for timmy dummy.

Nathan: Why where is he?

Lars: Well.

Nathan: Have you spoken to him?

Lars: Yes

Nathan: is he okay?

Lars: not really.

Nathan: why not?

SHRUGGING

Lars: I mean. Well.

SHAKING HEAD

Nathan. Mmm well…

Lars: You know what I mean.

PAUSE

Nathan: Is he dead? That's what you're trying to say?

Lars: No no! I didn't say medium!

Nathan: What?

Lars: Well Well! That's all there is to it.

Nathan: Oh well forget it. How are you.

Lars: not well…

black keys

2007-07-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

under review: "Black Snake Moan"

On first thought:

"i think i slept through half of black snake

"it seemed to be a mostly political statement about how america is fucked, soldiers are pussies, guitars are like penises of virtue, black people can save the day but there are different kind of black people. also, women should be chained up."

On second thought:

"human sexuality in the movie is reduced to strange angers and mysterious spells. aside from the political allegories in it the main motif was sorcery, spells and evil, which can be trumped by good will. and while some of that evil comes from within the characters, it represents as something more like possession than conflicted humanity. thus you have guilt without responsibility, evil without consequence. morality becomes something to enrage humans, or give them sorrow or redemption, just as much as magic. morality's source is unknown, but the thing itself is an object rather than a force, and can be manipulated. ethics, or the world's own will, god's real preferences, which can be understood but not chosen by us, not willed, in other words truth, seems ignored. i suppose truth too can be object, insofar as it is held and communicated by humans, but this is to conflate a certain kind of truth with truth as such. fate turns out to be nothing other than the way things happen, and has none of the correspondence of history. past and future have nothing to say to one another, the connection is cut. the most interesting element in the movie (the four elements being sex, evil, will, and fear) is fear, and is touched regretfully only through justin timberlake's enlisted soldier, at the bookends of the film, when he on the day before reporting to training pukes in the toilet, and later, after he has disgraced himself by quitting the army, crowded by giant trucks on the highway as he and his redeemed whore lady (the soldier and the whore is a longstanding storytelling tradition) drive from here to eternity, he pulls onto the shoulder and sobs into the steering wheel."

I've Been Checking Off Chekhov

2007-06-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

Chekhov and Tolstoy

I bought Ecco Press' box set of Chekhov's short stories all translated by Constance Garnett—the design of the artifice is beautiful. I get irritated sometimes with translations because I don't like counting on someone else to tell me what an author meant to say. But I don't have time to learn Russian and have decided that Garnett probably did a bit of research.

It's slow going. I'm only on the second book. The first realization I've had thus far in reading is that the majority of the fiction I like is gossip at base. The second realization I've had is that the first is not novel.

I came to the first realization while drinking wine, eating and gossiping with my roommate and his mother at a restaurant. Episodes were discussed that I remembered hearing on previous visits. Don't misunderstand; I was giddy as the others to contribute to conversations about the misfortunes of people that I didn't know and didn't know me. But I thought to myself, "This sounds like dialogue from a parlor in a Chekhov story." Of course I didn't ride to the restaurant on a horse, through the snow, and I wasn't wearing a top coat or a pince nez. And I don't think unmarried women over 23 are a lost cause. But at base, we were Chekhov's characters.

Below are two passages from "The Duel" that I thought worthy of being written down in my notebook.

Laevsky played, drank wine, and thought that duelling was stupid and sensless, as it did not decide the question but only complicated it, but that it was sometimes impossible to get on without it.

'It flings the boat back,' he thought; 'she makes two steps forward and one step back; but the boatmen are stubborn, they work the oars unceasingly, and are not afraid of the big waves. The boat goes on and on. Now she is out of sight, but in half an hour the boatmen will see the steamer lights distinctly, and within an hour they will be by the steamer ladder. So it is in life....In the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one step back. Suffering mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last.'

There's not a lot else to do but toil at the Sisyphean task when we're able and gossip while we rest.

Key Change is Dead

2007-05-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Long live Key
Change

A wig for his wig

2007-02-28T21:58:00.000-08:00

Under review: Paul Diddy's "Cultivated Incompetence"

Let me answer verbally, with letters I mean.
Spiraled round like walking forest, jungle birds sing
echo conic physicist notions, annular things.
Circles turning circles hey and rings within rings.

Prance to the floor like Franz Boas,
colleckon tribal languages electronically,
reckon accorded an oral record;
Henry Miller lip up on a boogie woogie beat.

Once in stanza now in hearse, the worst
foretold at most too much, but less in challenge
than as such, and such, environment and trust.
Clutch thee thy art, though not its valence.

But stand on the cutting room floor, in war,
and thrust the magic of your buttons not in holes
but into suddens, ovens, covens, bowls, in love.
If I understand your thrust, or theme, or rocknroll.

If empty bellies is the curse, or worse, the terror
lies in not quite listening, and therefore
dies in warfare with the spies in respite whispering,
now sister see, the play's the thing wherein
we'll find the conscience of the king.

come one

2007-02-16T13:03:00.000-08:00

cultivated incompetence

2007-02-13T16:29:00.000-08:00

just thought that everyone might like to hear the new album that i created, cultivated incompetence. to download, just click on the album name in this post, and that should start downloading a zip file onto your computer that should unzip and pull the files straight into itunes. everything on this album is sampled and recorded by people other than i. perhaps this will be a problem in the future, but i like the way that everything has coalesced. you decide. if you have questions about specific things, please email or post here and i'll answer as best i can. this is a premastered version (well, almost mastered, just needs to get a little louder).. njoi!

Re: You are disgusting

2007-02-02T23:58:00.000-08:00

I can't be sure anyone will find this interesting, but Lars' post that appeared for a day or two then disappeared inspired me to sift through old e-mails and I found this one from the whole Amish debacle. I find myself still having to defend myself about that fucking post. Also, Lars once asked me to write about it, and I think my response is basically all I have to say on the subject. I feel a little bad because I think the message came from a kid.

Subject: You are disgusting
[Someone Who Hates Me xxx]@yahoo.com wrote:
I don't know where you get the idea that the amish are bad. You have no right whatsoever to be making fun of a poor little amish girl who was injured very badly. You are not even from Cuba like I am so you don't even know the whole story. It is jerks like you that make up the scum of America! You people with your sick humor think that you are on the top of the scale and better than anyone else when in the end everyone just thinks you are an idiot!! Maybe you should think about what you write next time!! As a citizen of Cuba and a friend to the amish your views are somewhat racial and very disturbing to me. Considering your from Chicago, at least I'm assuming from your email address, you probably have never even seen an Amish person as well as met one because if you had, you would have realized just how polite and humble they are as a society. Maybe before you go bad mouthing what you don't understand, try to research or at least look into the topic before making a complete ass of yourself on the entire internet for the whole world to read. Good one. Besides you don't even have the guts to pick on someone who can fully defend themselves, thats a little cowardly don't you think? Think before you write!!

Citizens of Cuba Illinois

Subject: Re: You are disgusting
Sam Bakken [xxx]@yahoo.com wrote:
Well Mr. (or Ms.) [NAME] (I won't address the citizens of Cuba, Illinois because I can't believe they'd select someone as inarticulate and rude as you to represent them), I appreciate your e-mail--especially the civil tone you employed. I can't help but wonder if you're a jester as your logic jumps so erratically that I imagine many a laugh interupted your train of thought as you typed. I suppose you being an elementary school student could also explain it (if you are, your parents shouldn't let you read Chicagoist--I think it's rated X).

Anyway, I'm perfectly willing to admit that you may know more about the Amish than I, but to decide who possesses the most knowledge of the Amish, we should probably take some sort of test written and proctored by an unbiased party. And if you want to set that up, I'll be ever-so-willing to participate (maybe it could be held at your school).

But that test will have to take place after the 27th of December when I return to Chicago from Minnesota (where I grew up). In Minnesota there are plenty of Amish people, so rest assured that growing up I saw a few of them. And I realize many people think the Amish are polite and humble, but frankly, I think they are the ones that think they're "better than anyone else". And I think they're sort of fooling themselves because if the U.S. military weren't protecting the U.S., they'd be out of luck. But because you read my post so carefully I probably don't need to elaborate any more on my point.

I'm growing weary working on a response to your harangue when I know it's not likely that you'll read it, so I'll close with a numbered list (so I don't have to worry so much about paragraphs and transitions and the like).

1. I didn't make fun of "a poor little amish girl who was injured very badly". I made fun of/criticised a group of people that I think are following an unanalyzed/false philosophy. I also specifically mentioned "of course we hope everyone is OK" when I mentioned the accident.

2. Your statement "your views are somewhat racial" is completely ridiculous (one of my best friends is half Amish), please explain what you mean.

3. I did research the topic I was writing about. In fact, I linked to at least four other sources that discussed the Amish.

4. Not everyone thinks I'm an idiot. I can provide a list of at least 15 people that don't. Be careful with those generalizations (you'll learn more about that as you continue with your schooling--it's important not to generalize if you want to think clearly and scrape at the truth).

5. You're correct, I don't understand the Amish, that's WHY I was criticizing them. (Now be careful with this next sentence, I'm not comparing the Amish to Hitler.) I don't understand why Hitler did what he did, so by your logic then I shouldn't criticize Hitler's motivation, right? Can we agree that it's pretty much always OK to criticize Hitler? I'd bet so, but can you say, "I can understand why Hitler did what he did"? If so you probably need to be locked up.

6. You write "It is jerks like you that make up the scum of America!". I'd like to know what kind of a jerk you think I am. And I'd also like to know your definition of "scum of America". Again that simple, generalizing sort of approach to discourse won't get you anywhere. You ought to take a critical thinking course. I could probably stand to brush up too. Maybe we could take one together so we don't feel lonely.

7. I pick on everybody--those able to defend themselves and those not.

8. I ALWAYS think before I write. I think that's why I write well. And as long as I continue to do that, I'll continue making an ass of myself. (I think you need to think about really READING a piece of writing before you REACT to it.)

So really, "whatever" [name], or rather, congratulations--you've joined the finger-wagging mob. And...I think I...hold on a second...yep! I see you in the crowd! In fact, I think I see you wagging both of your index fingers! Keep up the good work! As long as you're busy being offended you won't have to actually think about what the offender said and after thinking about it possibly uncover a bit of the offender inside your self.

I know I said I was closing with the numbered list, but just one more paragraph (you've inspired me!). The post you're so concerned about was the last that I wrote for Chicagoist. And it's likely that it will indeed be the last. Too many people (the mob) are afraid of people that think differently than them, and unfortunately those people tend to win in the end and silence those different thinkers. Now don't get me wrong, I've only been silenced for now. Soon enough I'll be right back out there, maybe on Chicagoist, maybe somewhere else.

Happy Holidays!

Sam "The Jerky, Scummy, Idiot, Assy Coward" Bakken

P.S. Christ, people. Remember when we would post all the time on this bitch? We should harken back to those good, old, glory days. Post something--even just a link and a paragraph.

great gats

2007-01-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

Re-Decorating

2006-12-31T00:53:00.000-08:00

We're re-doing Lexie's room

We're re-doing Lexie's room

Hope it turns out real nice, real nice

We picked out a color scheme

It's just a matter of gettin' it clean

Because we're re-doing Lexie's room

We're re-doing Lexie's room

Hope it turns out real nice, real nice

They're on the lower level, Pac-man.

2006-12-14T21:57:00.000-08:00

The ghosts downstairs

Laugh, and play music they like

I imagine

They dance together when the beat sweeps nice

Their silverware

Clinks, hitting glass in a sudsy sink

I'd bet they hear

When I walk, and the floorboards creek

Or when we're drunk

Clanging cymbals, pranging guitar, banging drums, clattering clamoring around

They will have friends

Over sometimes, you'll hear a different laugh

It can be nice

Like their company is ours up here

It's almost like

We're family; living in this building

Yes it's silly

But it's sometimes like that

Lemon Casanis

2006-12-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

Let's see what Arianna Huffington has to say about this:

it is not far.

2006-11-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

i just recently finished this triptych that i have been working on for almost exactly a year on and off. each section has its own story, and the piece has a meta-narrative, but i'm interested in reading people's thoughts on this work before i divulge my own meaning (which is a bit detailed). thoughts?

Discuss The Youth's Galactic Innards

2006-10-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

***After the spitting, seething talking-to I received via voicemail on Saturday, I made it a goal to finish by Sunday's eve. If I'm not finished, I hope to have at least finished a good-sized gob.

I'll begin to weigh in then, but don't let that stop you from starting. Should we post whole posts? Or just comment on this post?

I think a concise, objective take on the thing from Lars might get the juices flowing. Or maybe, Paul, you could begin to discuss your favorite parts as mentioned before? I hate to structure it, but I know it would help me to get thinking deeply about it.

Yes, Dears: A New Song From The Budget

2006-09-13T23:43:00.000-07:00

Come over to our MySpace page and have a listen.

This new song is the first in The Budget's repertoire to include:
—A reference to an over-sized ape
—Some whistling
—A small bit of vocal harmony
—A short guitar solo
—The absence of a keyboard part
—A lyric that some might interpret as degrading to women*

*Believe us, you: The Budget doesn't mean it that way.

P.S. I fear I may have cribbed from a Wilco song, but I racked my brain and couldn't recall which one. I think that may mean that I didn't, exactly. Surely you'll let me know.

intensity in tent cities.

2006-09-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

i may have used that title before, but take a look and post something, damn it, at my redesign of the happy tedium main page. it got a little crazy. i'll let it speak for itself. i want to revive it and bring some more people into the fold. and i have to add a few features still, like get the 'linkorgy' section whipped into shape, but in the meantime, enjoy. and POST!

Raven Backpaddling

2006-08-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

For the heck of it, I'll link to an art exhibit/book review I posted on Amazon.com. For those of you within striking distance of Ottawa or Montreal--and, perhaps, some other good reason to go to one or the other of those urbs--you might want to check out "Raven Travelling" when it lands near your town (I haven't been able to track down listings yet, but it's hard to believe an exhibit as prominent as "Raven" won't travel to Canada's other major cities) .

Link to the Vancouver Art Gallery's page (where the exhibit is currently ensconced):
http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/exhibitions_raven.cfm;

Here's the link to the Amazon.com page where, so far, mine is the one and lonely review:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0295986190/002-6424869-1005607?v=glance&n=283155.

Andronicus, Titus

2006-07-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

Emerging from under the display table, the shinysmall creature kept a perfectly even pace – not quite a trot – as it rounded behind Vinia’s feet, continued the curve past her left side and turned in front of her. Vinia’s eyes, an exact 5 feet and 8 inches above the floor – a measure that accounts for the 3.5 inches of stacked wood and leather heel beneath her foot – were sending her gaze darting to absorb the innumerous shiny displays surrounding her. She was particularly focused on the area 15 to 45 degrees to her left, where the Sony store’s CD aisles seemed to emerge in the distance, past the audio equipment. Beyond the music, glass panels opened up to a plaza with what looked like four or five sushi restaurants. That couldn’t be, she thought, transfixed. Well, it is San Francisco.

Leather cracked against plastic below as the robotic dog caught the upswing of Vinia’s step. The toe of her pink platform hit the toy’s underbelly, sweeping it up, a solid five inches, she’d say, and down to a thud on the marbled hard carpet. It lay on its side, feet still soundlessly churning.

She gasped, then breathed out slowly. A polo-clad boy with narrow eyes laughed as he slouched against the wall, remote in hand. The dog’s legs stopped. Its head turned right. Yes, grey plastic pup eyes, quite sweet, stared up at her. Quite sweet, she thought before correcting herself: Quite a gesture. Certainly, the cocked plastic head looked mocking. His sales strategy? A grab at the female nurture instinct? A come on? Tease? Would another woman really feel the need to purchase the ertsaz pet she’d just punted? Vinia let another breath out, bending slowly with outstretched arm.

Troy’s limb swooped in and grabbed the rigid toy’s neck. Legs resumed their cycle as he brought the grey eyes up to Vinia’s.

“Still kicking,” Troy smiled, setting the robot on a display table and fixing a brief glare on the Sony salesboy. Where did Troy come from? He seemed to have bounded to her side in an instant, single stride.

Vinia counted in her head, up from quarter to 8 a.m., when she woke as Troy slipped out of the hotel door to make it to his first seminar of the day – something about the cultural overuse of Helvetica, or was it Use of New Serifs in the Digital Age? She hadn’t accompanied him to a single session Most of the Lithographic and Typographic Society Conference not only bored her but, as due, eluded her. So seven hours had passed, she thought. And Vinia grew increasingly worried he wouldn’t ever notice. It had already gotten to the point where she couldn’t bring it up. Hours had gone by. Hotel room goodbye, lunch together – and never once did she need to lift a finger. She nonchalantly sipped her smoothie, asking about Troy’s morning seminars, and occasionally Troy would offer a bite off his plate, or a piece from the bread platter, and she’d accept his fork or fingersful. But no waiter, nor storeclerk, nor Troy himself seemed to see that the sleeves of her dress ended abruptly, not giving way to wrists and hands. How to bring it up now? There was almost no point. And did she risk looking silly, or sounding insane? If no other person acknowledged it, how could it be? Well, she could conceive of it – or could she? – and she could see it. Two pieces of evidence any of a host of philosophers could work with to build confirmation that her hands were, in fact, gone. Fucking gone! Impossible! She felt her heart speed, breathing quicken, eyes water. This burst of panic had come on a hundred times that day. Calm down! This is Troy’s time to shine; you cannot be so consumed with yourself. That he seemed willing to continue to perform every function for her soothed Vinia. It kept her lips sealed. And, come to think of it, it felt sort of good. Good like sharing mascara in the Sandyshore Secondary bathroom with Amelia Dahlish. Of course Troy was the always the chivalrous type, customarily carrying her shopping bags or any burden, really.

Fifteen minutes later, still in the Metreon’s Sony store, when Vinia’s Sidekick rang, Troy reached into the side pocket of her purse to check the call. Vinia hadn’t begun to register how to handle such a task without hands.

Are you ready?

2006-06-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

Anthrax
Avalanche
Bomb Threats
Botulism
Civil Disorder
Drought
Earthquakes
Floods
Hazardous Material
Ice Storms
Landslides
Lightening (sic)
Meth Labs
Mount Rainier
Mount St. Helens
Pandemic Flu
Pneumonic Plague
Power Outages
Sarin
Seattle Fault
Shelter in Place
Small Pox
Snow Storms
Tularemia
Tsunamis
Terrorism
Volcanoes
VX
Water Shortage
West Nile Virus
Wildland Fire
Windstorms

cracked rearview

2006-06-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

Once you click on the image, please enlarge what you see in your browser. If you have a mac, a magnifying glass should come up and let you do that instantly. If not, I'm sorry. This thing is in full effect if viewed about 4 inches high and scrolled along slowly. It's unfortunate that you guys have already seen one of these images; I realized it too late, and the idea had already assembled itself. One other thing too bad for y'all: it assembled itself better in my head than in Photoshop.

stentorian

2006-06-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

alphabetically

2006-06-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

place these songs together on your playlist. it makes sense. only a few hours spent on this one, so there's much more to go, but here's a start.

saw band.

2006-06-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

this is the first song of our new album. well, not really. in fact it may never be an album at all. i'll post some writing in this post as well:
'game on'
the crowd is moving, standing still
i’m cutting candy cupboard pills
a will is such trendy thing
to lose make all the hippies sing
the grass is green the sky is blue
besides that haven’t got a clue
my head is clear my lines are true
your lawyer is upset with you
they lied to us. and us is all
the order tall. but binds will break
and forge anew before the quake
turns trees to glue
i’ve lost my place i’m turning pale
my eyes are broke i lost my veil
and words will not define a time
a memory a rhyme confines
we’re picking petals cause luck got fair
the walls are gone the place stripped bare
we liquidate the heads of state
like pontious pilate on a plate
and suddenly the wind it gales
and with it nails
we’re friends and we will bond together
but people still get killed by weather.

but seriously. here's a song that i made out of cut up samples. the song is mostly william burroughs cut up talking about the process of cutting things up. samples include the cranberries, death cab for cutie, wilco, of montreal, the white stripes, crazy jazz music, kids in the hall, as well as some other things.....

Daddy Ducky (or: How Steviepinhead Spent Mother's Day Weekend)

2006-06-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

On the Friday evening leading into the Mother’s Day Weekend, my son Lars's friend Christine was in town visiting from NYC, where she’s a writer/reporter. The two of them very thoughtfully invited Celia and me to come over for dinner (to my own house!) for spaghetti. We brought red wine, beer, etc., and they did the cooking.

Once we arrived, I realized that it was--whew!--past due time to change the cat litter. Celia, for some reason (probably not wishing to be "abandoned" to the two younger people at the outset of the visit), insisted that she would do the cat litter chore, but I put my foot down. (I know, your reader-ly intuition is already going, “Dong, dong, dong! You should always listen to your girlfriend!”) Celia took herself out and down to the parking strip in front of my house, where I had long ago built a treated wood planter box. There she meant to just bask in the pleasant spring weather until I was done with litter duty and we could jointly socialize with the young folk.

Instead, as Celia was innocently sitting on the edge of the planter box, along came a peeping sound. At first she thought it was a bird flying overhead, and she craned her neck to try to spot it, but the peeping then turned out to be emanating from a three-inch high duckling, waddling its way through the grass of the parking strip, with no Mama Duck or string of babies anywhere in sight.

It was a cute mallard duckling, all down-covered, with a dark brown mohawk running from the base of the beak over the top of its head to the back of the neck, where the darker color merged with the dark brown coloration of its back. This darker brown was laid over an "undercoat" of yellowy-tan, which along the sides of the face, body, and belly. Two cool darker horizontal "racing stripes” ran back across the eyes to the back of the head in a thin Zorro/Lone Ranger-style mask. The duckling’s stubby winglets (more like down-covered arms with pointy fingerless ends) were also in the darker color. The little guy was not naked anywhere, except for beak and webbed feet, but was not yet starting to "fledge out" with full-blown feathers.

Of course, in an ideal world, you handle a little lost wild creature as little as possible, and try to re-unite it immediately with its own family or (in the case of ducklings) with another mama duck with little ones at the same stage of development.

By this time, I had rejoined Celia and discovered the ducky's plight. Unfortunately, our quick but thorough search of my north Seattle neighborhood that night yielded no sign of a mama with ducklings. My house is about four or five blocks uphill from the "Ship Canal" that runs from Lake Washington to Shilshole Bay on Puget Sound. After canvassing the neighborhood, we wandered on down to the canal, but saw only a group of two or three green-headed male mallards, and no signs of females or little 'uns.

Once we got back to the house, we immediately tried calling Seattle Animal Control and Washington Fish and Wildlife, but both had closed for the weekend at 5 pm, before we ever encountered the duckling. The Seattle Animal Control message made it clear that we were supposed to call the state Fish and Wildlife folks for cases of "immature wild animals," so we left a message with that office. We probably should have tried PAWS, too, but I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that they would also be closed for the weekend. In any event, Celia has had problems in the past with them being rather officious (oh, no, we can't accept a lost King County pet, we're located in Snohomish County, that sort of thing).

So the little duckling hung out in Celia's “pile” (spun polypro) vest pocket for the rest of the evening while we chatted and drank with the young folks for a couple of hours, before we headed back to her house. There we contrived a meal of some squished-up wetted bread, then tucked our duckling in for the night in a straw waste-basket fitted out with polypro and wool items, all wrapped in a sweater, and with a light shining on it for warmth (thermoregulation is the most immediate challenge to survival for immature birds).

Celia had a climbing commitment for Saturday, another gorgeous day (she wound up summiting), and I had to do some stuff at work, so I played Daddy Duck for that day. I performed some internet searches to try to figure out what to feed it--again, ideally you're not supposed to feed or medicate immature wild critters, but we figured we were stuck with our little duckling for the weekend, at least, and the available internet info indicated that nestling-stage birds needed to feed every 60-90 minutes. I was also searching the 'net to try to get a fix on the best strategy for returning our ducky to the wild (with half a chance for success, as opposed to just tossing it into the bushes in a neighborhood filled with outdoor cats and not-always-leashed dogs, or plopping it into the Ship Canal with its steady weekend stream of powerboats).

Ducky accompanied me to work. I took along a Ziploc bag containing bread crusts, bran flakes, cracker crumbs, and the like. I alternated between holding it in my hand inside my polypro jacket pocket or letting it peck at a plateful of water and water-soaked food particles. (I still have little ducky tracks all over my acrylic plastic desk-protector as I'm typing this!) Dcuky displayed an endearing and industrious personality, peeping away, "hoovering" up little slurps of water and soaked crumbs, whipping his head from side to side to dismember larger pieces, then immediately chasing after the resulting shower of particles to try to scoop those up too, stretching his body out and waggling his wing-stumps, then curling up in my hand inside the dark, warm pocket, working his way as far upwards as possible (higher up under duck moms presumably representing the safest location, somehat like the penguins continually working their way toward the center of the pack in the "March of the Penguins" movie), placing his delicate and awkward-seeming, but incredibly strong and dexterous, webbed feet on my palm and tucking his mini-beak between my fingers...

Celia returned home from her climb of Baring Peak in mid-evening, in time to “supervise” our feeding and nesting routine, then we tucked the boyo back into his basket again.

On Sunday morning, we had some plans (picking up Celia's thoroughly-pleasant but mildly-demented mom from the adult care place for a planned Mother's Day brunch; I also had a phone appointment to call a young driver-client who wasn't able to talk for extended periods during the workweek due to his job, to prepare him for an upcoming deposition). Our time to re-canvass the area near my house for any further clues was limited, so we ate a quick breakfast, drove back to my neighborhood, and performed a more thorough search.

This further investigation (cue the Dragnet theme, dun dun DUN dun) determined that there was a pair of ducks who did return year after year to an area focused about a block and a half away from my house. The female had indeed been seen heading downhill leading a string of ducklings toward the water on Friday afternoon. Our best guess was that there was probably a hidden nest somewhere deep in the neighborhood vegetation, and that the mama duck would be very unlikely to risk undertaking the perilous multi-block journey to the Ship Canal (across at least two major arterials, one a four-lane wide, 35-mph road, and several other streets, and through the gauntlet of traffic, dogs, cats, and crows), with her entire train of ducklings, more than once in a season.

Obviously, little ducky must've become separated somehow fairly early on during this trek--traffic? dog or cat attack? last in line?--and then wandered west (across the hill) instead of south (downhill), for approximately a block and a half, crossing at least one residential street on the way, a journey that probably took him an hour or two of determined navigation and desperate peep-peeping, before he had come to Celia's attention (which is why the rest of the family was long gone by the time we conducted our initial reconnaisance).

The best chance for success in an "amateur" attempt to reunite a lost duckling with a duck family is during the first 24-36 hours, and involves "smuggling" the baby into a crowd of other ducklings while the parents are distracted. But, though we returned again to the banks of the Ship Canal that Sunday morning, and did sight one mated pair of mallards, there were no little ones in evidence. The male mallard showed zero interest in the peeping of our little guy. The female turned her head in our direction, but kept waddling away whenever we tried to approach. And just turning our little peepster loose on the edge of the four-foot concrete embankment, poised above wave-washed rock rip-rap, on the off chance that the probably-strange female might permit him to approach before he fell off into the rough water, did not seem like a good bet.

Ducky thus spent another day with us, pooping, eating, splashing, getting dried off, getting cuddled, and sleeping or snuggling in pockets or other warm niches. Celia's Mom was extremely sweet and gentle with the duckling--Bridget has capacious hands for a woman (she’s been a lifelong spinner and knitter) in which the duckling felt entirely secure. She sang all the verses of "All Creatures Great and Small" a number of times while cradling our cute little peepster.

We tucked the little boyo in for the night again. When we got up Monday morning, we performed a more diligent job of rounding up and calling all possible phone numbers for animal shelters and similar outfits. The state Wildlife personnel were jerks ("it's not legal for you to keep him"--duh! we're not trying to hand-rear him as a pet, we're trying to turn him over to you!--"oh, just throw him back in the water"--a sure death sentence, lacking an adoptive mamma mallard, as our duckling started becoming hypothermic after only a few minutes of eating and splashing in a quarter inch of water in a plate!--no suggestions for who might be willing to rehab the duckling, a basically worthless tax-wasting bunch of burned-out bureaucrats).

PAWS (the only entry in the phone book that even listed the phrase "wildlife rehabilitation") told us--much more empathetically--that they simply had no more room at the inn for baby ducklings, and that all the likely agencies were probably also full-up with baby ducks, because it was "that time of year,” when ducklings were being herded from nest to water, with the resulting inevitable “attrition." But PAWS did give us the numbers of a couple of wildlife shelter places to try and--while I was in the shower on Monday morning--Celia did hear back from a place up in Arlington, a small town one county north of here, who told her that they'd be "delighted" to take our little duck!

Celia had the day off, so she undertook to drive little ducky up to Arlington. The place involved was Sarvey’s Wildlife Center, which turned out to be the largest wildlife rehabilitation agency in the Northwest. Sarvey’s has been in operation since 1981. They specialize in rehabilitating avian raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, owls), but their five-acre facility houses songbirds, deer, raccoons, seagulls, pigeons, coyotes, squirrels--they handle 3,000 animals a year on a budget of around $200,000, 99% of which goes to animal care and only about 1% toward fund-raising and administration. Ducky went into a pen full of other similar-stage, well-cared-for, and plump-looking ducklings (the property has its own ponds and streams) . Celia took some great photos of eagles, hawks, and owls there.

Of course, in our hearts we miss our little friend, but our minds rest easy, knowing that “our” little ducky is quacking away at this moment, telling his new brothers and sisters all about the virtues of polypro pockets, acrylic desk protectors, and Formica counter-tops (not to mention Bridget’s all-encompassing hands). Doubtless he’s also teaching all his new “siblings” to peep out the tune to “All Creatures Great and Small.”

And that was my weekend of duty as Daddy Duck!

Trials and ululation

2006-05-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

It's up, NOW!

2006-05-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.myspace.com/thebudget

Submitted For Your Approval

2006-03-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.myspace.com/thebudget

Images

2006-03-18T12:48:00.000-08:00

Temps Roulent

2006-03-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

A New Yawkah in N'awlins, certainly she is.

The "laissez les bon..." crap at the bottom isn't mine ... nor is some of the brevity, but who would spot the absence of those select words anyway? I'll post the original if anyone wants to see it; it's not incredibly different.

La La? Sasha? La Sasha

2006-02-23T23:32:00.000-08:00

Better than Ezra

2006-01-11T10:32:00.000-08:00

Indeed.

With the same clip, and the same .45

2005-11-10T13:40:00.000-08:00

Sock it to me babies.

The Day of Magical Thinking

2005-11-10T01:18:00.000-08:00

I walked to the bus stop because if I were not going to the bus stop I would be at home not writing. It was close to five o clock. Joan Didion would not begin reading until after seven, but I was going to the bus stop at five o clock because I had to arrive early, to sit in the front row.

Several times on the way to the bus stop I nearly teared up. I did not experience any kind of the mortal grief Joan Didion describes in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she tells of her life after her husband died while their daughter lay in a hospital in a coma. I did not even nearly tear up for imagining Didion’s grief. Mine were rapturous tears. I was going to meet Joan Didion.

I wore a shirt (I'm still wearing it) that said, on the front,

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dirty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

And on the back it said, "Goodbye To All That." These last words are the title of one of Didion's essays, about leaving New York City, and I found them a fitting play on the words on the front, which is the opening paragraph of A Farewell To Arms.

All day I wore these words and some people saw them and they meant nothing and others did not notice the words at all. I did not care because I did not wear the shirt for them. I wore it for Joan Didion.

You see, in the late summer I read (quite accidentally; I was looking for another article in the same issue) Didion's essay in a 1998 New Yorker about Ernest Hemingway, her greatest influence. She singled out this passage, marveled at its rhythm and the symmetry in those four lines. She pointed out specifically the placement of commas in the second and fourth lines.

Didion, like Hemingway, writes with precision I can only hope to match. For example, here is a line by Joan Didion: "The women let the men commit suicide." I have never written a sentence as great as that. I have written many things I agree with more than that, but I have never written so well so plainly.

I must tell you Joan Didion did not write that line either. She spoke it, in 1978, in an interview for The Paris Review, which I read a few minutes ago, after I met Joan Didion. I have not read any of Didion’s books. I have maybe read four or five essays and encountered a number of her quotes in reviews.

For a long time I've wanted to meet a famous author. I've wanted to sit down, to learn about writing, to share my ideas, to become friends.

When I was a child I went to a signing at the University of Washington Book Store, where I met who was then my favorite writer, Brian Jacques. Brian Jacques wrote (and still writes, for all I know) a series of tales in a pseudo-medieval world full of questing and sword-fighting animals: mice, hedgehogs, hares and the sort. After waiting in line I met a bearded Scotsman who rapidly signed my book while I told him my many ideas for carrying the series beyond and before the walls of Redwall Abbey. Some books very similar to what I envisioned came out later, but you must believe they were only the obvious inventions required for expanding the franchise.

I learned then the impersonal and contrived atmosphere of a writer's book signing. The irritating queue. The failure of eye contact. I never went to another signing.

I first heard of Joan Didion in 2003 when her chronicle of growing up in California, Where I Was From, made its way into the popular journals, which all agreed the book was a masterful use of memoir’s form.

It was only recently, prompted by the unlikely Hemingway piece, that I came to excavate Didion's articles and discover her as a great stylist of the 20th Century. I read bits of Magical Thinking when they appeared in reviews this fall. At the time I was myself writing about death and her insights helped catapult me into a new realm of lucidity.

Still, I did not buy the book, though I wanted to and will someday. I value books more than anyone, but even I cannot afford hardcover.

I planned to arrive at five o clock to be sure of a front row seat. I made the shirt with permanent markers yesterday. It took a lot of time. I did not just want Didion to see my shirt. I wanted her to be able to read it.

Despite my going so early, I expected the reading would not draw many people. There was no notice in either of today's newspapers. I searched online this afternoon and found the P-I only noted her appearance once, last Friday. I only knew of it because last week's Stranger highlighted the event with a selection of authors describing how they'd ripped off Didion. When I got to the library the auditorium had not opened yet but already there was a long line. I took my place at the back and read from Houellebecq. Several people asked to read my shirt and wondered what it meant.

I got worried. I don't know how many people waited in front of me but there were surely more than the first row of seats. Surely not all of them cared as I did about meeting Joan Didion. Who of them even knew her favorite passage from Hemingway? Who else could have claimed their opportunity to be near Didion would be like the passing of a torch? Even as my rapturous moment seemed endangered, I choked up several more times while standing on line.

Hundreds of people lined up behind me and I was glad to be where I was. The reading was more than an hour and a half away. I could not keep from noting that if I had arrived when I wanted to, instead of leaving my house then, I might be in prime position. Perhaps it would still work out. Perhaps some of them would opt to sit farther up. I would be close, in any event. Maybe Didion would see my shirt right away and be drawn to it out of curiosity to read it, as the others had. She loved to read, did she not? She would come to me, laughing, disbelieving that it said what she thought it said. She might be grateful for my noting that passage. She might want to hug me.

Here is another example of Didion, taken from the same interview as before: "I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal, don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how they work, which is always trouble."

At last they started allowing people into the theater. As I shuffled in I saw people sitting in the upper seats. There was still a chance. Yes! Seats stayed open all through the first sections. But as I got closer I saw they were taped off, occupied by yellow signs and reservations. I started going up the sides.

But who was kidding? This would not do at all. I went back down in front and started looking for a place. Some seats were unfilled but people draped coats over them as if to save them. I asked about one in the second row. Some old woman in the first started defending the seat she saved. But that’s not the one I asked about and the guy there let me climb up. It was all right. I was very visible. I heard people behind me talking about my shirt.

I took out Houellebecq again but I couldn't read. There were a number of young girls climbing the stairs at the sides and I started to get excited about meeting someone. At least I could be sure the girls there liked literature, maybe. In New York I went to readings and got frustrated none of the audience seemed interested in getting to know each other, as though the common interest in writing was not enough, let alone the shared humanity. Why do people always act like they have nothing to say to one another?

I had a Stranger in my bag. Some of those girls had Strangers too. Did they know it was my story on the front? Of course not. I also realized Chris Clayton might be here. I started scanning for him.

The crowds poured in. The place was filling up. I could not even see the top of the auditorium there were so many people. On the floor below was a podium with a microphone and a table with two microphones and a flower arrangement and another table on which many books were stacked. A woman came to the podium and announced that the fire martial would not allow anyone to sit or stand on the stairs. Since there were too many people, she invited anyone on the stairs to come sit in front on the floor.

What?! I would have sat on the floor if I had known. But now it was too late. It would seem silly to come out of a good seat in the second row to sit on the floor. And anyway those who took the first spaces there found someone sitting immediately in their way a moment later. The women in front of me continued to protect their saved seat, but no one came to join them.

After several more announcements to clear the stairs and even a concession that people could stand at the wings of the floor, they began the preliminaries. Those women finally offered their saved seat to someone sitting on the floor. I threw up my hands, but what can you do? Anyway Didion was coming out.

I stood.

When I went to a Believer event in New York, I tried to start a standing ovation for Q-Tip but no one else stood. The writers and other speakers that evening were all respectable in their own right, but how often do you get to be in the same room as Q-Tip? Same with Joan Didion. But I didn't see anyone else stand.

Didion did not look up. She walked directly to the podium and without saying anything else began reading from her book in an awkward cadence.

She was just an old woman with huge glasses. Her husband died and her daughter died and now she flew around the country reading to massive audiences so her publisher can sell more copies. Joan Didion is very old and I'm sure her grief took its toll as well. In photographs in the New York Times Book Review her arms appeared as narrow as actual q-tips. I could not imagine the woman in those photographs flying around the country, standing and reading. I had been curious to see her frail arms.

But Didion did not take off her coat while she read. In fact, she held her bag on her shoulder the whole time. Eventually she found her rhythm and she sounded like a real person telling her own story, and she was.

Joan Didion did not read long. Afterward she moved to the table with the flowers where a sort of cipher woman read questions off cards culled from the audience. Didion spoke with strength and life. I saw her old woman’s hands struggle to open a bottle of water. She poured a little bit and the glass seemed too heavy for her hand. She answered carefully but did not think hard, stopping midway through a number of points and refusing to conjure anything that did not come immediately to mind, for example she did not try to come up with the books she had read while writing Magical Thinking.

When the cipher woman asked my question she neglected to preface it as I had with a mention of Didion’s article on the Terri Schiavo case, so the question became a banal one about the difference between writing about people you know and writing about news subjects. I had intended to focus on the difficulty of grasping the meanings of life and death with respect to those differences. Most of the other questions were not questions about writing at all. They were only questions about dealing with sadness and death, questions for Didion the woman, the character in Magical Thinking, not Didion the writer, the craftsman.

Then it was all over. We were invited to get in line while Joan Didion signed our books, and especially encouraged to buy the book if we did not have it already. That’s what the table with the books was for. If I still wanted Joan Didion to see the shirt I made for her I had to get in line, but I had nothing for her to sign and I did not want to pay 26 dollars. What was I to do?

I bought a paperback copy of Where I Was From for fourteen dollars. It wasn’t till after I did this I realized I should have had her sign the Houellebecq and saved myself the money. I thought of just leaving, but then my one chance to have Joan Didion hand me the torch would be squandered. And now my purchase sealed it.

In the time I took buying the paperback, the line for the signing became astronomical. I went to its end way out in the library and couldn’t stand it. They were all queued up for nothing more than a silly autograph. Didion wasn’t even looking at the people as she signed. Everyone was told to get in line and they did. Everyone was staring at my shirt. What did it say? Can they have a better look please?

Isn’t that what I wanted? Wasn’t I just trying to grab attention, Didion’s attention, everyone’s attention? I could not be like them, stacked one on top of another for no reason. I had to have Didion recognize me. I felt stupid for all of it and wanted to leave again but there was that book I paid for.

I went to the auditorium again and sat there waiting for the line to wind down. I tried to read Where I Was From but it was boring so I went back to the Houellebecq.

Maybe it would be better this way. I would get to Joan Didion when the line was gone, and she and I could linger, start up a conversation. This way she would have time to appreciate the shirt I made. What had I wanted? I wanted her to ask about my writing. I could show her the Stranger that came out today. She would not like the story but she could understand how the editors destroyed it. She said when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt of Magical Thinking the copy editors changed it so much it did not sound like her. She knew about these things. I wanted her to take me in, she had no family anymore and she had plenty of money. She could help my writing, literally patronize me.

I thought of how peculiar it was for such an old woman to have such an intellect. I have had a chance in the last few years to get to know each of my grandmothers as adult women and they have surprised me with their capacity to understand, surprised me with their sharpness. More so than most women I know, not just old women. But Joan Didion… imagine getting to talk to her. Imagine her as your grandma.

When the time came I went to the back of the shortened line. But the staff volunteers who were also waiting for autographs ushered me ahead of them. My moment alone with Joan Didion evaporated like that. There was a woman taking the books and handing them to Didion to sign. She took my Houellebecq.

"No," I said. "That’s not her book."

I should have just let her sign it. It would have been better. "What is it?" the woman asked. "A physics book?"

"No it's a novel. A French novel." Why did I say that? So Didion might overhear and be impressed. Impressed? "A French novel."

"I just wanted to say hello," I said.

"Hello," said Joan Didion. "How are you?"

"I'm good. I guess I'm good. Thanks."

She seemed to be trying to read my shirt. I’m not sure. I was certainly not going to say anything to draw her attention to it. I turned around and grabbed my things and left. I could have said anything. Some appreciation. Anything. I just left. She may have seen that the back said, "Goodbye To All That."

I thought about all this walking to the bus stop. It had not been for Didion at all but only to differentiate myself. The choked up pangs… I felt silly again and again.

At the bus stop there was a girl. She had a nice face, in the conventional way. It was a little too tanned for me and I could see a cakey film of makeup. She stood very stiffly. The two girls in front of me with darker hair seemed better, they moved, were lively.

But when I looked back at the girl I saw her shirt was spread open revealing a pink bra and nice tits. They were just shoved up there like a platter those tits. Were they like that before or had she just opened her shirt for me? She clearly wasn’t trying to hide them, but I stopped looking.

A bus came. It wasn’t mine. It was going to the U District and all those girls got on. I saw the one walking though the bus. I felt maybe I should have tried to speak to her. It was then I realized the feeling I had after Didion was exactly the same as when I notice a girl at a bar and hope she will want to come talk to me, hope that she’ll say something. But I never say anything. And then at the end of the night the bar closes and I go home jilted.

Didion jilted me like that. Or rather I jilted myself.

On the bus home I thought of something else. If I had triumphed tonight like I hoped where would I be now? I might be in Joan Didion’s hotel room, talking about writing and sharing my ideas. I might be fucking the girl from the bus stop. I might be fucking Joan Didion. If I had triumphed in any way at all surely I would not be writing.

Early, Showy

2005-10-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

Nicola1CBS: i didn't know bill nye the science guy qualified as an expert

cmarielagorio: no shit

cmarielagorio: john and i were just joking about that -- and the fact that harry just said "it's making some of us wonder if God is mad at us"

Nicola1CBS: i know... this has to be a new low for es

cmarielagorio: wow -- they have it as a tag on the screen "IS GOD MAD AT US?"

-- conversation over instant messanger after this morning on The Early Show, a bad segue from talk of the hurricanes' destruction and the recent flooding in the northeast turned into an entire segment with various hosts interviewing a priest and Bill Nye. If I worked for The Daily Show, this would be OK.

A Cover

2005-09-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

In the second part of The Office Christmas special, during the Christmas party held at the office, Tim and Dawn finally get together. Usually TV character romances seem artificial and are just plain hard to give a shit about, but not this one. As they kiss in the show, the song "Only You" by Yaz is heard.

A man shed a tear when he saw this. He thought it one of the best soundtrack-to-scene matches ever. He thought he should try to see if he could capture the emotion if he recorded a more analogue version of the song. Unfortunately, after creating said version, he realized that the charm was in the synthpop.

You can see if you agree by clicking here and then clicking on "listen" located to the right of "3. ONly_You" (the player will pop-up in a separate screen). You can listen to a very short snippet of the original by clicking here, scrolling down to "Listen to Samples" and clicking on "Listen" to the right of "7. Only You".

Ah-ite Folks, Summer Is Coming To A Close

2005-09-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

Apparently summer officially ends on September 20. "Summerbye" is quite short, but that's because there's no reason to draw the goodbye out. We'll all meet up again next year.

Look out for another new piece of audio to be posted soon...

Chief Justice

2005-09-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing New

2005-09-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

My unconscious is all genius and madness while my conscience is ever stuttering fool.

That the latter—the bumbling one—dominates observably, which is to say empirically, mimics the historical and lasting order of communities.

Yet the other continues right along, leaks out in entertaining ways just like underground culture.

I Want To Be Jay-Z's Friend

2005-08-29T01:32:00.000-07:00

You may find it interesting to watch this video (it's a Windows Media Video file if that matters) of him as a young pup.

Tomorrow!!! While I hope we see fewer Jamie Foxx appearances on Kanye West joints, "Gold Digger" is quite a song. I especially enjoy Yae's dancing in the video. And where do they find those fit hip-hop gals? And how many rappers actually date, or shack up with, women as gorgeous as them?

I can't tell you how excited I am to hear the Jon Brion on the album. I think it's probably important for the record that Jon and Kanye combine seamlessly, but at the same time I hope there are some real obvious Brionisms. Do I hear some in "Diamonds"? (By the by, I nearly refuse to like that song. Fuck you Kanye, you're not "conscious" just because you feel bad about getting iced up and then write a song reminding us that people die because you bought the ice. If you really give a shit, sell all of your diamonds and get a plane ticket to Sierra Leone and set up some schools or something. Fuck the holier than thou shit. Oh, and you might want to take a look at other sections of your wardrobe as well. Word is yah boi Louis Vuitton may have supported shuttling French Jews to the concentration camps. I ain't hatin', just take a look—gnome sayin'? And you might want to stop driving gas-fueled automobiles in your videos since the oil trade ain't so squeaky clean either. And hey! I smell a possible hit—for your next album you can write a ditty deploring the oil trade. Kanye seems like such an adolescent at times.

Laughing is an oral tradition

2005-08-28T22:31:00.000-07:00

Carl Woodring: "[The state of English literature today is] a seriocomic scenario in which sodden firefighters spray water on each other while the house burns down."

Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody...

2005-08-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

Nestling her back against the curved seat of the N train, Nela felt her calves tingle as the car’s cold atmosphere hit the tiny beads of perspiration covering her body – especially the legs, it seemed – as she hiked up her ankle-length skirt, letting its hem fall just above her knees. She let out a huge hot breath, as if it would cleanse the inside of her body, release steam. She rested her book on that new clump of fabric on her lap.

A quick click slam … click awakened her to the rest of the life on the car. Her head cocked left as the voice of the man so stealthily entering the car reached her ears. “…the bo-o-oard walk / down by the see-ee, ee uh-ah yeah / on a blanket with my bay bay’s where eye-uhhlll be.”

“Bah ba-ba bah” he sang, letting his voice be his percussion and his harmony when words weren’t necessary. And his voice did it with a richness. Punctuated by quipped “thankyouma’ams” when coins dropped into his hands, the man rounded the car, pointing two distinct smiling glances at Nela. His exuberance and 2 a.m. skill only made her feel more tired.

Down the row, the singer cupped his hand at a woman with the face of Claire Huxtable and a tweed-suited black man whose arm embraced hers. “Brother, why don’t you take your singing somewhere else?” the seated man interrupted the song. “Huh?” The singer paused, bending at the waist to engage in conversation. “Yeah, man, what are you doing begging for money?”

Nela heard the voice rise and thought the well-off brother would put a helpful bill in the standing man’s hand; his stern words seemed like hard-handed encouragement.

“Brotha’ I’m not begging,” He leaned closer. “Does this look like beggin’? I’m just singing. I can sing, man.”

“Well why you got your hand out like that? I sing, too; damn well. I do it for a living.”

“I am giving all these people something and living a li’l. What’s the problem wit dat?”

“I’m not going around bothering people all night,” the seated man said, staring straight ahead, back stiff, holding his head at an angle that one only employs when forcing an air of sophistication. The woman stiffened also, but not from cockiness. A squirrel stops on a dime, arching its back when in fear. Nela thought she looked like that. Especially in the eyes. “Where’s your dignity?” Her seatmate continued. “It’s not just that. I’m sick of you standing in front of me. These trains have rules against soliciting.”

“What are you sayin’ man?” the singer said, at once revealing a hunched posture, bowed legs and tense, dry skin, which he began to scratch on his left arm and neck.

“I’m saying I’m sick of you; get out’ my face.” Nela saw the eyes on an adjacent Asian couple widen, fixated. The distance between the men’s faces shrank even further.

“This train is no more yours than mine,” the homeless man said (Nela wondered if she could assume he is homeless).

“Oh yeah?”

“I don’t know why you talking to a brotha’ like this…”

“Unh.”

“…I don’t know what you’re tryin’ to…”

“Well man get! Get out of here.”

“I’m finishing my song,” the singer said as he finished stroking his arm resolutely, punctuating a final scratch with song. Nela half expected him to follow through, and still had the melody of “Under the Boardwalk” traipsing through her mind. But the singer couldn’t even hum; his body was too damn tense.

“I’m telling you or I will…”

“Huh; yeah, what?” Singer squinted, backing up from the seated gentleman, taking his stature in and noticing that the Claire Huxtable woman was now gripping her man’s arm, as if to say “what are you doing?” and “I’m here for you” at once. Singer had no one here. Not even his voice was doing it for him.

“Yeah. Man, I’m just saying, and you better go on and listen to me,” Tweed barked.

“Uh uh man,” he choked out, sounding more assertive than he felt he could.

“I’m not sayin anything anymore. Jus this: I get off at DeKalb.” He paused. “And I don’t want to hear anymore of your whining tonight.”

“Yeah? DeKalb? Well I’ll be getting off there too. What do you know.”

Singer man sniffed in through his unclean nose and, using the pole behind him as an axis, spun a half circle around before hobbling to the next door of the train. Nela watched him stand there. He didn’t look particularly nervous. He looked as poised as the seated man, poised and ready to encounter whatever the world through the train car held.

It took minutes and two train stops into Brooklyn before the tweed-suited man began muttering at the woman. It all sort of blurred in Nela’s head as nonsensical, pissed-off-middle-aged-black-man ramblings, but she made out “If I ever see him on my block! If I ever!” and “They have laws against bothering us. See? See what happens when there is nobody here to enforce? I have to do it myself. My. Self!”

Tweed's blabbering got more intense and drew the eyes, at one moment or another, of everyone on the train. When Nela looked over at the singer, though, he looked cool. Hunched back? He could shrug that off. Bowed legs? Cool to lean with.

The train stopped again. Nela looked up from her book to see Tweed and Claire exit. Singer exited too. She dropped her head. The train pulled away.

"You approach your text somewhat as if it were a magical puzzle"

2005-08-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

Many young people today do not concern themselves with style and think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style—which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite—is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.

What distinguishes literature from scientific communication, for example, is that it is not unambiguous; the artist of language arranges words in such a way that, depending on how he emphasizes or gives weight to them, they will have one meaning, and another, and yet another, each time at different levels.

Q: You said to me once, around 1971: "It is time that I finally told the truth." You added: "But I could only tell it in a work of fiction." What was the reason for this?

At that time I was thinking of writing a story in which I wanted to present in an indirect manner everything that I had been previously thinking of saying in a kind of political testament, which would have been the continuation of my autobiography and which I had decided not to do. The fictional element would have been minimal; I would have created a character about whom the reader would have been forced to say: "The man presented here is Sartre."

Which does not mean that for the reader there would have been an overlapping of the character and the author, but that the best way of understanding the character would have been to look for what came to him from me. That is what I would have wanted to write: a fiction that was not a fiction. This simply represents what it means to write today. We know ourselves very little, and we are still not able to give ourselves completely to each other. The truth of writing would be for me to say: "I take up the pen, my name is Sartre, this is what I think."

Q: Can't a truth be expressed independently of the person who expresses it?

It is no longer interesting then. It removes the individual and the person from the world and goes no farther than objective truths. One can attain objective truths without thinking of one's own truth. But if it is a question of speaking of both one's objectivity and the subjectivity that is behind this objectivity, and which is just as much a part of the man as his objectivity, at this point it is necessary to write: "I, Sartre." And, as this is not possible at the present time, because we do not know each other well enough, the detour of fiction allows for a more effective approach to this objective-subjective totality.

Q: Would you say then that you have come closer to your own truth through Roquentin or Mathieu than in writing Les Mots?

Probably, or rather, I think that Les Mots is no truer than La Nausée or Les Chemins de la Liberté. Not that the facts I report are not true, but Les Mots is a kind of novel also, a novel that I believe in, but that nevertheless remains a novel.

—New York Review of Books,
interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, 1975

Deus Ex-Tra-Ordinary Machina

2005-08-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

Maybe you give a shit, maybe not, but Fiona Apple's third album is finally going to be released. Apparently this is old-ass news, but I just read about it today. From the reports it sounds as though Fiona Apple went into the studio for a second time to re-record everything sans Jon Brion which is fairly disappointing. But don't fear, you can download the Brion version here (I'm in the process as I type so I can't offer criticism yet. It's a torrent and I don't know what that means (and can't offer any technical support), but there are instructions for download on that page. If you don't want to download the whole thing, you can listen to a couple of Brion-produced mp3s here.

Spayed Queen

2005-08-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows England has a Queen. Despite the many photos of William littered about, not as many people—I promise—realize England has had Kings and will again subsequently. If this seems preposterous, consider the order of information apprehended by children. Speaking for myself, who probably encountered the Queen first in full color on bills in British Columbia^1,2, I understood quite certainly at a young age the world included a Queen of England, and as far as I knew it had always been that way. I believe this is true at some point for anyone born late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It is a little like the undercover faith in immortality you carry until anyone who was always in your life, like your grandfather, dies. Later, you discover characters like King Henry and King James and King George, but they are rather like protagonists or villains than governors and so have no relationship to people at large. Moreover, they are all extinct. The women come up most often in words like Victorian or Elizabethan but these terms reference the character of a culture in time—not individual people. The Queen is but her Queendom. This is all part of the same headitching male hegemony that makes you wonder, since there is a Queen Mother, why that woman is not Queen. Eventually the mechanics of succession avail themselves and the relationship of Henry to Elizabeth appears. Yet you can hold this in your head and still maintain the aphorism that England has a Queen and that’s all there is to it. That is to say, the fact that history, which allows us to behold such characters as "Victorian," also gives birth to a character of the future already visible in the present does not interfere with the unshaken reality we all inhabit and universally trust (even though we’ve never met the Queen ourselves)—any more than the future in its own unlimited wisdom can reach back and alter what happens now. Once William ascends, of course, all this is destroyed irrevocably.

note1: I want to dispute any idea this might raise that I ever had any money then

note2: Interestingly America displays its presidents past in monochromatic stylism, and so money there carries historical perceptions rather than anything having to do with any existing real world. Nevertheless I still say Americans are acutely conscious of the Queen of England.

As I Please

2005-08-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

I came to the shore with my arms full of goods. Mine were fine, as good as any other sailor's loaded on the dock. They would bring such joy on the far shore and best, I would deliver them!

Ships went.

Eager, I awaited my own crossing. But soon I saw I had no craft to carry me.

Where should I find one?

I studied the other vessels. I found old timbers on the beach and tied them together. I made a few wee barges float. I got out on the waves and trollied around near shore. Good creations, but none would carry me across the vast gulf--and I had to fit all those precious things beside.

I tried to craft a grander ferry. Scale made my handiwork sloppy. I tried adding boards one by one and never built much of a hull. I tried to make a frame and fill it but it was always full of holes.

Nights, I could not avoid gathering more and more wonderful items for the voyage, till I had a heap. They would mean so much if they reached across. Of course I needed an even greater craft to stow them all, yet I had none.

I tried begging an able seaman to carry my things on his boat. But I wanted to arrive behind my own helm and no one would help me anyway, nor show me how it was done.

As time went on some of my delicate things perished, spoiled. Worse, I began seeing others loading into their ships the very things I expected to supply. Still I had no craft!

I cried for want of a worthy craft. I cried for suffering my goods might ease on the other side. The sky opened, wept with me.

In the fit of storm, I lashed my cargo along with masts and deck strewn about from my failures. I gummed the gaps with pitch and shoved off riding the heap by itself. First the winds and swells tossed this load and I out to sea. In the calm its buoyless weight pulled me under.

Alone, lacking craft, I sunk. +

I begin tonight with a vignette I wrote for a little baby who's being born. An idea of it was: Here is something that will be in this world for the kid, an attempt at issuing a craft--like a container, say an amphora--which will be there when he arrives.

Mr. Pound instructs...

Mr. Naipaul stretches... (oh register-- it's free)

Mr. Wolfe tawdles... (don't bother paying, but you know it's there)

Fiction writers are eager to joust for the novel just as reporters try to explain the importance of print newspapers. Defending your craft is like defending your farm--in fact it's exactly the same.

But, like Democrats, writers are lately persuaded into talking about the wrong things because they cannot identify the issues. There was the famous book about the autistic british boy and the dog and the nearly as famous passage where the boy, thinking awfully like a machine, cannot understand why people enjoy fiction because who likes lies? The big joke is naturally that all of it's a made-up story and after all, dear reader, you must not think that way because you picked up the book.

This is an attempt at postmodernism. In essence it's a try to tip the hat to the reader. It's a chance to say: I'm here, you're there, and we both know this is all fake. But this is like turning literature into photography. What it really is, no matter that it parodies the debate, is a novel's embarrassment about being a novel. It's a stab at being real, cutting through the fiction, because it is not comfortable swimming out where it cannot touch a toe to the dock of truth. Because if you're not trying to fool anyone, it can't be a lie, right?

Two years ago I witnessed Heidi Julavits and two other panelists--the whole panel, all writers who have fictionalized terrorism since September 11, 2001--tell an audience of, well, silent readers, that fiction might not be the best way to interrogate the contemporary global ouroboros. There was something queasy, they seemed to say, about deliberately telling lies. There's that word again--as if dreams too were lies! This was an analytical complaint; we must be informed rather than fooled.

But it's really a faithful complaint. How can we be righteous and consume something false? Let alone produce it? When people worry if fiction is "adequate" for dealing with this world, they are really wondering if it is appropriate. Is it respectful of the dead to make whimsy? Oughtn't we deal with this thing instead of fantasizing?

Once upon a time, the discovery of gravity actually provided people the tools to take flight.

The novel is a chicken. A flightless bird, reared in restrictive cages, whose eggs are harvested endlessly for the grill. The chicken and egg are also notorious paradox--where postmodernism meets evolution.

Nevermind that novels evolved at first under the guise of testimonials, travelogues and correspondence. We know what we mean, don't we? Imaginary bound stories.

Novels have been called endangered almost since they were identified as a species, but that was a judgment of art--not propriety. Novels have, I think, exhausted their artistic virtue. Infinitely many more wonderful novels will be written and printed, just as the baseball records will continue to fall. But the golden bough, whether you say it was Joyce, Miller, Fitzgerald, Pynchon, or someone who doesn't write English, is long snatched from the branch. Novels, like chickens, are extinct except as a commodity.

The question Shall there be novels? is not a question of art. Nor is the question What is the next kind of novel? The question is What is the next new thing such as a novel?

But the faith question, the Shall question, still lingers. Not about the novels. (Who cares? Shall we have violins?) But the fiction question is a trial of art. Are we allowed to compare, or must we always represent?

I do not believe Naipaul really said fiction was not useful. He is finished with the novel is all. A true postcolonial, he thinks cinema peers over the horizon. The only thing that captured his awe the way novels must have awed the Victorians. Maybe he realizes his generation, too, is past, and probably too the envelope of the movies. He knows he cannot do films, so he uses his tools to do journalism and criticism.

Mailer is still waiting for the novel that can bottle America. He has waited for the immigrants to do it and waited for the Americans to do it and he has tried maybe to do it himself, though it does not seem that way. Mailer's own fiction is lately thoroughly drenched in research, but he still relies more in the magic of words than their fidelity to the world. They let us peek at the inconceivable--the will.

The only way to answer the art question, I say, is to stop talking about fiction the way Nancy Pelosi smiles. Fiction includes drama, painting, movies, photography, and soon, biology class. Fiction is criticism. Criticism is journalism. Journalism is illustration. Fiction is illustration. All of this is the craft of understanding the world. If you write, you will deliver your experiences and dreams to the world. You have nothing to lie about. +

I end with another essay, without hyperlink,

by George Orwell
7 July 1944

When the Caliph Omar destroyed the libraries of Alexandria he is supposed to have kept the public baths warm for eighteen days with burning manuscripts, and great numbers of tragedies by Euripides and others are said to have perished, quite irrecoverably. I remember that when I read about this as a boy it simply filled me with enthusiastic approval. It was so many less words to look up in the dictionary--that was how I saw it. For, though I am only forty-one, I am old enough to have been educated at a time when Latin and Greek were only escapable with great difficulty, while "English" was hardly regarded as a school subject at all.

Classical education is going down the drain at last, but even now there must be far more adults who have been flogged through the entire extant works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace and various other Latin and Greek authors, than have read the English masterpieces of the eighteenth century. People pay lip service to Fielding and the rest of them, of course, but they don't read them, as you can discover by making a few inquiries among your friends. How many people have even read Tom Jones, for instance? Not so many have even read the later books of Gulliver's Travels. Robinson Crusoe has a sort of popularity in nursery versions, but the book as a whole is so little known that few people are even aware that the second part (the journey through Tartary) exists. Smollett, I imagine, is the least read of all. The central plot of Shaw's play, Pygmalion, is lifted straight out of Peregrine Pickle, and I believe that no one has ever pointed this out in print, which suggests that few people can have read the book. But what is strangest of all is that Smollett, so far as I know, has never been boosted by the Scottish Nationalists, who are so careful to claim Byron for their own. Yet Smollett, besides being one of the best novelists the English-speaking races have produced, was a Scotsman, and proclaimed it openly at a time when being so was anything but helpful to one's career.

Life in the civilised world.
(The family are at tea.)
Zoom-zoom-zoom!
"Is there an alert on?"
"No, it's all clear."
"I thought there was an alert on."
Zoom-zoom-zoom!
"There's another of those things coming!"
"It's all right, it's miles away."
Zoom-zoom-ZOOM!
"Look out, here it comes! Under the table, quick!"
Zoom-zoom-zoom!
"It's all right, it's getting fainter."
Zoom-zoom-ZOOM!
"It's coming back!"
"They seem to kind of circle round and come back again. They've got something on their tails that makes them do it. Like a torpedo."
ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOM!
"Christ! It's bang overhead!"
Dead silence.
"Now get right underneath. Keep your head well down. What a mercy baby isn't here!"
"Look at the cat! He's frightened too."
"Of course animals know. They can feel the vibrations."
BOOM!
"It's all right, I told you it was miles away."
(Tea continues.)

I see that Lord Winterton, writing in the Evening Standard, speaks of the "remarkable reticence (by no means entirely imposed by rule or regulation) which Parliament and Press alike have displayed in this war to avoid endangering national security" and adds that it has "earned the admiration of the civilised world."

It is not only in war time that the British Press observes this voluntary reticence. One of the most extraordinary things about England is that there is almost no official censorship, and yet nothing that is acutely offensive to the governing class gets into print, at least in any place where large numbers of people are likely to read it. If it is "not done" to mention something or other, it just doesn't get mentioned. The position is summed up in the lines by (I think) Hilaire Belloc:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the English journalist:
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there is no reason to.

No bribes, no threats, no penalties--just a nod and a wink and the thing is done. A well-known example was the business of the Abdication. Weeks before the scandal officially broke, tens or hundres of thousands of people had heard all about Mrs. Simpson, and yet not a word got into the Press, not even into the Daily Worker, although the American and European papers were having the time of their lives with the story. Yet I believe there was no definite official ban: just an official "request" and a general agreement that to break the news prematurely "would not do." And I can think of other instances of good news stories failing to see the light although there would have been no penalty for printing them.

Nowadays this kind of veiled censorship even extends to books. The M.O.I. does not, of course, dictate a party line or issue an index expurgatorius. It mere "advises." Publishers take manuscripts to the M.O.I., and the M.O.I. "suggests" that this or that is undesirable, or premature, or "would serve no good purpose." And though there is no definite prohibition, no clear statement that this or that must not be printed, official policy is never flouted. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip. And that is the state we have reached in this country thanks to three hundred years of living together without a civil war.

Here is a little problem sometimes used as an intelligence test.

A man walked four miles due south from his house and shot a bear. He then walked two miles due west, then walked another four miles due north and was back at his home again. What was the colour of the bear?

The interesting point is that--so far as my own observations go--men usually see the answer to this problem and women do not.

Nintendo Music Is Occasionally Grand

2005-08-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

This seems absurd, but if you go to this Web site and scroll down to "#44: MEGA MAN 3" and click on the "PROTO MAN'S THEME IN MP3 FORMAT" link, your default media player will play a great song.

It begins with what sounds like a robot wailing. Then, through the sobs, the robot airs its grievances. After that sob-fest section, the robot seems to assure us that despite the sadness, it knows life continues and is still as grand as always. I honestly think it's a great song.

It also couldn't hurt you to go to this Web page, scroll down to "#5: METROID" and then click on the "ENDING IN MP3 FORMAT". From about 50 seconds in through the rest of the song, it's a Strokes song from before there were Strokes songs. And don't give up on it too early—the big payoff is at the 1:26 mark.

They have got to make a synthesizer that mimics those 8-bit sounds. Maybe they do. If you have any information on something like that, leave it in the comments.

Credit where credit's due: I found out about that page from Cold Carryouts contributor Sam's del.icio.us page. (I don't really know what a "del.icio.us page" is either.)

The Chimera rears its head – to speak?

2005-07-28T00:53:00.000-07:00

Stem cells. Embryonic stem cells. ESC. With all the blabbing, intelligent and otherwise, surrounding this scientific phenomenon, should we care? Is it really a scientific venue of great promise or just a flash point for political talking-heads? Being of the scientific inclination, I lean to the former, yet not with as much unwavering support as some. If restrictions were more relaxed here in the US, would researchers be closer to breakthroughs that could actually be used in humans? Perhaps. Would Muhammad Ali be mounting a comeback in the ring following his cure of Parkinson’s? Highly Doubtful.

The concerns that have engulfed the public’s debate on this topic are many. It is often burdened by semantics, and as such has been a rallying cry for the all consuming abortion debate. Paragraphs, articles, books, and series of texts could be devoted to the science and the ethics that surround ESC, and I won’t even try to scratch the surface here. But tangential to this topic is an equally interesting, if somewhat more unsettling issue that has remained for the most part, until recently, under the public’s radar…

Working within the already restrictive policies dictated by the Bush administration, the question remains how we get stem cell technology (embryonic or adult for that matter) translated into effective medical therapy. It is here where the topic begins to rear its head, thanks to the way research regulations are currently constructed, whether they are federally mandated by congress, the FDA, or the NIH. I’ll digress here for a bit of background before the punch line. As it stands now, in order for any type of medicine / therapy / procedure to get to the bedside or clinic, it has to go through exhaustive research; first at the laboratory bench, then in animal models, and then through a final progression in human subjects. This is not only a very timely endeavor; it is a costly one as well. For some perspective, estimates for the cost of bringing a single drug to market range from $100-$500 million dollars. Any way you cut it its going to be expensive. To bring us back, most of the stem cell debate has focused on the beginning and end of the process. Is it justifiable to sacrifice/harvest an embryo for research purposes, for the potential the technology has to drastically affect the face of human disease as we know it? Yet somewhere in the middle, in the realm of stems cells practical application, a new topic of interest arises. The question surrounds the use of stem cells in animal models (particularly for research on neuro-degenerative disease) and how this research raises some new and interesting questions about another portion of the ‘means’ we may have to use to achieve our ‘stem cell end’.

The transfer of tissues and genetic information between species is nothing new, as gene splicing/transfer and xenoplantation have all been in practice for some time (mammal enzymes inserted into bacteria, porcine heart valves into human patients are just two examples), and while met with some resistance, it never reached the fervor that now surrounds ESCs.

But what if we were to reverse the exchange? What if rather than Bob Johnson getting a new chimp heart, the chimp received the heart from Mr. Johnson? Or more accurately what about whether or not human stem cells would be sufficient for organ repair rather than complete transplant in animals (taken of course within the context of human clinical research). Do any new objections come into play once the pluripotent stem cells are on the table? If the chimp survives an experiment where it received human stem cells to repair damaged cardiac tissue, is it fundamentally different now that it has human and primate cells functioning harmoniously? Perhaps not. But what if the organs in this example were changed? What if the stem cells being exchanged were to be directed down the path of neuro-differentiation? Would an exchange of Mr. Johnson’s stem cells for the sake of neuro-repair in the chimp be TOO sufficient? What if some of those cells are able to constitute novel behaviors, structures, or even thoughts? Are ANY changes objectionable? Is this action/research inherently corrupt thanks to what a certain Dr. Leon Kass would refer to as the “Yuck Factor?” Or is there a threshold that we could try to create?

Now I agree that conceptually this seems Dr. Moreauian. Yet if we are to take this technology seriously (which I think we should) and demand of it’s efficacy like we have demanded of all our other past and current therapies (again, I think yes), then it is a concept we must ponder. With animal trials already being published that show that the injection of same species stem cells to damaged neurological tissue can lead to some degree of regeneration (http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=15124028), and tests already being done where human stem cells are introduced into mice, I don’t think it preposterous to think a time will come soon where we sit on the precipice of a species debate not seen since Scopes. It needs to be decided what risks we are willing to take to possibly engender another species with the one quality of life we can call unmistakably human - self-consciousness.

That, and how good ol’ Mojo will be at taking out the garbage…

Written by Erin O'Tool, but posted by S-DOT-Business because Erin forgot his password or something.

The Onion Man

2005-07-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

There was a man named Joe Garden and it was a fine name for him because like a garden he was florid and fecund only instead of leaves and carrots his fruit was the joyful fruit of laughter and i never knew him when he wasn't making us all laugh at ourselves and all the other things that surrounded us. His fruit was as delicious as an onion and he grew these onions as quickly as a thought and gave them to us without our ever asking. Once when there was a Presidential election Joe made buttons and we pinned them on and they said "Vote Joe" and that made me laugh too. I never voted but later, after they elected someone else, Joe made the buttons instead into part of his campaign to fill one of the late night TV slots when they needed to replace the host. And that also seemed fine because it was much the same job as being President and Joe seemed maybe even better suited for it.

(more below)

Non Prophet

2005-07-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

it doesn't seem to me that it would be very difficult to prophecy. all you have to do is know how things work. for instance i can say that a great harm will come to a great many people and be just as sure as i am in saying winter will come, or spring. and if anyone notices that after i said it some many people did come to a great harm he may want to know how i knew it was going to happen and perhaps even did i have something to do with making it that way. and the way to dispel suspicion would be too show that i really have no power and the only reason i could be sure the findings matched the forecast was the size of the sample. much harder is to predict details like which horse will come in first in which race. so prophets like to be vague about things such as dates. but another hard thing is to make anyone believe what you're saying or even to find someone who will believe. that's why alarm is the number one item on the soothsayer's list.everything else he'll get to once you've already begun to listen.

Want Higher Soccer Scores?

2005-07-20T23:13:00.000-07:00

Everyone, they speculate, would be dying to watch professional and college soccer in america if only the game begat more of that thrilling calibratory scoring. Higher scores! they say as though the real demand were not Higher ratings!

Well I have an answer. And it's a wonder no one thought of it sooner. When the offensive movements cease at the end of a soccer play, the present rules tend to reward the defense with ball possession. How about, rather than immediately turning the ball over, giving the offensive team four tries to get to the goal in whatever combination of pass attempts or breakaways they can manage, wile accumulating position accumulating on the field. At each stopped ball, whether boundary violation or stalemate, until the fateful fourth attempt, give the ball back to the offense. Teach them persistence. But also teach them the stakes should they lose that possession, afforded four tries. They suffer four full uninterrupted tries by the other team, a particularly impossible and humiliating assignment.

Should this suggestion not fulfill the scoring demands, there are happily many further adjustments available that might add the the accumulated scores of both teams and thus, advertising revenue:

1. Increase scoring reward. Instead of one point a goal, offer five or six.
2. Expand the goal. Take an example from Rugby. Allow players to score by simply diving over the endline.
2(a). Since an endline-wide goal would make airborne kicks exponentially easier, goals scored through the air would only count within the designated boundaries as usual. But shucks the offense deserves a chance to get between the posts without an upper limit or any one getting in the way of the ball. So get rid of the crossbar and raise the goal higher than a man can leap. Since this is only a half advantage, give the score a three.
3. Interceptions still count as turnovers. But players who achieve them must instantly leave the field.
4. As an added incentive for crossing the endline (and promoting higher scoring), offer an extra point for a kicking exhibition after the score.

O wait! That's football. Well I hear it's big in Europe. Let's give football a chance.

Dude, Listen To This...

2005-07-15T01:43:00.000-07:00

So I'm waiting for the train yea?

You know. I've been at Luke's and I'm at the Logan Square Blue Line stop. I want to get on the train that's headed south. Because I live two stops south of Luke. And we all know that late at night the train only comes every half-hour.

And it's late at night and shit. So to pass the time, I bang out a rhythm on a metal pedestal. It's not really a pedestal, but a sort of metal easle that holds up a map of the system--a map of the train system with the blue and the brown and the red and the purple and the green and the yellow,...did I say blue? Cause it's on there too.

Anyway, I sing and at the same time bang on a garbage can in rhythm. Over the loud speaker I'm told to stop. And I'm wearing a pair of Levis Strauss jeans ("low loose bootcut") from Target and a black "Chicago Blues Festival" T-shirt and white Hanes socks and Nike "Cortez" sneakers and "Banana Republic" boxer-shorts. They're not actually "boxer's shorts", but underwear. Oh, and I'm wearing a collared shirt that buttons up. It's from The Gap. An ex-girlfriend bought it for me.

And so I'm told to stop, and I stop. Then I start banging again on the garbage can, and the rhythm is groovy in that you can groove to it. It's not a new rhythm, but it's a rhythm that grabs me by the throat and I can't stop. And then I hear the "Boo-doo" chime that normally introduces an official CTA statement. And the voice asks something like, "Do you want to be arrested for banging on a garbage can?" And I think, "Yes I want to be arrested for banging on a garbage can." But I stop with the rhythm and then the train comes and then I go home.

Testing Email Post

2005-07-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

If this works I've discovered a way to email posts direct to the journal.
Check it out check checkitout...

and so forth

Ain't no mo to it?

2005-07-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

From Ward Harkavy, The Village Voice:

It's terrible that those people—so far, a total of 37 [now at least 50]—died in London today. But there are other kinds of terror and other deaths happening in other parts of the world. And Western governments and corporations—more and more these days, that's one and the same—have done little to stop the slaughter in the [Democractic Republic of Congo]. In fact, the greed of Westerners has kept most of the continent destabilized. But, see, that's great for the financial markets, because the plundering by Western firms has gone on unabated and unchallenged for so long and oil firms, among others, are continuing to extract huge profits from the continent. Don't upset that apple cart. Hence, what's known in only some quarters as the African World War.

Bubble Vision

2005-06-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

by Steviepinhead

Having this bubble inside my left eyeball is pretty entertaining, most of the time. It wobbles and wiggles like that good old jellyroll. It undulates the way the earth must when its bell gets rung by a tsunami-sized quake. It’s not nearly as big as it was at first: if you closed your right eye, looked down at your lap, and made a fist about the level of your sternal notch--about the place you would put the squeeze on if somebody started choking to death at the next table over--then the bubble would just suffice to cover the shape of your fist. Your fist would look a little enlarged as it fell “beneath” the bubble--that fisheye lens effect--and the bubble would be tinted a nice indigo shade around the edges.

There’s just one bubble at the moment, but this morning there were two or three baby bubbles skittering around the mama bubble, adhering right at its rim-line (where the tint of blue is the darkest). Sometimes the babies were snuggled up against each other like beads on a necklace. Sometimes, as I moved my eyeball back and forth or jiggled and joggled my head, toweling off after my shower or tripping downstairs for breakfast, the transmitted motion scattered the beads to separate perches around the circumference of the larger bubble. If they rolled around to just the right positions on the dial, the assemblage bore a remarkable resemblance to Minnie Mouse (or maybe Mouse Woman, the mythical mediator between humans and spirit powers).

When the bubble was bigger and newer, it occasionally shook itself into two or three bubble segments of roughly the same size, with flattened interior membranes. This was cool, since it yielded a fly’s compounded view of the world, like going back 550 million years and taking a different evolutionary tack.

In addition to the bubble, I have some teensy new “floaters” in my left eye. I haven’t decided yet if these are true floaters, or miniscule defects in the retina itself. True floaters are usually filamentary or fuzzy, not as dark or distinct as these little pinpricks. These also fly in tighter formation than the usual floaters. So maybe they are “spot-welds,” vestiges of the laser’s passage, like hot spot tracks on the globe. Whichever, they are small enough that I expect I’ll learn to ignore them.

The bubble is more disconcerting, but then I don’t have to get used to it, since it is in the process of shrinking, evaporating like a black hole. Two weeks ago, what little I could see was almost all bubble, which was like trying to watch your neighbors’ TV through a window blocked by their kid’s fishbowl. Then, the bubble had more of a pinkish-yellowish hue. A week ago, when the bubble filled about half the visual field, it had gone to lavender, and just today it’s turned this intense indigo. I assume the deepening spectrum has to do with the size of the bubble--the longer red wavelengths got through when it was bigger, but now only the shorter blue wavelengths will fit.

Even with my left eye closed, I still see the outline of the bubble, unless there is absolutely no light leaking through the lid--a dark sun, the indelible after-image seen by one of those old-time army guys, rousted out of his barracks and trucked in the back of one of those puke-green flatbeds to watch an A-bomb test from way too close to ground zero.

When the bubble filled the eyeball, it was hard to see anything else. A sight line running directly through the center of the bubble was distorted the least, like looking directly down on the “flat” earth from above. Any other sight line passed through more highly-curved arcs of the bubble, distorting images beyond recognition. It was reassuring, though, to look directly “down” through the bubble and see my blurry fingers waggling back at me. Right there at the end, back in before-bubble time, I could wiggle those fingers for all I was worth, and not see a single one of them.

You can’t see the bubble from your side of the eye, so you’ll have to take my word about it. From out there in the world, my left eye looks very red on either side of the iris, and the pupil is visibly dilated, like the left side of my brain was coming off a supreme ganja extravaganza. For the first several days, my eye was so goopy and ugly that I mostly kept it closed to spare the innocent. There was an Invisible Man’s worth of gauze wrappings that first night in the hospital, but they didn’t leave those on, and they didn’t issue any kind of a racy piratical replacement patch either--too many different drops and ointments to be administered too many times a day.

The only clue that I was about to receive my very own eyeball bubble was a new floater in my left eye, first noticed a few days before the long Memorial Day weekend. Of course, my eyes have always been problematic--I got glasses in third grade for nearsightedness and I reached the geeky coke-bottle stage by high school. Wire rims and lighter plastic lenses permitted a modest makeover in time for college, and hard contact lenses delivered me from the four-eyed phenomenon just in time to enjoy a post-college year as a ski bum. The left eye was always weaker; bifocals and reading glasses have been staved off in recent years only by tweaking the right lens for more distant vision and the left lens for close-up work.

And of course it was the left iris that harbored what Stephen King calls the “devil’s spot,” a red blotch of pigment against the faded blue-grey.

The new floater was prominent, annoyingly close to the center of vision on that side. Otherwise, it behaved like all the other little ghostly floaters we’ve all had since childhood--you move your eyeball in any direction, and a miniscule ghostly crew swirls the same way, sometimes drifting along for a beat or two after your eye stops, catching their collective breath before you move your eye again and they have to head off in some other direction, with just that instant’s hesitation, like those folks in the audience who are always slow to get the joke.

Somehow, my eye doctors had overlooked giving me the “new floater” lecture, which they really ought to have done, particularly given the degree of my nearsightedness. So, while the new floater caused some mild concern, it was a matter of more-fun-fricking-aspects-of-aging, rather than drop-everything-and-call-the-medics-now.

So Celia and I ferried over to a friend’s island cabin for the long weekend and helped build a bonfire to consume some rotting old stumps someone had shoved downhill onto their property. The bonfire became an occasion to practice my annual fire-jumping routine for the upcoming mountaineer’s barbeque: as I ran up a log ramp to launch through the six-foot pyre, I tripped--dang--and had to convert my graceful leap into a racing dive, just barely managing to sprawl on the far side of the fire instead of face-planting directly into the flames.

The next Friday night we drove in the opposite direction, meeting up with Balls and similarly-grizzled types over in the Teanaway drainage to instruct novice climbers in rock and ice ax techniques in realistic terrain. Saturday’s instruction went well; our little group of students summitted Volcanic Neck, the most challenging of the peaks in our practice area.

Saturday night was the big BBQ. As I was changing out of my climbing clothes and boots, and rummaging in the cooler for some cider, I did notice an odd little area of obstructed sight the size of a fingernail paring at the very bottom of my left visual field, like a single tear waiting to fall. I brushed at the “tear” a couple of times without result, but I felt no pain or discomfort and anyway I was soon distracted by all the rowdy shenanigans of the BBQ: the fading daylight and the first few reluctant stars, the smoke and sparks of the cook-fire, the camaraderie and, of course, the drunken fire-jumping. I was looking to retire my “act,” so it was gratifying when four or five other hardy souls followed me through the flames. We had a couple of sprawls and close calls and one fellow who simply shuffled straight through the coals, too fast for the flames to grasp.

Sunday morning, we started back over the pass fairly early; Celia was scheduled to attend an afternoon wedding shower. The obscured area of vision had grown larger, but I was still able to drive, and I was still in denial, hoping that whatever this was, it might still vanish as quietly and painlessly as it had appeared. We were back in town, and I was unpacked and done with my weekend chores, by noon and my intentions were simple--to settle down in the front-porch sunshine for a perusal of the funny papers. But this weird visual impairment was becoming more difficult to ignore: if I held my closed hand a foot or so away and middle-low on my left, I couldn’t see my fingers behind a grey-brown veil. If I opened my hand up, I could see the tips of my fingertips, but none of the rest of my hand. What the heck, before diving into the Sunday paper, I decided to call the free nurse-line sponsored by my medical insurance plan. I described the situation--by this time having concluded that the new floater perhaps belonged in the sequence somehow--and the R.N. told me to get down to the nearest ER, pronto.

By shortly after one, the ER doc had referred me along to the “on-call” ophthalmologist, which required a drive to another medical facility across town. With one round of eye-blurring drops behind me, more in prospect, and with even less vision in my left eye, I had gotten a message to Celia at her shower that I might need her help with driving in the near future. We almost met up at the eye-doc’s, and she actually beat me to the next destination, the on-call retinal specialist’s office up at the north end of town. We arrived shortly before the doctor did and finally got a definitive diagnosis--the new floater had been a subtle sign of retinal tearing, perhaps a thin thread of capillary blood--and the swelling lobe of non-sight was a much more obvious manifestation of a retinal detachment (which, if untreated, quickly leads to irreversible blindness). The retina is stretched more thinly inside the elongated eyeball of the very nearsighted and a thinner retina is more prone to tearing in response to otherwise innocuous age-related changes. I had lost my lower vision first due to the camera reversal effect: the retina had torn and detached on the upper rear of the eye, draping down, blocking more and more of my vision as the “curtain” continued to fall.

So that’s why I acquired this entertaining bubble in my eyeball. By the next evening, the earliest eye-surgery could be scheduled, I could see in a slender crescent across the very top of my left visual field. At five that Monday night, I was wheeled into the OR for vitrescopy surgery, and placed under general anesthesia. Two hours later, I was waking up in recovery, woozily eavesdropping on to the dissociated chatter of the attendants. The gas bubble had been injected into the liquid vitreous of the eyeball using miniature microscopic instruments the surgeon had inserted through tiny apertures in the white sclera. The gas bubble plastered my peeling retina back up against the inner curve of my eyeball, which allowed the surgeon to fire a laser in through my lens and neatly repair the tears. This was the less-invasive surgical alternative, “moving the wallpaper to the wall.” I was able to avoid the less pleasant, more-traumatic option of “moving the wall to the wallpaper” by means of a scleral buckle, girth-hitching a band of material around a semi-eviscerated eyeball, altering the anatomy at the back of my eye just enough to smooth out the wayward fold of retina.

The first night in the hospital was “uncomfortable”--the surface of my eye had been roughed up that hurt each time it scraped against the lid, like having an eyeful of grit. To keep the repair in place, and to avoid depriving the cornea of its internal fluid bath, the gas bubble needed to be nudged into the top rear of the eyeball, which meant I had to try to sleep with my bandaged face shoved down into a horseshoe-shaped pillow (picture a massage table). The pillow tugged against the bandage, which tugged against the lid, which hurt. This was my first surgery, and my first overnight stay in a hospital, so it was a learning experience: the nurses do their best, but they don’t come when they’re called, and they don’t give you nearly the quantity or quality of drugs you’d like. I had to negotiate for several hours to get a sleeping pill. Much of that time was spent huddled elbow to knee on the bed, with my forehead jammed into my fists.

After finally getting some sleep, morning was a considerable relief, and the bubble and I were able to begin our acquaintance in relative comfort. The doctor examined me that same morning, and again that Friday, and again last Friday. Keeping the bubble properly positioned was the main task of that first two-week period--looking down as much as possible, no gazing out into space, and no sleeping face up. I’ve been able to read a paperback, but looking up at the top of the page of a larger book or a newspaper, or across at a TV, computer, or movie screen, was strongly discouraged. That edict was finally lifted last Friday and on Saturday I took myself to the multiplex for a dose of Brad and Angelina: Mr. and Mrs. Bubblehead!

I can drive for short distances. The bubble should be gone in a week or two, and then I can return to altitude. No strenuous physical activity (of the grunting, eyeball-pressuring sort) for another three to four weeks, until the scarring of my sclera is healed. “Full” vision may not be back for an amorphous term of several weeks to a couple of months: in any event, until the eye has settled down, there’s no way to obtain a new correction, so until I’ll be effectively functioning with “good” vision only on the right side. So now I’ve reached that frustrating manageable-nuisance phase or, as my hypothetical A-bomb observer might have said, Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

On the other hand, a little over two weeks ago I was going quietly blind in my left eye. From that perspective, this tiny bubble is my new best friend.

-- Submitted by Steviepinhead

Straight Path

2005-06-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

I’m looking for the way to old anasazi
Yes I’m gone all day for old anasazi
I am riding along toward old anasazi
And nobody knows the way but me

I have been wandering along
To way out here yonder
Where the gullies draw buzzards
And the buffalo are goners
Nothing but their bleached bones can I see

I’ve never known the way to anasazi trail
Oh I don’t know the way to anasazi trail
I’ll never know the way to the anasazi trail
But nobody can know the way but me

The sun’s been low a longtime
And the cactuses draw long lines
While the air grows cooler but the
sun might go below the canyon line
Now ifonly the shining stars will let me see

Do you know how to get to the anasazi caves?
Am I on the way to the anasazi cave?
Can you show me the way to the anasazi caves?
Nobody can go that way but me

Compression Test

2005-06-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

DSCN1508
Originally uploaded by clagorio.

Fuck tattoos. This is inner-body art. Er, not really, but I do feel as if I've sculpted myself, however unintentionally.

A jock defends his market impulse

2005-05-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

Bob how you ask a question like that?

Listen Sonny—

How you ask a question like that Bob?

I’m just asking you to look at the cost—

Do you like having a job?

Sonny.

Do you Bob like having your job?

…

Sonny I think what Bob is aski—

Linda I like making a lot of money. I like it. It probably more money than any one person deserve. But you ask me do I think it greedy?

Well that about sums it right there.

No Sonny I want to know do you think it is fair. Greedy is another issue.

Fair to who Bob?

Well fair to the fans who pay it says here a hundred and fifty dollars on average… for an average family.

I don’t make no money off that hot dog man. People buy five dollar hot dog for they kids Bob that got nothing to do with me.

Fair enough Sonny. But—

So what you really asking Bob, is if I think it unfair making this much money and still asking for more at expense of fans, then I must be greedy. So I’m just skipping along to the real part of the question.

Sonny.

No it aint unfair and I aint greedy. Your job—

But you’re at the bargaining tables…

Bob your job—

…and you have ticket prices jerked higher and management extorting tax revenue, ultimately out of the fans, to pay these escalating contracts and Sonny—

Bob the money we get do not come out of fans. It come out of you. Out of TV.

Sonny I can assure the viewers network policy forbids compensating players for—

Out of the TV contracts Bob. Look how much money they pay the league, and the local teams, for those TV deals. That where the money come from Bob.

Sonny.

And we see that. And somebody paying that, it mean somebody making even more money off us. So we just making sure we get a share of that.

But without media no one would even know your—

Exactly. So you in it too Bob. We in it together. Somebody make money so much putting me on TV they can afford to pay you to ask me do I think it fair.

Well we put on a show for the TV viewers and the network employs thousands of people but those fans at the stadium still—

The money ain’t made from those people. I ain’t asking for they money. Like a magazine. Everybody know the money come from advertisers not subscriptions. You just want subscriptions to up the ads. TV don’t even charge. All your money ad money.

But fans' prices are going up.

And people say I should retire. Take it easy. Get in the studio make a million dollars.

Fifteen more seconds Sonny, let me ask you while we have—

Well Linda I don’t know about a million, right—

How much you make Bob?

It’s not polite to say Sonny but you can be sure the average broadcaster earns far less than—

Oh that’s too bad Bob you know maybe you and your fellas ought to get together and—

Well Bob, Sonny we’re out of time.

Thank you Linda and thank you Sonny. When we come back assistant commissioner—

A story of evolution

2005-05-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

Life doesn't know what it's doing. It has no plan and no training. Life does not even looking out the window to see how well it's succeeding at whatever it's doing. Life is carefree.

Some might say it's indifferent. But it never gives up and it doesn't get down on itself about its aimlessness. What life does instead is try everything. Given an opportunity to go in several directions, it doesn't restrain itself to one path. It tries all of them. Life's adventurous like that.

The thing about life is it fails almost all the time. There's good news though. Most of those failures, extinctions, are the result of life's other activities being so overwhelmingly successful they dominate the inauspicious efforts until those're abandoned altogether. Even mild successes tend to bludgeon the memory of dead-end paths.

But eventually the paths that lead somewhere fork and life doesn't learn its lesson. After all it might not have found its way had it not tried all the earlier directions. Life continues its unrestrained, ignorant journey at all available angles. Through no fault of its own, however, it's somewhat limited now. There's a built-in control. Life can only explore its unbridled curiosity at these new intersections descended from avenues that worked out the first time. And theselife does explore.

After centuries of wandering around, life finds itself in many different places, but not every place. Simply because the control's effect has been to guide it, however absently, in exclusive directions. Life, though still unconcerned with where it might be headed next, gained a little perspective in its travels and can't help but pause, awed and astonished to realize it never would have gone so far and certainly never roamed so wildly and inventively, had it departed with a determined goal and restrained itself to that path, or even its best guesses where that path might be.

The end. But, naturally, life goes on.

The Walk Up

2005-05-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

Hello,

First, be sure you read Lars' post below. It seems that whenever someone posts something here someone else posts fairly quickly after. And since we haven't updated lately, you may have missed Lars' most recent. Anyway, read it first and leave him a comment.

I recorded a song tonight that I'd been working on for a bit. I think the lyrics are good because I'm actually trying to say something.

Whenever I upload a new song to the PureVolume page it plays at double speed, but then a day or so later it's fixed. So it may be at double speed right now, but go here and listen to "theRunDown". Then tell me what you think.

Enjoy! Have Fun!

S_Dot_Business

Bluff

2005-05-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been writing Adam fake stories for Sports Illustrated for a while and he’s just now starting to get shit from his bosses.

“Hey man,” he says, “that part about the brawl behind the curtain at the press center at Skydome was awesome but how did you get back there?”

“I didn’t,” says I, “I made the whole thing up.”

“Oh,” he says, “well we can’t use the thing where the baby sneaks into the beer vendor’s stand and drinks the 64 ozer and then curls up inside the plastic cup because, uh, babies aren’t supposed to drink and that vendor could get fired.”

“What!? You’re fucking journalists. You’re not supposed to worry about who gets fired. The baby went back there didn’t he? That was the best item I got.”

“Well maybe,” says Adam, “The other thing is when you write all the excruciating details about one single play, it’s really fantastic writing and I would love it if they would print that but they want more quotes and summary of the whole game. And the section about the storm. Like I say its very well written and so tactile, the images of the roiling moisture and so forth but they are going to come down on me about it. That’s the thing.”

“Well why don’t you get Sports Illustrated to actually get me a press pass so I can do some real reporting?”

“Yeah maybe I’ll do that.”

“And I have that car now,” says I, “so I can get to the games if I want and have enough time.”

“That’s right,” he says, “that’s right: the car. Yeah maybe we’ll do that.”

“Lets go up the beach.”

The beach is not flat and full of sand. It’s bluffs with wisps of thick fibrous grasses holding the earth back from an eroding seashore. The water’s cold. We’re in the north, but the sun’s nice and it seems like New England summer.

There’s a point of land like a small cape or a breakwall stretching out from the foot of the hotel. A girl with springy hair and glasses washes the window in the hotel’s main door. I roll up into the hotel and tell the bell woman I’m on the sixteenth floor which is a lie. I don’t even stay at this hotel. It’s very fancy.

The woman is huge, too tall. She lifts me up by my ankles and holds me like that, dangling above the floor though her fists and my ankles are just about at her shoulder. She throws me out the door, past the girl washing glass.

“Run,” says I. And me and Adam do, around past the point and handfuls of vacationers on the small slope there where a real beach with some pebbles is protected by the ridge. Little kids play with pails and adults lay on blankets. Not that many though.

The hotel manager, the bell woman, and the window-washing girl pursue. The manager is yelling at us. This is hotel property here, behind the hotel, near the beach. The manager wears a pink and green skirt suit and waves her hands menacing.

I turn and lead Adam the other way, up a high much steeper slope above the beach in back of the hotel. My feet make contact with the slope and carry a bit of the way but soon I’m on my hands and belly, pulling on the thick clumps of grass, because it’s too steep to run. The earth’s in my fingers and there’s sun and sweat on my back. Adam doesn’t seem too happy to be doing this. The women are behind us, climbing and shouting.

We haul ourselves over the summit. Trees and shrubs like those on the edges of the slope fill the top of the high mound. We’re not quite higher than the top of the hotel but the hotel manager and her staff are after us. Adam ducks quickly into an outhouse and I jump in after. It’s a little awkward. I’m sitting on his lap so I stand against the door.

The hotel manager, the bell woman, and the girl bang in fury against the door but it’s locked. Adam flushes himself down the toilet and he’s gone. Escaped.

I open the door swiftly, yank the girl with springy hair and glasses into the outhouse. I fumble with the lock but the other women are so surprised they pause and can’t throw their thick arms in the outhouse door.

The girl’s surprised too. But the outhouse is all ours now. I kiss her. She’s excited. We make out. Whew.

(I dreamed this.)

An Itty Bitty Ditty For All You Kiddies

2005-04-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've been messing about with these chords and a melody for a week or so. I recorded it last night to see what happened.

It's best served cold, in a bowl. Splash a bit of milk on it and top it off with two tablespoons of raspberry vinaigrette. Salt and pepper to taste. I've even had it on a slice of whole-wheat bread with a dab of orange marmalade, and it wasn't bad.

I'd probably pair it with a zin or a cab. Nothing too expensive though—it doesn't deserve it.

I've got to let the cat out and wash the parakeet so I need to go. Click here and listen to "go_home".

Please Reconsider

2005-04-19T02:41:00.000-07:00

If you were unfortunate enough to have heard the song I posted last, I repoligize.
Here're two others instead.

Why?

Because trees look better alive than dead. That's why!

click below and listen to "Turn on" first, and "Take Control" second. Or don't.

This text is a link to a page on
the World Wide Web.

The song "saturday" is still available for posterity.

All comments accepted. And to Diddy: sorry I lost my metrocard on saturday otherwise I would have come and met you. You have a sweet voice.

Writing aboutbloggingaboutblogspot.com

2005-04-13T00:24:00.000-07:00

I feel about blogging the way I do about LA. Still, I was slightly delighted to read this piece by my friend Geeta (whose personality has been described as "walking blog"). I do wish she'd dwelled more on the ideas such as "what if Godel and Einstein had cars and G4s and wrote on godel.blogspot.com what was said on their walks to work?" Then again, what use are hypotheticals? Here we are.

I have a story in the same Voice section, but I'm not going to link to it because it's not great. Sort of fun, but this is more.

New York is dead; St. Louis decomposes

2005-04-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

WESTPORT, Missouri — St. Louis began like many cities, as a junction or harbor, in this case settled by French traders near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. It’s known as a sort of gateway to expansion, but now walking through its empty arch brings you nowhere.

My mom grew up in St. Louis for a while. For her it is like Ann Arbor is for me, a place she lived and left but never where she was from. Driving around the ruins in north St. Louis I imagined I would find her old house there, but I really didn’t know what part of the city she’d lived in and of course I wouldn’t have recognized the address. The houses there were ancient, made of bricks. Of some of them, bricks were all there was left.

The area reminded me in some ways of the more desolate parts of Brooklyn, except I couldn’t get over the liberal use of the land space. The buildings were brick—rectangular, usually without a sloping roof, and so looked somewhat like little apartments. But the lots always widely surrounded the walls themselves, with huge gaps between the houses like an old hobo’s grin.

There were many empty lots too, sometimes several in a row, and these were totally overgrown with grass, green and lush without bramble, different than the brownfields in Detroit. Colors were full in the spring sunshine. Every one of the houses matched the Golden Gate Bridge and the grass was the color of artichokes. The people I saw in this neighborhood, lounging on stoops, loitering behind a barricade, walking—these people were all black.

I passed a pile of rubble: a house collapsed, but oddly—as though someone had put it in a plastic bag and shaken it till all the bricks and lumber broke apart and mixed, and then dumped it out there in a mound. The house next door was missing a façade and I looked into it as a cross section. Strewn debris, a mattress, copper pipes, gashed walls with plaster torn away to reveal the brick exterior. Many of the other houses were boarded up, abandoned.

I wanted to take one. The weather was nice today and there was so much unclaimed space. I looked at downtown St. Louis, at the arch and the dome. It was so close. I hadn’t driven far, had gone immediately for gas after splitting from my companions near the arena and the first pump I found was in that little slum just north of downtown. My companions were driving to Indianapolis for the day to write an assignment about women’s basketball. Luckily, my writing duties are more flexible and I wanted to understand a bit about St. Louis, about its character.

Everywhere I’ve lived property values are high. Seattle boomed in the eighties and nineties. Competition’s fierce in Ann Arbor. A new high rise goes up every week in Madison. New York City tries to turn every lifeless or putrefying hovel into profitable development and anything anywhere near Manhattan is at a premium, so even Jersey City has its little housing explosion. Why would developers allow such blasted wreckage just blocks from the liveliest part of this city?

I’ve heard East St. Louis is a ghetto. But that’s across the river, not even in the same state, so the neglect seems administratively reasonable. I passed a one-story house on a rising patch of grass with its door open. I saw five or six girls in plain summer clothes collecting their things in the doorway. The house didn’t extend very far back from the street. Each house on that street was made with red bricks but each one was differently shaped, with different dark scars chipped in the baked walls. I’m drawn to places like this. But I don’t believe it would be fun sharing a brick hut with a family of eight.

Certainly the people who live there must live somewhere. They didn’t build the house. It was already there. That whole community may have at one time been lovely. I saw a lot of beauty in it as it was, and each structure standing alone in the sun carried a sort of aged nobility. But that’s the thing with St. Louis. It’s an inherited city, an occupied city; not a city being created.

In fact, I don’t know if anything is created in St. Louis these days. I suppose Anheuser-Busch makes beer here. There are tours of the flagship Budweiser brewery; a picture in the brochure at my hotel shows it, too, lined with brick. The baseball park where the World Series ended here last fall is called Busch Stadium. I’m not sure I would even think of St. Louis as a big city if it weren’t for the big league teams, the Cardinals and Rams. Its pro basketball team is just a ghost. The Spirits of St. Louis were the only club not functionally adopted when the old ABA merged with the NBA years ago, but a provision in the dissolution contract allows its owners to make a slice of the current mega-league’s general revenue even though the team remains idle.

So sports and tourism are truly the main industries in St. Louis today. After I left the poor brick boneyard I rode into the city proper. Much of the architecture there is old, too. I saw the protestant names of extinct corporations carved high in the stone edifices of buildings long since taken over by anonymous offices. The latest dates on those buildings are the 1920s. There are a handful of newer structures: Like Indianapolis, the city features bulging convention and athletic complexes and these help bring dollars to the local economy despite there being no real product, as with the Spirits.

The basketball tournament here this weekend, which cycles to St. Louis frequently thanks to the state-of-the-art dome built to bring the Rams here, must be one of the most important times for the vendors and bars and hotels. There are riverboat casinos docked along the waterfront, not far from the dome and the arch and the Budweiser brewery. Newer immobile casinos sprout along the bend of the Missouri nearer where I’m staying outside of town. Last night one of the dealers at Harrah’s carried on a pleasant rapport with some of the players at a blackjack table. The dealer is having his first child soon. One player just bought a Corvette. When the dealer’s shift ended, he and that player went to the waffle house together. The player was a regular.

I remember reading in my studies of third world countries about “degradation” brought on by tourism. Islands spend fortunes to build airports and luxurious hotels while their thousands of inhabitants live in squalor or work in service. Independence is not necessarily autonomy and former colonies remain intestines to the rest of the world. And in St. Louis, what was once an outpost has been swallowed by an expansion it once pioneered—is now merely provincial.

*****

Postscript: New York is trying to build a new football stadium, to bring the Jets back from New Jersey and snare the Olympics for 2012. Part of the plan is even greater expansion of its convention district on the west side of Manhattan. I like football but the parallels with St. Louis are disturbing. If New York has nothing better to invest in than tourism it’s time to call an end to New York. The only opposition to the stadium I’ve seen has been from a rival arena (Madison Square Garden) and from editorials mostly concerned about dealing with more annoying yokels wandering the streets and footing the up-front tax expense. No one seems interested in the larger issue: Because of globalism, much of the world is now provincial. Everyone comes from somewhere and everyone wants to visit places but fewer and fewer people cares about really being anywhere. I like to travel and am averse to settling, but I think I try to deeply experience the places I go and to make something of those experiences—to make something of those places. I try not to just flock. But the good news is that wasting the world accomplishes two important artistic requirements—suffering and low rent. Most art expresses a desire for transformation, and strife tends to engender such calls for change. Most artistic movements arise in areas where artists can afford to settle because no one else wants to live there (conversely, where there are no good jobs, people turn to art). Think Hemingway-Stein-Fitzgerald in depressed Paris after WWI or the British rock explosion coming from the ashes of bombed-out England after WWII or basically anything black people have ever done. On the other hand I think there’s a difference between a field going fallow to refertilize and paving it into a parking lot. In some respects, constructing an artifice of touristic entertainment is worse than carpet bombing everything. It’s like making an arch that doesn’t hold anything up. Because instead of forcing people to make something over, it just gives them something to look at without enriching them at all. If New York, considered a decadent Casbah or a “Calcutta with money,” becomes just another provincial loitering hole (in many ways it is already; but I mean if it becomes exclusively that, like St. Louis) then where else is left in the world to turn?

Triptychs and Tennis Shoes

2005-03-31T14:02:00.000-08:00

Reading might take a bit of imagination. What looks vaguely like a cell phone screen should stand for one below. I'm no good at this html, so though I think makes a space, it doesn't seem to help me align these symbols and text. The links weren't part of my original story, but I think they work as part of the comment on instant text dependency in communications, or however you want to take this, these days.

____________________
New Message õ 11:11

VERIZON

.ilI ß
____________________

(read)

Hey whered you
go last night
ponytail

(down)

Sender:
16463267666

(down)

Sent:
Sep 4, 2005
11:11 AM ET

(end)

(end)

BEEP!

____________________
New Message õ 11:12

VERIZON

.ilII ß
____________________

(read)

Hey by the this
is pasha the
spainiard french
russian guy
from the tribeca
grand last night

(down)

Sender:
16463267666

(end)

The still unfamiliar number found its context for Clara. She shoved the cell back into her fleece’s kangaroo pocket as she rounded the corner past the deli (if this was a film the so bright in the sun tulip tubs of pink-red-yellow clenched buds would only be bright pink-red-yellow streaks, if I had a video camera on my head. In my hand. If I had a video camera I’d run straight to the promenade) her Asics thumping the heartily uneven sidewalk of Clark Street. She turned onto Henry, a bit proud to only now be beginning to feel the tingle in her upper arms of running hard and being out of breath. She expected it before she got to Cadman Plaza, a good half-mile from her apartment on Flatbush. But now she could get almost to the romantic streets – Willow, followed by Pierrepont and Montague, flanked by Love Lane and Grace Court – without tiring. She’d loved the steeped-in-its-own-history vibe of Brooklyn Heights when she first navigated the narrow streets of brownstones and whimsical firehouses. Now the wrought iron and window boxes seemed so West Village, but without knowing Dylan slept here or Kafka – even Broyard – could have sat on this stoop and had these same thoughts. (That pretension. Here, so nice where it might be so post-post gentrified but this skyline view this highway underneath how can cars keep racing below and helicopters darting up from Lower Manhattan and airplanes circling jersey and these three noises intersect. Wait, wasn’t it train whistles, plane engines and boat anchors? Well there’s the circle line. I doubt that editor ever ran a marathon. Would spanishrussian run a marathon? He looked so american in that polo shirt. Maybe that’s why he came up so slyly, hello, my name is pasha i was born in Spain but my mother is from Leningrad why did he say Leningrad and my father raised me in Monaco. Well, you know Cannes? yes, between there and Monaco, well, all that and he’s still got to wear the polo shirt I bet).

(read)

Hey we should
4 a drink
sometime

(end)

(messages)

(type new message)

AMAN

She started keying in “Amanda said you’re a werewolf; I can’t drink with a werewolf” (that shaggy hair scent oh I dig that werewolfiness) but stopped. Clara had a penchant for using formal punctuation in text messages. Instant messages, too. Hence the semicolon. But she couldn’t text and run on Henry Street. (so fucking hard to go straight with all the strollers wheeling out in front not like in the city where people are more consistent. Sure, there’re canes and electric wheelchairs and walkers and toddlers on leashes, but just the density of strollers and the moms that zoom them is fucking overwhelming in the heights. Overwhelming and wheeled oh like that Lou Reed song about running over giuliani’s head. Or more the opening of bulgakov, but with giuliani’s head to keep the New York feel. Giuliani could meet the devil like the professor did but in city hall park. city hall park perfect. But wouldn’t that be a Village Voice cover right there? Giuliani chillin on a bench across from satan. Wasn’t it already?)

(end)

(end)

(Do I like the werewolf?)

Don't get mad

2005-03-30T22:44:00.000-08:00

i know i shouldn't do this and anyway i hate this story but this website is so funny

apparently somebody at CBS wrote a pseudo-obituary of the paralyzed woman and it slipped onto the news web site by accident before she died (is she dead yet? i don't even care). that must have been a terrifying tragedy for the poor woman; imagine reading your own obituary in the national press... but apparently she's fighting back. this other story, hilariously also on CBS, includes this quote from a full blown follower of st. francis of assisi: "Everyone is willing to write this woman's obituary except one person. And that's Terri Schiavo herself."

i should say not; she doesn't have a will.

also, did you guys realize the reason she's in a coma is because she was bulimic and had a heart attack during a wretching fit? okay, maybe she wasn't literally puking at the time, but she deprived herself so much her body spasmed for lack of nutrients and incited a bizarre anatomical reaction that cut off blood to her brain. this whole dispute about "killing" her centers on the feeding tube -- she's better nourished now than when she had control of herself! why isn't that an issue? would the catholic church be defending someone who nearly died trying to commit suicide, only the bullet simply destroyed brain function and left the hopeless sinner alive? what's the difference if you try to starve to death?

imagine if there'd been so many court appeals while jesus was on the cross. we'd have been celebrating differently last sunday, that's for sure. it doesn't matter to me. i'm jewish. i just want palestine to recognize terry schiavo's right to exist. (btw, did you see israel's ridiculous header to equalize against france?) too bad hunter s. thompson didn't survive long enough to witness this mess. but at least we know how he wanted to end his life.

alright i'll end this before i'm (s)excommunicated. it may already be too late. pray for me.

Million Dollar (veggie)Baby ?

2005-03-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go ahead and assume that those of you out there who may be reading this have at the very least heard some mumblings/reporting/rumors/bloggerspeak of the Terri Schiavo case which is unfolding (but not unplugging) in Florida. Ooops, was that offensive? Stupid maybe? I guess I've just fallen victim to the outbreak of stupidity that seems to have stricken a certain and growing segment of our population....

Last week a California man offered Michael Schiavo $1,000,000 to relinquish custodial rights to his wife's parents. But wait, the stupidity doesn't stop at the "I want to buy the rights to your wife so that I can give them back to her parents" bit (which can stand on its own leg of idiocy). Oh no, everyone's favorite California business man explained that the reason for his offer was a newfound sense of "hope" he had for her after seeing a video of her and the life she leads (la very exciting one at that, what with the eating through a tube and the other vast enjoyments that come with being in a persistent vegetative state-PVS). Apparently this man, in all his vast scientific endeavors, has "seen some miraculous recoveries occur through the use of stem cells" which have otherwise been kept entirely secret from the medical community. While this man’s proposal is a bit despicable, and his knowledge of science more than lacking, it is really only a small example of some of the strange issues that are arising from this unfortunate case.

Not to be outdone by a mere businessman, members of the Catholic Church are also now weighing in on the issue, and in doing so, have opened up an entirely new forum for stupidity to be spewed and misconceptions to be had. Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, the Vatican’s chief bioethicist, has been quoted as saying that removing her feeding tube would be the equivalent to euthanasia. Statements such as this have riled up ranking members in the lower echelons of the church, leading to statements today by an Arch Bishop in Pennsylvania likening the cessation of feeding of Mrs. Schiavo to the Holocaust, and those who provide said “service” to be invoking an American Final Solution. I’m not sure if further comment on that is really necessary….

So what’s the point you ask? Why the diatribe on stupidity? Perhaps to illustrate that while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, taken in the context of healthcare they have real consequences. Perhaps instead it’s to spark some conversation about PVS as it’s an all too common condition that can be more easily dealt with if you have some of your own, informed notions of what it is. Or, it could just be let everyone know that if I’m ever the unfortunate soul in PVS, go ahead and play my Clint Eastwood – and if you can get the cool mill for it first enjoy yourself.

See the links below for any further information about the Schiavo case.

EMO

Timeline for Events in Mrs. Schiavo’s life - http://www.miami.edu/ethics/schiavo/timeline.htm

Additional links - http://www.miami.edu/ethics/schiavo/Schiavo_links.htm

The Shot Hit

2005-03-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

I recorded a song tonight. For some reason it's a father singing to his young daughter about her mother leaving them. Don't ask me. I don't get it either. Go here and listen to "Cradle".

Enjoy! Have Fun!

another song

2005-03-14T17:25:00.000-08:00

this song is on a different tip, but is also good. i wrote it last night, really high. it's for a friend (kind of) named tyler peterson, as the song is also named "tyler peterson". lyrics are as follows. get it here. www.pauldiddy.com/dj/tyler.mp3

to all the ones i've loved before, that tried and true
and animals and friends of fur, through view renewed
manicure your orient, sign the bill and pay the rent
destiny your manifest, a pill that pallid pales the best
a den a nook a lair a nest
a book to have's a book to share
and so is heat and so is hair
fairness strips the lender bare
please heat his head and heal his cares
taste this grace i give, smells of homonym
i'm leaving on a whim, join in unison
and sing another hymn.
observing is a game to play
observe a space observe a day
observe a garden and a fray
concrete cracks and cliffs of clay
observe absorb and sing away
decide and act to stay that way
don't even leave your house today.

paul

The Hott Shitt

2005-03-11T18:57:00.000-08:00

My friend Drew H. is totally back at it with another hot emo-core ballad. Click on this link and listen to "Line3". You should put on a cardigan, get drunk, listen to the song, write down the lyrics and then call the girl next door and sing the song to her. Or else you should take a shower in your swimsuit.

:-*^<3,

Sam

Pest

2005-03-11T06:48:00.000-08:00

Then comes the blade.

The cockroach is shaken from the polymeric plane. Blade teeth crush upon it, but the surface gives way more easily than the cockroach, like a fluttering veil. In the tremor, without a taught field to hold, the cockroach loses its grip. Free of tension, free of footing. The blade swoops somewhere in the nearby air, which folds from the push. But the cockroach is grown and heavy; its wings do not pull even at calm air. The cockroach feels a strong pull from behind and is sucked away as the blade pounds the surface again, collapsing it deeply. But it is nothing for the cockroach.

Spluoaghhgfff

The cockroach is drowning. Really suffocating in the water. It is lodged. This is water, but the cockroach has not seen water like this. This is not a drop or a stream. This water is vast, it is continent. The cockroach aims its legs and its whiskers and cannot pull out. It has managed to puncture this surface, break through it and grapple with the matter beneath, but cannot break out. Cannot even reach out. It keeps its eyes above and slowly, easily as it is done, rocks its tail down enough to gain its breath.

The cockroach is alive. It continues to push its legs, waiting because it can do nothing else. It pauses, battling for position. It knows how to crawl but cannot crawl in this tractless stuff and cannot crawl into it. Could not burrow, for certainty of asphyxiation: the slick particles endlessly caving in. But can't at all, can barely evenly shift. The cockroach boils in madness. Wet up to its armpits. It suffers immobility worse than paralysis. Able to move and wiggle; totally suspended.

Recent Submission To Seventeen Magazine's TRAUMARAMA Department

2005-03-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

A True Story by Benjamin Swetland

One day something started to grow on my ass.

Perhaps not on my ass proper and more so on that flat steppe between the small of my back and the gulley going you-know-where, but in these kinds of cases the proximity of the inevitable has an over-riding influence. So I'll just say one day something started to grow on my ass.

It was red, painful, and ambitious. I mean, it was killing me. The location of my enemy prevented me from either standing or sitting without stabbing pain. I had always heard that the Viet Cong held POWs in small bamboo cages designed to prevent their captives from standing or sitting, forcing them to squat uncomfortably for days. As I hunched in my apartment, the ongoing mental association between John McCain and my ass only redoubled my agony.

So I went to the doctor. First I got to have a nice chat with the twenty-something attendant in my gown and black socks. Then, stretched out on the examination table the physician quickly diagnosed the problem: a peri-anal abscess. Hmm. A squirmy little set of words for sure, but so much the worse when your pants are across the room and a vaguely Eastern European woman is using them to describe YOU. The prescribed cure was a thorough lancing and a course of antibiotics.

Then I got to field the anal sex questions.

Now, look. I'm not gay and I've certainly never had anal sex, but as a part of a certain segment of straight guys who wear expensive jeans I have been asked if I'm gay before. What I've learned is that the last thing you want to do is be too strenuous in your denials. Yelling about how straight you are only makes you look like a gay-baby-seal-clubbing, beer-chugging, Eminem-listening, secretly-gay-being homophobe. That or a please-penetrate-the-paper-thin-armor-of-my-straightness-and-set-free-my-unmitigated-fabulousness gay dude. So when the doctor told me that whether you believe in God or in Mother Nature certain things don't fit in certain places, I could only nod my feeble assent.

After a quick numbing shot, the doctor punctures the swelling. Not really feeling the needle, what hits me first is the smell. Some bacteria can smell, I'm told. Fortunately, she rounds out the lesson by shoving gob after gob of stinking blood and puss rags in front of my face while intermittently wiping up the stuff trickling down my ass-crack. It was like having your diaper changed if your diaper is tiny and inside of you.

Next step is to probe the abscess to determine how deep it goes and whether or not it connects to any deeper tissue. This is achieved by shoving a giant Q-tip into my body and poking it around. Does that hurt? Yes, Doctor, it hurts. Would you like a pain shot? Yes, Doctor, I would. The doctor pokes her head out of the door and calls for two milligrams of something or other, blah blah blah. Two seconds later there's a knock at the door and a staffer comes in with the needle.

And who is it?
Who comes in?
Who has the shot?

Why, none other than the small Indian girl from work whom I publicly declared my crush on in my short-lived blog on the WORLD WIDE web. With my bared ass, streaming stinking blood and puss. With my brain exploding and soul taking flight. With my communist-childhood-having doctor wiping my butt. She actually managed to appear glad to see me before sprinting from the room, leaving me to receive my proverbial peri-anal probing.

On the way out my adolescent crush and I engaged in strained small-talk, took care of the bill, and in general DENIED ALL REALITY. Anyway, turns out it was a chance infection, the antibiotics worked, the thing healed, and I feel much better.

Right?

Grat If Ication

2005-02-27T11:12:00.000-08:00

We did this a handful of days ago. The point was supposed to be how quickly we could make up a song and deliver it to friends halfway across the country just to keep us all amused, but the poor internet here has kept this song's release down until now. Enjoy wegroes.

The Broken Guardrail

2005-02-23T22:19:00.000-08:00

Vanquished! I am rolling over bridge now now through a tunnel I have to warn my mom the cars going underground before the signal fades Ive just explained it all to her and shes taking it easy after all shes heard this week she knows the whirls of wind can change can push a hurricane back across the continent Shes gone Im in the tunnel Over head lights the suns behind me now too Im out again into the light but its shadows rolling ahead of me until the river turns and the road turns and I can see on the curves slope a stripe of buttery light reflected bright earth and cedar back at the sunset and the deep pacific green shimmers across the river golden skipping the sun back into my eyes like flat stones.

I recognize this part of the river where I had rafted once as a boy. The raft was a big yellow raft, really big like for an expedition, and sturdy. Led by my dad’s sister or half brother maybe, but both my parents were there, and their mountaineering friends; they were like parachute adventurers then just dropping into the world for an afternoon or a week and pack up and back to the city; once had literally jumped with skis out of hovering helicopter onto unmarked downhill peaks, down and up. And my two brothers of course also rafted with us. We boys did some paddling but mostly played with plastic animal warriors. When the raft flipped over, capsizing suddenly with a burst or a jerk like a rage upsetting a dinner table, some of my favorite of those little toys were lost under the river. A military style cargosized rescue copter’s twirling teetering blades pulled at the air which fearing the swinging beams grasped tight to raft which came loose from the water startling the wind and we dropped just as the shock had lifted us but bottom up into the waves. Somebody told me a driver had leapt his vehicle off the highway over the cliff at river’s edge and the giant helicopter was there to carry that driver and his passengers to a hospital. I looked into the river which was muddy like a tea, searching for my little beasts and a fallen snorkel. When I did look up I saw a great dented boat, apparently crushed by the careening vehicle, its windscreen split and shattered. But it appeared the car itself had drowned and I saw the helicopterists hop from a long rope ladder into a nickel colored raft, while state police gathered above near the broken guardrail. I recall the water felt warm like soup but reeds or grass and fish bothered my legs. And why didn’t we just right our raft and go on? And sometime I realized the broken boat was a truck, a Chevrolet maybe, so mangled and angular, its canopy so collapsed, its hood squeezed to a prow; I mistook it for a water craft.

Crossing a wide break in the trees where the river comes right along the highway, along bends around the mountains, I look for that spot where the truck crashed years ago, to see if I can identify it from up here above the road. I’m also trying to imagine riding through these valleys back the other way. I know I passed like that just a few days ago, but it was night and I sleeping. I hadn’t seen it in any color. I pretend to go off on monologues about the places I pass and know. It is glorious feeling these places, being by the Yakima river, being on the edge of the continent with a full continent to go again. But that of course is also the sadness.

So as I drive now I’m looking in my imagination for the forward ride to the West as I make its way in reverse East along Route 90. I know these slopes these bends these signs these trees, even better than I will know the flat hills and farms and orchards that follow, and I want to tell someone, tell them what little there is that this has to do with me. This remains the place I am from. If it is an outer reach of it, it is still where I spent hikes and carwindow views when I was much younger, and where I will always envision the birthplace of man to have been like. My companion is gone. Christine Lagorio flew to San Francisco this morning. I drove her to the airport in my dad’s van. I drove back to my dad’s house thinking about Seattle rolling through its southern industrial end, separated only by the freeway from residential South Seattle — our own South Bronx South Side South Central North Dallas East St Louis West Savannah West Phila District of Columbia — its shipping yards its train yards and old airfields and new ballfields. I had a vision of myself with a radical freedom, the kind of emancipation broken loose by a disaster that severs you from all your dependents, addresses, addressers, appointments; the freedom to stay where you are or go wherever you want. So several exchanges of phone calls I’m driving this Saturn something, I’ve lifted my dad from work in his van with my packed bags in it and explained all on the way way out past the airport so I could drive this car for free to Hampton, Virginia, birthplace of Allen Iverson, and I’ve seized this perhaps because it must be right now to succeed this is a moment of action — literally includes a rush-hour race through downtown Seattle and far to the south before the Driveaway Service closes — the seizure’s victim this sudden end to the Seattle moment. My hours of boundless freedom closed, I am bound in the foster Saturn with my dad and Seattle behind me going exactly where I’ve already been. Taking Christine’s place beside me now is myself. And there being no one else, I tell myself stories.

I mentioned this feeling of jettisent free agency. I was like an ant whose hill is demolished by a step on the bluff. Like a crab lifted off the beach. I found myself in Seattle with no timetable, no contracts and few possessions. The architecture of my journey has been pulled off the river and dumped upside down. My meager toys scattered at the basin. This morning I rushed through those hilly streets, green even as the high summer sun gleams off skyscrapers, roared up Aurora, high above the canal— there are moments like these when the spirit seems to calcify and I feel not, like so often, in the world, but I feel myself moving on the world, a body moving at the surface of reality, apart from its trappings, illusions and debts. You must remember to remember because at times I will be prone, I know, and it is a shame, to forget to express that this journey is one of body and its vehicles, that its proportions will always be mansized, not godlike except when gods are humans, not universal except in the constellational sense, that is that every point or vertice connects to every other. But this spiritual carriage of body through time and place is always contained within the vessel of myself. This is a study of the body, as Henry Miller says the Greeks studied the body, eternalizing the spirit with human proportion, but a spirit that nevertheless swallows the whole world. At the moment of absolute emancipation, at which my arms and legs extend throughout this country, the world, as it tries to close itself to me, I can with the movement of my foot on a gas pedal convert all that energy into action, into transformation. This bright blue morning I might concede to stay in Seattle, to live with my dad perhaps rent free, survive on the propulsion of my writing. Or return to Missoula by bus, but strand myself there like the settlers who founded the place in that cauldron on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, and successive generations who found themselves similarly on the world. Might abandon the bar at Park Avenue, that safely expendable job. I might board a plane back to New York, where my Jersey City lease is up in little more than a month. Wasn’t the rent cheap on Capitol Hill? Might pay for the car, might save —this awareness swells as you chase the sun to the West. Something about the shadows change, the angle of the sun, but it has risen with the rising dusk all along my way toward the coast, this feeling that I might do anything, that every element of my carriage into the future is unstable. I read a comment a while ago by a critic whose name I never noticed, about minimalism. It said movements in art by nature head toward the edge of a cliff and inevitably must turn back and walk down from the edge. But I exclaim why not jump over the brim? Why is it not even in the conversation? Not a suicidal plummet but a leap into the air —a leap! The same muscle spring as pressing the accelerator. My heart is in the future nearly all the time and this trip is designed to spread tales and tie roots for later vision, but it has only until now led me through past places. Enough of the gravestones and dreams. My experience is a pillow and I am inside the fluff, tearing at its seams. Now I drive under the greening dark of twilight first to Missoula to extinguish the deceased.

Yesterday my mom was in Seattle. She’s still there I guess. She’s been up in Skagit country where I was born, and had a ticket from SeaTac to Detroit. It’s a coincidence she came to the city just as my path spiraled through. Otherwise she and my dad wouldn’t have crossed at all. It’s my dad’s town now, but he was happy to let me drive her downtown in his van. A museum visit and a walk on the waterfront with Christine. We two slept in my dad’s bed when my mom called, left her purse in the van. He and the van were at his girlfriend’s place; that’s why we’re in his bed. No answer there; adults sleep. Her flight was in the morning too, earlier than Christine’s. My dad got a late start. Thus the day began.

Beyond the Cascades I am without tales to tell myself. I don’t really know these fields. A peculiar smoke rises from somewhere its smell invades the air they highways flat and I cant see ahead into the night. I am bound, bound to bring this car to its destination, bound now to live in some loft in Brooklyn: have just this afternoon, while riding the fast dash to this car with time to take me everywhere, committed over the phone to a Bushwick apartment. I am thwarted, my agency now as much imagined as the opposite journey into the Pacific mountains, the roadside cedars, the red boulders, the river still golden with the drowning sun, its ghost now forever unavenged, its tale undetailed. I am defeated. Once believed invincible, I find myself down, oddly dominated, denied — but not destroyed. I am not destroyed — it is invigorating; I have new wheels, new legs for a new jaunt. This is how I am vanquished. I have thrown my arc at the Pacific and it rebounded me, sent me bouncing the other way. Night is fallen and I reach the end of flat East Washington. I am now on the deadly dark curves, reaching after 90, which may have done in my last chariot but Missoula awaits and I push the curves, dodge oncoming headlights. Into the freeing mountain darkness. Every command in my mind at sunrise at sea level is now distant as the wet Sound, where the road might turn suddenly and blindly as the day.

Eine kleine lied

2005-02-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

This is just a link to a little song that i wrote and recorded quickly with my computer microphone last night. I'm posting it to get a little useful feedback. It's only 1:38 in length and a pretty little minor key number. song can be found here:
www.pauldiddy.com/dj/internets.mp3
lyrics are as follows:

"a league of internets"
you walked barefoot down the alley
planting trees and killing time
in parades you were a hero
grilling cake and drinking limes
back in The Cask of Amontillado
desert sun and canteen wine
who knows anything?
my senses are immense
i digress
in infantile infinence
if you want me you'll have to climb the fence.
i could hear a voice so clearly
in a prussian dialect
saying blue jeans fit you dearly
and darling coats your countenance.
you are a station not a nation,
you are a league of internets.

enjoy.
colours.
paul

McSweeneys McGriddles

2005-02-22T20:08:00.000-08:00

Dave Eggers dropped by town recently. Of course he used to live in Brooklyn so that isn’t such a big deal. The founding branch of his publishing house is here, and the fledgling second home of his youth writing centers. Eggers arrived for a fundraiser for the same tutoring hall, 826NYC, at its secret Park Slope hideout, the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. Aspiring literary moguls filled the seats and the standing room for an adult seminar with the symmetrically male and female lumps on either side of Chicago curly-shock framing California smile and downcast eyes; these three the 826 panel on Writing and Publishing the Novel, though the main draw was the brush with celebrity the McSweenies hosted for just $50 a head.

Never mind that most of the audience never read “You Shall Know Our Velocity”, Eggers’ only novel, or that once long ago the Staggering Genius mined our tender sides with his admissions of guilt about profiteering his family’s tragedy or that serious would-be novelists might have benefited more from an equally expensive but certainly earnest full house had the names of the panelists been unannounced. We’ve got to hand it to Eggers for creating such a valuable demonstration of his business model for franchising himself off the stakes of his publishing and movie contracts. Eggers has discovered precisely the gold mine that helped editorially and financially liberate rap music in its day of popular growth, the legacy of ownership against indentured artistry driven by the recording and publishing industries.

Fuck you. I know hip hop didn’t invent labor ownership. Examples range from United Artists to United Airlines to lately-noticed Ray Charles’ contract demand for his own master recordings. But somewhere between Death Row and Bad Boy rap realized it had something to sell to the mainstream in the very performance of artist-control; you can make money putting out your friends because your fans will buy their stuff. Ideally, you can bring up your whole community, whether it’s a block in Atlanta or your literary web journal. Once you have your own independent house, you can publish yourself and whatever you want, as in No Limit Soldiers, or you can break into other niches, like Rocawear. And the best thing for collared white typists who don’t have even have rek to protect is there’s nothing illegal or unscrupulous about it; it’s not misogynistic if you pimp yourself. Will we see a D. Eggers sneaker line soon? When does Lil Toph get his own book deal?

Again, that’s all well and good. Fuck I can’t wait to do it myself. You don’t have to be a fan of Jay-Z to recognize this artist entrepreneur shit is the way out. What the fuck were you going to do? Sign up with another gallery? Take your book out on tour? Play in that pro sports league forever? I know indy stuff seems kind of faky for capitalizing now but what else is revolution if not seizing power? McSweeneys played a valuable role in popularizing free internet publishing and exploring antiformulae for online literature. The educational programs and charity contributions are a useful product and double as an investment: a literate youth buoys the publishing market. Plus there’s a farm system. By all accounts “Happy Baby” is delightful. And “Rising Up and Rising Down” may be founded on the cheesy golden rule but as a chronicle of contemporary violence it’s the most necessary publication in years. McSweeneys is delivering itself to acclaim probably more swiftly than Eggers planned, but he’s right there with his name behind a book often enough to look convincing. Of course there’s the work with the kids. Building an operable organization independent of the publishing ensures a stable nonprofit to anchor further production experiments. As a web journal McSweeneys is seldom provocative. A smattering of contoured critique occasionally populates the Believer’s pages, amid the clutter of McSweeneys inbreeding and Eggers hustlers-in-league. But there was this one cover back in November…

A full-page John Kerry portrait illuminated by a halo of popsicles. Nine times the size of the usual illustrations, which traditionally share the front with three or four other artists, writers or images on a four-color tic-tac-toe square. The Kerry cover tipped the McSweenies as more than uninventive, adoring democrats, but as peddlers of a mythos in the form of political inclusion for subscribers. McSweeneys front page itself now cultivates pie-throwing as often as anything literary or particularly funny. The web journal is today more or less a synergistic portal to other McSwys/826/Believer ventures and events, the way porn sites funnel you to the paid members-only section. That is, instead of engendering social mobilization, Eggers has aligned himself more readily for mobilizing consumers toward his empire’s expansion projects. This is a structure for resourcing power verily similar to the republican party’s. McSweeneys literally sells itself to its constituents, growing more and more and more entrenched—as omnibroadcast as a political party, devouring its bloc, digesting its own tail with startling efficiency. That is what a political party does; it raises money for its own survival, and in strengthening its reach, empowering its investors, it reinforces its resources, capital resources. None has performed so well or so directly as today’s republicans judging by their swift sweeps last summer. It’s a fucking wonder the party doesn’t give up politics altogether and just get rich hosting fancy dinners, except —shit oh! I fucking forgot its donors want to rule the world. So why bugger Eggers about his attention to which strategies succeed these days? That’s how convergent evolution works. It’s how your favorite NBA team finally gets a title next year. Eggers’ capital is essentially artistic enthusiasm and the McSweeneys platform is awful benign. The most dramatic measure proffered by Eggers so far is a something like volunteer pyramid-building; and even the Kerry annunciation stands for little less than piddly reserve enthusiasm.

So what the shit? Eggers probably isn’t a jerk. At worst he’s a dork with too many people who’d pay to see him talk about writing. Jonathan Lethem, one of the lumps Eggers joined on the novel panel, is a repeated novelist and a Brooklyn product, and even he doesn’t draw SRO readings around here. I should give Dave a break. Fuck, almost all his family’s dead. It’s not like he’s going to shut down half of Manhattan in September or invade a country. But this motherfucker sticks in my craw. I didn’t really know why till I was walking through the park the other day. All those orange curtains were still up, all over the paths, and I heard that whole thing cost the artist more than twenty million dollars … and he and his wife raised all the funds themselves. If the fucking Christos can bring in so much cash just to erect metal poles in Central Park, without charging me a damn thing—Jeanne-Claude pulled the bills by selling copies of blueprints and sketches of the project, and photos and marginalia from earlier Christo works, privately to buyers and supporters—surely Dave Eggers can raise enough money for a literary academy without sharecropping his artist-politic movement to struggling writers who want nothing more than a glimpse of him. That’s how Alex Rodriguez supplements his income, asshole. Knitting a lattice of creative energies to put out ever-widening arrays of art is one thing. Trawling it behind your vessel like a wide-cast fisherman is another. It’s no fun reading hardcovers anyway.

Here Is The Garbage

2005-02-16T02:18:00.000-08:00

This is an experiment with a site that will host audio files uploaded from my computer for free. It's not an original song, but I believe it's in the public domain. A friend described my interpretation of the song as a song for homosexual children. That description was not meant as a compliment. I took it as one.

You can go to http://www.purevolume.com/sbakken and listen to it in the "PUREPLAYER" on the right side. It's the song called "LondonB". You can't download it, nor should you, the option isn't working. You'll just have to listen to the stream. But it should sound a bit better than my usual over-the-phone posts.

Please keep in mind that I just mucked about with recording one night starting with a two part harmony that turned into four. Then I added one guitar part, then some vocals, then another guitar part with effects and finally a percussion track. It's not anything I'll probably ever use. I posted it because I remembered trying the site once when it wasn't working. It is now working so I wanted to throw something up and try it again.

Believe you me, I realize a couple of notes are a bit off. And I'm sure we'll have complaints about off-beat percussion. Don't let any of this explanation discourage you from criticizing it or telling me what you think about it in the comments.

I've decided not to post anything original that may go on my EP until it's complete. I'm currently grappling with my employer to get a few days off to finish it.

Enjoy! Have Fun!

SANPELLEGRINO

2005-02-10T01:58:00.000-08:00

Of inferior quality, not complete, quite possibly a stolen melody that I can't quite place, but still the first piece of music ever posted on KeyChange. Have fun!

Balls Atop

2005-02-10T01:36:00.000-08:00

The name's Balls--Balls Norwegian. And right now I'm here on top of a snow-capped mountain. My crew and I have been climbing for a good three days--spiking ice. That's what us familiar with the terrain call climbing.

Right now I'm considering what my poor Marcia must be thinking. I told her as I mounted the helicopter to fly to the base of this old snowy bastard that I'd never see her again. I had to tell her then cause otherwise she'd've tried to stop me. I told her that I'd be sacrificing myself to the mountain god--to nature. I'd been considering jumping to my death. What better way than to go out on top eh?

But now I'm realizing there's still so much more out there for me. There's still a lot of things out there for Balls Norwegian. I think I'll call Marcia once I get back down and take a warm shower. My God, I can't wait for a warm shower. I'll probably spend a good hour in a hot shower. And then I'll wear a robe and drink some coffee. Then I'll call my poor Marcia.

Stage Directions

2005-02-07T18:29:00.000-08:00

Lars embarks into the room. Paul is on the couch with his computer. Lars speaks to his cell phone. He doesn’t know what he’s doing for the game. He just woke up. He puts the phone down and down he goes on the couch.

Paul to the kitchen making coffee. He leaps in the air then leans intensely on the fridge.

“Wait that’s fucking crazy!”

Paul brings Lars a cup of coffee and sits by his computer. “That’s fucking crazy. That’s what that dream was; I dreamt this when I was sixteen.”

“What did you dream?”

“I had a dream with Lars and there was something about football. And I was doing just what I’m doing now.”

“What living here?”

“No working on a web site like I am here or something with trees and branches just like on this screen. And then Lars and the Super Bowl or something football.”

Lars is laughing.

Paul says: “Do you want pancakes.”

Lars waits. “I mean I would eat pancakes if you made them but I don’t really care if I have pancakes.”

“Okay well I’m going to make pancakes.” He begins to mix pancakes.

Lars lies on the couch. He is in sweatpants and loose sweatshirt. Paul moves in the kitchen in slippers. He goes to the sink.

“I came home from that party last night and crushed like 15 cockroaches here. I pounded them here. One after the other. I think I woke Ken. It’s fucking nasty.”

“Bump Bump,” Lars says. “Had to murder ‘em. Ken was here?”

“He was sleeping. Here since you’re going to have some pancakes do you mind doing the dishes while I cook?”

“See that’s why I’m not that invested in the pancakes. I would enjoy them but I don’t want to have to move all that much now.”

“I just remember having a big breakfast with many roommates and everyone working together on the meal.”

“I know I would like that too but it’s that for now I can’t get so involved. I have to sit here for a bit. I don’t even care if I eat for a few hours this early. Here I’ll wash just the things, the pans for you to grill on.”

Lars goes to the sink.

“You had that dream last night?”

“When I was sixteen.”

“I was in your dream when you were sixteen?”

Lars is laughing. They eat.

“Ken seems better right?”

“Maybe I don’t know.”

“But he’s like in a better mood it seems. He’s not as angry or listless. He joked with Lucas about Richard’s work on the golf course. And we all talked about the environment at MoMA.”

“He stills seems like a bit of a guest here.”

“He’s done with the chemo now though. Isn’t he? Now he can do things. I expect everything will be cool soon.”

“What makes you think he’s in a better mood?”

”Just when I saw him the other day, the first time after he got back, when you were recording. He seemed more engaged. More interested in what happens now. I was going to say something but I haven’t had a chance to speak with you yet.”

“I’ve been going to Tommy’s to play music more often. I don’t want to disturb Ken too much. You can hear everything through that wall between our rooms.”

They quit the food. Light a joint.

“Yeah I bet. I was going to move my typewriter from right by that wall. I figure if I’m going to use it it’s going to include late at night. And the head of his bed is right there.”

“There’s something unsettling about Ken. I feel odd wearing his slippers.”

“After he moved in before, before he left, he started showing Richard and I these paintings he was making on packaging plastic and he was saying how much he thought they sucked and it was just a piece of shit for now but he’s just trying it out and so on.”

“When I told him about the work I’m doing for the web site he was like you mean you accepted a job you weren’t qualified for?”

“Really? But I thought he didn’t seem as grouchy this time.”

“I thought it was strange. At the gallery even yesterday and then he just came back and watched videos, didn’t want to come see the party at all.”

“What was the party like?”

”It was only okay. Not that many girls. And April’s friend didn’t come. I just got really stoned.”

Here comes Ken through the door. The boys offer the joint. Ken won’t have it.

“What girl?”

“This tall beautiful girl Lebanese or something. We were talking two nights ago, April’s friend.”

Ken stands at the approach to the room. He wears a small hat over his skull and narrow jeans.

“By the time I came back there wasn’t anybody anywhere,” says Lars.

“Yeah your phone message was really funny. Especially the part about the latest edition of us at 3. Here listen to this:”

Paul holds his phone. It says:

YO PAUL WHAT’S UP WHAT’S UP I’M JUST CALLING
TO SEE IF YOU’RE STILL OUT AND ABOUT OR MAYBE
YOU’RE TRYING TO GET A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP LIKE
MOST AMERICANS IN ANTICIPATION OF THE SUPER BOWL.
IT’S LIKE 6 IN THE MORNING AND I’M WALKING
AWAY FROM WORK. MAYBE YOU’RE STILL PARTYING TOO HARD
TO HEAR THE PHONE RING AND IF SO CALL BACK.
BUT I’M NEARLY IN THE TRAIN STATION. THE MAIN
THING THAT HAPPENED TONIGHT WAS
I ACCIDENTALLY GAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER TO
THIS FAT BLACK GIRL AT THE BAR. I MEAN
I GAVE IT TO HER ON PURPOSE BUT I WAS TRYING
TO GIVE HER A FAKE NUMBER AND I ACCIDENTALLY
GAVE HER YOURS. SHE WAS CRAZY. BOMBAYED
SHE SAID CAUSE SHE WAS DRINKING BOMBAY SAPPHIRE
AND SHE WANTS TO WATCH THE SUPER BOWL
WITH ME TOMORROW. SHE LIKES THE EAGLES.
SO SHE MIGHT CALL YOU. I THOUGHT I’D WARN YOU
BECAUSE IF SHE DOES DON’T TELL HER
YOU’RE MY ROOMMATE OR SHE WONT STOP CALLING.
ANYWAY SORRY ABOUT THAT. I UH UH WELL
WHAT’S UP WITH YOUR NIGHT? DID YOU MAKE OUT WITH GIRLS?
DID DEVIOUS SEMANTICS PLAY? DID YOU EVEN GO
TO THAT PARTY? I’M GOING TO CALL YOU AGAIN IN CASE
THE MUSIC IS TOO LOUD OTHERWISE I SUPPOSE ALL THAT
AND MORE ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF LARS AND PAUL
WAKE UP AT 3 IN THE AFTERNOON. PEACE OUT

Lars is smiling. Ken smiles and stands in the approach.

Lars begins setting a chessboard.

“Is a big black woman going to call me?”

“Maybe. I gave her your number.”

“I’m going to give the phone to you.”

“Ken do you play chess?”

“I know the rules. Are you any good?”

“Yes. I usually beat Paul. I haven’t played Richard yet.”

“I don’t like games where if you figure out a certain technique you can just win it.”

“Chess isn’t really like that. Someone who knows some strategy has an advantage but there’s no key to winning like tic tac toe. It’s more like football.”

“I think the field is too small and the motions too restrained. It’s formulaic.”

“It’s not though; the basic principles are central control and covering angles. But the best results come from unpredictable play.”

“I don’t like it.”

Paul says: “Where are you coming back from Ken?”

“Oh I left early and decided to go outside for a while longer. I was having a hard time sleeping. I feel fatigued but I have a kind of itchy nervous reservoir of energy I can’t relax. And I could hear the music from down the hall all night. I was miserable. I was having a tough time and I finally slept.

“Then Paul’s phone started beating.

“It bumped for a while. I couldn’t sleep. I left my bed and tried to eat a sandwich I had from yesterday but I had no appetite. I walked outside. It was light already and warm but I had misery in my eyes and it was on the walls of the neighborhood.

“The dirty mounds of snow between the sidewalk and the street were melting and flooding toward the intersection. Humped on the edge of the curb they were flat in the light, greyish brown and falling into dark puddles, or channels really, heading down the street. The water was like in caves, almost loud as an echo, but everything else grew light and opened up. Everything else caught the new sunlight and relayed it.

“Kids were up early, tossing a football across the street by the driveway. Splashing errantly in the wet delta of the driveway. They wore bundles like snails but it wasn’t cold. I passed those kids. Like I say the walls of the street were bright but miserable, like a misery of desertification, a slow emigration of rooted life and with it tendrils keeping the landscape from disintegrating.

“I crossed Brooklyn and as the day grew I saw more and more people in the streets. Families went to church. I saw Puerto Rican grandmothers herding children. Black men and women lined Graham Avenue to enter a chapel there. Everywhere was warm and snow disappeared with the people heading to church. But it was so early I seldom saw a car. Everywhere was quiet even with the people. Over by Havermeyer gangs of Hassids, children in uniforms and curls, walked broadly by. I followed the rapid melting streams to the river.

“There is a kind of feeling I get sometimes and I don’t think its something I’ve had just you know in the recent time, where if I’m walking its as if trees or bushes keep striking me in the face and across the chest, and winding up my legs. I don’t really feel the pain like that, like a whip or scrape in the face, but it’s like the annoyance, the disturbance of branches reaching across and wrapping me up, a kind of auric bramble. And if I have always felt that I’ve been made aware of it by this thing, I think. And it’s not just when I’m moving but that interfering reaching at me, getting in my way, even when I sit down or stand in the kitchen. But here I was walking between all these old storage yards, warehouses, shiphouses, sheds. Sticklike trees punching out of corners in fences and where the walls met the cement. The street was wet with the flowing snow but the walk and the trees, branches, the corners of walls, the buildings were dry with the winter. Drowned and dried out. These trees were scrappy, weedlike, reaching from cracks. Rooted in cracks, a cracked shell of a city. And I was reminded, even as I felt it still in my mind, of the feeling of those branches halting me.

“The trickles of water disappeared as the roadway disappeared into the fragments of stones and bricks at the edge where the water reappeared as the dark deep river. The branches were upon me as I pushed my way past a wire fence but there were no more real trees here, just yellow grass out of the mud leaning at the river.

“I hopped along the wet broken beach, the glass and block beach.

“I stood on some damp pile, leapt onto old dock planks. Fighting the branches. My sneakers sunk lightly into the soil-soaked woodwork. Snows had left their deposits and rejoined the river. I was a fiber of ice, a crystal of water, held in place by a wrecked bough from the earth. The landscape will be carried off, bright and miserable. I touched my hat on my head.

“The ecology of dry land, surveying the place because the place is a niche to fill, is an ecology of defragmentation. The land is swept from above and excavated below by man or crooked water, undermined, brought back into the water. Like computer files. Whole grain to grain alcohol. Everything consumable, the carboniferous world broadcasts like digital music, amplified by its reducibility. Those godlike tentacles don’t reach to the water as I’d thought; they are from the water pulling into the deep. Cast out like Super Bowl advertising. Exploding like a tumor and then wrung out like a narcotized mind. The soaked detritus drains to the deep. The deep atomic core.

“I wept.

“I dove in, splashing water to the shore. Everything fills above me.”

This Shit

2005-02-01T22:30:00.000-08:00

A dream. I'm out of town somewhere with my father. How you can be out of town in a dream I don't know. But we are.

We are staying in a house. Staying at a house because we are not at home. If we were at home I'd say, "We are at home." But we are not.

We're staying at a house. There's some sort of goal or plan or engagement that awaits us outside of the house for which we are currently preparing.

I've glanced into a room across the hall from me and see my father. His hair is damp and a towel is wrapped around his waist. He is wearing his glasses and applying deodorant and aftershave while looking in the mirror.

I am in the bathroom in the hall. The bedroom my father is staying in must have its own bathroom attached. Mine must not. That must be why I'm in the bathroom in the hall.

The thing about this house, well I haven't seen the rest of it, but it's...

Well, it's like the houses some of our relatives had—our relatives from the older generation. My father's parents', uncles' and aunts' houses or condos.

They're clean places, sterile places. There are always tablecloths on the tables and candles lit for dinner at these houses. Children don't and did not live in these homes. Accept maybe in the one unfinished room in the basement where there's always a cabinet near the floor filled with worn-out toys. The toys were scuffed and some were dirty, but nothing else in the house was. And you had to put the toys back in the cabinet when you were done and the matriarch of the house always preferred if you played in that room. Leave the toys in that room. Don't take them out.

The house was like those houses and condos we stayed in when we took trips from Illinois to California or Oregon. We'd drive straight through. But Mom would wrap presents, little games and things, for my brother and me. We got to open one every three or four hours during the trip if we "behaved". Those trips were always during the summer. Christmas was seven months past and five months away. I'd heard friends talk about half-birthdays. Those car rides were half-Christmases.

But I'm not a kid now, I'm my age. We could have taken the trip last week in conscious life. But I know we didn't drive. I see carry-on luggage in my father's room. He'd packed less than he would have if we'd driven. I need to go get my soap and shampoo out of my suitcase.

I know we didn't drive, we flew. But where's Mom? Where's Marco? His name is Mark. Well, his first name is Marcus, but he spells the shortened version with a kay. But I've called him Marco ever since we played Marco Polo for the first time. We probably played it for the first time in one of these wealthy relative's pools. With their kids' kids that were sooo lucky.

But none of that matters since I'm in the bathroom right now. I'm in the bathroom with this terrible kind of wallpaper plastered on its walls. I seem to remember this wallpaper from Grandma's old house. It has a gold background and there are these vine-ish designs on it growing out of the carpet on the ground. Who carpets their bathroom? Older relatives from my father's side do. Whoever put the wallpaper up made sure everything was straight but made mistakes lining the pattern up horizontally at the corners. The vines are green. But there's only just enough blue added to yellow to make these vines' green. Yellow-orange flowers sprout from the vines. The flowers either clash with the background or they match. It's a dream; it doesn't quite make sense or matter.

All the cabinets in this bathroom are stained dark brown. And the mirror isn't just a mirror but four mirror panels that each act as a door for a section of the medicine cabinet. The outside edges of the sectioned mirror are framed in wood, stained the same dark brown. The mirrored doors on the medicine cabinet are the ones that you press in until the little latch inside lets go and they pop open.

And I've done just this to one of the mirrored doors and see the shelves inside and on one of the shelves I see a bottle. I see a plastic bottle. The wedge-shaped kind that stands upright on top of its cap. I see a bottle of green-tea face wash. I close the medicine cabinet door and look towards the other room at my father.

Holy shit. I know where we are.

Now he's sitting on the bed in there and the TV is on in that room. The comforter is pink with turquoise wisps and flowers and flourishes. Are we in a hotel? Dad looks up from putting on socks and looks at me and raises his eyebrows and makes his mouth into a perfectly straight line. I puff my cheeks and roll my eyes and wag my head from side-to-side at him. He looks at the TV and I shut the bathroom door.

I don't want Dad to see me invading privacy. I lock the doorknob and walk back to turn on the shower. Would she let it clash like this in here?

The bathroom is longer than it is wide. The cabinets with the counter on top and a sink built in, the medicine cabinet/mirror above them and the toilet are all on the left side when you face the back. There are towel racks and bars holding damp towels on the opposite wall. At the back of the bathroom is a bathtub with a shower head and a shower curtain. The toilet is between the sink and the bathtub. The shower curtain is either off-white or gold. Everything really does clash in there.

Standing outside of the bathtub I turn its handles, adjust them so the water runs hot as I like it and pull that rod on the faucet. Now water is coming out of the showerhead. I press open all of the mirror panel doors starting at the left and moving in sequence towards the right. All of the doors swing open to the left except the farthest right which swings open to the right. The backsides of the left-most and right-most doors are also mirrored. I walk back to the left side of this contraption and look at myself in the mirror on backside of the left-most door. I mouth, "Don't do this," to myself knowing I will. At least I think twice.

Moisturizers, that mouthwash and toothpaste mixture, tweezers, Q-tips, Kleenex, that deodorant also infused with green-tea, Sudafed, that acne stuff that burns at first, that lotion, that lilac-scented spray.

Holy shit. I know where we are.

I've looked through the first three sections of the medicine cabinet. I don't want to keep going. My stomach is empty. My stomach is full of nervous and nothing. I'm having trouble swallowing. I have a ball of air in my throat. I don't want Dad to see me doing this. I don't want to keep going.

You know...that's the thing with dreams. I'm not sure I want to tell you the rest. That's my unconscious. My neurological privates. Vulnerable, open, exposed. Fleshy. Open to attack. You sometimes dream things you don't even want to tell yourself about. That's all the shit. The brown shit that embarrasses you. That's for me to know and get over. I defeat it myself or create an identity that doesn't have or think this shit.

But you've come this far so I'd better deliver. Otherwise you may not ever listen to one of my stories again.

I mean I've told you that I haven't talked to her for months. And that I'm over it. And I am. I'm not lying to you. I'm not that. I guess there's just a little bit of shit left over in the unconscious that needs to be cleaned up.

There are four mirrored doors that cover four sections of the medicine cabinet, and I've looked over the first three and closed their doors immediately after. And the mirrors are fogging up and it's humid and I'm sweating.

And my father knocks on the bathroom door.

All of the muscles in my body, below my chin, flex simultaneously and I swallow the lump in my throat and I bite my tongue. He knocks again.

"We gotta go in 20 minutes so you should get out soon."

I lean my head behind the shower curtain, careful not to rustle it, and yell, "Yea OK."

I am looking at the mirror on the third door which is shut. I stick my tongue out. It hurts, but there's no blood. Nothing serious. I look at myself in the eyes and grit my teeth while inhaling through my nose. Then I raise my eyebrows and open my eyes wide and curl my lips into my teeth. And I'm making this face at myself. And my self is making this face at me. And I stop looking at myself and glance over at the shelves exposed by the fourth door. And I see them.

That deodorant, that hair pomade shit, that Chapstick, that face wash, that shaving cream, that after shave. These are products I use or have used in the past. But I know these are not mine. They're his. They're hers. They're theirs.

Holy shit. I know where I am.

I slam the fourth door shut. It is loud. The entire cabinet shudders. Things fall down inside. I expect a knock. It comes.

"You all right in there Steven? You really should hurry it up."
"Yea, yea. I'm almost done."

I look in the mirror and notice that my hand is clasping my cheeks. I'd better be sure to put everything back in its proper place. They'll know I looked through. And that's what they'd expect. They'll make that suction-click sound pulling their tongue from behind their front teeth and they'll say, "I can't believe him," and they'll widen their eyes and part their lips after the em for effect.

Holy shit.

The shower's still running and the steam is billowing out from above the shower curtain. The steam runs across the ceiling with little smoky legs and feet.

I start from the left again and open all the mirrored doors. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click. A couple of her things fall out. Most of his things fall out of the fourth section. Their things fall out onto the yellow Formica counter and some fall into the sink.

Another knock. I expect it.

"Come on Steve! What's going on in there? We really have to get going pretty quick."
"Nothing, nothing. I'm almost through."

I realize each "nothing" must catalyze his suspicions. I put the things back where I think they were and I can't remember their exact places and they'll know and now I'm touching THEIR things and what AM I doing?

They were nice enough to let us stay here on our trip. Where are we going? Why are we here? Why is my shit in these cabinets? That's not my shit. My shit is still in the suitcase.

I'm doing my best to re-place everything correctly, but I don't remember where it all goes. I'm found out. I'm fucked. I'm not actually found-out in the dream, that's just the sense I have. All of the mirrored cabinet doors are closed. Everything is standing or lying down in the cabinet. Not everything is exactly in its original position, but everything's close and everything's there.

I step into the shower. Just to wet myself so it looks like I've been in the shower. I get out. I dry off. It’s a dream. Skips and jumps. I'm following my father out the door of the house. Now I'm awake. Conscious.

Now don't fucking psychoanalyze me—I'll take care of that myself. Just don't to my face at least. Well, I guess just don't do it right now. I mean, I told you the whole story for a reason. Obviously I want your opinion at some point.

What the fuck is this thing? I think I'm disrupting her stability in some mystical way? Fucking self-involved narcissist.

I mean, SHE wasn't in the dream. It was just me and the idea of her and the idea of her with the other. Consciously, I remember the relationship like I remember a trip to summer camp. I'm only remembering the good parts. It's not like I want it back, but I do remember it and get tender. Not crying but saying, "God damn. That was pretty great at the time." But for some reason there's still this shit in my dreams.

Edification

2005-02-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

i'd really rather not link things but
i think i'd have to plagiarize otherwise

DVD night: "Amadeus" vs "Sweet Sweetback"

2005-01-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

Everything happens for a reason. Everything that comes our way is won, right? Teach em up and kids get right after that intimacy with god or perfection of wisdom chasing like it’s the fucking milk truck and no one wants to end up with gold teeth. Eventually the wake grows so wide only image left in their mind is longing, for its path to find. How are you supposed to know searching for the purpose, searching out the design, just puts you further yearning for the goal, truth?

Root out perfection and there ye shall find god. In “Amadeus” Mozart swivels his baton like a superconductor channeling the Rex Fantastic. Nevermind that Wolfie himself is a giggling ninny besotted by his own desperation for a father’s favor; he sits at his billiard table composing dipping into the inkwell like it’s a reservoir of divine cues. Antonio Salieri would kill to soak up the holy precision, but only fills with narcotic craze that his lifelong study can’t make him a vessel transmitting heavenly melodies. The angels he hears are all blown off course, their wings caught by the storm of progress. But who’s flawless? Mozart’s dad masks himself like he’s ready to preside at an orgy, and scares the opera prodigy’s eyes tight shut. Wolfgang’s middle name is barely uttered in the script but “Amadeus” is Latin for god’s lover.

Music to Salieri is god in mathematical resonance, the lord whose billiard balls bounce just so, just as he determined to strike them. Mozart does not bring the fugal counterpoints that Bach does, but his harmonies sound with a precise beauty that confounds Salieri nonetheless. The Italian hungers and hunts and his empty hands are to the movie like silences that draw tension between notes. Mozart’s real scores are the recitative matching the conflict’s slow rhythm haunt for haunt. The soundtrack of course is brilliant. Breathless Salieri identifies: “And there an oboe, high and unwavering, until a clarinet takes over and forms a phrase of such … longing.”

But this plaintive superscribing woodwind sounds like—that sounds like jazz! The soaring clarinet of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” runs along high like telephone wires, transmitting escape, branching all over the land. If the Christian God is a clockmaker the jazz god is a blacksmith. Not just for forging new sounds from European instruments and West Indian rhythms, but because his work is never done. He doesn’t wind up his pieces and send them on their way; he stands by the furnace: hammers and mends, shatters and bends. Jazz is variation and invention. Instead of perfect, jazz is exquisite—which means “well chosen.” “Sweetback” is a chase movie and, like Salieri, the cops just can’t find what they seek.

“You can’t get away on wings. But niggers got feet.” Sweetback runs all day and night, wiggling his own magic wand and attracting LAPD like a lightning rod, but all he channeling is Redd Foxx. The black man doesn’t have a father to worry about and he doesn’t look back. When he’s with a woman, she’s the one feeling full with god’s word. Progress in “Sweetback” is an excuse for the police, a murmur from angels. Sweetback gets on by getting off course. Deviation defeats progress. Flawless can’t beat lawless. Haunted and hounded, chased by sirens, Sweetback makes his own path and his own high notes. With the squealing horns and clarinets, he breaks out. He moves with his feet instead of his hands clutching after something. Sweetback’s route is not designed. It hasn’t time for perfection. It’s pounded out and left for detectives to find, puzzle over and pursue.

Is LeBron Like Ike?

2005-01-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Often my greatest fear is the lurking possibility that what I imagine about reality is false. Frequently it manifests as insecurity about girls. Occasionally it looms as the existential worry that the world is an utter illusion. The problem is a matter of communication. Do my senses and perceptions faithfully communicate a true interface with matter, and even more questionably, is there any way for me to be in touch verifiably with other personalities -- other people?

Inversely, I doubt I can make my own mind, my own identity and ideas, accessible to others. For the past few weeks I've been struggling to write an essay comparing Dwight Eisenhower to LeBron James the basketball star. My main problem was an oppressive concern over how to address the piece (analytically? aggressively?) in order to make the arguments plain and yet thorough, convincing. I also suffered a sneaking doubt about the validity of my theories, like some critical part wouldn't hold up, but it was more a matter of how to frame the thing. I was certain of my thesis and its constellation of minor observations but I seemed incapable of translating it verbally.

Basically, the idea went like this: Society's tendency to elevate leaders comes out of the same solipsistic terror. The moment a human identity emerges, that sensibility is carved from -- cut off from -- the interconnected particles and interrelations of the universe, because to identify is to separate. So to place someone ahead of others enables individuals to follow, to be a part of something and even to remove some of the responsibility and danger of acting independently. Just as important is to grant the leader some kind of lineage: an origin connected to the beginnings of all things, both to unite the individual with an ancestry connecting people together (as in evolutionary branches) and more subtly to make a link to a time when minds lacked self-consciousness and therefore lacked the dividing factor of identity. Eisenhower was the model, because his life represented a progression of leadership, a sort of validation or sign of anointment. Before being president of Columbia University, he was president of the U.S.; before that the spearhead of D-Day and Allied operations in Europe; long before that a football star at West Point. This follows religious and royal precedent that kings and prophets must be descended from earlier founding figures or their early life full of portent and auspice, and preferably both (hence Moses and the bulrushes, David defeating Goliath, Jesus' annunciation, etc). Some modern scholars believe most of these origin stories were invented to author the kind of authenticity described above. Well LeBron James entered the national scene as a junior in high school with a sports illustrated cover headlined "The Chosen One" and I intended to demonstrate a kind of Biblical search for prophecied savior (or, if you prefer, like the search for a child Lama) after a line of "false prophets" (Iverson, Kobe, etc.) anticipating a "next Jordan". Then a discussion of what might lie ahead for the young LeBron, considering the ostensibly portentous example of Eisenhower, himself once a young star athlete who went on to excel at every level. But the possibility of a President BronBron (one nickname is already King James) raises the question of what kind of figure would he be, and this is where it connects back to solipsism. My idea is that, especially given the illusory nature of these "ascendant descendant" mythologies, presumed leaders do not transgress the solipsistic barrier presented by identity unless they resist or even shatter (by a mechanism of fragmenting contradiction through rebellion) the structure that identifies them (as that leader). Obviously, Eisenhower was not that counterstructural figure. Could LeBron be? Not likely, but possibly… etc etc

Unfortunately for my essay, I discovered Eisenhower's athletic past was not as glorious as I thought I'd learned. Though impressive as an Army running back, young Ike broke his leg and ended his playing career midway through his only season. He wasn't exactly the LeBron James of his day. It doesn't obliterate the underlying philosophy which was really the subject of the writing and which I still stand by (in a certain sense, my belief in the non-true early-Eisenhower kind of bolsters the illusory-anointment idea), but it kind of makes the supposed connection silly. Indeed all I reinforced is that what I think may not be grounded in reality, and any attempt to communicate seems rife with clouds of doubt.

One Cannot be Faulted

2005-01-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

no one shouldn't read this

it's not real and may seem somewhat silly but it's more or less an articulation of what i believe w/r/t symbols, connection, transit and reality. don't worry about understanding it. we can talk about that

Fine!!! Here!!! Enjoy.

2005-01-06T16:41:00.000-08:00

Though there are many things you shouldn't do, at least don't do the following:

1. Let a near-zero checking account balance and general lack of money prevent you from feeling anything but guilt and self-pity. Do not let it prevent you from reading, writing or generally enjoying life. Remember, you're going to die. You are going to die. You will die.

2. Only after experiencing number one and receiving a large check you weren't expecting soon after, let that check be the thing that reaffirms your usual belief that life truly is grand and not quite the terrible lot you thought it only a day previous. Surely you're better than that. It should be something more mysterious and lovely.

3. Convince yourself after drinking three cups of coffee that coffee is all you need to be productive. Do not say, "It's because I haven't had coffee lately that I've left all my interests to themselves to stay important and viable in my life".

4. Unsuccessfully disguise a personal post as an advice column.

5. With number four said—listen too intently to me.

Yellow Book Comics

2004-12-21T20:00:00.000-08:00

this is bordering on the way intensely personal, i guess, but since the only three people who will ever see it who can make sense of the references are the three of us listed as contributors to the site, what difference is there in broadcasting it as fiction to the rest? anyway the characters are alive and not imagined but it is fiction, in truth, in that no scenario or conversation like this ever took place... i wish it could appear bigger, even in the link, but you know how it goes. so just forget about everything and use your eyes:

The Laredo Legend

2004-12-21T19:26:00.000-08:00

i created a cartoon strip a while back that ran in the badger herald for about two months the year after I graduated -- until I moved to new york. here it is, from No. 1 at the top all the way to the last millionaire-influenced panel, including some that never saw publication before:

yeah i used to work in a liquor store. it was my eye on madison (get it?) and where many of the strips initiated and even where some were sketched and inked

a shoutout to a friend of a friend's comic that ran at columbia and created quite a stir from time to time, so i used it to parody the atmosphere in madison and my then-profession transmuted into blither

september 11 2003

censored in just its fourth installment, this episode of laredo never ran because two prongs of potential offense led to a three-fold conspiracy to silence it. explanation: my roommate at the time, a local city councilman, was concerned about the discussion of some private information concerning another public figure, so he entreated my former roommate, the herald's comics page editor, to bounce the strip. when that failed he brought the strip to the pizza entrepreneur whose shop appears fictionally in this comic's alternate universe. the albanian pizza man was concerned about his patrons both realizing he is not italian and associating albania and his shop with islam. he claimed the muslim tie did not exist, despite my having cited my source. threatened with withheld pizza, the comics editor relented and the strip got spiked

which launched my counterattack, and a fundamental change in style and direction of the cartoon

pat me on the back for predicting the badgers surprising first loss that season

racial tension and literary references become the norm

but lets not leave out sports and unnecessary intellectualism

four strips ran each week, because i didn't make one for thursday's color page, so this begins laredo's third week, with guest stars (also another wacky whitey reference)

outkast's double album dropped the previous tuesday, but i hadn't got my art in on time so this whole week ran late

as promised, so fulfilled

this is what living with verveer was like, and it's the last of guest-star week

i went to ny looking for an apartment, then came back for two weeks. this week was drawn from new york (or rather jersey city)

ralph wiley died this year, during the nba finals; next time you chadwick for odb, think of r-dub too

columbus day, in the bicentennial of lewis & clark reaching the pacific

the ongoing story of the strip is cryptic and many complained. this one probably didn't help, but if you look at it in the context of this week (this and the previous three) it ought to tie together

now this one makes no sense. it never ran because i didn't think anyone would get it. basically the paper of the strip is supposed to be tearing apart, mimicking the various conflicts and indecisions of the otherwise-unrelated drawings, and revealing the universe beyond.

the replacement i made, a bill watterson rip-off, did run. not only did i still get to draw a saturn-like planet (spot the error!), i think it ended up working well with the post-colonial themes of the story

i had a chance to meet duany's family at the final four. wonderful people

i had to look up the name of the font, only i forgot and turned the comic in. later i found it and had the comic editor fill it in before it ran, but i only have the originals and i can't remember it again

and that's it

A Weeping Peach

2004-12-13T22:48:00.000-08:00

"Well, since you won't, I'm going. And I'm going to take your car because I'm in no shape to walk."
"Why can't you walk?"
"Trevor, tell me again why am I going to the store in the first place?"
"Tampons right?"
"Yes. Because you forgot them the first time. And because I don't have them, I'm in no shape to walk."
"That is GRODY brody. Will you get me some cranberry juice?"
"Why? Did the seeping talk give you a sudden craving for red liquids?"
"Yes. Your bloodied privates make me thirsty. So you will?"
"Yes dear."
"What did we say about that?"
"Sorry honey."
"What did we say about your usage of any noun, excepting pronouns, other than my given name to refer to me? Will you just go?"

If she drove to the gas station I'd have fifteen minutes alone in the apartment. But. I go for closest. She goes for cheapest. Maybe she'd drive to the grocery store. She doesn't pay for gas. A trip to the grocery store would give me a good thirty to forty minutes.

"Grocery or gas?"
"What?"
"Are you going to go to the gas station or the grocery store?"
"Grocery store."
"Here," I said and in one motion jumped up from the couch I'd been sitting on and threw the keys at her.

From ashy to classy

2004-12-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

What should you do
When your man is untrue?
You gotta cut that sucka off
and find someone new
I need another di-i-ick
In my li-i-ife

What should you do
When your bitch is untrue?
You gotta cut that hussy off
and find someone new
I need another bi-i-itch
In my li-i-ife

-- Notorious B.I.G. (paraphrased)

Cultural Studies (Part II)

2004-11-30T19:41:00.000-08:00

i've been wanting to write something about my neighborhood for a while, and i was trying to focus on the contrast between this bizarre illuminated construction site that's right across a six-foot concrete-block wall from a children's playground, on the same block. there's this huge tractor crane that kind of hangs-looms over the wall. anyway, instead i'm going to illustrate another contrast. recently two hand-made signs went up in my main lobby/central stairshaft entrance:

"Fight Back: This is Whack!
Please contact our local police precinct to report the unsafe conditions on our block. There have been a number of muggings @ GUNPOINT! at the corner of Bushwick and McKibbin. We must protect ourselves from threats of violence and make this building safe. The local precinct is
[precinct #]
[precinct phone number]"

and

"END POLICE OPPRESSION!
Dont tolerate this kind of grandstanding for authorities. We should be teaming up with the local poor, not excoriating them for resorting to alternative industry.
Give me a break pansies. Where did you think you moved? Boardwalk? Check your rent. Housing in this neighborhood is inexpensive but believe it or not there are still people who live here who struggle to afford it. You grabbed a piece of here. So theyre going to grab a piece of yours. And they go and grab their piece.
[drawing of a gun and a peace logo]
-- Peace"

Lyricide

2004-11-28T23:01:00.000-08:00

There’s only one way to measure
The ways that your treasure
Becomes the way to our pleasure
You don’t know how
the times have changed
and I’ve never seen how
my wandrin waned
but I can’t help drown the days in vain in bed
while tunnels just house the trains all day
and I oughto start ridin all the way in stead
but it’s just one way to measure
the way that my leisure
comes from the pain that lays here like lead

you’ve been my girl
you’ve been my girl
where do I sign up again

it’s been a long time in the comin
but my laundry’s getting done and
the lords wont let me stop runnin
I just don’t feel
Whats so different here
And I wont ever kneel
Out of lonely fear
But I can’t always keep out in light or in swell
There are streets dark with sighs outside
And I found out how to write out the night
So nows a time so long comin
There’s laundry to be brung in
And I wont stop till I’ve been well served and fed

You’ve been my girl
You’ve been my girl
Why shouldn’t I leave you again

You’ve been my girl
You’ve been my girl
Where shall we come from again