Election Reflections...

I’d like to put down now how, exactly, I feel about the 2007-2008 presidential campaign. Some folks won’t like it. Oh well, this is reality as I see it, feel free to write me back and tell me how I’ve got it all wrong, same as people have been trying to do for years when I say America is coming to a wriggling, kicking, screaming close as the #1 head honcho.

Before I begin I'll provide some voter background for myself. I was born in 1976. I remember turning eighteen in 1994. Clinton was elected two years before so I didn’t vote for the first time until 1996, and for all my presidential voting experience B.C. (Before Cunt, how I delineate the Bush Jr.-era) I made it a point to vote third party. My thinking in this was if a third party could get that measly 5% then we would have a debatable alternative to the two party system which has gridlocked A LOT of progress in this country for a long time. Many people told me I was throwing my vote away, but I saw it as the only logistical way within the system to really herald change.

Then came The Cunt.

Once it was down to The Cunt you’d better believe I was voting for the Democratic candidate. But this isn’t voting, it’s Emergency Voting, a further example of the sad but true nature of this two party system, where many of us find ourselves voting for the lesser of two evils.

Now two terms later I am finally ready to cast a non-emergency vote again. And you’d think I be ready to go third party again, but look, it’s all but completely disappeared. Essentially Barrack O’Bama has taken that spotlight, almost a third party idealist running in one of the two major parties. So you’d think I’d be voting for him, but I’m not. Here’s why.

Time for the terrible truth the way I see it, please hold your tomatoes until the end.

I’m fine with Barrack O’Bama as president – in maybe four or eight years. The shame of the campaign is that the way Hillary and he have picked on one another my initial hopes that he might bow out and become her running mate is pretty much in the trash bin (unrealistic expectation fostered by those campaign years of West Wing). Fine, I’m a realist, and if not that scenario then I just don’t want him to win. I want Hillary Clinton. Barrack is a revolutionary candidate to a degree, and there is a lot about him that would do wonders for this country, internally. However, what we are looking at in the next 5-10 years is the beginning of a new world paradigm where America is no longer going to be the #1 world power. We’ve got China and to a lesser degree India engaging the world market with more of a presence, and this is only going to continue. Don’t believe me? Ask any economist who has a thing about oil prices and they’ll tell you the reason our oil prices are going up is because these two countries are adding demand for the product. Eight years ago there were 6 million cars on the road in China, today there are 20 Million, with their oil consumption in recent years increasing by as much as 30%* annually, and expected to increase 150%* by the year 2020.

However, while both China and India are entering more of a manufacturing domain as well, with industries such as automobile production and export vying more and more for dominance in the world market for China and things not too far behind for India**, China is the encroaching new economic powerhouse on many levels. A recent study by Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that China specifically may soon rival the U.S. in terms of being the principal driver of the world's economy, a title the U.S. has held since World War II.***


So what does that have to do with Barrack O’Bama? Why should changes in the global paradigm have anything to do with him as president? Wouldn’t his charming, think fast and never abandon hope persona fit like a glove in this new world arena?

The president-to-be is not necessarily the object of the issue here. We all know it’s the people the elected surround themselves with that really make the difference, whether just by supporting their campaigns or actually doing the brunt of the work. I still think, to some degree, President = Queen in a figurehead sort of way.

Will O’Bama be able to surround himself with the right people? I’m not so sure. Would Hillary? I can’t say for sure, but I think someone in her position, with the hundreds of favors I’m sure Bill would be able to call in, she’d have a better shot at it. She’s from the institution. It’s not the individual’s experience per se, it’s their contacts. It’s their abilities to be able to handle the rising shit storm even at this moment bearing down on this country like a Tornado on a trailer park (RUN JED RUN!!!).

And there’s another, really nasty reality I see as well. With this flux of power going on America is going to act like it almost always does when it’s interests are threatened– we’re the biggest kid in class and you better believe we’re going to beat up anyone within range just to ‘set the record straight’. On our way out of the head of the class we are going to kick and scream and carry on. Would O’Bama help this? I have no doubt he could stem the tide of some seriously ugly political strategies or dealings, but how would that go over? I’m not talking about with the rest of the world but with the myriad of covert and not-so-convet agendas that comprise the enormous python that is the political reality of this country? I’m sorry, but I think ‘not very well’ is the realistic answer here.

And just what happens to people in places of power and spotlight that don’t ‘go with the flow’? They die. They die the kind of deaths that occur at the end of high-powered sniper rifles. Shit for that matter, just to come right out and say it, O’Bama is black. Now, this means nothing to me, and I hate to treat it as an issue, because it shouldn't be, but to pretend its not is to ignore history. What happens to strong, insightful and revolutionary black leaders in the U.S.? See the above statement.

Now think about what would happen if this country was already struggling through a difficult re-alignment in the pecking order of world economy/politics and then the first black president gets assassinated? I’d call it the worst thing that’s ever happened to this country; an event that would add momentum to the out of control nose-dive we’re already seeing the beginnings of. Is that worth having such a breathe of fresh air in the White House right now? Or is a solid, no surprises, probably slightly mundane 4-8 years of stabilizing and nurturing what this old sick dog needs to be able to sit back up calmly and start thinking about learning some new tricks? A revolution of hope is a good thing, and it is exactly what this country needs, but first we need to have some synapses repaired so we can recognize hope for what it really is: a ladder that simply must be placed on a solid surface in order to be climable without a premature tumble back to the lower floors from whence we’ve traveled long, long ago.

So yeah, I guess I finally understand what it means to be a Democrat. Now I just have to be careful not to get stuck there like most of them do.

References: You can find this stuff anywhere on the internet enws and science sites. These are probably the most basic articles and thus hte ones I directly reference. Georgia Institute of Technology grad. I am not. Take them for what they are, but if You look, its common knowledge. That being said...

*http://www.voanews.com/tibetan/archive/2006-04/2006-04-04-voa8.cfm for the full article

**http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/in-india-more-cars-going-faster/

***http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080124103159.htm for the whole article on the study.

Bedlam in Goliath...

Jesus Christ!!! The production on the new Mars Volta album is as insanely textured and schizophrenic as the music it relays. This is a break-neck pace musical hallucination the magnitude of which we don't get to see very often in the days of the disappearing musical giant. Usually music like this drowns under its own heavy-handed nature. But this... this is like watching the etheric waves feeding your senses shatter and roll back to you across a lime green limoleum floor, only to induce racks of cultured seizures showing offering your left and right hemispheres a glimpse into the future of sound as we know it.

Nearly three decades ago electronic music began its bid as the evolution of creative music, but oddities like The Mars Volta, well, they're one of the good guys taking that aesthetic and re-applying it to the good old instrument-rock long ago flounced by ignoramous egomaniacs like Yes and Dream Theatre.

title sleuth...

Hanging out in the elecrtric air, nightime, the substance of the work I choose to do. 'What the fuck does that mean?' You might ask. Well, what does any of it mean?

Here's a magick spell. Consume half a quart of your favorite poison, tap out three notes on a guitar or keyboard or whatever, employ some system of looping and let that fucker drone on. Could be a delay pedal, I use Ableton live a bit, but that's costly and not very practical, unless you already have it (so maybe make the focus of intent acquiring a free version of ableton live and then start going to their website and entering any number of contests out there to win it). Shit, I even use a nice analogue metronome from time to time. This is real nice in emulating the visual of descending a staircase or any other montonous image you can employ. But I'm getting slightly ahead of myself.

The Monotonous Imaging (or MI) is a sort of grid you want to work to affix your consciousness to. The idea is, you wind your 'here and now' apparatus around this image so tightly that as it advances the 'pretend' also advances the submersion of your 'conscious' into your 'subconscious'. Once this fully takes its toll you won't be able to implement anything else without breaking your null state, so have everything ready.

What you want to have ready is whatever you are working for. I got into this whole kind of thing with Austin Osman Spare-influenced authors talking about the sigil method.* But what I'm proposing here is my own twist on that method. You can turn the desire into the path that you walk down in order to access the lower depths of the mind, thus makign the journey itself the 'charging' of the desire, masked enough by the performance to not have the actual outcome in mind at the time (bad. Lust of result will thwart even the best laid magickal plans).

So whether you click on a metronome and stare at a giant painting you've made to represent what you want or you mathematically turn all the letters left into numbers and the numbers into notes, then record them, loop them and sit back and zone on it, you too can penetrate the inner workings of your subconscious, use them to access the Universe, and adjust the odds in your favor.

But heed the old adage: be careful what you wish for. Always contemplate the ramifications of any desire, as they might destroy others lives, or even your own.



*At this point the sigil thing is fairly popularized so I won't try to explain it too much here when others do a far better job of it elsewhere (Peter J. Carrol and Grant Morrison come to mind, as well as Spare himself, but good luck finding his writings and then,. if you do, good luck decoding them). In a nutshell write out what you want, eliminate all vowels and repeating letters from the words, then take whatever is left and put it together into a single image, bending and twisting the letters into a picture of sorts. That's a sigil. Popular method is to then mediate on it until the mind reaches vacuity, or perhaps more popular still and far quicker and more practical, jerk off (or even better, do like I do and map out the sigils in advance and then call one up days or weeks later while in the throws of ectasy with the one you love) and at the moment of climax stare at the image. The blank state the mind is in at that moment, same as where its at when zonked out in trance through meditation, is the state at which we are no longer just on the island of our mind but also in awash in the greater sea of the archetypal/collective unconcsious/kung fu wonderbread. That's how it works; its as if at that moment we've just hacked the grid on the Universal computer and have but a single instant to upload our virus/program into it, making it perform the task we ask of it.

Vinyl and Cocktails...

“It’s too late, Baby, now it’s too late, though we really did try and make it…”

Words from a Carole King song, released in 1971, five years before I was born. Unimaginably they have been haunting me all day*. Haunting because I remember the somber musical arrangement and regretful vocal melody from what seems like lifetimes ago. I have discussed this before, many times before as I have tried to grasp something beyond the experience of the casual music listener. Songs like this, from this particular era trigger a freefall into memory for me. Not memory as a verb or as a passive noun, no. This is Memory as a proper noun, a place that exists; a thing that I can touch with some, if not all, of my currently recognized and categorized five senses.

This is not a place of a childhood gone by or lost love or anything like that. No, even though I have a vested, nostalgic interest/bias in this stuff, because it impacted with me, I heard it, late 70’s/early 80’s and that was indeed my childhood, but these ‘memories’ are just a spring boards; a chaotic succession of windows into what I have come to think of as a aural time machine, somehow bringing me to a place I could only just barely understand as a child, but feel so enamored with now; life as a coming of age process for people my parent’s age in the that time.

My parents had not been hippies or participated in any of the sense of revolution that engulfed the world of many western 20/30 something’s in the 1960’s. No, they had worked and entertained friends and moved in and started a family, and their musical tastes reflected this. When I was growing up and subjected to my parents’ music it was always easy listening: Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Mathis, Burt Bacharach. Why? Because this particular time was the era that the singer-songwriter became a commodity for the ‘new age of consumer’. The hippie-psychedelic-folk-protest engine, a four-sided square cube of the 60’s brought on horrors like the eagles, where all of those elements met with cocaine and gin as a buffer, a filter if you will, and were squeeze-strained into the California, Laurel Canyon, milquetoast singer-songwriter ‘movement’ which basically brought all the soft, concerned Earthy-protest of the hippies back into a stable and marketable commodity for the newly re-charged, post World War II baby boomers. This was music for those who had been just slightly too old to be drawn into the short-lived and in the end disappointing thrill of revolution that cast iconic careers in the Woodstock generation and had instead seen the motifs of that era as the next marketable romance to hold each other at night and think about how the only reason to live through and look past atrocities like Nixon, the Vietnam war and the rise of the serial killer was to settle down in a home, with a factory or dock job and begin raising children to try and move the population yet another generation past the greed and terror that had eeked in around the edges of the American dream and begun corroding it.

On the surface there was nothing wrong with this. Its what people do: carry on living regardless of the loneliness and adversity that permeates the world as we have defined it for ourselves as a culture. Raise babies, seek the future… how was my father or your father or grandfather or whoever most closely links you to this time I discuss here, how were they supposed to know that the jobs would devolve to the point of extinction (and as well, how were the computer programmers who replaced them a decade and a half later supposed to know that they too would suffer the out-dated, out-sourcing death-knell)?

…………..

I found another killer record today. Sara’s been really into thrifting, finding stuff in thrift stores and then selling it on ebay. When I go along I comb the records, and I mean vinyl records, for all those IPod generationals who think I might just be using an archaic word for CD’s. We have our old turntable (Sara’s; I had several but all of them were in those all-in-one stereo combos from the 90’s and they weren’t worth moving) and between the two of us we have quite a bit of vinyl. Everything from Roy Ayers to the Misfits to Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, James Brown, etc. I like to dig through the piles of discarded memories that is a record pile at a thrift store – it in and of itself is a way to climb back through time. You always get staples like Ray Cunnif, Brahms and Herp Albert and the Tijuana Brass, and those alone are enough to take you back. But then there’s stuff that I find, like these quirky records from the dawn of the Stereo Age, with bold cover notes boasting the ‘Brand New Technology’, ‘A New Way to Listen to Music’, etc. They’re awash in these trippy designs and insignias that are supposed to emulate, I guess, multi-faceted sound waves, frequency oscillation and a head start in a new and better direction and quality of life for the music listener. I imagine its because I was born during what could still be considered the early segment of the Stereo Age that this stuff appeals to me so much. I remember the dark lacquered book case that was just inside my family’s front door, in what people then called the ‘Den’, with its many shelves for books and records and even a drop down liquor cabinet, where things like Clan MacGregor Scotch, Tom Collins mix and, the holy grail, an always replenished plastic bottle of my Grandma Baker’s (Dad’s mom) Grasshopper cocktail mix hung out and waited for me to hit the age of curiosity when I would one by one drain them all of their assorted contents and replace with water to keep up appearances (my folks were never big on liquor so it wasn’t something that ever got noticed). That was another throw back many of these records played to, this idea of the cocktail party as some new and space age ideal one must always be prepared to fully stock at a moments notice. The sixties-bleeding-into-the-seventies was full of this new age, chic social agenda that included Fondue, Roasts, cocktails of seemingly exotic nature and a ‘Hi-Fi’ stereo system upon which either Linda Ronstadt or Herp Albert could whisk the merriment into a delighted frenzy at a moments notice.

These are the records, not just records as in vinyl but records as in a documents of people and the way they lived, so different but not so distant from today…

Listening to Stereophonics: Language. Sex. Violence. Other


*Although posted today this was actually written several weeks ago on a day off.

NEW BAUHAUS!!!

And I'll be damned, it is AWESOME.

This is the ONLY instance of a band I love who, after 20+ years (probably 30 actually) decide to do another studio album and it 100% fits in with what they 'were'. It's as if You gave David J., Haskins, Ash and Murphy a rip van winkle potion, and they woke up with 1983 still in their heads, then sat down for a couple months in a studio and went about making their next album.

Plus, the production is wonderful. I received an advance copy of this but make no mistake, I will be buying it the day it comes out to support one of my favorite bands.


Now the only thing I can think of that I am REALLY looking forward to is the next Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album. Check out their myspace for a new track that rules.

Norton 0 (I assure you its edited)

The bar was cold and dark, pretty much exactly what we expected for this type of situation. We sat alone, sipping merrily on a Tom collins, pretending to enjoy the poorly made cocktail and looking at the waitress' ass. She was somewhere on the other side of forty, dark-haired and pretty, in that 'I'll be your waitress and maybe give you a blow job in the service elevator after my boss leaves for fifty-bucks and or a night out on the town and away from my three kids' way'.

We were not having that. One of us would have to silently stay behind and incorporate a poltergeist spell that might persuade her to re-think her life [seven days later she would leave her abusive 'boyfriend' and move the kids to Portland, where her mother lives].

It's always funny to me how people resist change until they think God has sent them a message.

"God doesn't talk to assholes..."

"Huh? Look buddy, I just came to bring you your bill. Fuck off jerk!"

We're speaking out loud again. Hmm, we all smirk to one another, amused that she apparently considers herself an asshole.

We think about it and then leave a twenty on the table (not because there's any one of us in here that feels bad about what was accidentally said out loud but because we can't stop thinking about the children she will soon be taking care of sans any help from a prize-fighting boyfriend) and maneuver through the dingy crowd to the bathroom in back where we take a stall, bust out two Vicadine, crush them up in my hand and arrange them out on top of the back of the toilet in order to snork them down with a half-straw we created while at the table. The lines go down rough, like prescription dope always does, but we all know that in ten minutes that beautifully peaceful feeling will ring in from around the edges and cause the world to once again seem like a much nicer place than it really is.

So, the connection was not made and now it is up to one of us here to go and make the report. The child is chosen, as he always has the most refreshing ways to deal with responsibilities.

Fifteen minutes later, beneath the overpass of Northeast highway, where it rises up over Harlem. Rumours have circulated for years about the secret caves which supposedly were built into the foundations of the structure by unknown entities more than a lifetime ago when further development at the end of the fifties pushed more and more people in search of homes to the south suburbs, which were largely at the time forest preserves. Norton knew all about these rumours, and it had been his discovery of one such tunnel that had forever changed his world.

He moves through a stagnant moat of collected rainwater and to a small hole apparently taking unsubstantial residence at the foot of one of the large concrete support pillars holding the elevated highway above this, one of the last remaining sacred places of the city. Norton, as well as the people he now associates himself with* use these caves as homes and operating headquarters, from where they silently, invisibly observe the city around them to better work to inoculate the social and psychic virus which seems to flitter around fucking up the natural order of everything. Today a new virus had been added to the list. A virus named Rufus who used to be best friends with as many as twelve of the respective character roles Norton had long ago written for themselves. "In every man a thousand, in every woman a thousand more, wear the mask, raise the curtain, the world, a stage to adore." This poem ran constantly through the collective's head, often changing its mood and thus, its operative representative.

Burrowing silently like a snake the adventurers make their way through the inhuman tunnel and out into a wading pond of more stagnant rainwater (this area collected and filtered for human use), from which they eventually emerge into the anti-chamber where the others would no doubt already be assembled.

They were there.

Three scruff and bearded men sit waiting, lounging around bizarre rock and concrete formations, sculpted from loose or stolen concrete that makes its way down from botched roadway repairs and excess dumping (both of which occurs more than anyone would really like to believe). Three men, but a council of dozens lay eyes on the adventurers as they make their way to their feet and prepare to present their findings.

"Brothers and sisters of the Norton-verse, what have thee to report to the council?"

"We would prefer to take a casual application to this meeting, as the news we have uncovered begs for further, regrettable action."

"Very well, everyone, remove your pants. You too ladies."

Information is exchanged and deliberation with the gods begins.

In the end the council cannot take his outpost from him and for this he is glad. That pederast, gandolf mother fucker Zoo-mani has a favorite 'nephew’ he wants to appease with the gateway outpost for the supermodel dimension, but Norton wasn’t about to go for that. Three twenty-something aged frat boys walked by him in the street just in time to overhear part of his internal conversation and think him crazy.

Hah! He’d show them.

“In another coupla’ hours I’ll be nailing the girl who you’ll be drooling over in next years swimsuit issue so pISS oFF young upstarts!”

Later

Norton sat in the corner booth of the little cafe...

....

All of this happens without severe incident and eventually they decide to retire. The funny thing about being on the clock in a parallel Universe that just so happens to overlap with this one is no matter what you plan or what you want, you always wind up asleep at the wrong time and awake at the wrong time. Explain that one.

“So here we are, another night in front of the delicatessen. What shall it be?” As they asked themselves the question for the three hundredth and sixty fifth day in a row (this was their one year anniversary as an enlightened being, awakened from the soup by a baseball bat to the head on Easter last year) a tiny rat ran by, trying oh so desperately to avoid the inevitable. Sure enough Norton’s arm shoots out like lightning and WHAMMO!!!! Dinner is served!

Several hours later he wakes as the door to the dimension of super thin fashion models opens and the next BIG THING comes through, naked and hungry and looking oh so desperately for her precious dog, a half-breed Shit zue named Malcom-cum-Malco. Norton gets up and puts on the customary coffee (not really coffee at all, but something closely akin he picked up in the stimulant-verse, heated and ready with only a lighter and a prayer for better rib meat). For several months now, ever since he moved to this underpass, he has acted as the chauffer into this world from the legendary supermodel-verse, where food is scarce and sex is ridiculous. Nineteen or twenty years of eating rock cocaine and fucking finger puppets their parents arrange for them to marry leave these girls ready to explore, and when they finally become thin enough to sense the portal in their labia they come through the door ready for the first man they see, hence Norton’s dedication to fending off anyone who moves in on his territory.

Of course, three hundred and sixty five days ago it was not his territory and the only reason he ever got it to begin with was the ass backwards result of yet another devious if not poorly planned and misguided attempt to take over the Universe(s). Stop playback and select fuck-off if you’ve heard this one before.

“So there we were, all twelve at the council and none of the mofo’s appreciated the risk and responsibility we had decided to take on by taking up arms against the true coffee terrorists, starbob-squishpants. We mean here was a chain where everything cost, like, thirty times more than even the most rudimentary flavour could demand, and our whole boycott and our whole poopy-pokey-I’ll-slap your-disgusting-coffee-traitor-face extreme gymnastics routine was getting absolutely no press. We mean, how many upper middle class upper class middles do you have to poke in the bung hole before someone at good ol’ fashionably reliable channel 1,111.29 takes notice and puts you on as the next regular guest star of Baywatch 18 B.C.? This isn’t a fucking hard equation, knowhatimeanthen?”

STOp!

This new one with the pretty black hair has just come through and suddenly we’re seeing where this is going. On our previous adventure, out there in the inexplicable backwaters of time, we learned the real-time inconvenience of trying to cube all the various dimensions of time into a single, mathematically valid representation of that which is singularly unable to be cubed into standardly mathematically valid points of representations. In the Norton-verse we have come to call this Poo-uvering.

So here’s Norton sitting directly across the shopping cart from this six foot five, ‘hundred and twelve pound mutant foreigner, knowing full well that an agent for Pipsi or Nubisoy is nearby, scanning for the new arrival, trying to convince this poor piece of meat that the only good thing that is going to come to her is him, if she lets him. and based on the foodless, orgasmless equations she’s been raised on he’s not really wrong.

1000x

“After we finish Britany asks me what this world is like and if she will ever see a purpose beyond garden. We try to tell her that the underpass/overpass at NE Harlem needs a guardian veterinarian, to put down the bums and jerk off the strays, but in the end her eyes roll back and forth looking for the corporate lawmen to swoop in on their web-like dossiers and take her to the land of fake breasts and Grammy award show performances. Oh well, we got our rocks off.”

Later that night the whole population is asleep, even the late-night watchmen personality named Mavis when an intruder arrives and shackles the physical vehicle to its shopping cart.

They awake alarmed and quite unhappy with Mavis.

“Who are you and why have you endangered my mission? I Norton 0, prototype Universe for the post pre-age of no modern command that thoust answer me!”

“No! No! You have us all wrong comrades. We are here with a message from the council and bind you only out of fear and respect for the, ah, legendary violence of some of the members of your vehicle. We mean no offense!”

“No Offense?! No offense?! BlahHh! You, have your best and bravest get off his balls and deliver the council’s message, then put your biggest coward at the wheel and get from my sight before I find one of my carnivorous poodles and use it to flay the flesh from your grill!”

'That damn council,' they thought when it was all over. Never too smart.

It was back to the café to wait for the waitress to get off work and then follow her home. Word of her true form had found it’s way to them and it was now believed that she had smuggled here with her a canister or two of some grade A toxic material from the expensive slag mines of the cavernous world of intelligent rocks.

It all sounds so strange and cheesy, the skeptic in him, Marlowe Thought. But damn it if it wasn’t all also true. There were strange little twists to the physical world everywhere one could look, it was just modern society trained their young to be concerned about pointless oddities like situation dramadies and low fat tofu bars instead of the invisible world that exacted itself on their lives everyday. How many of these glue-sniffing squish heads would believe that if they just lit a candle every morning in the southeast corner of their mansions they would never have to pay taxes to their overblown god Comercé. Fools! In this day and age it was always about what everyone else was doing, especially those pointless tarts from the tribe they call Cele-britee.

It took only hours for Norton 0 to work his way out of the cuffs, not realizing the entire time that the kid had been so nervous that he had actually left the keys in the lock.

“Now, one quick scuttle inside to the hall of ancients and we’ll be on our way!”

He closes his eyes and a tidal wave of inner movement cascades over them.

"Seething! SEE-THINGS!!!"

........

1965 (whoops? Wrong direction!!!)

There is a jazz guitar amp that we oh so desperately want to send to ourselves in the future, but we don’t know quite how to do this because we no longer hold access points to the vocal stabilities and techniques required to make this hole on the front of our faces do anything other than slather as imperceptibly astute examples of living erotica dart and sketch by in various stages of dilapidation. Cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will do that to you sometimes..."

"Eh? Do whut to yew? Ey canNOT follow a goddem word yer sayin'"

""Were we speking aloud? Oh dear? How much does he know? How much did you say?"

"I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING"

"LOOK, is it that cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will induce various degrees of dilapidation in a body? Or were you referring to yourself and your ridiculous ability to hold twenty-seven different conversations with yourself all at once and in different dialects?"

More questions. Damn, we want that guitar.

That Norton was sure he had not said aloud. And the simple fact was it would not have mattered if he did, now that the other man's kidnet hung from the silvery edge of his curved carving blade.

"Shit, I guees that means KIP, the psychotic personality has garnered control again. GETREADYFORANOTHERWHITECHAPELOHYOUPERILOUSANDUNSUSPECTINGWORLD!!!"

.................


*Or rather, they now associate themselves with, as Norton and their comrades subscribed to the para-psychological view that in every person there is a collective and to regard people as one single 'I' was at least half of the reason the world was awash in terrifying situations (wars, rapes, murders, etc.) created by too many reinforced and hopelessly selfish egos

Who are these people???

OK. US. PEOPLE. LIFE AND STYLE. There's a few others, but these are the names unfortunately left clinging to the walls of my cerbral cortex like shit on an outhouse wall. Every weekend I spend HOURS picking up the rampant publication detritus of our store's magazine section, and these are the number one read journals of tripe that make their way again and again off the shelves and into people's casual hands, to be scrutinized for gossip and then left hanging from various endcaps and fixtures, shelves and counters, chairs and floor for people like me to come along, scoop up and redeposit them in their proper display, only to momentarily be swept away again so yet another slack-jawed gawker can come along and drain them of their 'information'.

Imagine being one who would spend your time accessing the supposed personal lives of the celebrities that 'The Spectacle' (thanks Grant) issues to your obssessive, boring and vicariousness-fueled minds. Imagine actually caring about what will be in this week's edition, as they parade cover story after cover story of this actress' belly, this one's tits; this actor's struggles with pills, this one's overdose. Can't imagine it? Okay, well now imagine staring into the eyes of one who meets all those criteria and more - are you too feeling the sting of the thwarted futurist? Feeling science's failure? WHERE'S MY GODDAMN STERILIZER RAY!!!

A woman became very irrate one Saturday morning recently when our shipment of weekly scandal rags had not arrived in time. She had 'woken early and made a special trip' just to read the new issues (never mind that she, like most, would probably not have bought the rags she felt so strongly about being denied, instead choosing to sit and read them in the store, no doubt spilling coffee or chocolate or chocolate coffee all over them before leaving them to be recovered by the likes of myself and the other patient hearts who toil to accentuate their leisure.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? Why would anybody care that much about the lives of others? Is it as though I have always imagined, that these hapless shells of wretch we see in similar visage to ourselves have nothing and no one in their lives to inspire any passion or adventure of their own, so that they await so eagerly the further happenings of the cult of celebrity*? I ask you, oh weary reader, IS THIS LIVING??? Is this worthy of the same air that those of us how value our lives breathe? Perhaps one of the major oil companies, in preparation for the eventual dry up of their life's blood, could team up with an energy drink company and do those of us actually LIVING on this planet a favor and invent a stylized alterna-oxygen 'fuel' that those more concerned with vicarious-living, product-obeisance and general douche-baggery could purchase at a premium and partake in, thus creating another fashion whirlwind for themselves, many more millions of $$$ for the company, and an un-tainted supply of this Planet's actual lifesblood for those of us intent on getting on with it and LIVING our lives, not skulking through them like a less than interesting boutique on the corner of the new shopping developement.

I should like to see that, a fashionista expressing their dominance with a Coach gasmask pumping Cosmopolitan-sweetened air through their system, looking down on us 'breathers' as if from a pedestal of superiority.


*see my earlier post on this, titled 'Legalese'

Brainscape

You know what has always fascinated me? Well, not always, because its the sort of thing you have to grow to be able to even really think about. Not grow like age but grow like start taking the steps toward the direction of even becoming self aware enough to ask this sort of question. And I know that sounds pompous, like, 'oh, I'm far more evolved in thought than others', but think about it. Look around next time you're in public and tell me most of those people you see have the presence of mind to think about anything other than their basic, animal functions. The people reading these words will see what I mean and feel a kindship in what I say because most of them I know and I know they have the mental facility/mapping for this. But look at the everyday people on the street. So many of them are open books: Eat, Fuck, Phone, Work, Shop, Sleep, or something such as this. "WELL WHAT THE FUCK FASCINATES YOU ALREADY???" I can hear You saying.

My head.

Seriously, sit back and think. Not about anything in particular, just let your mind wander around for a while. Daydream. Contemplate. Whatever. Now think about work (not for too long), think about your school days, the bar last weekend, your lover's face, or Parent's sitting at the dinner table, think about as much stuff as you can. Then pull yourself out of it and become lucid of the N.O.W. again, and think about all those thoughts, what are they? Electrical impulses triggered by inner neural activity yada yada - they're like files in a Mac right (sorry PC users)? Well, look at your hard drive right now, how many MB of your total MB does what's on it use? There's the photos (those images of Ma and Pa at dinner), the song caught in your head (MP3), the conversational points you took away from a political sparing match at the pub last evening (Word file). All of these different types of information flicker across your screen as electrical impulses too, but they are also stored and accessible again and again (except perhaps the finer points of that discussion at the pub, if you were drinking more than you should have been). Stored and accessible and thus they take up room on that hard drive. HOW MUCH ROOM DO OUR THOUGHTS TAKE UP? WHERE ARE THEY STORED?

That's my point in a nutshell. I remember the first time I thought of it like this, and I mean really THOUGHT about it was on a drive to Dayton several years ago with Sara. She had taken the wheel and I think I was still in a quasi hypnogogic state after zoing out behind the wheel for an hour or two in the flat NOTHINGNESS of the Midwest (I love You Midwest) and I sat there in the passenger seat staring out the window thinking and then all of a sudden I was thinking about the space inside my head. There are YEARS and a multitude of physical locations and music and images and people and words and all this other shit, all collapsed down enough to fit inside my head. And if you're like me, when you go wandering through that stuff an enormous, amorphous landscape opens up and to catch yourself lost in thought is like standing on a precipice at the edge of some vast adn epic Savage land, rolling hills of information and feeling stretching out as far as the eye can see.

So where does all of it go? To think of it in possibly more abstract terms, how does all of that fit in this little round box equipped with all these other funky gizmos whose purpose is collecting MORE information ALL the time? What extra-dimensional theory would explain or map how all of these things fold and collapse into our physical form, and then open up for our perusal at a mere thought? 11 dimensional Supergravity? Brane theory? Superstring? I don't know, but thinking about it really revvs that inner landscape...

Magick crowd control...

So I've done this before. Back at the bar. I used to HATE it when certain people came in. There were regulars that would suck up a bar seat for a whole night sometimes, leave next to no money, be abusive, irritating, annoying, demanding, whatever. Finally I got the idea to create a servitor, a tulpa, a Magickal (ie Will controlled) thought form that is programmed, much like a computer is, to do X when criteria Y is met. For the bar I named the servitor Karla, after Karla from the 80's television show Cheers, a no-nonsense bitch of a waitress that wouldn't take shit from anybody and would easily chase unwanted clientele from the establishment. I 'programmed' X = make undesireables leave the bar when Y = I drank tea. I don't know why I used that, but it worked. In fact, after I did that several of the unwanted regulars disappeared, hardly ever to come back.

Now at the bookstore we're worse than the fucking bar, especially of late. We have DROVES of high school kids who come in, take up all the seating, buy next to nothing, fuck things up, act like douche bags, are LOUD and all of this makes our (management) lives that much harder because not only do they annoy us, but they annoy our customers (many of whom are fucking annoying too) and then they complain to us. So guess what? Yep, I'm going to program a new servitor and attempt to attach it to the store. We'll see if it works.*

*some people would no doubt hear about the accomplishment at the bar and say, "oh, that's just a coincidence. you've convinced yourself that it worked, but it just happened to coincide," to which I would answer, "Who cares, as long as it works". That's the point of 'Magick' or whatever You want to call it.

Word

The Fixx...

I bought the vinyl of their 1983 2nd album REACH THE BEACH over the weekend for 50 cents at a thrift store and I cannot stop listening to it. I have always loved the tracks ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER and SAVED BY ZERO but know I love the entire album. And the weird, 80's art album cover is cool as hell. Thrift stores are so wicked for always finding these types of 80's niche records in.

Cloverfield

Where to begin? By hte time I finally saw this on the day it was released I had the definite feeling Cloverfield could NEVER live up to the expectations I had. If there was an award for the best marketing campaign, this should definitely get it. nd I'm not even talking about whatever the viral marketing campaign was, as I missed out on that completely. I don't watch tv or listen to the popular radio or really read much of the newspaper (preferring to get my news as an NPR junkie) so all I had to invest me in the film was the teaser before Transformers last July and the sudden proliferating billboards all over LA. Well, it was enough.

One thing that built suspense was my own approach, in that I refused to read anything that had to do with the flick. And then I planned to see it on opening day, something I normally would never do. IN this case though, I figured it may become damn well impossible to avoid the revelation of what it was that was that had torn the head of the statue of liberty off in the teaser. When you work at place with a lot of sci fi and horror movie buffs, avoiding something like that the next day is pretty hard if they've all already discovered the secret. It was hard enough avoiding it up until now, as many folks were scouring the net looking for clues to sate their anticipation. Myself however, I like to be surprised, really surprised, and I wanted to be sitting in that chair, baked, and have whatever it is scare the hell out of me the same way it would scare the hell out of the people on the streets of that fictional universe's Manhattan.


SPOILER>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>










Okay, well, there were two big rumors that had me concerned. The first was that this was a Godzilla remake. I may have mentioned here once before, I had effectively sworn an oath in front of many people that if in the big reveal it was in fact Godzilla I was going to stand up, shout Fuck You at the screen and leave. Of course, that would have made me quite the asshole, but it would have been well warranted, at least in my mind. Godzilla was cool in nineteen fifty. That 'Atomic Age' bullshit is dead and gone, we've been living with the repercussions for half a fucking decade, and so the concept of a giant atomic-irradiated lizard wreaking revenge on mankind is about as poignant as remaking a flick were characters flush aligators down the toilet and they grow super large via hazardous waste chemicals and attack.

The 2nd rumor that had reached me was that this was possibly a Cthulhu movie. Now, at first that seemed like an awful idea. But about a week before it opened I started dreaming about this flick, as though I was in it. I started to imagine that the monster was Cthulhu, only being that it was supposedly shot all on home video as though recorded by a person caught in the midst of it there would never be a place for the filmaker to actually get a 3rd person perspective and so, we would never know it was the big C unless they had designed the monster so that those Lovecraft nerds out there (myself most definitely included) would recognize him. This idea I liked. Imagine, a film based so much out of a love for that mythos that it was enacted so true to life that it had the perspective of one of Lovecraft's protagonists - they're recording what is happening to them, unaware at the street level that this is the awakening of the elder gods, yada yada yada. My inner fan boy is starting to need a mental book-checking, but you get the point.

It was, however, not Cthulhu. although, there is a way the nerd quarter fo my brain sees that the filmmakers could have intentionally left it open for those in the know to argue that it was. But I'll get to that later.

The only inkling of a let down was that the monster did not live up to the abstract horrors my imagination had half conjured in rampant expectation. The day before seeing it my friend Amy stirred this to a boil when she said she had read one review that had described the monster as being 'a thing of 17 nightmares' or something to that effect. Now, of course, when expectation adn the abstract inner realms of imagination get working together like this, their offspring could NEVER be realized outside of that abstract realm of imagination, let alone on a DV camera via special effects. But man, I'll tell you this, sitting there in that theatre, pulled so deep into the chaos of having that handheld home movie camera put me street level with all those screaming, dying, looting people, when I saw that motherfucker for the first time it was something akin, I think, in film comparison, to that scene in M. Knight Shamalamdingdong's SIGNS with the first footage of the 'Buenos Aires birthday party'. It scared the LIVING FUCK out of me. It was glimpse, glimpse, terror, expectancy pushed through the roof of your mouth like venomous barbs and then full on HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!?

Now that, my friends, is a fucking monster movie. Mail your dime store giant lizard back to 1950 where someone might spill their pop at the sight of it. These days its gotta be the some-deep-sea-trench-just-vomited-this-abysmal-black-horror-into-the-lap-of-unsuspecting-mankind, and directly or indirectly, that IS H.P. Lovecraft.


Nerd addendum.

So, there is a scene, after we've seen the monster attacking, where the armed forces are attempting to evacuate what's left of the people of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge and off the terrorized island when suddenly a giant tentacle-looking thing reels up out of the water and destroys the bridge. NOW, I know this is irrelevant to most folks lives, I know its nerdly obsessiveness the likes of which I make fun of others about, I know I should get a fucking life or find something worthwhile to do, but You know what? I will. I'm off work the next two days, just finished my third screenplay this year and am hard at work on my new one in another window, so writing this is my little tangent and I'll 'get a life' again when I damn well feel like it.

Anway, the point is, the monster we've seen thus far (and I do believe there may have been two even though here:

http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/01/09/cloverfield-building-a-better-monster/

the designers discuss its creation as if it is just one) wasn't the only one. Seems to me since we were only seeing it from one camera perspectives, there were glimpses of more than one thing that were unable to be confirmed or followed up on. Now, the biggest example of this is that tentacle in the water. The monster is on land in Manhattan, and has no tentacle, so what the hell was in the water and attacked the bridge? The argument could be made that the monster we've seen was the spawn or herald of something much bigger, and what is a much bigger horror and usually travels with a herald? Beside Galactus? CTHULHU. So, my hopes are Mr. Abrhams will put all his effort into the last few seasons of LOST, make a killer star trek movie, even though I HATE star trek, fo rthe most part, and then make a companion piece, NOT A SEQUEL to Cloverfield that will give us more angles, if you will, of what exactly is happening that night in Manhattan, Cthulhu or not.

WEEN...

Ween is an amazing band. I could do the whole 'drop to your knees and worship them' bit but Henry Rollins did it first and he did it better (cuz he's Rollins) and I'd rather recommend You hunt down that spoken word piece of his (or ask me for a copy) and listen to it.

It's not just Rollins' delivery this time though, he speaks the truth here. Ween is possibly the greatest living rock band in the world. Now I know that's a bold statement but let's look at it, shall we?

You get two fuck off stoner misfits who went from spending their ingenuity on rigging gas masks into scotch guard bongs and recording fuck off comedy music with a few heart-felt breakup songs scattered in for personal development issues to the fellows that hired a troup of living Nashville legends and wrote the best country album of the last decade (those who don't agree wither have not heard 12 Golden Country Greats or regard Deana Carter and keith Urban as country, which they ein't!!! From there the 'brothers' Ween gave the world The Mollusk, the perfect fusion of their old funny/catchy/quirky scotch guard era comedy music and a mature beyond imagining assortment of breath taking rock songs, from the title tracks Beatle-esque simplistic beauty to the magnum opus immortality of the faux 70's Brit rock of Buckingham Greene. I remember the day The Mollusk came out, I ran to the old record swap in beautiful downtown tinley park and traded in a NIN cd, along with some more forgettable titles because I knew the new Ween album was coming out and wanted to sit down with my friends Brown and Sonny to partake but I had no dough. After a quick record swap (perfect naem for the now defunct independent franchise, eh?) I headed over to Sonny's where the three of us smoked ourselves into a fucking coma and sat down to listen. NONE of us were prepared for what we heard, esp. Buckingham Greeene.

After that we learned not to expect anything from Dean and Gene because they were clearly able to do ANYTHING. So a few years later we get White Pepper and BAM! Wow, it was as if the bastard sons of ELO, ELP, XTC and a tour bus of Jimmy Buffet impersonators were squeezed into those scotch guard bongs now. I pictured Dean using a plunger to push Andy Partridge's arms and Keith Emerson's legs deep into the modified tubing of the apparatus while Gene flicks the lighter on em and takes a massive, lung-filling inhale.

Did I forge the live album, Paintin the Town Brown. No I didn't. Up there with The Who Live at Leeds and Slayer Decade of Aggression. I usually hate live albums. Not these, and definitely not ones that show case a band that can not only play any one of their songs a hundred different ways but has such a back catalogue of gems that ANY time you see them they are able to pummel you with something you've never heard before and make it sound like it was their number one hit accross the Universe. Such is PTTB and a priceless gem like COVER IT WITH GAS AND SET IT ON FIRE.

Another thing about Ween is they have SOO MUCH MATERIAL. I mean, I'm not about to go through their whole catalogue right now or I'll be running on at the mouth in front of you worse than on the Drum Off post. Suffice it to say up through the years (and now I'm getting kinda weirded out considering how many albums, and thus years, I've been with this band. Brown must be even more weirded out, as he's been into them since the first fucking album!) Ween has consistently defied all expectation, all convention, and still managed to put out the funniest, catchiest, most unique and memorable rock music I've heard. There are many other rock bands I love, but there is only one Ween.

Update 666

If You've put off taking my advice to go check out Technoccult.net, this is the kind of gem Your missing.

http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8U3916G0

Thanks to Tiamats Vision for posting a link to this there.

http://www.technoccult.net

There Will Be Blood

SPOILERS CONTAINED WITHIN:

I have been looking forward to this movie for quite sometime. The trailer had me with its Penderecki-like violin scratchings ripping and clawing all over the images of the early days of the oil business imagery. It opened here in LA several weeks ago (Dec. 26th I think) but only played at the Arclight in Hollywood for most of that time. Now, the arclight is THE place to see I flick, judging from my only experience back in July when my friend Chris and his buddy Avner brought me to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine there. The sound was fantastic to the point of nearly being painful, which is exactly how I like the sound in a theatre to be. Twice this year we saw big blockbusters out in 'burb theatres and the sound literally seemed to be emanating only from the front of house. Fuck that, I want that shit to RIP my fucking face off! So the Arclight would have been the first choice, except the juxtaposition between Sara's schedule and my own has made it pretty much a massive inconvenience at best to get there. So anyway, P.T. Anderson's newest masterpiece (and probably the best film of his career thus far) opened wide this weekend and we made our way to the theatre in Rancho Palos Verdes, our local fav thus far, to finally see it.

We were not disappointed at all.

What with the three weeks or so of hoping to see it but being thwarted again and again I had begun to worry that my anticipation had been revved to the point of being unquenchable.

Nope.

From the very first note, the very first shot, all the way through to the end, There Will Be Blood is a breath-taking, dark, witty, funny, horrible, emotional piece of art that will stay with me for the rest of my days. I have a lot of favorite movies, but within that realm there are a certain few whose perverse mixture of the horror and the comedy of life, exemplified by stand out, iconic performances make them actual facets of my personality. Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining or Dennis Hopper in David Lynch's Blue Velvet spring immediately to mind. Their violence, sarcasm and beligerence is motivating in that it not only shows you how bad a person can be, but also motivates the impressive tales that contain them to leap off the screen and make you jump, flinch, laugh and hollor along - the inherent 'fun' in being able to be so unbelievably evil just by invoking the character through the quoting of iconic lines or acting along with the characters. Well, everything I'm trying to bestow to you above, Daniel Day-Lewis has it in this film. Hopper's role in BV is argueably a lesser part of the film in that he is not the main character (although I my self would argue he is the main character to some degree; he certainly drives lot of what transpires even if he does not have as much screen time as Kyle MacLachlan) but Day-Lewis' role as Daniel Plainview reminds me so much of Nicholson's Jack Torrance in that since seeing it I find myself wanting to run around holloring any number of memorable lines at the top of my lungs.

Now, TWBB also reminded me of another favorite from this past year, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men. So much quiet. So many big, open spaces where there was no movie on screen but a window into the characters' lives. Sara put it best, and I'll paraphrase her here, but after TWBB she said really like both these films for the fact that they were not so much conventional stories, with set-up, conflict introduced, exposition and finally climax and resolution, but more like recordings of real life. I liken them to using the camera not so much to tell a story the way most filmmakers or filmgoers think of a story, but more as an unnatural observer that watches a cadre of people's lives from point A to point B and then ends. TWBB is definitely that, and I would argue that the problem many people have with NCFOM is that it takes a tale that should have a resolution and everything else and twists and tweaks it so that it does not have them.

My picks for 2007:

Best Film: No Country For Old Men (TWBB a very close 2nd and the one I think will actually win the award)

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis

Best Actress: Not sure.

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem

Best Director: P.T. Anderson

Best Score: Johnny Greenwood for There Will Be Blood

Best 

Biggest piece of shit: Probably Transformers. I know there was tons worse (there's never any shortage of shit on the movie screen) but this, ah, even though I enjoyed myself profusely watching it, it was just bad. Not that it could have been anything else really, but my god, that scene with the autobots leaning backwards over neighboring houses trying to keep out of sight of the kid's parents? John Tuturro in this horrible role? NOOO!!! I'm going to rewatch Miller's Crossing soon to try and renew my faith in the guy.

I'll trail off here because I haven't given the rest that much thought.

Lily and Thompson

Pink Floyd - The Wall

When was the last time you sat down and listened to this start to finish? It'd been YEARS for me, as I listened to it so much in high school that I kind of absorbed it and became jaded as I moved out into the world and saw how commonplace it was. Threw it on last night on a whim and you know what? It's FUCKING AMAZING!!!

There's this episode of six feet under, the first of the fourth season I believe, and in it there's a scene where David finds Claire in her room staring at a book of photographs by some famous photographer. She explains she is trying to see with different eyes, to leave all the tired associations the world grafts onto us behind and really see something in a different way. That's what I did to The Wall last night and I saw it for the monument it is. Haven't felt juiced by anything Pink floyd since high school.

Planet Earth...

I find it so amusing how popular the BBC television series Planet Earth is in box set form.

Wait a minute. Back up asshead.

Okay.

So I work retail right, and one of the most popular things nowadays, dvd wise, are box sets. You got box sets of television show seasons, ya got sets of movies in certain series or by certain directors or starring certain actors/actresses. THen you get the stuff thats documentary orientated, and the BBC's Planet Earth is one of those.

Many of you will know what this series is. If not for my job I would never haave heard of it. But I tell you, we sell these things like pot on a high school campass. Really, epecially everytime we do our big box set sale (couple times a year), then we literally have our inventory beefed up with them (last time I think with somewhere around 100 copies) and we sell them down to single digits, if not out entirely. I have actually seen people get FLAMING FUCKING ANGRY with me for having sold out and not had any. FURIOUS these people become (easy yoda) at the thought of not being able to spend $50-$80 (Depending on which sale) on a box of discs that contain images of animals and landscpes, phenomena and serenity from across the globe narrated by David Attenborough. Angry with us you say? Why?

We're standing in their way of treading up through the store in their Indonesian, child labor-made sneakers, paying at the front with a currency that, in most cases consists only of abstract 1's and 0's, having their their small, 2 lb package swaddled in a PLASTIC bag (at their request because the irony driver in me always has me ask a Planet Earth purchaser "do you need a bag with that') so they can transport it home in their hummers and SUV's, and throw on the 'spectacular images' (one customers words) of the Planet Earth and completely fucking IGNORE the real thing outside the walls to their own protective little existences.

Now, before I go any further let me just say that yes, I'm being somewhat of a hypocrite here. My shoes weren't made in China by World Industries. I don't know if they employ sweatshops or the like. They're a smaller company though, originally manufacturers of skateboards. The point is, Your going to have to wear some form of shoes, they should be something that is comfortable and something to some degree you do not find vomitous. WHY wear something like NIKE when they have had a past of child labor (for one example check out this old article

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1020-01.htm).

Now, I'm not going to go on an all out rampage about shoes here, I'm just using a couple things to point out the ridiculous nature of people. We often joke at work about how many people probably leave with their Planet Earth DVD, unwrap it in the car and toss the plastic wrap out the window. This is so far out of my realm of existence but every once in a while I see someone do this while driving, often I think with cigarette celophane (based on the fact that yes, when I was a 15 year old douche bag punk with long ass hair, a chip on my shoulder about EVERYTHING for NO reason and too many Pantera albums (but then of course, 1 Pantera album is too many in my adult opinion) I also through cigarette celophanes out the car window. And I can remember exactly when I stopped, how I realized what I and so many people I knew were doing was completely thoughtless, without motive and downright terribly hateful. Indicitive of all the things older folks thought and said about us that we tried so hard to rebel against. And I THOUGHT and CHANGED my behavior and attitude. That's what I'm trying to say about... oh, wait, let me end these paranthesis and get back on point...)

Anyway, that's what I'm talking about in this meandering, soapbox post. Yeah, Nike may have changed their policies. From what little research I just did as writing this it looks like they have. ALOT of those sports shoes/clothing/products have. So no, its not fair for me to stand up and say I'VE CHANGED!!! TAKE ME SERIOUSLY AND FORGIVE ME AND LETS MOVE ON and not allow someone else to do the same thing. HOWEVER, the point isn't NIKE, or Hummer or whatever. Its the big joke that in the height of all the talk of 'GREENING' so much awe and respect, sacrifice and time is being poured into a marketable, consumer commodity PRODUCT instead of into the real, living and breathing thing that nurtures us. Text book IDOLATRY. Our real 'GOD[DESS]' is the marvelous machine that gave us life to begin with.

PLANET EARTH, the planet, not the DVD!!!

She is our mother and we forsake here. It's similar to everything else now, where our entire world and all of our intricacies as humans are being encoded into those wonderfully magick 1's and 0's, uploaded like characters in a William Gibson novel, while the flesh and blood bodies we all started with wither away from McDonald's-sized neglect (Billions and Billions served and I'm a fucking hypocrite ehre too because I ate there at some point in the last week).

Alright, I've left you circumnavigating the text here, my out of control ramblings weaving off and on topic, no doubt alienating many. That's the way I write because, honestly, thats the way information happens in my head, it all weaves in and out and that's how, I like to think, I make some of the connections and points (what points I hear you say, outraged) that I do. These are more an idea firing launchpaad than something that will sate those looking for classically trained 'articles'. Too bad, go to Wiki or an Encyclopedia if you want your theories 'opinion-free'.

2007 Guitar Center Drum Off

so I come home from work yesterday afternoon and Sara wisks me away to downtown Lala land, specifically the Henry Fonda Theatre (aka the Musicbox) for the finals of the Guitar Center drum off.

'What the fuck's a drum off?" I ask, wanting only to consume copious amounts of beer and chicken after a hard day in retail hell.

"Thousands of try-out contestants from GC's all over the country have been widdled down to four finalists. They play tonight, amidst a bunch of bells and whistles, for the winning spot."

"What are the other bells and whistles?" I ask now imagining a mostly empty room, hardly filled by about one hundred geeky looking guys wearing Dream Theater t-shirts and gesticulating constantly with Trekky-like enthusiasm. Perfect for me to bring my paperback Terry Pratchett novel and a thirst for over-priced Irish whiskey from the upstairs bar at the Fonda, where a couple months previous we witnessed the Melvins play 'Houdini' start to finish followed by Mudhoney performing 'Superfuzzbigmuff'. Decent seats up on that balcony, maybe Sara can skim the nerds for her story and I can finish Wee Free Men and score a buzz.

"We're not staying for them, believe me. I want to get the story and get home in time to watch some more Lost."

Okay, I'd never let her down, so here we go.

I've been up since 6:30 in the A.M., so I'm tired. I sleep a little on the way down sitting cobain. I wake up just before we park, to the sound of Sara saying, 'Oh, they have spotlights.' Spotlights? I think, for a drum off? This confuses me. In my sleep-swaddled head I try to fit the images of a Hollywood funciton that warrants spotlights with the images of the nerd train I had in my head.

Try as I might the two would not reconcile, and then we were moving.

Sara, far more important in the musicians community than I often remember, is on her phone immediately with a gentleman named Robbie. He's a head rep something-or-other-big-shot for GC and she's giving him a step by step guide to our approach, as apparently he is coming out to usher us into the ...VIP? Wouldn't VIP at a drum off be the equivalent of VIP at an action figure collectors show?

Boy, am I wrong.

Robbie meets us on the corner and after a quick introduction he leads us back toward the entrance to the club.

THRONGS, yeah, that's the word alright, THRONGS of people are waiting in a line that wraps around the block and is flanked on either side by MASSIVE, Hollywood, MGM Grand style spotlights. The entire city block is alive with hipsters, metalheads, parents, kids, poseurs, minor celebs... I think I spot Wes Borland off to the side of the entrance arguing about his name's status on the list and I give him the finger as we're wisked past EVERYONE and installed in front of a kindly lad who plants a fourescent green wristband on each of us before we're allowed in.

Robbie gives us a brief tour of the facilities as they operate for the evening, ie - general admission, balcony, and thrid floor where the VIP seating is located within stones throw of the bar with the whiskey. He sees us seated and runs off, no doubt a list of a thousand people to greet and welcome similarly. We scope out our seats and then hit the bar. No reading here. This is set up as much a rock show as any rock show I've been to, and more so than some. It's packed, its noisy, its dark and its ALIVE WITH that expectation. Did I mention the name ANGELS and AIRWAVES on the marquee when we entered? No? Well, evidently they're the presiding rock icons to close the show after the competition (making me wonder how many of these people are here for them alone and if a version of this shindig without them would look quite abit more like the original image in my head) Shortly after we sit, the show begins.

Now, Stephen Perkins, drummer from the late Jane's Addiction is the host of the show. Interesting. Stephen holds the unique honor among his Jane's peers as being the only one of the three I do not find a contemptible douche bag. How could I, he's the only one that hsn't at some time in post-Jane's time tried to whore himself out for as much spotlight as possible. He comes out, harmless enough and says a few words, then introduces the opening act.

Opening the show was the Street Drum Core. Never heard of 'em? Neither had I. Here's what Amazon throws down as a description: "Street Drum Corps is a punk rock version of Stomp, a tightly choreographed mix of street drumming and pop-punk tunes..."

Now, go goggle them and look at some of their pictures on Myspace or wherever. The French have a word for folks like this, La Dil-Do. Seriously, a punk rock version of Stomp? Does anyone want to see this? ANYONE? Their performance was wretched. Granted, there were some interesting layers of rhythm and lights that made we wish for halucinogens (which would have been a mistake based on the shitty timbre of their music itself) but overall this was like fifth generation Slipknot knock-off run by high school theatre kids swept up by the 'all image, no substance' moniker often associated with Hollywood. TERRIBLE and they make Shawn's SIT THE FUCK DOWN list (to be addressed in a future post cuz its a looong list).

After the faux-punks (my how I wish we could eliminate that word from the popular lexicon) here's Mr. Perkins again. He comes out to introduce the two guys from GC who put the whole thing together and to introduce the living legends they are honoring this year. The more Perkins talks, the more I take a cynical view. He sounds exactly like my good friend Sonny impersonating 'whitey'. Seriously, this guy just sounds so white, there's no other way to say it. Of course I'm probably just looking for a reason to complete my disdain for the entire Jane's cast, and I try to keep this in mind and give him a fair shake. In the end I do, but still, he's getting made fun of after this. The word 'parradiddle', a drum training exercise, came out of his mouth SOO many fucking times I almost gained the ability to successfully anticipate its arrival.

'Wow, you guys, there are so many paradiddles going on backstage.'

'We got hits, grooves and more paradiddles coming at'cah in a few minutes.'

'Someone just jumped me backstage and force-fed me a piece of posterboard with the word paradiddle written on it in stinky permanent marker.'

The first two are half-remembered paraphrases and the third is a bit of a fantasy, but you get the drift. So out comes Alan White from YES, last years award winner, followed by Steve Smith from Journey and Dave Garibaldi from Tower of Power who won this years awards. Everyone on stage had a grand old time and I must say even though I'm not a drummer and really have no idea who these people are, really, its good to see great musicians get recognition. Okay then, that being said, the rest of the night went pretty well. HTe four finalists came out and played, we saw the winner coming a mile away I think, but still, it was actaully pretty cool. Then Robbie found us and wisked us away again so Sara could meet the CEO of GC, they brought us out to the VIP patio and after a few more minutes we left, wanting to get that early start before Angels and Airwaves showed their pointless tattooed asses.

All in all, one thing about this night was how indicitive it was of why I love Sara. I sometimes make up my mind about things based on nothing at all, and she often comes along and shows me differently, thus she adds layers to me that I do not add to myself. But I guess that's what's really meant by a 'soul mate'. The ying need the yang to make a complete circle.

The Trapezoid on Amduscias Comp...

I wanted to drop a line here talking about the Amduscias Winter 2007 Compilation my current music project, The Trapezoid is appearing on. Now, obviously I want You all to hear my track, but seriously, its 3 discs long and fell of great music. The artists are going to be unfamiliar to many of You, but that's even moree reason to go and download it here:

http://www.archive.org/details/AMR100

and help support independent music. It's all what many of my friends whould call 'weird' music; bizarre and often challenging tinctures fermented with Ambience, Noise, Avant Garde, Electronic, Dark Wave, No Wave, whatever fucking wave You want to call it. The point is it is original, imaginative and absolutely WONDERFUL!!!

My recommendation is download it, throw on Your best set of headphones, smoke out or pour yourself a drink, turn off the lights and immerse yourself in the sounds of the limitless dimensions of imagination.

its too bad...

I hate feeling as though I have friends out there who I can no longer talk to because of petty little squabbles. Seriously, I can't think of one example where this has happened where it has not been at least partially my fault, so I'm not pointing fingers at anybody and declaring my outrage or anger at them. No, its just that age old idea that time is the great destroyer - it literally pulls the fabric of our lives apart. Of course some of that is just the way we as people, with raging ids, egos, and libidos do things. We ATTACH to things, nostalgia for times and people that no longer orbit the same planets we do. How could they? It's like the ultimate proof of good ol' Aleister Crowley's Thelema, the basis of which is the idea that if everyone does what they are truly supposed to do, they would never cross another - our 'paths' take us to our ultimate selves, and on the path to our ultimate selves why would there be conflict with others? This then, what I'm talking about right now, shows how we form islands of alliance, friendship and comaraderie in our fledgling or formative years, tiny Pangias of meaning that eventually get pulled apart, scattering all the components into their own course, to become their own continents.

But this is one of those days where I'd like to call some people and chit chat, I won't name names, but suffice it to say that working on my screenplay about growing up in bands there's some pretty integral guys out there I cut my fucking teeth with in everything from bar fights to recording to throwing fucking potatoes at people. Some guys I'd like to call up and say 'What's up fucker," and drink a beer while on the phone and talk about what we're up to.

Fuck it, I don't dwell, I just wanted to catalogue this as a feeling, so next time it happens I can come here, glance at the words and dilute the nostalgia before it begins.